From a distance, it might have looked like a small child was wending her way through the waving grass along a vast lake. But a closer look would have revealed a strange, in-between creature — a big-eyed imp with a small head and an apelike face who walked upright like a human.

She may have looked warily over her shoulder as she walked, on alert for saber-toothed cats or hyenas. She may have used her strong arms to climb the shrubby trees nearby, searching for fruit, eggs, or insects to eat. Or perhaps she simply rested on the shores of the croc-infested waters, gulping down water on a hot day.

She likely had no idea it was her last day on Earth.

Roughly 3.2 million years later, her skeleton was unearthed by paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson and his team on the International Afar Research Expedition.

The stunningly complete fossil was nicknamed "Lucy." And her remarkable species, Australopithecus afarensis, may have been our direct ancestor. Our discoveries about Lucy have transformed our understanding of humanity's tangled family tree.

Fifty years later, we know so much more about her species. In fact, anthropologists have learned so much about Lucy and her kind that we can now paint a picture of how she lived and died.

Her last day may have been filled with companionship, but it also entailed a relentless search for food. And it was likely dominated by the ever-present fear of predators.

"I suspect that the last day in her life was filled with danger," Johanson told Live Science.

Finding Lucy

The modern story of Lucy began on Nov. 24, 1974, in Hadar, Ethiopia. Johanson and then-graduate student Tom Gray stumbled upon a bone poking out of a gully. Following two weeks of careful excavation, their team recovered dozens of fossilized bones. Together, these bones made up 40% of the skeleton of a human ancestor, making it the most complete skeleton of an archaic human species that had ever been found.

Pamela Alderman, another member of the expedition, suggested the team nickname the skeleton Lucy, after the Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds."

"And it just became iconic," Johanson said, "a moniker that everybody knew."

Lucy’s discovery transformed the study of ancient human relatives.

"I was in high school when she was found," John Kappelman, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin, told Live Science. "It really did reset the way paleoanthropology worked."

Lucy's skeleton, along with subsequent discoveries of other fossils of her species, have given anthropologists a wealth of information about what is essentially the halfway point in human evolution. At 3.2 million years old, Lucy and her kind lived equidistant in time from our ape ancestors and contemporary humans.

"She's our touchstone," Jeremy DeSilva, a paleoanthropologist at Dartmouth College, told Live Science. "Everything sort of comes back to her as the reference point, and she deserves it."

"A lot like us"

One thing is fairly certain: Though there were some obvious differences, Lucy looked and acted a lot like us.

"If we saw her coming out of a grocery store today, we would recognize her as upright walking and some kind of human," Johanson said.

Although her strong arms and the shape of her finger bones suggest Lucy could climb trees, her pelvis and knees were clearly adapted to walking on two feet.

The size of Lucy's thigh bone also revealed that she was only about 42 inches (1.1 meters) tall and 60 to 65 pounds (27 to 30 kilograms) — about the size of a 6- or 7-year-old child today. And the eruption of her wisdom teeth showed that, although she was in her early teens when she died, she was a fully mature young adult.

"Australopithecus in general was maturing fast," DeSilva said, "and it makes sense if you're on a landscape full of predators." In species that are frequently prey, individuals that mature faster are more likely to pass on their genes. But australopithecines were unique—while their teeth and bodies matured quickly, their brains grew more slowly, telling us that they relied quite a bit on learning for survival, DeSilva said.

Her discovery also settled a debate that was raging in the early 1970s: Did our big brains evolve before we learned to walk upright? Lucy's head, which was not much bigger than a chimp's, showed the answer was no. Our ancestors became bipedal long before they evolved large brains.

Lucy's clan

Because her skeleton was found on its own, Lucy's "social life" is a little murkier than other parts of her daily life. But many researchers think she lived in a mixed-sex group of about 15 to 20 males and females, not unlike modern-day chimpanzees do.

And although there's no direct evidence, Lucy's skeletal maturity suggests she could have had a baby. Bringing that relatively large-headed newborn through her relatively narrow pelvis would have been challenging, which means she may have had the help of a primitive "midwife."

