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A priceless 16th-century casket containing the embalmed heart of a French queen consort has been found after it was snatched by thieves earlier this month. The theft of the 500g solid golden box containing Anne of Brittany's heart had fuelled fears the relic would be melted just for its weight in gold. The casket was taken along with other relics after robbers reportedly broke in through a window of the Thomas-Dobree museum in the western French city of Nantes. French police arrested two men who then led them to the buried haul on Saturday. Anne of Brittany was born in...

Fewer than 40 such eggs are held in public collections today (The Buffalo Museum of Science, BSNS Q 257) ___________________________________________________________________________________________________ hen humans first arrived on the island of Madagascar around 1500 years ago, they encountered an array of remarkable species that have since gone extinct: gorilla-sized lemurs, giant tortoises, tiny hippos and a huge, long-necked, flightless bird that lumbered through Madagascar’s forests and laid the largest eggs of any known vertebrate, including dinosaurs. The eggs of the Aepyornis, also known as the elephant bird, were a highly valuable food source for Madagascar’s human settlers. With a volume roughly equal to...

The missing submarine was found off the coast of Denmark. Sea War Museum Jutland _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ A missing German submarine said to have taken the defeated Nazi leadership to South America has been discovered after being lost at sea for nearly 73 years. The U-3523 was one of Hitler’s Type XXI submarines – a new and highly advanced design which came too late to stop an allied victory. It was the first class of U-boats designed to sail submerged for a prolonged period of time and had a range which allowed it to sail non-stop to South America. The U-3523...

A Japanese variety of sweet potato Pixabay _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ At some point, sweet potatoes crossed the Pacific. This much we know. As for the rest—How? When? Why?—we’re just not sure. Or, to be more clear, some people are sure they’re sure, and others disagree. Sweet potatoes have been at the center of a massive archaeological debate for many decades now, and a new paper in Current Biology has only stoked the flames. It uses genetic data from sweet potatoes and their relatives to establish a phylogenetic tree of their evolution, thereby demonstrating that the tubers existed in Polynesia before humans lived...

Forget small nomadic tribes and pristine jungle: the southern Amazon was likely covered in a network of large villages and ceremonial centers before Columbus. Geoglyphs in the southern Amazon are evidence of a once-thriving population. Photograph courtesy of University of Exeter ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Before Spanish invaders conquered South America, sparse groups of nomadic people clustered around the Amazon River, leaving the surrounding rain forest pristine and untouched. Or did they? New research suggests a very different story—an Amazonian region peppered with rain forest villages, ceremonial earthworks, and a much larger population than previously thought. The research, funded in part by the...

Burials from a cave in Morocco have yielded the oldest human DNA evidence yet from Africa, offering new insight into Stone Age migrations. The DNA samples come from one of the most ancient cemeteries in the world, the Grotte des Pigeons, near the village of Taforalt in northeast Morocco. Beginning around 15,000 years ago, a culture of hunter-gatherers buried their dead with animal horns and other adornments inside this cave. Though burials were found as recently as 2006, archaeologists have been excavating the cave since the 1940s. The name 20th-century researchers gave to this culture —the Iberomaurusians—reflects the theory that...

Photo: The 19th-century gin bottle was found north of Perth with a damp, rolled up piece of paper inside. (Supplied: Kym Illman) ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ A Perth family has made an extraordinary historical discovery after becoming bogged on a West Australian beach. Tonya Illman was walking across sand dunes just north of Wedge Island, 180 kilometres north of Perth, when she noticed something sticking out of the sand. "It just looked like a lovely old bottle, so I picked it up thinking it might look good in my bookcase," she said. But Mrs Illman realised she had likely uncovered something far more...

Full Title: History of tattooing is rewritten after world's earliest figurative inkings are found on 5,000-year-old Egyptian mummies in the British Museum The world's earliest figurative tattoos have been discovered on 5,000-year-old Egyptian mummies at the British Museum, rewriting the history of inking. The tattoos are of a wild bull and a Barbary sheep on the upper-arm of a male mummy, and S-shaped motifs on the upper-arm and shoulder of a female. The find dates tattoos containing imagery rather than geometric patterns to 1,000 years earlier than previously thought. Researchers say the discovery 'transforms' our understanding of how people lived...

A Native American burial site hidden for 7,000 years beneath the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Florida has been unearthed in what archaeologists are calling an "unprecedented" discovery. Florida Secretary of State, Ken Detzner, said in a news release on Wednesday the unmarked site near Venice, which measures roughly 0.75 acres, was first discovered by a diver in June 2016, who then reported possible human remains on the continental shelf to the Bureau of Archaeological Research. One of the stakes excavated at Manasota Key Offshore revealed a notch in its length. It is not yet known what the...

Credit: Biblical Archaeology Review 44:2, March/April May/June 2018 _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Author and archaeologist Eilat Mazar has published an article in Biblical Archaeology Review suggesting that a small piece of clay with a seal imprint on it (called a bulla) might be the first-ever extra-biblical reference to the prophet Isaiah. In her article, she gives a historical overview of both King Hezekiah and the prophet Isaiah, followed by an overview of the locations in which both people were believed to have lived and worked—specifically temples in Jerusalem that have been under excavation for many years. Researchers found a bulla believed to...

