The artifact was unearthed at the archaeological site of Nishikaminomiya, northwest of Tokyo, according to a translated statement from Japan's Gunma prefectural government. At the site, archaeologists found nearly a dozen burial mounds known as "kofun" dated to the fifth and sixth centuries.

This time period in Japanese history, which lasted from about A.D. 300 to 710, is called the Kofun period. Many tombs in this period had cylindrical clay sculptures called "haniwa" that were used as offerings to the dead and were often thought to contain the souls of the deceased.

The newly unearthed haniwa is about 16 inches (40 centimeters) tall; but only the head and torso remain, so it would have originally been a lot larger. The figurine was discovered in a moat around an enormous burial mound that measured about 145 feet (45 meters) in diameter. It's likely that the haniwa was originally placed near a boat-shaped sarcophagus archaeologists discovered in the mound and that it slipped down the hill over time to land in the moat, according to the statement.

Experts think the haniwa represents a female shaman known as a "miko," or "shrine maiden." These priestesses bridge the gap between the human and spiritual realms in the Shinto religion. During the Kofun period, miko would have performed important funeral rituals and offered spiritual guidance.

The haniwa figurine has a traditional Japanese topknot hairstyle called a "shimada," which indicates that the haniwa represents a miko, according to the statement. Both of the figurine's wrists have bracelets made from clay and red pigment. The haniwa's fingers have been carefully molded, and the figurine has a prominent nose. In addition, she wears a red sash painted on her torso and holds a rod-shaped ritual implement in her left hand.

"These details suggest that considerable care was taken in making the figure, even in features that would not be visible from a distance," representatives of the Gunma prefectural government said in the statement.

Archaeologists discovered the haniwa this year during excavations of the main burial mound at Nishikaminomiya, but they have been working at the site since 2020.

The haniwa is currently on display at the Gunma Prefectural Archaeological Research Center's Excavation Information Museum in the city of Shibukawa.

'> Ghostly statue of 'shrine maiden' discovered at 1,500-year-old burial mound in Japan

The new season promises to push the boundaries of underwater wildlife filmmaking, using next-generation camera technology including "splash drones" that can land, float and take off directly from the water.

Whereas "Blue Planet II" (2017) exposed the impact of plastic pollution, each episode of "Blue Planet III" shifts the focus to "stories of hope and recovery" across five spectacular marine habitats: tropical seas, open ocean, seasonal seas, polar waters and the deep.

The sixth and final episode, "Future Seas," will look ahead to the challenges facing our oceans and what we can do to protect them for future generations.

Read on as we show you where to watch "Blue Planet III" online and on TV.

How to watch "Blue Planet III" in the U.K.

"Blue Planet III" premieres on BBC One at 8 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 1, and will also be available to stream on BBC iPlayer.

BBC iPlayer is a free streaming platform for U.K. viewers — although you will need to confirm that you have a TV licence.

Watch "Blue Planet III" from anywhere

If you're traveling abroad you can access your usual streaming services from anywhere with a good VPN.

A VPN — or virtual private network — is a piece of internet security software that can alter your device's digital location, unlocking the geo-restrictions on most streaming platforms.

Our expert colleagues at TechRadar rate Surfshark as one of the best VPNs. Not only is it great for unblocking streaming services, it has top-level security features, a reasonable price tag and, right now, a big discount.

Can I watch "Blue Planet III" in the U.S.?

Viewers in the U.S. face a three-month wait as "Blue Planet III" won't air on BBC America and AMC+ until 8 p.m. ET/PT on Saturday, Jan. 23, 2027.

The six-part David Attenborough documentary will air weekly on Saturdays, with episodes also available to stream on AMC+.

Remember, if you're from the U.K., but in the U.S. for work or on vacation, you can use a good-quality VPN to watch your usual British streaming services from anywhere.

Can I watch "Blue Planet III" in Australia?

Australian viewers will be able to watch "Blue Planet III" on Channel Nine, which has snagged the rights to the six-part Attenborough documentary.

However, an Australian premiere date has yet to be announced.

If you're just visiting Australia, you can always use a VPN to access your usual streaming services from anywhere.

