A 4,000-year-old skeleton bearing traces of leprosy has been found at Balathal, in Rajasthan, India.

Part of a 300-year-old broom made of twigs was unearthed in a Benedictine monastery latrine in Germany.  

Students from Washington & Lee University have excavated thousands of artifacts from the home of Edmund Bacon, who worked at Monticello as Thomas Jefferson’s overseer from 1806 until 1822. “We don’t know very much about the middle ground of society,” said their instructor, Alison Bell.  

Sculptures that were part of a giant Soviet pavilion at the 1937 Paris World Fair are being excavated by archaeologist Francois Gentili from an ice chest at the site of a seventeenth-century chateau. “It is as if someone wanted to provide them with a grave,” he said.  

Homo heidelbergensis individuals were predominately right-handed, if the marks on their teeth were made while holding on to meat they were cutting with stone tools. “Most hominins, even early hominins, are going to be bright enough not to bring a blade up to their noses,” commented biological anthropologist Travis Pickering of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.  

Radiocarbon dating shows that Gypsum Cave in Nevada has been used by humans for about 4,000 years for hunting and ceremonial purposes. Packrats moving artifacts around had interfered with early attempts to date the cave.  

BBC News has pictures of the Bronze Age road made of tree branches that was discovered in Swansea.  

And there’s more information on the earliest known irrigation system in the southwestern U.S. from the Los Angeles Times. The system could have watered between 60 and 100 acres of corn and amaranth, and dates to at least 1200 B.C.  

Here’s a better photograph of the rock-art image of a marsupial lion that was recently discovered in Australia.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Wednesday, May 27, 2009. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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