If Lucy had a baby, she also likely had a partner. Other A. afarensis fossils, such as those of Kadanuumuu, show male australopithecines were only slightly larger than females, which, in primates, usually corresponds to more monogamous pairings.

Lucy and her kind would have spent a significant amount of their time avoiding becoming another animals' lunch. "These small creatures would have been nice hors d'oeuvres for a sabertooth or a large cat or hyena," Johanson said.

Perhaps because of that omnipresent danger, the group likely relied on each other.

"I think they had each other's backs and helped each other out," DeSilva said, "especially when they were in dangerous situations."

A healed bone fracture seen in Kadanuumuu provides evidence that these primates cared for one another. Around 3.6 million years ago, this male australopithecine broke his lower leg. By the time he died, though, the break was fully healed.

"On that landscape with that many predators, no doctors, no hospitals, no casts, no crutches, how in the world do you survive if not for social assistance?" DeSilva said. "It's really strong evidence that they didn't leave each other for dead."

Lucy's last day

Lucy probably started her last day much like any other, waking up from the treetop nest made of branches and leaves where she slept, along with her group, before setting off to find food.

It's not clear whether she would have been alone or in a group when she left to forage; if she did have a baby, she may have carried it.

But there's no doubt that she would have spent a significant part of her day looking for food. She most likely ate a few staples, such as grasses, roots and insects, chemical elements in her tooth enamel showed. She may have happened upon the eggs of birds or turtles and promptly gobbled them up as tasty, protein-rich treats. And if she was lucky enough to come across a carcass of a large mammal, such as an antelope, that hadn't been picked clean, she and her troop mates may have pulled the flesh from the bone, using large rocks.

"They can't afford to be picky eaters as these slow bipeds in a dangerous environment," DeSilva said. "They're eating everything they can get their hands on."

However, there's no evidence that Lucy’s species used fire to cook any of their food.

Death at the water's edge

In the past 50 years, we've created a picture of Lucy's last moments. It's not clear exactly why she was by the lake; maybe she was thirsty, or perhaps it was a great spot to look for food.

But there are two main theories for how she died.

"Perhaps she was down there at the water and — bam! — a crocodile comes out," Johanson said. "Crocodiles are incredibly fast, and it's a dangerous place if you're a little creature" like Lucy.

Johanson found one carnivore tooth mark on Lucy's pelvis, and it had not healed, meaning it occurred around the time of her death. Although the animal that made the mark has not been conclusively identified, "we know that australopithecines were preyed upon because there are a number of examples," Johanson said.

In 2016, Kappelman and his colleagues put forward an alternate ending for Lucy: a catastrophic fall from a tree.

Based on high-resolution CT scans and 3D reconstructions of Lucy's skeleton, Kappelman identified fractures in her right shoulder, ribs and knees that were unlike the typical fracturing that occurs in fossils crushed under the weight of dirt and rocks for millions of years.

"Something traumatic happened here during life," Kappelman said.

The kinds of fractures Lucy suffered are consistent with a fall from a considerable height, perhaps from a tall tree in which she was foraging for food.

"She hit on her feet and then her hands, which meant she was conscious when she hit the ground," Kappelman said. "I don't think she survived very long."

It's not clear whether she was alone when she died. But even if she was with others of her kind, they likely wouldn't have done much with her body.

There's no evidence that A. afarensis "bodies were treated any differently than any other animal," DeSilva said. "Maybe there was some curiosity around it, and then they carried on."

Primate researchers have documented other species' curiosity about inanimate bodies. For example, chimpanzees often care for the body for a few hours or days after death, sometimes guarding the body.

Lucy's group may have done the same for her until her body was naturally buried, which would have happened quite rapidly, perhaps by a flood or mudslide.

In the end, though, "we know very little about how any of these creatures died," Johanson said.

Lucy lives on

Thanks to Johanson's 1974 discovery of Lucy — as well as other important findings, like the "First Family" and the footprints at Laetoli in Tanzania — we now know quite a lot about A. afarensis.

"It was a highly successful species that was comfortable in lots of different habitats," Johanson said; A. afarensis fossils have been found in Kenya in addition to Ethiopia and Tanzania. "From an evolutionary perspective, her species was highly adaptable," he said.

