News reports from Myanmar say that railroad construction continues to damage the ancient city of Mrauk U.

German authorities seized 15 artifacts near the Dutch border that had been plundered from Iraq. Two of the objects were fakes.  

A team from the University of South Carolina has located what remains of the CSS Peedee, a gunboat scuttled by the Confederates in 1865, in the Pee Dee River. Two of its three cannon were found last year. The rest was broken up during a dredging operation in 1906.  

The Tasmanian government has approved the plan to build a bridge over the Jordan River, at a site where archaeologist Rob Paton says he has found 40,000-year-old Tasmanian Aboriginal artifacts. “It’s a nice neat record of a very long span of Tasmania’s history,” he explained.  

These two Egyptologists, Jean Francois Champollion and Karl Richard Lepsius, were born on December 23. The Daily Telegraph offers brief descriptions of their lives and discoveries.

Thousands flocked to Stonehenge for the Winter Solstice, enjoying a Pagan marriage ceremony and a snowball fight.  

A detailed study of stick use among the Kanyawara chimpanzees in Kibale National Park, Uganda, has revealed that young female chimps sometimes treat sticks as dolls, in a way that evokes maternal play. The researchers think this form of play is a learned tradition among the Kanyawara community. “This would suggest that chimpanzee behavioral traditions are even more like those in humans than previously thought,” said Richard Wrangham of Harvard University.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Wednesday, December 22, 2010. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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