A toe bone belonging to an archaic human has been found in Siberia’s Denisova Cave and turned over to Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. A tooth and a finger bone from the so-called Denisovans have already come to light. “We have no results we are ready to talk about yet,” Pääbo said.

The HMS Investigator sank in Arctic waters in 1854 while searching for the lost Franklin Expedition. Discovered last year, researchers say the wreck of the Investigatoris a treasure trove of nineteenth-century artifacts. (Some of the metal items from the ship had been salvaged by local Inuit before it sank.)

A 2,600-year-old painted wall  has been unearthed in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt.

The skeletal remains of a child, stone foundations of houses, wall plaster, and coins have been found at the site of a Roman settlement in Dorchester, England.

Archaeologist Jill Eyers continues to study the 97 infant skeletons that were excavated from a Roman villa complex in England 100 years ago. She thinks they may have been the unwanted offspring of women working in a brothel. But Brett Thorn of the Buckinghamshire County Museum thinks the site may have been home to a mother goddess cult. “The large number of babies who are buried there could be natural stillbirths, or children who died in labor,” he said.

A mini ball dating to the Civil War has been found in a tree on the Gettysburg Battlefield.

Here’s more information on the four men recently accused of smuggling Egyptian antiquities into the United States during the Arab Spring, and the growing demand for looted antiquities.

Investigators suspect that a fire at one of the Society for Commercial Archaeology’s ten most endangered roadside places was deliberately set. The fire destroyed the main building at the abandoned Dinosaur World theme park in northwest Arkansas last week.

A monumental gate decorated with stone sculptures has been unearthed in southeastern Turkey at the Neo-Hittite Tayinat citadel. “The lion is fully intact, approximately 1.3 meters in height and 1.6 meters in length. It is poised in a seated position, with ears back, claws extended and roaring. A second piece found nearby depicts a human figure flanked by lions,” explained Timothy Harrison of the University of Toronto.

Tens of thousands of artifacts confiscated from looters and smugglers are stored in Turkey’s archaeological museums. “The police and gendarmerie keep bringing new artifacts to the museum. We need to solve the storage room problem in the museum as soon as possible,” said a representative from the Istanbul Archaeology Museum.

An eighteenth-century brick foundation has been uncovered on the campus of William and Mary College in Williamsburg, Virginia. “It’s a substantial outbuilding or dependency. Based on the time period, where it’s located and the dimensions, it’s probably a specific-function building like a kitchen building or maybe quarters for slaves,” said Joe Jones, director of the William and Mary Center for Archaeological Research.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Hawaii have completed a survey of World War II-era shipwrecks and sunken aircraft along Maui’s southern coast. “The wrecks along the coast are like windows into the past and they remind us of the sacrifices made during World War II,” said Hans Van Tilburg, NOAA maritime heritage coordinator.

A large shell midden on the central coastline of British Columbia could indicate the site of Luxvbalis, a village inhabited for 10,000 years and then lost during a smallpox epidemic in the 1800s.

Nature News offers a wrap-up of recent genetic studies of archaic humans.

The “Hobbit Wars”  are heating up again. A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that Homo floresiensis was not a separate species, but a modern human child with a developmental disorder. Critics point out that the study does not compare the size of the Homo floresiensis brain to the size of its body.