National Fossil Day, part of Earth History Week, is sponsored by the U.S. National Park Service and aims to educate and inform the public about fossils' scientific value.

Early humans were lashing stone tips to wooden handles to make spears and knives about 200,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to a study in the 16 November issue of Science.

Attaching stone points to handles, or “hafting,” was an important technological advance that made it possible to handle or throw sharp points with much more power and control. Both Neandertals and early Homo sapiens made hafted spear tips, and evidence of this technology is relatively common after about 200,000 to 300,000 years ago.

A new series of radiocarbon measurements from Japan’s Lake Suigetsu should help make radiocarbon dating more precise and accurate, especially for older objects, researchers report.

The work could be used to refine estimates of the ages of organic material by hundreds of years. Archaeologists, for example, may be able to further specify the timing of the extinction of Neandertals or the spread of modern humans into Europe. And climate scientists may better understand the chains of events that led to the advance and retreat of the ice sheets during the last glacial period.

Two new reports show that a bacterium, known as GFAJ-1, requires small amounts of phosphate to grow—and that it cannot substitute arsenic for phosphorus to survive, as a 2010 report in Science had suggested.

The GFAJ-1 bacterium, which was discovered in the arsenic-rich sediments of California’s Mono Lake, became the center of a controversy last year after Felisa Wolfe-Simon of the NASA Astrobiology Institute and the U.S. Geological Survey and colleagues reported that the microorganism could incorporate arsenic into its DNA when phosphorus wasn’t available.

Researchers have revealed new details about the brain, pelvis, hands, and feet of Australopithecus sediba, a primitive hominin that existed around the same time early Homo species first began to appear on Earth. The new Au. sediba findings, unearthed in Malapa, South Africa, make it clear that this ancient relative displayed both primitive characteristics as well as more modern, human-like traits.

Due to the “mosaic” nature of the hominin’s features, researchers are now suggesting that Au. sediba is the best candidate for an ancestor to the Homo genus.

Researchers in Texas have discovered thousands of human artifacts in a layer of earth that lies directly beneath an assemblage of Clovis relics, expanding evidence that other cultures preceded the Clovis culture in North America. This pre-Clovis toolkit appears to be between 13,200 and 15,500 years old and it includes biface and blade technology that may have later been adapted—and improved upon—by the Clovis culture.