Written Basque may be 1,000 years older than anyone thought

Shards of pottery often tell historians useful things, but even the geekiest archaeologist would admit they are not very exciting to look at. Not so a discovery in Irulegui, in Spain’s Navarre region, last year: a life-size bronze cut-out of a hand, green with age, with a small hole indicating that it was meant to hang, perhaps over a door. It was found in a village destroyed in a war of the 1st century BC. Such striking hand-shaped designs are unknown in Spanish or neighbouring cultures.