Archaeologists in China have unearthed a mysterious set of rectangular wooden pieces linked to an ancient astronomical calendar. The artifacts were discovered inside an exceptionally well-preserved 2,000-year-old tomb in the southwest of the country.

Each of the 23 wooden slips is about an inch (2.5 centimeters) wide and 4 inches (10 cm) long and displays a Chinese character related to the Tiangan Dizhi, or "Ten Heavenly Stems and 12 Earthly Branches" — a traditional Chinese astronomical calendar established during the Shang dynasty, which ruled from about 1600 B.C. to about 1045 B.C.

As long as humans have been minting coins and crafting beautiful jewelry and other stunning collectibles, an equal number of people have been right behind them searching for these precious finds. Here are 10 extraordinary discoveries made in 2023 that prove that the hunt for buried treasure never gets old.

Men and women might have had their fingers deliberately chopped off during religious rituals in prehistoric times, according to a new interpretation of palaeolithic cave art.

In a paper presented at a recent meeting of the European Society for Human Evolution, researchers point to 25,000-year-old paintings in France and Spain that depict silhouettes of hands. On more than 200 of these prints, the hands lack at least one digit. In some cases, only a single upper segment is missing; in others, several fingers are gone.

In the past, this absence of digits was attributed to artistic licence by the cave-painting creators or to ancient people’s real-life medical problems, including frostbite.

But scientists led by archaeologist Prof Mark Collard of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver say the truth may be far more gruesome. “There is compelling evidence that these people may have had their fingers amputated deliberately in rituals intended to elicit help from supernatural entities,” said Collard.

When did archery arise in the Americas? And what were the effects of this technology on society?

These questions have long been debated among anthropologists and archaeologists. But a study led by a University of California, Davis, anthropologist, is shining light on this mystery. The work is published in Quaternary International.

Focusing on the Lake Titicaca Basin in the Andes mountains, anthropologists found through analysis of 1,179 projectile points that the rise of archery technology dates to around 5,000 years ago. Previous research held that archery in the Andes emerged around 3,000 years ago.

A multi-institutional team of anthropologists has discovered that two pieces of ancient Scythian leather excavated at sites in Ukraine were made from human skin. In their project, reported on the open-access site PLOS ONE, the group tested an account by the Greek historian Herodotus regarding certain behaviors of ancient Scythian warriors.

Prior research has found that an ancient group of people known as the Scythians lived in what is now the Pontic-Caspian steppe from approximately 700 BCE to 300 BCE. Because they were itinerant people, not much is known about them beyond their reputation as fierce warriors and excellent equestrians.

They were known to the ancient Greeks, though—famed historian Herodotus mentioned them in his writings. He said they were known to drink the blood of their slain enemies and sometimes used their scalps as a means for wiping the blood from their hands. He suggested that there had also been reports of them removing the skin from the right hand of an enemy and using it to make leather for their quivers. In this new effort, the research team looked for evidence of this last claim.

Ancient bricks inscribed with the names of Mesopotamian kings have yielded important insights into a mysterious anomaly in Earth's magnetic field 3,000 years ago, according to a new study involving University College London researchers.

The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, describes how changes in the Earth's magnetic field imprinted on iron oxide grains within ancient clay bricks, and how scientists were able to reconstruct these changes from the names of the kings inscribed on the bricks.

The team hopes that using this "archaeomagnetism," which looks for signatures of the Earth's magnetic field in archaeological items, will improve the history of Earth's magnetic field, and can help better date artifacts that they previously couldn't.

The Dordogne region of southern France is home to over 200 caves decorated with colorful Paleolithic art, but little is known about how old it is. Due to its coloration with iron- or manganese-oxide-based material, radiocarbon dating of the art has not been possible, and it has been generally thought to have been created during the Magdalenian Period, which occurred between 12,000 and 17,000 years ago.

Now, a research team from the Center de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France has reported the first discovery of black carbon-based art in Dordogne's Font-de-Gaume cave, portending new opportunities for both radiocarbon dating and reevaluation of existing art in this cave and others throughout the region.