Lucy has had a broad impact on the field of anthropology.

"The discovery of Lucy really hit the start button for looking in older and older sediments in Africa," Kappelman said. As a result, we have found numerous ancient hominin species and now have 50 years' worth of fossil evidence that human evolution was messy and complex.

Lucy was the only human ancestor discovered at Hadar. But a couple dozen miles away at Woranso-Mille, a paleontological site in Ethiopia, Yohannes Haile-Selassie, director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, and his colleagues have found evidence of a strange land inhabited by multiple humanlike species between 3.8 million and 3.3 million years ago. For instance, Lucy's kind coexisted alongside another ancient relative, A. anamensis.

Would they have been friends, enemies, competitors or something in between? Right now, anthropologists still have little idea what this landscape teeming with ancient hominins would have looked like.

But perhaps 50 years from now, we'll have a better picture of how Lucy's kind interacted with these other ancient hominins. Even then, Lucy will likely remain one of the most famous fossils of all time.

"I like to think all fossils are pretty special," DeSilva said, "but there's nothing like Lucy."

About 3.2 million years ago, our ancestor "Lucy" roamed what is now Ethiopia.

The discovery of her fossil skeleton 50 years ago transformed our understanding of human evolution. But it turns out her species, Australopithecus afarensis, wasn't alone.

In fact, as many as four other kinds of proto-humans roamed the continent during Lucy's time. But who were Lucy's neighbors, and did they ever interact with her kind?

For almost a million years, A. afarensis lived throughout East Africa, and paleoanthropologists have found numerous fossils of this species ranging from north central Ethiopia to northern Tanzania — a span of 1,460 miles (2,350 kilometers), or roughly the distance from Boston to Miami.

"It was a highly successful species that was comfortable in lots of different habitats," Donald Johanson, a paleoanthropologist at Arizona State University who, along with his graduate student Tom Gray, discovered Lucy's fossils in 1974, told Live Science.

For decades after Lucy's discovery, paleoanthropologists assumed A. afarensis was the only hominin that lived in this region during the middle Pliocene epoch (3 million to 4 million years ago). But the discovery of a fragmentary jawbone in the Bahr el Ghazal region of Chad in 1995 dramatically changed the picture of hominin diversity.

At 3.5 million years old, this fossil of a species that would be named Australopithecus bahrelghazali was the first indication that other hominins lived around Lucy's time, Yohannes Haile-Selassie, director of Arizona State University's Institute of Human Origins, and colleagues wrote in a study published in the journal PNAS in 2016.

Lucy's kind may not have interacted with these australopithecines, who were more than 1,500 miles (more than 2,400 km) away. But at the site of Woranso-Mille, just 30 miles (48 km) north of where Lucy was found at the site of Hadar in Ethiopia, Haile-Selassie and colleagues found A. afarensis fossils along with other, anatomically distinct fossils from the same time period.

These fossils belonged to a new australopithecine species: Australopithecus deyiremeda, which was dated to between 3.5 million and 3.3 million years ago. A. deyiremeda had markedly different teeth than Lucy's species, suggesting they had different diets, but paleoanthropologists do not currently agree on whether it is a different species from Lucy.

Woranso-Mille also yielded a partial foot dated to between 3.4 million and 3.3 million years ago, and its opposable big toe suggests this individual was better adapted for climbing than A. afarensis, a species that habitually walked on two legs. Although this individual was clearly not a member of A. afarensis, the "Burtele foot" has not yet been assigned to a species.

And at the Lomekwi site on the bank of Lake Turkana in Kenya, Meave Leakey, director of Plio-Pleistocene research at the Turkana Basin Institute in Kenya, and colleagues discovered another middle Pliocene hominin. The researchers named it Kenyanthropus platyops, Greek for "flat face". Dated to between 3.3 million and 3.2 million years ago, K. platyops overlapped in time with Lucy but lived over 620 miles (1,000 km) away.

K. platyops' brain was similar in size to that of A. afarensis, and the species lived in a grassy, lake-edge environment, much like Lucy did. While some researchers think K. platyops might be a Kenya-specific version of A. afarensis, others, including Haile-Selassie, think its upper teeth are different enough to call it a separate genus and species.

