The melting Schnidejoch glacier in the Swiss Alps has yielded Neolithic artifacts, including an arrow quiver made of birch bark and parts of shoes and pants, suggesting that the Alps were accessible to humans 5,000 years ago. The finds correspond with calculations made by climate specialists that the Earth was going through an especially warm period. “Now with Schnidejoch we know they were rather keen on mountaineering,” said Albert Hafner, chief archaeologist with the canton of Berne.

New dates for the eastward migration of Canada’s Thule people have ruled them out as the people who scared the Vikings away from L’Anse aux Meadows. “As far as we can tell, Thule never made it onto the island of Newfoundland,” said Max Friesen of the University of Toronto.  

Japanese engineers will travel to Greece to study the earthquake-resistant Parthenon. “The ancient Greeks apparently had very good knowledge of quake behavior and excellent construction quality,” explained Maria Ioannidou, who is the archaeologist in charge of conservation on the Acropolis.  

Descendants of refugees who fled Franco’s Spain in the 1930s returned to give DNA samples that will be used to try to identify bodies in mass graves. The Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory has information on as many as 400 graves, where the bodies of some 5,000 people who disappeared under Franco’s regime could be buried.  

The remains of a stone building have been uncovered in Russia’s Novgorod Kremlin. Its walls are thought to date to the fourteenth century.  

A lead seal belonging to Tsar Simeon, who ruled Bulgaria in the ninth century, was found in Veliki Preslav, the capital of the first Bulgarian empire.  

Turkish fashionistas are wearing copies of Iron Age bracelets and rings.  

Meet Vic Armstrong, Harrison Ford’s stunt double in the first three Indiana Jones movies, in this article from CNN.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Monday, August 25, 2008. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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