"Blue Planet III" global trailer

We test and review VPN services in the context of legal recreational uses. For example: 1. Accessing a service from another country (subject to the terms and conditions of that service). 2. Protecting your online security and strengthening your online privacy when abroad. We do not support or condone the illegal or malicious use of VPN services. Consuming pirated content that is paid-for is neither endorsed nor approved by Future Publishing.

'> How to watch 'Blue Planet III' online: Stream David Attenborough's spectacular new series natural selection over countless generations, not conscious choices. But a smaller set of animal behaviors look like something else entirely — deliberate tactical, and aimed at manipulating another individual's beliefs, the same way human lies do.

Figuring out which is which turns out to be one of the trickiest questions in animal behavior research, James O'Hanlon, zoologist and science communicator, told Live Science.

In this excerpt from his new book, "Liars, Cheats and Copycats: Trickery and Deception in Nature" (Columbia University Press, 2026), O'Hanlon explores camouflage, mimicry and misdirection throughout the natural world, building toward the book's central question: Can animals tell lies?

In it, O'Hanlon examines one of the strongest candidates for an animal that deliberately lies: the fork-tailed drongo (Dicrurus adsimilis), a small African bird whose ever-changing repertoire of false alarm calls has made it a favorite subject for scientists studying tactical deception.

James O'Hanlon interview: 'You start painting pictures of squirrels twirling their mustaches': A biologist on whether animals can lie

Fork-tailed drongos are remarkable vocal mimics and can do an uncanny impression of a meerkat alarm call. The meerkats respond to it just as they would one of their own and scamper to safety. Meanwhile the drongo flies in once more to steal the meerkats' abandoned food.

They don't stop there; drongos mimic a whole range of other animals' signals, mimicking various avian neighbors like the caped glossy starling or the pied babbler. Those ever-watchful meerkats fall for the ruse once more, leaving their meals behind. Researchers have identified over fifty unique deceptive vocalizations in the drongo's arsenal.

By constantly rotating their "cry-wolf" tactics, these birds ensure their victims don't grow wise to the deception, allowing the theft to continue unabated. Yet, their cleverness isn't reserved solely for exploited meerkats.

This remarkable talent for mimicry extends to other creatures as well. Pied babblers and sociable weavers, who both forage in groups upon the earth, frequently find themselves bamboozled into fleeing their food by these false warnings. Had the legendary boy who cried wolf possessed such adaptive ingenuity, he might have successfully maintained his trickery.

It would, however, have resulted in a peculiar fable with an entirely different, perhaps darker, moral lesson.

It's early days in our understanding of whether animals can tell lies. Social group-living animals are likely candidates for finding animal tricksters in the wild, and we have only scratched the surface of what kinds of trickery goes on in these societies. Time will tell whether similar forms of deception are happening in the subsonic songs of whales and dolphins, the chemical mists of ants and termites, or the barks and howls of wild dogs.

Despite the growing list of evidence, scientists are still hesitant to conclude definitively that animals can intentionally deceive another, in a similar way to humans. This might have more to do with the professional conduct of scientists than it has to do with the reality of what goes on in animal societies.

Firstly, one of the most important rules in studying animal behaviour is to not anthropomorphise animals. In other words, don't project human-like qualities or emotions onto other species. Scientists must be completely objective and not assume that other animals think, behave or make decisions for the same reasons we do.

Since lying has always been perceived as a human behaviour, scientists are incredibly hesitant to conclude that it could be happening in other animals.

The second reason is that scientists are trained to never definitively conclude anything. There is an idea in science that you can disprove things, but never really prove things. This is why you will find scientific writing littered with phrases like "the evidence suggests," "it's probable that," or — my personal favourite — "the most parsimonious explanation is," and so on and so forth.

A professional scientist will often give a direct "No" answer but rarely a direct "Yes." It's like squeezing blood from a stone. But this is a good thing. What often sounds like indecisiveness or a lack of certainty is actually just good professional practice. It's part of a scientist's job description — to consider all possible explanations for the observations they have made and examine every possibility on its own merits.

Then the conclusions that are drawn come down to which of these possibilities is most likely. In a universe of infinite possibilities and scales of enquiry, it would take an impossible amount of overwhelming data for scientists to exclude all possibilities but one.

