A 3.2 million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis foot bone has been discovered among the remains of some 35 individuals in Ethiopia. The long bone suggests that “Lucy” and her kind had well-formed arches and walked with an upright gait, and that they could have left the 3.7 million-year-old footprints at Laetoli in Tanzania.

Scientists looking for fossilized rat bones stumbled upon 10,000-year-old petroglyphs in a limestone cave in East Timor.  

Archaeologists have found what’s left of a Nantucket whaling ship 600 miles northwest of Honolulu. The Two Brothers struck a coral reef in shallow water in 1823. Several harpoons, tools, and cauldrons whalers used to render whale blubber have been recovered.  

Two scow schooners were discovered in San Francisco when a trench for a new sewage pipe was dug at a “ship graveyard.” Jim Delgado, director of maritime heritage at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, explained. “They’re largely forgotten now, but these scow schooners moved the goods that built the city and the Bay Area economy.”  

The Peruvian National University of San Antonio Abad in Cusco is building a new facility for the collection of Machu Picchu artifacts that will soon be returned by Yale University. The “UNSAAC-Yale University International Center for the Study of Machu Picchu and Inca Culture” will be run jointly with Yale.  

A team of researchers from the Smithsonian Institution and the Texas Historical Commission wants to know if they have found the grave of James Coryell, one of the first Texas Rangers. Coryell died after an attack by Caddo Indians in 1837.  

Pakal the Great, ruler of Maya city of Palenque, may have had a second son, according to epigrapher Guillermo Bernal from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History. The son’s name was found on fragments of a wall panel from the Temple of the Sun.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Friday, February 11, 2011. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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