"A closer look at the currently available fossil evidence from Ethiopia, Kenya, and Chad indicates that Australopithecus afarensis was not the only hominin species during the middle Pliocene, and that there were other species clearly distinguishable from it by their locomotor adaptation and diet," Haile-Selassie and colleagues wrote.

This growing collection of fossils from different hominin species raises an important question that paleoanthropologists are trying to answer: Did these different species meet, or even mate with each other?

Almost all primates are social creatures, living in groups and cooperating to forage for food. And some nonhuman primates, such as tamarins, marmosets and howler monkeys, mate across species.

A. afarensis was as social as other primates, and Lucy may have lived in a group of 15 to 20 males and females. A preserved trail of footprints from three australopithecines walking together at the site of Laetoli in Tanzania is further evidence that Lucy and her kind were social creatures.

But there is currently little hard evidence that australopithecines mated across species, Rebecca Ackermann, a biological anthropologist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, told Live Science in an email.

That said, "there is morphological evidence consistent with hybridisation in A. afarensis," particularly in the variation in their teeth," Ackermann noted. But these differences cannot be conclusively tied to interbreeding by current DNA techniques because australopithecine fossils are too old to harbor usable DNA.

Instead, we may be able to infer whether they ever interbred by looking at ancient proteins, which are coded for by DNA, she said. By looking at proteins in tooth enamel, Ackermann and colleagues clarified how individuals from the hominin species Paranthropus robustus, which lived in South Africa 2 million years ago, were related.

Despite the vast number of A. afarensis fossils discovered over the past half century, paleoanthropologists still have a lot of work ahead of them to fully understand the world Lucy inhabited.

"How these hominins were related to one another, how they interacted, how they filled niches on the landscape, and the degree of interbreeding that may have happened are open and important questions," Jeremy DeSilva, a biological anthropologist at Dartmouth College, told Live Science.

Both sides of the bronze pendant feature inscriptions in ancient Greek. The text on the King Solomon side translates to "Our Lord defeated evil," while the other side names four angels: Azrael, Gabriel, Michael and Israfil.

"It is a symbol of religion and power," Ersin Çelikbaş, an archaeologist at Karabük University in Turkey who oversaw the excavation, told Live Science. The pendant was used as an amulet, a charm that was thought to protect against evil or danger, Çelikbaş added in a translated statement.

According to the Hebrew Bible, King Solomon was a ruler of ancient Israel during the 10th century B.C., but there is little archaeological evidence to confirm the biblical account.

Though Çelikbaş is certain that the artifact is a Christian pendant, "Solomon is an important figure in all three holy religions," he said in the statement. "While he is referred to as a ruler in the Torah and the Bible, he is also recognized as a prophet in Islam. The depiction of Solomon on this [pendant] surprised us and revealed the importance of the artifact for Anatolian archaeology."

Related: Rare gladiator-shaped knife handle discovered by Hadrian's Wall

Archaeologists uncovered the pendant during excavations at Hadrianopolis. This ancient settlement in Paphlagonia, a region in north-central Turkey on the coast of the Black Sea, became a city under the Romans. It was called Hadrianopolis for the Roman emperor Hadrian, who ruled from A.D. 117 to 138, and was rebuilt in the Early Byzantine period. Today it is located in the vicinity of the city Karabük. 

The site of the ancient city is famous for its animal mosaics, and excavations have revealed baths, churches, fortifications, burials, a theater, villas and other structures, the statement said. The pendant was discovered in a building that might be related to military activity, although its function is still unknown, Çelikbaş told Live Science.

"In our previous excavations, we had determined the existence of a cavalry unit here," he said in the statement. "Prophet Solomon is also known as the commander of armies. We understand that he was also considered as a protective figure for the Roman and Byzantine cavalry in Hadrianopolis." In fact, Çelikbaş hypothesized that the pendant belonged to a cavalry soldier.

Based on the archaeological layer where they found the pendant, the archaeologists dated the artifact to the fifth century, when Hadrianopolis was part of the Byzantine Empire, he added. Emperor Constantine, who ruled a few centuries after Hadrian, later split the Roman Empire in two, leading to the creation of the Byzantine Empire in A.D. 330.