This article is adapted from Liars, Cheats, and Copycats: Trickery and Deception in Nature by James O’Hanlon . Copyright © James O’Hanlon 2027, 2025 First published in Australia by NewSouth, an imprint of UNSW Press Ltd. Used by arrangement with Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

Help us improve Live Science Pro: We're always trying to make our content better. Leave us feedback about Pro here.

'> Can animals lie? This sneaky bird might be proof. Liars, Cheats and Copycats: Trickery and Deception in Nature" (Columbia University Press, 2026), biologist James O'Hanlon turns to tactical deception aimed at manipulating what another animal believes — and whether we can consider this as lying.

Live Science spoke with O'Hanlon about his book, and why so many scientists are reluctant to say "yes, animals can lie."

Read an excerpt: Can animals lie? This sneaky bird might be proof.

Olivia Maule: The chapter opens with a moment from a talk you gave, where a woman at a senior citizens' club asked you a question about orchid mantises that left you stumped: "How does the mantis know to look like a flower?" Why did that moment stick with you enough to open the chapter with it?

James O'Hanlon: Because it was such a simple, straightforward question that I couldn't give a simple, straightforward answer to. At the time, I was thinking about what's going on in the brains of the animals I was looking at — does a camouflaged animal actually know it's camouflaged? Does an insect that looks like a leaf know what a leaf even is?

And it got me thinking: they don't need to. This stuff just sort of works because it works. That's a completely different type of deception to the other things dealt with in this chapter, which is: Do animals actually know that they can lie? Can they intentionally deceive, like we can?

OM: So would you say you have an answer to that question now? And if so, what would it be?

JO: If I had to answer, it would be yes. It looks like it. But scientists are paid to be pedantic, so it's always going to be a "yes, but" or a "possibly." There's a ton of behaviors that look like animals can lie, and they're really good at it, but with any type of science, we're never going to know for certain what's going on in their brains. It's a best-guess situation.

OM: How would you help readers hold those two ideas at once — that this is genuine deception in an evolutionary sense, but not necessarily lying in the way we mean it as humans?

JO: When we talk about lying in humans, there's a value judgment attached. We're judging each other on whether we're good or bad people, doing right or wrong things. We kind of have to relax that judgment a bit when we're talking about other animals.

I guess it becomes an ethical question — we look at deception as being right or wrong, morally good or bad, and that's a very human-centric way of thinking. Ethics and morals are things we've developed to help us get along in our own societies. Who knows what's going on in animal societies?

There's an example in the book of golden snub-nosed monkeys that use deceptive alarm calls to scare off other members of their group and steal their food. After a while, those monkeys start to get ignored, and the group stops responding to their calls. So maybe there is some sort of animal-society rules and regulations keeping lying in check. Maybe. We'll see.

OM: I do want to ask about the chimpanzee study, in which chimpanzees intentionally misled competitive handlers to boxes without food, and compare it to the 2017 dog study, where dogs learned to mislead handlers much faster than the chimps did. What did that result do to the assumption that big brains equal better lying?

JO: There's always been this idea that lying is a really cognitively complex task — you need the brains not just to realize what's going on in the real world but to imagine a false possibility, and then to describe that false possibility as if it were real. We talked that up as something you need big brains to do, and there was also a bit of patting ourselves on the back for being such smart animals — maybe we lie a lot because we're such smart animals. But the more we learn about animals and what they're capable of, the more we realize they can do so much more than we thought was possible with the brains they've got.

OM: Does that suggest lying is less about raw intelligence and more a byproduct of needing to survive in a group?

JO: As far as all the examples of tactical deception in the book that look like they're intentional, they all, or mostly all, come from social animals. We don't seem to see it in solitary animals. That's a big sign that maybe it's something that's evolved because individuals can exploit it in a social setting. But it's still such early days, so it's hard to say for definite how different levels of sociality, and how bonded individuals are within groups, correlate with more deception.

OM: Could you elaborate on the distinction between deception and something like the camouflage you introduce in the book with the tiger's stripes?

