To round off my brief stint at the Guardian, here’s a piece about a mastodon specimen with what looks like a spear-tip stuck in its rib. This specimen, the so-called “Manis mastodon” has been a source of controversy for several decades. Is that fragment man-made or simply one of the animal’s own bone splinters? Does it imply that humans hunted large mammals hundreds of years earlier than expected, or not?

Having re-analysed the rib in an “industrial-grade” CT scanner, Michael Waters thinks it’s definitely a man-made projectile. He even extracted DNA from the rib and the fragment and found that both belonged to mastodons. So these early hunters were killing mastodons and turning them into weapons for killing more mastodons.