The graves of three Neanderthal individuals have been unearthed in southeastern Spain, at the site of Sima de las Palomas, the first known Neanderthal burial ground in Mediterranean Europe. “Such discoveries are extraordinarily uncommon,” said Michael Walker of the University of Murcia. 

Here’s more information on the brick tombs and a well uncovered in Hanoi during road work. The tombs were built in the fourth and sixth centuries, and resemble tombs in the Thang Long Royal Citadel. “I think that under the tombs and the well is a complexity of relics, perhaps the entire village along the Red River,” said Nguyen Lan Cuong of the Vietnam Archaeology Institute.

Archaeologists in England have been excavating an unfinished castle that was started in the 1100s near lands claimed by both the King of Scotland and the Earl of Chester. The Earl eventually moved the border of his lands 60 miles to the north and the castle was no longer needed. 

Would now be a good time to visit Athens?

Happy Spring Break! The news will return on Tuesday, April 26.

Italian police uncovered a 2,000-year-old mausoleum near Naples that had been buried under tons of illegally dumped garbage. 

Markings on fossilized front teeth indicate that right-handedness has dominated in Europeans for at least 500,000 years. “These marks were produced when a stone tool was accidentally dragged across the labial face in an activity performed at the front of the mouth. The heavy scoring on some of the teeth indicates the marks were produced over the lifetime of the individual and are not the result of a single cutting episode,” said anthropologist David Frayer of the University of Kansas. 

John Hoffecker of the University of Colorado Boulder thinks that humans living in Africa evolved a “collective mind” able to communicate complex information no later than 75,000 years ago. “With the appearance of symbols and language—and the consequent integration of brains into a super-brain—the human mind seems to have taken off as a potentially unlimited creative force,” he said. 

Recent research in the evolution of language suggests that it evolved along “varied, complicated paths.” “Each language family is evolving according to its own set of rules. Some were similar, but none were the same. There is much more diversity, in terms of evolutionary processes, than anybody ever expected,” said Michael Dunn of Germany’s Max Planck Institute. 

It had been thought that only Homo sapiens give birth to babies that face backwards, but researchers from the Great Ape Research Institute of Hayashibara Biochemical Laboratories in Tamano, Japan, have observed the birth of backwards-facing chimp babies. Human mothers, however, routinely seek assistance when giving birth, but chimp mothers prefer to give birth alone. 

Science Now has more information on Australopithecus sediba. “We really have found something very, very odd and very unexpected,” said Lee Berger of the University of Witwatersrand.