JO: Compared to the intentional deception we've been talking about, things like camouflage still work regardless of whether the animal doing it is aware of it or not. The idea behind lying and tactical deception is that it only works because it's intentional — there's some sort of choice to do it.

Whether the animals are aware of that choice is another question. Think about the way we do it as humans — are we always aware of it? Whenever your friend asks whether you like their new haircut and you just go, "Yeah, it's great," you don't really think about the fact that you're probably lying. It's just part of our social norms. So it becomes a very blurry gray area very quickly.

OM: It sort of boils down to the choice of it all — whether they can choose to do it or not, which raises the question of whether it's conscious or unconscious.

JO: It's tricky, because as soon as you start talking about it being a conscious decision these animals make, you start painting pictures of squirrels twirling their mustaches, giggling at how evil they are for pretending to hide nuts. And you start to think, maybe this isn't the right exact way to think about lying and deception.

OM: The drongo — a bird renowned for its ability to deceive meerkats — doesn't just have one trick, it cycles through different alarm calls and borrows calls from other bird species. Does that put it in a different category of liar than squirrels or monkeys, or is it the same trick with a different toolbox?

JO: It could just be the same trick with a different toolbox. It's essentially doing the same thing as the golden snub-nosed monkeys we were talking about before. But birds are incredible singers and have very flexible call structures, and there are tons of birds that can mimic other birds. Maybe you just pair that ability with this deception adaptation, and it looks a bit different, but it's the same kind of trick.

OM: Do you think these behaviors are inherited, or just innate characteristics of the drongos themselves?

JO: I don't know — I'd be interested to find out. The evolutionary aspect would be that the ones who can do it get more food and are better able to survive and reproduce. Whether they learn it from their parents, it's entirely possible. We know from birds in general that they learn calls from their parents and their social groups, and there are even studies showing birds will start learning calls while they're still in the egg, listening to their parents' calls. So it's entirely possible they learn this trick socially, as far as I know.

OM: In writing this book, what did you find is the best way to approach understanding animal behavior as it relates to human traits like lying or deception?

JO: I think there's still a little bit of baggage from old-school thinking, that you need bigger brains to be deceptive and tricky in this way, and there are still people who think it must be things like the higher apes and great apes that are capable of this stuff.

As soon as you start studying that in something like an invertebrate, it's really hard to get the idea out there — other scientists will come back and say, "No, that couldn't be possible, this must be some other type of behavior, or it just looks like tactical deception, but it's not." This happened with the researchers who did the work on cuttlefish that change one side of their body to look like a male and the other to look like a female — there was a lot of resistance to that idea, seemingly just because it was a cuttlefish, this little invertebrate, so it couldn't possibly be capable of such cleverness. But as far as the actual evidence goes, and what we can see, it's really no different from what we see in these big-brained mammals, so why not assume the same thing is going on?

A lot of it comes down to the culture and practice of science, and the people doing the science. We're supposed to be as objective as possible, but we're still humans, we're still animals. It takes a while for ideas to change.

OM: Is there a risk that this caution has become its own kind of bias, where we assume human specialness by default until proven otherwise?

JO: Yeah, definitely. It's important, as part of scientific practice, to be as objective as possible, and as a general rule, to not anthropomorphize. But at the same time, we're just animals too — we're just another one of the great apes. We share characteristics with lots of different animals, so it's not a huge stretch to think that what's going on in our brains is also going to be similar to what's going on in other animal brains.

It's just a question of when we apply that kind of thinking, and when it's useful or not. Something similar happened in the field of understanding pain in animals — scientists studying this were always trying not to anthropomorphize, not to assume animals experienced pain the way we did. Then, the more we understood it, it became quite clear that they probably did, and it almost became an ethical question to stop with the anti-anthropomorphizing and instead go, no, we know what pain feels like, we can say that.

We're never going to be able to see what's going on in their brains, but that doesn't excuse us from recognizing what's going on. So I think it became okay not to anthropomorphize but to recognize the similarities between humans and other animals, as opposed to always hinging on the differences between us.

OM: At the end of the chapter, you say that if you buy a scientist a few drinks, they'll eventually admit that animals can lie. I obviously can't buy you a drink over email, so I'll just ask you directly — do you think animals can lie?

