June
27
/ 2025
In the chilly darkness of Obłazowa Cave, hidden away in southern Poland's limestone cliffs, a remarkable relic slumbered beneath the grime for tens of thousands of millennia. Crafted from the twisted tusk of a woolly mammoth and only slightly more than 70 centimeters in length, this sweeping curve of ivory could be the world's oldest surviving boomerang — and by far its most mysterious. First found in 1985, the boomerang already looked out of place back then. Initially, radiocarbon dating indicated that it was just about 18,000 years old. But new results released this week in PLOS ONE reverse that figure completely. What the Data Says: Baynesian Modeling and Radiocarbon Dating With sophisticated Bayesian modeling and indirect dating of nearby
