A burial dating to 500 B.C. has been unearthed within a pyramid mound at Chiapa de Corzo in Chiapas, Mexico. Bones of two men were found within the tomb, along with a turtle-shell pendant carved with an Olmec-style face. 

Examination of the site of a proposed nuclear dump in Scotland has revealed an ancient burial cairn. The Bronze Age tomb had been plundered.  

Did climate change fuel culture change in prehistoric North America?  

An article in Current Anthropology suggests that early modern humans populated parts of the Arabian Peninsula that are now underwater as long as 120,000 years ago. The shoreline was flooded during the Ice Age some 8,000 years ago, and some scholars think that epic stories of catastrophic floods may have first been written by inhabitants of this region.  

Living standards in medieval England were higher than previously thought, according to a study by economist Stephen Broadberry of the University of Warwick. “The majority of the British population in medieval times could afford to consume what we call a ‘respectability basket’ of consumer goods that allowed for occasional luxuries,” he said.  

More people may have lived in Georgia’s Ocmulgee National Monument over the centuries than previously thought. Dan Bigman of the University of Georgia has been mapping the area with ground-scanning equipment. “It seems like we are seeing (evidence of) a lot more structures…than I expected,” he said.  

The RMS Titanic is being eaten by a newly discovered, rust-eating bacteria named Halomonas titanicae. “What is fascinating to me is that we tend to have this idea that these wrecks are time capsules frozen in time, when in fact there are all kinds of complex ecosystems feeding off them,” commented Dan Conlin of the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic.  

Here’s a photograph of the Greek goddess statue that will leave the Getty Villa Museum and return to Sicily. The statue is the last of 40 ancient objects that the institution agreed to return to Italy because of “the questionable legality of how they were acquired.”

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Tuesday, December 7, 2010. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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