Although the pendant is the first of its kind discovered in Anatolia, Çelikbaş is aware of one previously found in Jerusalem. "The presence of similar artifacts in these two distant geographies indicates that Hadrianopolis was an important religious center in ancient times," he said in the statement.

The pendant is now in his lab, and he will eventually hand it over to a museum to exhibit it.

Editor's note: This article was updated at 1:15 p.m. EST to note that the amulet was found in Hadrianopolis in Paphlagonia, an ancient region of what is now Turkey, not in another Hadrianopolis that was formerly called Uskudama.

The monument, which is engraved with images of lions and sphinxes, is known as Arslan Kaya (also spelled Aslan Kaya), which means "lion rock" in Turkish. The inscription spells out the name "Materan," a goddess of the Phrygians, who flourished in what is now Turkey from roughly 1200 to 600 B.C. They knew her "simply as the Mother," Mark Munn, a professor of ancient Greek history and archaeology at Pennsylvania State University who wrote a paper about the inscription, told Live Science in an email.

Other ancient cultures also revered Materan. "The Greeks knew her as the Mother of the Gods," Munn said, noting that the Romans called her "Magna Mater," or "Great Mother." At the time the monument was built, a kingdom known as Lydia, which also had high regard for Materan, may have ruled the area, Munn wrote in his paper, which was published Oct. 24 in the journal Kadmos.

The monument is heavily damaged from weathering and looters, making the inscription extremely hard to read. What it says has been a source of debate since the 19th century, Munn noted in the paper. To solve the mystery, Munn photographed the inscription in detail when the light was good and reexamined older photographs and records of the inscription.

"Much depends upon the favorability of the light when photographs are taken," Munn wrote in the article, noting that the light was particularly good on the morning of April 25, 2024.

Related: Cryptic 4,000-year-old writing system may finally be deciphered

It makes sense that the monument would bear Materan's name, as it also contains an image of the goddess, Munn said. Materan's name would likely have been part of a larger inscription that explained who commissioned the inscription and who Materan was.

He also examined the monument's various stylistic details, which support the inscription's date to the first half or middle of the sixth century B.C., Munn wrote in the study.

However, Rostyslav Oreshko, a lecturer at the Practical School of Advanced Studies in France who has conducted extensive research on Phrygian inscriptions but was not involved with the research, said the work didn't offer a new interpretation.

"Munn's article in Kadmos does not propose something radically new about the inscription, it simply sets straight the reading," Oreshko told Live Science in an email. "The reading Materan, referring to the well-known Phrygian goddess, was suggested already in the 19th century," Oreshko said, noting that Munn's findings support that interpretation.

The debate over the inscription has been going on for over a century and time will tell if it is now at an end.

The wreck, which lies at a depth of around 1,300 feet (400 meters), was found in 2022 by an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) mapping the lake for Norway's military.

The discovery caught the attention of researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) based in the city of Trondheim. But they were not able to revisit the wreck until last month.

NTNU maritime archaeologist Øyvind Ødegård told Live Science that he and his colleagues explored the wreck for about an hour using a remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV) tethered to a research boat on the surface. But technical issues and encroaching bad weather prevented the researchers from using the underwater drone to take wood samples for radiocarbon dating, so the wreck's exact age will remain unknown until they can return there next spring.

Several visible features of the wreck, however, indicate the vessel was built between 1300 and 1700, Ødegård said.

Related: 32 haunting shipwrecks from the ancient world

Norwegian lake

Lake Mjøsa is the largest lake in Norway and lies about 60 miles (100 kilometers) north of Oslo. It covers more than 140 square miles (360 square km), but only a few square miles of the lake bottom have been mapped. It was a vital trade route between the many prosperous communities along its shores from at least the eighth century.

Ødegård said the researchers now think the mysterious vessel was a "føringsbåt" used to carry cargo and passengers. Such boats were widely used on Norwegian lakes, but their flat-bottomed construction made them unsuitable for the open sea.