JO: Yeah. I'll give a straightforward yes, because I can.

You need to get scientists out of their professional mindset, where they're trained to give the most correct answer that they can. And yes is a bit of a broad-stroke answer for a scientist when they're in professional mode, which is why you need to get them out of the lab and out to a bar or a cafe, and get them talking in human terms again.

OM: What would you say is your favorite example in the book — what are you most excited for readers to walk away with?

JO: I'll go with the cuttlefish example — the one where a male cuttlefish will put male color patterns on one side of its body and female patterns on the other, to trick other male cuttlefish. It might be my favorite because, as a young student, I worked on this particular species of cuttlefish. We were studying them, watching all of their crazy color-changing abilities, and just wondering what on earth they must be talking about, what was going on there. Then, years later, seeing the aforementioned research come out was this sort of lightbulb moment — that's what I was watching them do all along. I think that has a personal connection for me. I spent so much time looking at these creatures, being mesmerized by what they were doing, with no idea what was going on. So it was great to see scientists come in and figure it out, and answer those questions.

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

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'> 'You start painting pictures of squirrels twirling their mustaches': A biologist on whether animals can lie John Maisey, the curator-in-charge emeritus of fossil fish at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, told Live Science. "The takeaway is that the shark lineage within the fishes generally does go back further than trees. But it really depends on how you define what we mean by shark."

The modern sharks we see today first emerged around 195 million years ago, during the Jurassic period. Fossils of ancient sharks from this time can be traced to living lineages, namely Hexanchiformes, an order of sharks identified by their six or seven gills and single dorsal fin.

This means that modern sharks, at least, are not older than trees. Experts generally agree that trees first evolved in the Middle Devonian epoch, around 380 million to 390 million years ago. "I think it's not very controversial, when we had the first trees," Cindy Looy, a paleobotanist at the University of California, Berkeley, told Live Science.

For instance, the first true tree in the evolutionary record is considered to be Archaeopteris, an extinct genus discovered in a 385 million-year-old fossil forest near Cairo, New York. Looking at these fossils, Archaeopteris has many characteristics of trees we have today, including a tall, woody trunk; leaves; and a deep root system. Other early trees ‪—‬ such as Eospermatopteris found in ancient forests near Gilboa, New York, and Calamophyton in southwest England ‪—‬ also appeared in the fossil record 390 million and 393 million years ago, respectively.

But when we look at the extinct relatives of modern sharks, "that's where it gets a bit wobbly," Maisey said. There are fossils from the sister groups of modern sharks that can be traced back through the Permian period and into the Devonian period (around 359 million to 420 million years ago). The most abundant group are hybodonts, an extinct group of spiny fish that have a unique calcification pattern in their cartilage that is similar to that of modern sharks.

"It’s called tessellated calcified cartilage, and that's a very important hallmark of most of the shark-like fishes and their ancestors," said Maisey, who has studied a spiny fish fossil called Doliodus problematicus from the early Devonian. If this definition is used, these sharks first appeared around 400 million years ago, before trees emerged.

Sharks' rough skin can be traced even further back, with the dermal denticles — the tooth-like scales that roughen a shark's skin — first appearing in the fossil record around 450 million years ago.

These transition fossils, where fish were evolving into sharks and gaining shark-like traits, introduce a gray area in the definition of sharks. "When you get back into the ancient past, when you're not dealing with things that we have living examples to compare with anymore, then it becomes a bit more tricky [to figure out what they are]," Maisey said.

Fossils also present a very limited picture. Many contain only fragments of an animal, like a fallen tooth, so scientists are still piecing together the clues of exactly how and when sharks arose. That means every fish fossil discovery often leads to more questions about what other transition fossils could be out there, Maisey said.

There is also much to be discovered about trees, Looy added. Terrestrial fossils, especially ones that clearly show parts of a tree, are quite rare. Finding a fossil forest requires a lot of luck, she said, although there is little indication that trees were present before the Middle Devonian.

"That's why I think the fossil record is so intriguing," Maisey said. "Because it may not give us all the answers, but it certainly raises questions."

How much of a shark fan are you? Find out with our shark quiz!

'> Are sharks really older than trees?