Did Neanderthals take refuge in Russia, near the Arctic Circle, as late as 33,000 years ago? Archaeologists have found Mousterian tools that might have been made by Neanderthals, along with the bones of woolly rhinoceros, reindeer, musk ox, brown bear, wolf, and polar fox, in the Ural Mountains.

Yesterday, the U.S. returned Peruvian textiles, pottery, and other cultural objects recovered from a man who had tried to smuggle them into Houston.

A human skull was revealed when a tree toppled in a residential yard in Gonzalez, Florida. Students from the University of West Florida are looking for the rest of the skeleton. “We are at a loss right now. We don’t know why someone would have been buried here,” said their professor, Joanne Curtin.

Construction workers uncovered a 1,700-year-old burial in southern Austria.

In South Dakota, human bones estimated to be 700 years old were unearthed during a construction project, along with a scraping tool.

Live Science reports that 15 rock art sites have been found in northern Sudan. “We asked the local people about the rock art and they said that it would be very old, before their grandfathers,” said Tim Karberg of Germany’s Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster.

There’s more information on the quest to discover the resting place of “Mona Lisa” in The Telegraph.

James Cuno has been named president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust, which adopted a policy in 2007 that new museum acquisitions must have a clear ownership history dating back to 1970. Yet Cuno has argued against laws that give governments ownership of artifacts found within their borders. “We’re bound to bring works of art into this country legally. I have argued against the laws, but I haven’t broken the laws,” he said.

Reports from China claim that an airtight copper pot containing 2,000-year-old wine was found in a Western Han dynasty tomb in Henan province.

A timber keg full of butter was unearthed in a bog in Galway, Ireland. The butter is estimated to be between 2,000 and 2,500 years old. “It would have been a substantial loss to the family that buried the butter in the bog that they never recovered it. Perhaps the person who buried it died or forgot where it was left,” said archaeologist Ross MacLeod.

In the nineteenth-century, more than 50 enslaved African Americans lived at the estate of Dr. John Mackall Brome, in what is now Maryland’s Historic St. Mary’s City. Graduate student Terry Brock is working to reclaim their history. “They want me to go through data that hasn’t been analyzed and put together the best story I can. They gave me all the excavation data from five or six field seasons of archaeology,” he explained.