The latest explorations showed this particular føringsbåt was built with an upright stern, a feature introduced in Norway after about 1300; earlier Viking ships were the same on both ends. And there are signs that it may have had a central rudder at the stern for steering, whereas Viking ships used a specialized steering oar on one side, Ødegård said.

The boat was also built with wooden planks overlaid in a "clinker" style. This traditional Scandinavian boatbuilding method was superseded by the flush planks of the "carvel" style, an innovation from the Mediterranean.

Telltale planks

The 33-foot-long (10 m) wreck in Lake Mjøsa is covered with sediments, which Ødegård thinks may have been penetrated by the sonar equipment that located the wreck in 2022. The wooden planks in the hull that can be seen are relatively wide — a sign they were cut with an ax, rather than sawed at a shipyard.

"That is an indication that this wreck is older," Ødegård said.

The 2022 discovery was made with an AUV operated by the Norwegian military, but the latest explorations used an ROV operated by the university spin-off company Blueye.

The wreck now lies on the bottom of Lake Mjøsa in deep and calm waters, but the lake surface in that area has strong currents, Ødegård said.

In addition to preventing the researchers from reaching the wreck on several occasions, the currents may have caused the føringsbåt to founder.

"It's not the calmest spot," he said. "That leads us to guess that someone had an accident while crossing the lake."

Where it is from: The island of Iona in Scotland's Inner Hebrides

When it was made: About 1,200 years ago

Related: Oracle bones: 3,250-year-old engraved bones and tortoise shells from ancient China were used to foretell the future

What it tells us about the past:

The Book of Kells is a large illuminated manuscript — a handwritten and heavily illustrated document ornamented with paints made from gold and silver. It was made at the beginning of the ninth century, probably by Celtic Christian monks on the island of Iona in Scotland's Inner Hebrides.

The manuscript consists of the four Christian gospels written in Latin and is famed for its rich illustrations and masterful calligraphy, which date from a time before the invention of printing.

Books at this time had to be painstakingly copied by hand, a task often performed by teams of monks. Experts think the Book of Kells was created on Iona in this manner in about A.D. 800 by monks devoted to the sixth-century Irish missionary St Columba, who is credited with spreading Christianity throughout Scotland.

But the British coastline was prey to Viking raids at this time, and dozens of monks had already been killed in raids on isolated islands like Iona and Lindisfarne.

In the early 800s, the monks on Iona relocated to Ireland to avoid such attacks — and they took the manuscript with them. It was then housed for centuries at a monastery in the Irish town of Kells, where it got its name. But it was sent to Dublin for safekeeping during Oliver Cromwell's conquest of Ireland from 1649 until 1653.

In 1661, the Book of Kells was donated to the library of Trinity College Dublin, and it is still on display there today; the college has also made a digitized version.

The Book of Kells is considered the finest example of the "Insular" style of illuminated manuscripts — from the Latin word for island, the island being Celtic Britain — that were produced in Ireland and Britain during the post-Roman period.

Insular manuscripts are characterized by their elaborate initial letters, and are often highly decorated with fanciful designs of legendary animals and Celtic motifs.

The Book of Kells manuscript is written on vellum — usually prepared by scraping calf skin — and spans 680 pages that experts think were written by at least three different monks.

Some of the pages are missing, possibly because of a theft in the 11th century, but it is remarkably complete for a text that is so old.

In a paper published Nov. 13 in the journal Scientific Reports, the team reports finding the remains of a concoction that may have induced hallucinations in those who drank it. They found the remains inside a 2,200-year-old vase that shows Bes, an ancient Egyptian dwarf god associated with childbirth, merriment and music.

The team conducted chemical analyses of organic residues inside the vase, revealing traces of wild rue (Peganum harmala), Egyptian lotus (Nymphaea nouchali var. caerulea), and a plant of the Cleome genus, all of which are traditionally shown to have "psychotropic and medicinal properties," the team wrote in their paper. They also detected the remains of sesame seeds, pine nuts, licorice and grapes — a combination that was "commonly used to make the beverage look like blood," the team said in a statement.

