Daily briefing: Iron-Age human bones were made into tools before interment

You have full access to this article via your institution. Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here . A human leg bone (far right) and three arm bones unearthed in Scotland show signs of having been worked to sharp points. (Laura Castells Navarro) The remains of an adult buried some 2,000 years ago in what is now Scotland show signs that her brain might have been removed and her bones modified as tools , before her skeleton was carefully reassembled and interred. The finding adds to the mystery of how Iron Age Britons treated their dead: few human remains have survived from that period. The Independent | 5 min read Reference: Antiquity paper Four artificial intelligence models have failed to match top mathematicians in a test of research-level maths problems. The test posed models — including OpenAI’s ChatGPT 5.5 Pro — questions that research teams had solved, but not yet published. Then they gave the AI answers to mathematicians to formally grade. The best-performing model solved six of the ten problems, but three of the questions stumped every AI competitor . It seems that the systems were “missing one more critical and unexpected idea that the human solution uses to close the last gap”, says mathematician Johannes Schmitt. …