A piece of a 35,000-year-old ax head has been discovered in remote northern Australia. “It would have been ground, probably against a sandstone-based grinding stone. The hard grains of sand left little groves and they are large enough to see with the naked eye,” said Bruno David of Monash University.

An excavation next to Boston’s Faneuil Hall has revealed early eighteenth-century artifacts related to the Triangle Trade.  

Did Neolithic farmers domesticate grain in order to brew beer for feasts? “It’s not that drinking and brewing by itself helped start cultivation, it’s this context of feasts that links beer and the emergence of complex societies,” explained Brian Hayden of Simon Fraser University.  

There’s more information on the royal garden unearthed at the site of Ramat Rachel, near Jerusalem. The well-irrigated green space changed hands as various empires ruled Israel from the seventh to the fourth centuries B.C. “We are carefully deciphering what we have in front of us. There are no parallels to it,” said Boaz Gross of Tel Aviv University.  

Under the Native American Graves Protection Repatriation Act, Central Michigan University transferred ancestral American Indian remains to the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe. More than 200 people accompanied the remains and associated funerary objects on the walk from the university to Nibokaan Ancestral Cemetery, where they were reinterred. “These grandparents are being returned in a special compassionate way,” commented one participant.  

The human skulls shipped to Brigham Young University last month are more than 700 years old, and will be turned over to American Indian leaders in Utah.  

Discovery News has a photograph of the red granite statue of Amenhotep III unearthed in Luxor.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Friday, November 5, 2010. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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