The researchers also detected the remains of human bodily fluids such as saliva and blood, suggesting that people drank the concoction. It's possible that the human fluid was inserted as an ingredient into the concoction, the team said in the paper.

The team used a variety of techniques to identify the ingredients in the concoction, whose residues were left on the vase. These methods included the extraction of ancient DNA, as well as fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, a technique that uses infrared light to determine what a compound is made of.

Related: This silly, bug-eyed dwarf deity was defender of 'everything good'

These finds make the team think that people in ancient Egypt were trying to recreate the "Myth of the Solar Eye." In the story, Bes calmed Hathor, a sky goddess associated with fertility, when she was in a bloodthirsty mood by "serving her an alcoholic beverage, spiked with a plant-based drug, disguised as blood to a deep forgetting sleep," the team wrote in the paper.

"It would be possible to infer that this Bes-vase was used for some sort of ritual of reenactment of what happened in a significant event in Egyptian myth," the team wrote.

It's also possible that the hallucinogenic drink was used by people who were trying to predict the future. "A ritual linked to the cult of Bes during the Greco-Roman periods involved the practice of incubation for oracular purposes, in which the consultants slept in the Bes-Chambers at Saqqara to obtain prophetic dreams," the team wrote. Bes was associated with childbirth, and women may have gone to the oracles to seek predictions of how their pregnancies would turn out.

"Egyptologists believe that people visited the so-called Bes Chambers at Saqqara when they wished to confirm a successful pregnancy because pregnancies in the ancient world were fraught with dangers," Branko van Oppen, curator of Greek and Roman art at the Tampa Museum of Art and co-author of the paper, said in the statement. "So, this combination of ingredients may have been used in a dream-vision inducing magic ritual within the context of this dangerous period of childbirth."

The vessel is housed in the Tampa Museum of Art. In 1984, the museum acquired it from a private collector, who had purchased it from the Maguid Sameda Art Gallery in Cairo in 1960. Where it was originally found is not clear.

The skeletal remains of at least 42 children, ages 2 to 7, were discovered at Templo Mayor, the most significant temple complex in Tenochtitlán, now Mexico City, in 1980 and 1981.

The skeletons, which were facing up and had their limbs contracted, were placed inside ashlar boxes on a layer of sand. Some were adorned with finery such as necklaces and had green stone beads in their mouths.

Now, new research has revealed that the sacrifices were likely an attempt to end a great drought in the region by making offerings to the rain god Tláloc. The research was presented last week at the ninth Liberation through knowledge meeting: "Water and Life" at Mexico's National College.

"At first, the Mexica state tried to mitigate its effects by opening the royal granaries to redistribute food among the neediest classes, while carrying out mass sacrifices of children in the Templo Mayor to calm the fury of the tlaloque [rain dwarves who were assistants of Tláloc],” Leonardo López Luján, an archaeologist and director of the National Institute of Anthropology and History's (INAH) Templo Mayor Project, said at the meeting. "For a time, it faced the tragedy this way, but the excessive duration of the crisis made the state vulnerable, forcing it to allow the mass exodus of its people."

To find out why the mass offering was performed, INAH researchers studied geological data alongside entries in the Mexican Drought Atlas, which showed that a major drought occurred across central Mexico between 1452 and 1454.

Related: 'An offering to energize the fields': 76 child sacrifice victims, all with their chests cut open, unearthed at burial site in Peru

The drought, which took place during the reign of Moctezuma I and the construction of the Templo Mayor, decimated harvests, devastated populations in the region and forced starving families to sell children to nearby towns in exchange for food, according to López Luján.

"Everything seems to indicate that droughts in early summer would have affected the germination, growth and flowering of plants prior to the canícula [dog days of summer], while autumn frosts would have attacked corn before it had ripened,” López Luján said. "Thus, the concurrence of both phenomena would have destroyed the harvests and led to occurrences of prolonged famine."

In an effort to alleviate the crisis, the sacrificed children's bodies were sprinkled with blue pigment, seashells and small birds and were surrounded by 11 sculptures made of volcanic rock.

The sculptures were made to resemble the face of Tláloc, the Aztec god of rain, water and fertility. In fact, the adornment of the children was likely an attempt to make the children resemble rain dwarves, López Luján said.

