From ancient England, evidence of a very strong line of women: A tantalizing vision of a women-centric society has emerged from an ancient cemetery in the countryside of southwest England.

Whereas women commonly left home to join their husbands’ families upon marriage, the Durotriges, a Celtic tribe that lived in Dorset 2,000 years ago, bucked the mold with a system called matrilocality, wherein women remained in their ancestral communities and men migrated for marriage.

By analyzing the genomes of 57 Durotrigan people buried sometime from about 100 B.C. to A.D. 100, scientists found maternal lineages typical of matrilocality. This was the first time this system had been identified in European prehistory.

Meanwhile, individuals with ancestries unrelated to the dominant line were mostly men, suggesting that they had moved from other communities to live with the families of their wives, according to a study in the journal Nature.

“I was not expecting such a strong signature of matrilocality,” said Lara Cassidy, an assistant professor in genetics at Trinity College Dublin who led the study. “When that came out of the data, it was a bit of a shock.”

“But upon reflection, if you look at what classical writers were talking about and if you look at the archaeological context, there are a lot of hints that women were able to attain high status in these societies,” she added.

The liberties of Celtic women have been a hot topic for thousands of years. Roman writers were scandalized by reports of their sexual freedoms, which included taking multiple husbands. Cartimandua and Boudica, early female leaders in Britain, demonstrated that women could reach the highest levels of power, commanding armies and heading tribes.

Archaeological evidence also hints at flexible gender dynamics that varied widely depending on local traditions. For instance, Celtic women were sometimes buried with luxurious grave goods, like jewelry and mirrors, a marker of high status. Patrilocality, whereby women live near their in-laws, is still far more culturally common, but female-centric societies are not as unheard-of as they were even a decade ago.

“It’s a generational paradigm shift,” said Rachel Pope, an associate professor in European prehistory at the University of Liverpool with expertise in matrilocality who was not involved in the study. “It’s partly a trend in archaeology more generally, where we have returned to data and material evidence to lead narrative, rather than imposing narratives that confirm our own biases.”

Rain-collecting rattlesnakes give new meaning to “thirst trap”: You are in a desert and dying of thirst. Suddenly, storm clouds appear, and the sky starts to spit tiny drops of liquid. How would you quickly make the most of the potentially lifesaving precipitation? One more thing, you don’t have any hands.

Prairie rattlesnakes have evolved an easy solution to this problem. They simply coil up and turn themselves into rain-collecting pancakes. “It is a behavior that is seen in several different species of snakes,” said Scott Boback, a herpetologist and ecologist at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. But “most of that information has been very anecdotal.”

After all, rattlesnakes don’t like being found. And precipitation in arid environments is infrequent. If Boback and his team wanted to study the phenomenon, they realized they’d have to make it rain. With garden sprinklers and video cameras at a rattlesnake hibernaculum outside Steamboat Springs, Colorado, Boback and his team recorded nearly 100 snakes reacting to simulated rainfall. That let them to quantify the behavior and break it into stages.

Not only did they observe snakes drinking off their own flattened bodies, as well as the ground, but they also saw snakes lean over and take sips off their neighbors. They also found that snakes in large aggregations were more likely to drink off other snakes than those in small clusters were. “Some of the aggregations are literally massive,” said Boback, an author of a study in the journal Current Zoology. “So many snakes, all coiling together, that it essentially creates a carpet of snakes.”

All of this suggests that warmth and protection may not be the only benefits for rattlesnakes that den together.

The scientists also watched as some rattlesnakes shifted their bodies out over ledges, like a cantilever, to create a horizontal rain-collecting platform across uneven ground. The snakes also sometimes tipped their entire coiled bodies forward, coaxing the water toward their mouths, as we might with a bowl to consume that last slurp of tomato soup.

Ancient tattoos come under laser focus: A culture flourished along the Peruvian coast from about A.D. 900 to 1500. Called the Chancay, they left behind a wealth of cultural remains, including intricate tattoos that are preserved to this day on the skin of mummified individuals.

Details of these tattoos that had been hidden to the naked eye, including finely traced lines, were described in a new study. After illuminating the mummies with laser-stimulated fluorescence, or LSF, a tool that until now had never been applied to tattoos, scientists discovered lines 0.1 to 0.2 millimeters wide, narrower than work produced by most modern tattoo needles.

“We were shocked by just how fine the tattoo lines were in our LSF images,” said Michael Pittman, an assistant professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and an author of the new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in an email.

Mummies featured in the study had been buried at the Cerro Colorado cemetery. Their tattoos are about 1,000 years old and display geometric designs, as well as an amorphous animal with a curled tail.

The Chancay are known for high levels of craftsmanship across their material culture, and left elaborate markings in far more than their tattoos, said Aaron Deter-Wolf, a prehistoric archaeologist at the Tennessee Division of Archaeology who was not involved in the study.

Pittman, a dinosaur paleobiologist, has spent more than a decade probing fossils with laser-stimulated fluorescence. This noninvasive tool exposes specimens to high-powered lasers, producing a fluorescent glow that sometimes reveals subtle features, like soft tissues. In recent years, Pittman’s team has started exploring the archaeological applications of the technique.

“We expect LSF to work on other ancient tattoos from different cultures around the world,” Pittman said.

Deter-Wolf was not convinced that the study showed clear advantages of LSF over other techniques for scrutinizing ancient tattoos, such as multispectral imaging.

He also had concerns about some of the study’s conclusions. Pittman’s team suggested in the study that the tattoo patterns were made from punctures by a fine instrument, like a cactus needle or sharpened animal bone. Deter-Wolf believes that most of the tattoos examined were made with incisions, not punctures.

“A painter uses different paintbrushes to achieve different results,” Deter-Wolf said. He said tattooists had done the same thing, “so depending on the tool that they’re using, you will get a different physical signature as a result.”

Pittman stood by his team’s conclusion. “The unique thinness of our tattoo lines among published Chancay tattoos suggests a needle-based production (puncture tattooing) is more reasonable,” he said in an email.