Voice of America offers interviews with researchers and photographs of the controversial teeth and tools unearthed at Qesem Cave, Israel. “Any new material that we find, especially from this poorly documented time period 200,000 to 400,000 years ago, is great and necessary for our ongoing interpretation of human evolution and Neanderthal evolution,” commented anthropologist Shara Bailey of New York University. 

A wharf that was used during the Revolutionary War through the 1800s has been uncovered in Newburyport, Massachusetts, during the construction of a waste-water operations building. The site was contaminated during the 1900s by an oil tank farm, and much of it cannot be preserved. “We’ve come across something historical, but the integrity of it is no longer intact. If we’re not preserving what’s there, we’re trying to document it and learn from it,” said project manager Pieter Hartford.  

Forty statues from Syria’s Tell Halaf have been carefully pieced together from the burned wreckage of a bombed private German museum. They are now on display in a special exhibit, along with the fragments that could not be saved. “No one could have imagined several years ago that this exhibition would be possible. Tell Halaf had been forgotten. It was thought to be certain that the pieces which disappeared in 1943 were irretrievably lost,” said Michael Eissenhauer, director of Berlin’s state museums.  

And the skeletal remains of a dog who was been killed and buried 2,000 years ago near a hoard of 5,000 gold and silver coins will go on display for the first time in England. “We believe it was bound and sacrificed and buried to guard the coin offerings. It was in an awkward position, looking at the hoard,” said Vicki Score of the University of Leicester.  

The remains of a fox have been found buried with a human in a 16,500-year-old cemetery at Uyun-al-Hammam in northern Jordan. “The burial site provides intriguing evidence of a relationship between humans and foxes which predates any comparable example of animal domestication,” said Lisa Maher of the University of Cambridge.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Thursday, January 27, 2011. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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