Were the early humans roaming east Asia more than half-a-million years ago clever enough to build sea-faring watercraft and curious enough to cross a vast expanse of open sea? This and other questions arise from the discovery in the Philippines of a butchered rhinoceros skeleton and the stone tools probably used to carve away its meat, researchers said Wednesday. The find pushes back the arrival of the first homo species on the island chain ten-fold to 700,000 years ago, they reported in the journal Nature. Earlier archeological clues from Luzon island — tools at one site, pre-historic animals remains at another — hinted at the presence of primitive human species, echoing the way Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis probably populated the Indonesian archipelago during roughly the same period. But until now, the earliest confirmed evidence of hominins — the scientific term used to group modern and early humans — in the Philippines came from a single, 67,000-year old foot bone unearth

US officials on Wednesday returned to Iraq 3,800 ancient artifacts that had been smuggled into the United States and shipped to a nationwide arts and crafts retailer. The items include cuneiform tablets, cylinder seals, and clay bullae. Many of the tablets come from the ancient city of Irisagrig and date back to 2100-1600 BCE, officials said. Packages of cuneiform tablets were initially intercepted by customs agents and falsely labeled as tile samples for retailer Hobby Lobby. The company last year agreed to forfeit thousands of ancient Iraqi artifacts and pay $3 million to settle a civil suit brought by the US government, attributing its purchase of the illegally imported items to naivete. The Department of Justice says thousands of cuneiform tablets and clay bullae were smuggled into the United States via the United Arab Emirates and Israel in packages shipped to the Oklahoma-based company.

A major new exhibition at Tate Modern reveals the intertwined stories of photography and abstract art. Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art is the first show of this scale to explore photography in relation to the development of abstraction, from the early experiments of the 1910s to the digital innovations of the 21st century. Featuring over 350 works by more than 100 artists, the exhibition explores the history of abstract photography side-by-side with iconic paintings and sculptures. Shape of Light places moments of radical innovation in photography, such as Alvin Langdon Coburn’s pioneering ‘vortographs’ from 1917, within the wider context of abstract art. This relationship between media is explored through the juxtaposition of works by painters and photographers, such as cubist works by George Braque and photographs by Pierre Dubreuil, or the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Otto