Ancient Egyptian princesses were probably trained in using bows and daggers and put themselves at risk of serious injury. Rediscovering mummies from about 3800 years ago has revealed that some of these women had enlarged bones in their arms and bowing of the bones in their palms, which suggests they were active users of the weapons they were often buried with.

“They carried their bows and daggers into the afterlife not just as ornaments, but as testaments to the active, resilient and powerful lives they led,” says at Beni-Suef University in Egypt.

Weapons have been found throughout history. But there has been much debate about whether this was symbolic or meant the women used them.

Now, Hashesh and her colleagues have studied six royal mummies – five female – found at the Dahshur complex of pyramids and tombs from Egypt’s Middle Kingdom between about 1850 and 1700 BC. The mummies, some of which were found with bows and arrows alongside them, were excavated in the 1890s, and were rediscovered in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo during a curation project in 2020.  

The team has analysed the bones to learn about the lives of these royal individuals, four of whom are thought to be daughters of the pharaoh Amenemhat II.

A key finding was that Princess Ita – who had an elaborate gold and lapis lazuli dagger in her burial assemblage and was aged between 28 and 34 when she died – would have had very strong connections between the bones in her forearm and strong hand muscles. This implies the habitual gripping of weapons like daggers or maces, says Hashesh.

Princesses Noub-Hotep (aged between 40 and 44) and Itaweret (aged 20 to 34) both showed enlargement of the radius bone in the forearm, which could be an adaptation to . The former princess, who was buried alongside arrows, also had bowing of the second right metacarpal bone in the palm and strengthened attachments of finger muscles. These hint at the sustained mechanical load required to hold a bow and are indicative of “archer’s grip”.

“I imagine the lives of princesses like Noub-Hotep and Ita were far from the sedentary, purely decorative existence we often associate with ancient royalty,” says Hashesh. “To develop the archer’s grip and the structural bowing of the hand bones observed in Noub-Hotep, they must have begun training in archery and martial arts from a young age.”

at Griffith University in Australia says this study gives us real insight into these princesses’ lives. “Royal women were not simply sitting around a palace or following their menfolk around, but living active and skilled lives. They were trained in very practical martial and hunting arts, just as we imagine their fathers and brothers were,” she says.

The bones also revealed that injuries were common. For example, Princess Itaweret survived broken ribs and foot fractures, which Hashesh says were probably caused by accidents or hard blows.

“This tells us that they were out in the world, perhaps engaged in high-impact activities where falls and blows were a real danger,” she says. When injured, their status gave them access to surgeons capable of setting bones so well that they healed without infection or misalignment, she says.

But at the University of Southampton, UK, says that other activities could result in similar alterations to arm and hand bones, such as frequent juggling or using a scythe. “If we were to find a tennis player buried with a club, we cannot simply argue that this [similar] bony change was a result of clubbing people,” she says.

Scientists have tracked the eye movements of a bird in flight for the first time, revealing that pigeons in the air lock their eyes in place rather than looking around. The behaviour may help them control their flight, but it could also leave them more vulnerable to predators.

If animals on the ground want to look at something, they move their head or eyes to fix their gaze on it, then use rapid and sometimes wide-ranging movements of the pupil, known as saccades, to give a stable view of the object relative to its surroundings. But no one really knows what happens when birds are flying.

To find out, at the California Institute of Technology and his colleagues designed a lightweight rig of mirrors and cameras that can be attached to the head of a common pigeon (Columba livia) as it flies, as well as a small backpack that houses a camera control board and battery.

They then trained six pigeons to fly between two perches about 20 metres apart indoors, and three to fly some 25 metres outdoors to return to a coop.

During test flights in both environments, the head-mounted eye-tracking system revealed that after take-off, the birds increased their pupil size and adopted a fixed and consistent eye position in their heads, essentially locking their eyes in place.

“Whenever they start flying, the eyes rotate forward on average,” says Ros.

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If their heads moved, their eyes moved in synchrony with them. The fixed eye position aligns with the primary horizontal axis of the birds’ vision and their vestibular system – the sensory network that controls balance and spatial orientation.

“Pigeons have been shown capable of moving their eyes independently and that they can be moved by a maximum amplitude of about 15 degrees,” says at the University of Birmingham, UK. “Therefore, to show that, during flight, eye movements are less than 1 degree does suggest that the birds are actively stabilising the position of their eyes when in flight.”

Why they are locking their eyes isn’t certain, says Ros. He thinks the alignment with the vestibular system suggests the behaviour may help pigeons distinguish their own motion from external motion – such as the movement of a tree’s branches, or a car or predator – to help them balance and navigate.

It’s also possible that reducing eye movements minimises the computational load on the brain. “The world during flight moves a lot faster than it does during non-flight,” he says.

Eye movements give pigeons a , but Ros says locking their eyes into a forward-facing position is likely to reduce this, leaving a larger blind spot behind them where they couldn’t see predators.

He is curious about what pigeon eyes would do in other situations, because all the tests were done when the birds were low to the ground. “It might be different if pigeons were flying higher up, where there aren’t lots of objects rushing past,” says Ros. He also wonders what would happen when pigeons fly in flocks. “Would they look at other pigeons? At predators? Or at something on the horizon?”

Martin thinks other birds might also stabilise their eye position during flight, including predators. When in pursuit of prey, , he says. “This presumably would require the peregrine to fix the position of their eyes rather than move them about.”

A rich and complex ecosystem stretching back 700,000 years that included woolly mammoths, bison, horses and big cats has been unveiled thanks to DNA preserved in frozen faeces.

(�����dz����ٱ�����ܲ����貹�����⾱��) are rodents about 40 centimetres long, found in cold regions of both North America and Siberia. These areas were joined by a land bridge in the past, with the whole region being known as Beringia.

“The squirrels hibernate for about eight months of the year, and in the four months that they’re conscious, they really need to get out there and eat and bring as many resources as they can back to their burrow,” says at the Hakai Institute in Campbell River, Canada.

This means their burrows often contain a wealth of faecal pellets and food caches, which makes the animals like “natural archivists”, says Murchie. To see what might be stored in this archive, he and his colleagues looked at preserved faeces – known as coprolites – from 13 Arctic ground squirrel burrows in the central Yukon in Canada that were frozen in permafrost.

The burrows dated to between about 700,000 and 30,000 years ago. From the droppings, each of which is about 1 to 2 centimetres long, the team extracted DNA belonging to a wide range of organisms.

These include microbes, more than 200 different plant groups and animals including insects, other rodents, woolly mammoths, horses, grey wolves, steppe bison and a big cat that was either an or a cougar. “It’s the whole cast of organisms that lived in the Beringian ice-age ecosystem,” says Murchie.

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You might assume that ground squirrels would primarily eat nuts and seeds, but that’s not the case, he says. “They’re actually quite omnivorous, almost like little bears. There are reports of ground squirrels eating carcasses of moose and lynx, so the fact that we find all of these large animals in their coprolites isn’t actually that surprising.”

Murchie and his colleagues were able to use the DNA they found to reconstruct mitochondrial genomes of many animals from different points in time. These included 12 ground squirrels – one lineage of which dated back 700,000 years – three horses, two bison and one hare. They also found enough DNA to piece together six woolly mammoth genomes, but details of those will be published separately.

“These are fantastically preserved samples that really showcase the ecological diversity of the Yukon through time,” says at Clemson University in South Carolina.

She says it is hard to know whether DNA from a given species is present in a coprolite because it was eaten by a ground squirrel, or because it existed in the environment and leached in. But she does say it is feasible that the rodents consumed mammoth meat, given how much DNA was present in the samples and that ground squirrels are often scavengers.