A study suggests that the interaction of merchants, without substantial intervention by political authorities, likely explains the diffusion of Bronze Age technology for weighing goods. Knowing the weight of a commodity provides an objective measure for valuing goods in the marketplace. To determine how different units of weight emerged in different regions, Nicola Ialongo and colleagues compared weight systems in use between Western Europe and the Indus Valley from 3000 to 1000 BCE.

Holding onto everyday items as keepsakes when a loved one dies was as commonplace in prehistory as it is today, a new study suggests.

Once thought to be extinct, lobe-finned coelacanths are enormous fish that live deep in the ocean. Now, researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology on June 17 have evidence that, in addition to their impressive size, coelacanths also can live for an impressively long time--perhaps nearly a century.

500 years after the full implementation of copper technology in Scandinavia, the trade that brought the much needed copper to Denmark and southern Sweden also expanded across the Alps. At this time, Bronze Age Scandinavians already traded frequently in central Europe and across the North Sea.

An underwater archaeologist from The University of Texas at Arlington is part of a research team studying 9,000-year-old stone tool artifacts discovered in Lake Huron that originated from an obsidian quarry more than 2,000 miles away in central Oregon. The obsidian flakes from the underwater archaeological site represent the oldest and farthest east confirmed specimens of western obsidian ever found in the continental United States.

An archaeological site in Israel's Negev Desert bears evidence of early transition to the Upper Paleolithic period in Eurasia, according to a study. The shift from the Middle to the Upper Paleolithic is marked by a change in lithic, or stone, tool production -- a potential proxy for demographic changes from Neanderthals to Homo sapiens.