Puzzle: fragments of 2,000-year-old scrolls before reassembly. Credit: Shay Halevi, Israel Antiquities Authority, The Leon Levy Library of the Dead Sea Scrolls ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ About 1,000 Dead Sea Scrolls discovered just over 70 years ago near Khirbet Qumran on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea have been officially published since the turn of the millennium. But in the case of some, all that was left were poorly preserved remains of texts written in a cryptic script – and all that had been released to the world were photos of small pieces of manuscript, in a preliminary order. There have been...

FILE - A scuba diver measures the length of Sac Aktun underwater cave system as part of the Gran Acuifero Maya Project near Tulum, in Quintana Roo state, Mexico, Jan. 24, 2014. Herbert Mayrl/Courtesy Gran Acuifero Maya Project (GAM) handout. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ MEXICO CITY — Items discovered underwater caverns in eastern Mexico to reveal what is believed to be the biggest flooded cave on the planet Archaeologists exploring the world's biggest flooded cave in Mexico have discovered ancient human remains at least 9,000 years old and the bones of animals who roamed the Earth during the last Ice Age. A group...

High relief of standing dromedary on sandstone spur at center of image. Credit: © CNRS/MADAJ, R. Schwerdtner _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ At a remarkable site in northwest Saudi Arabia, a CNRS archaeologist and colleagues from the Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage (SCTH) have discovered camelid sculptures unlike any others in the region. They are thought to date back to the first centuries BC or AD. The find sheds new light on the evolution of rock art in the Arabian Peninsula and is the subject of an article published in Antiquity (February 2018). Located in the province of Al Jawf in northwest...

The first modern Britons, who lived about 10,000 years ago, had “dark to black” skin, a groundbreaking DNA analysis of Britain’s oldest complete skeleton has revealed. The fossil, known as Cheddar Man, was unearthed more than a century ago in Gough’s Cave in Somerset. Intense speculation has built up around Cheddar Man’s origins and appearance because he lived shortly after the first settlers crossed from continental Europe to Britain at the end of the last ice age. People of white British ancestry alive today are descendants of this population. It was initially assumed that Cheddar Man had pale skin and...

MANSOURA, Egypt (AP) — A skeleton has been unearthed in Egypt’s Western Desert, whose ancient sands have long helped preserve remains, but unlike most finds this one isn’t a mummy — it’s a dinosaur. Researchers from Mansoura University in the country’s Nile Delta discovered the new species of long-necked herbivore, which is around the size of a city bus, and it could be just the tip of the sand dune for other desert dinosaur discoveries. “As in any ecosystem, if we went to the jungle we’ll find a lion and a giraffe. So we found the giraffe, where’s the lion?”...

Proto-Sinaitic led to the development of the Phoenician alphabet and its variants, many characters from which are clearly visible within the Uruguayan petroglyphs. Based upon this hypothesis, the characters would be dated from 1850 BC to 1100 BC. After this date (1100 BC) came the fully developed, 22 character, Phoenician 'international' writing system subsequently used by all West Semitic languages. I observed that many of the 'new international' characters do not appear among the petroglyphs suggesting movement away from this particular coastline 'port of call' some time after 1100 BC... Proto-Sinaitic has, allegedly, been found in Brazil at Itacoatiara, near...

[S]cholars digitally removed the tree canopy from aerial images of the now-unpopulated landscape, revealing the ruins of a sprawling pre-Columbian civilization that was far more complex and interconnected than most Maya specialists had supposed. “The LiDAR images make it clear that this entire region was a settlement system whose scale and population density had been grossly underestimated,” said Thomas Garrison, an Ithaca College archaeologist....who specializes in using digital technology for archaeological research. The project mapped more than 800 square miles (2,100 square kilometers) of the Maya Biosphere Reserve in the Petén region of Guatemala, producing the largest LiDAR data set...

The left hemi-maxilla with teeth. Credit: Rolf Quam _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ A large international research team, led by Israel Hershkovitz from Tel Aviv University and including Rolf Quam from Binghamton University, State University of New York, has discovered the earliest modern human fossil ever found outside of Africa. The finding suggests that modern humans left the continent at least 50,000 years earlier than previously thought. "Misliya is an exciting discovery," says Rolf Quam, Binghamton University anthropology professor and a coauthor of the study. "It provides the clearest evidence yet that our ancestors first migrated out of Africa much earlier than we...

To the west of Ethiopia near the Sudanese border lies a place called the Asosa zone. This may be the location of the oldest gold mine in the world. Dating back some 6,000 years, it provided a key source of gold to the ancient Egyptian empire, whose great wealth was famous throughout the known world. It may even have supplied the Queen of Sheba with her lavish gifts of gold when she visited King Solomon of Israel almost 3,000 years ago. The excitement in this part of the world is more about the future, however. Some local inhabitants already make...

Glacial archaeologists are racing melting ice in Norway to rescue thousands of ancient artifacts exposed by climate change—revealing something surprising about a mysterious and little-known ice age. A team of scientists from Norway and the United Kingdom working in the mountains of Oppland, Norway, have discovered more than 2,000 artifacts, including Iron Age and Bronze Age weapons, remains of pack horses and even prehistoric skis. According to lead author Lars Pilø, co-director of the Glacier Archaeology Program at Oppland County Council, the skis differ from the modern-day version considerably. They're broader, and might have at one point been partly covered...