The handle is made of copper alloy and depicts a gladiator with a helmet and a shield. The figurine represents a secutor gladiator: a heavily armored class of fighter whose name was derived from the Latin words for "chaser" or "pursuer" and specialized in close-quarters combat against the retiarius gladiator, a more agile net-and-trident-wielding class of gladiator.

An inspection revealed that the gladiator figurine is left-handed. Left-handed gladiators were considered unlucky, though some were specifically taught to fight left-handed to give them a unique advantage, according to a statement from English Heritage, a charity that oversees historic sites in England. In this case, researchers suggest the feature might mean that the gladiator represents a specific fighter rather than a symbolic warrior.

In ancient Rome, gladiator fights, or games, were one of the most attended forms of public entertainment. The gladiators were normally slaves or condemned criminals, and the fights sometimes ended in the death of a gladiator. The events were organized by members of the upper Roman class, including the emperor himself, to show off their wealth, celebrate special occasions, and entertain the masses. Though the Colosseum in Rome is by far the most famous amphitheater to have hosted gladiatorial games, they officially took place all throughout the empire from 105 B.C. to A.D. 404.

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"Despite being enslaved and socially outcast due to their profession, gladiators could become huge celebrities," Frances McIntosh, English Heritage's Collections Curator for Hadrian's Wall and the North East, said in the statement.

The knife handle is clearly a Roman gladiator souvenir, according to the statement. Though gladiator memorabilia is well documented — including ceramics, cups, lamps and figurines — it is a rare archaeological find in Britain. The find highlights just how pervasive gladiatorial enthusiasm was.

"Even now, almost two thousand years later, the fascination around gladiators persists and has expanded even further into modern popular culture, as evidenced by the excitement surrounding the new Gladiator film sequel," McIntosh added.

The handle was discovered in a river in Corbridge, a Roman settlement and supply base originally called Corstopitum situated along Hadrian's Wall in Northumberland, half a mile (0.8 kilometers) west of modern-day Corbridge. The Roman settlement dates to A.D. 79 and was inhabited until the Romans left Britain in around A.D. 400.

English Heritage plans to put the rare knife handle, as well as other finds from the river, on display at Corbridge Roman Town, a preserved archaeological site, next year.

Upon analyzing the images, which were taken in 1973 by a U.S. satellite system named KH-9 (Hexagon), the team found remnants of a 1,400-year-old settlement. This helped them match the site to the lost location of the Battle of al-Qadisiyyah, the researchers reported in a study published Nov. 12 in the journal Antiquity.

The Battle of al-Qadisiyyah took place in A.D. 636 or 637 between the Arab Muslim army and the Sasanian Empire, which ruled the area that is now Iran between A.D. 224 and 651. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, the battle was a consequential victory for the Muslim army and the beginning of the eventual Muslim conquest of Persia.

But William Deadman, an archaeologist at Durham University in the U.K. and the lead author of the study, and colleagues had not originally set out to find the lost battle site. Using the 1973 satellite imagery, they were examining the Hajj pilgrimage route of Darb Zubaydah as part of its consideration as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. According to UNESCO, Darb Zubaydah connected the city of Kufa, Iraq, to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, and was the most important Hajj route between A.D. 750 and 850, during the Abbasid Caliphate, a golden age of Muslim civilization.

Related: Cold War satellite images reveal nearly 400 Roman forts in the Middle East

As the researchers looked over the newly declassified images, they realized they might have the chance to find the lost battlefield of al-Qadisiyyah, according to a Durham University statement. Records of the battle had given clues to its location. For example, they mentioned there was a 6-mile-long (10 kilometers) wall that connected al-Qadisiyyah to a neighboring town and that the town was "south of a body of water, between [a] moat and a bridged stream," the paper noted. Using these clues, Deadman located a modern-day agricultural field that matched the description.

An on-the-ground survey confirmed the find. Researchers identified the 6-mile-long wall and the moat north of the town mentioned in historical texts.

"This discovery provides a geographical location and context for a battle that is one of the founding stories of the expansion of Islam into modern day Iraq, Iran and beyond," Deadman said in the statement.