An oceanographic surveying consultant working for Odyssey Marine Explorations, Inc., has paid more than $216,000 to settle insider trading charges. Ernesto Tapanes is said to have bought 42,000 shares of the company’s stock after he spotted an anomaly off the coast of Gibraltar, (a wreck known by the code name Black Swan), and then sold the stock after the discovery and its cargo of coins was announced.

A new genetic study suggests that the Lapita, the ancestors of today’s Polynesians and Micronesians, were probably East Asians and Taiwanese who island-hopped through Near Oceania.  

National Park Service archaeologists will dig at Abraham Lincoln’s childhood home in Knob Creek, Kentucky.

Italian officials say that their campaign to recover stolen antiquities is working–illegal excavation was down four percent from 2006. “The figures show how, at the moment, international trafficking is surely declining,” said General Giovanni Nistri of the Carabinieri’s art squad. Thefts from museums had also declined.

And, an American man has returned a boomerang he stole from an Australian museum 25 years ago. “I removed this back in 1983 when I was younger and dumber,” the man wrote in his apology.

Talk about the so-called “Jesus tomb” continues today. This article in The Jerusalem Post says that opposition from Ultra-Orthodox religious affairs authorities will prevent the reopening of the Talpiot tomb.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Friday, January 18, 2008. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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