Researchers in Germany have unearthed 400,000-year-old wooden spears

ok for people who don't know what are absolute phrases here are my 2cents on how to solve this one :

A: appear was is a red flag, it still is perhaps, also evidence of is unidiomatic
B: Appears it had been and stunning evidence that : this is problematic because the "And" here just disturbs the meaning altogether
C: "Appear was" : same error as A
D: hold , can't find a mistake
E : Evidence of unidiomatic

D It is : and stunning evidence modifies the clause before the comma so yeah

Appears verb is referring to which subject? Is from what resulting in inverted sentence structure?
Please help

@VeritasKarishma GMATNinja

how do I identify here that 'stunning' is not ing verbal but part of absolute phrase

I thought ing verbal is incorrectly used here.

The only way to tell what the function of "stunning" is in this context is to consider the meaning conveyed.

We can see that it doesn't make sense to say that, when researchers unearthed 400,000-year-old wooden spears, the researchers were "stunning evidence." Thus, as you indicated, logic dictates that "stunning evidence ..." cannot be a participial phrase that modifies the preceding clause.

However, we don't stop there. Rather, we have to consider whether a different meaning makes sense.

Doing so, we see that "stunning evidence" can be an appositive that renames "400,000-year-old wooden spears from what appears to be an ancient lakeshore hunting ground." The spears and hunting ground represent "stunning evidence that human ancestors systematically hunted big game much earlier than believed."

In that case, "stunning" is a participle that modifies "evidence."

Since the sentence is properly constructed and the meaning conveyed makes sense, the (D) version is correct.

This is construction certainly isn't wrong, but it's funky and pretty unusual. "What" is basically functioning as a stand-in (a pronoun) for "the thing that":

"Researchers in Germany have unearthed 400,000-year-old wooden spears from the thing that appears to be an ancient lakeshore hunting ground..."

And how do we know whether it should be "appear" or "appears"? Well, it depends on what comes after "to be":

• "Researchers have found what appears to be an ancient hunting ground." - Since "an ancient hunting ground" is singular, we need a singular form of the verb ("appears"). Notice also that you can replace "what" with "the thing that" ("the thing that appears to be...").
• "Researchers have found what appear to be ancient fishing hooks." - Since "ancient fishing hooks" is plural, we now need a plural verb (appear). Now the "what" means "the things that".

But again, this isn't something you're likely to see very often, so don't lose too much sleep over it.

I hope that helps!