The salvage company Odyssey Marine Exploration says that information released by WikiLeaks exposes the U.S. government’s interference in a lawsuit between the company and Spain. Spain claims that the $500 million in gold and silver coins recovered by the company were taken from a Spanish galleon.

Early farming villages have been excavated on the Mediterranean coast of southern Croatia, where plant cultivation and animal husbandry began as early as 8,000 years ago. “Farming came to Dalmatia abruptly, spread rapidly and took hold immediately,” said Andrew Moore of the Rochester Institute of Technology.  

Modern humans began wearing clothing some 170,000 years ago, according to a DNA study of body lice, which “almost certainly didn’t exist until clothing came about in humans,” according to evolutionary biologist David Reed of the Florida Museum of Natural History. “I find it surprising that modern humans were tinkering with clothing probably long before they really needed it for survival. But that tinkering really paid off when they finally left Africa and moved into Europe and Asia,” he added.  

There are still human remains in an historic cemetery in Los Angeles, even though it had been thought that the cemetery was moved in the nineteenth-century. Some residents object to moving the graves in order to build a proposed cultural center.  

More than 1,000 artifacts dating to Australia’s Gold Rush have been unearthed in Victoria.  

A house decorated with wall paintings dating to the third century B.C. has been discovered on the highest point of the site of Paphos, in Cyprus. The house has a central courtyard surrounded by three or four rooms.  

The bones uncovered in a basement in southern Louisiana could be more than 700 years old. The house had been built on an Indian mound, and the bones had probably been collected over many years by different people.  

Six missing pieces from a colossal double statue of Pharaoh Amenhotep III and his wife have been unearthed at his mortuary temple in Luxor. The statue was discovered in 1889.  

Eight statues were stolen from an ancient temple in northern India.  

A team of sport divers claims to have located the USS Revenge, commanded by eventual U.S. Navy hero Oliver Hazard Perry and wrecked in 1811 off the coast of Rhode Island.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Monday, January 10, 2011. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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