A piece of a 35,000-year-old ax head has been discovered in remote northern Australia. “It would have been ground, probably against a sandstone-based grinding stone. The hard grains of sand left little groves and they are large enough to see with the naked eye,” said Bruno David of Monash University.

An excavation next to Boston’s Faneuil Hall has revealed early eighteenth-century artifacts related to the Triangle Trade.  

Did Neolithic farmers domesticate grain in order to brew beer for feasts? “It’s not that drinking and brewing by itself helped start cultivation, it’s this context of feasts that links beer and the emergence of complex societies,” explained Brian Hayden of Simon Fraser University.  

There’s more information on the royal garden unearthed at the site of Ramat Rachel, near Jerusalem. The well-irrigated green space changed hands as various empires ruled Israel from the seventh to the fourth centuries B.C. “We are carefully deciphering what we have in front of us. There are no parallels to it,” said Boaz Gross of Tel Aviv University.  

Under the Native American Graves Protection Repatriation Act, Central Michigan University transferred ancestral American Indian remains to the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe. More than 200 people accompanied the remains and associated funerary objects on the walk from the university to Nibokaan Ancestral Cemetery, where they were reinterred. “These grandparents are being returned in a special compassionate way,” commented one participant.  

The human skulls shipped to Brigham Young University last month are more than 700 years old, and will be turned over to American Indian leaders in Utah.  

Discovery News has a photograph of the red granite statue of Amenhotep III unearthed in Luxor.

Figuring out how to craft stone tools boosted the brain power of early humans and paved the way for language, according to neuroscientist Aldo Faisal of Imperial College London. Areas in the right hemisphere of the brain become more active when more advanced stone tools are made. Some of these areas are also involved in language processing.

Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt’s antiquities department, announced that the upper half of a red granite statue of Amenhotep III has been uncovered in Luxor.  

In a letter to the newspaper El Peruano, Peru’s President Alan Garcia has asked President Barack Obama to intervene in the dispute with Yale University over artifacts from Machu Picchu.  

A 45-year-old man has been sentenced for stealing artifacts from the Lake Roosevelt National Recreation Area in Washington State. As part of his punishment, he has been banned from the recreation area for three years.  

In Bedfordshire, England, a 2,000-year-old quern stone, used for grinding corn, turned up at a golf course. “Apparently only three have ever been discovered in the south of England so it is quite rare, and even rarer to find one that is completely intact,” said club captain Neil Bagshawe.  

Renovation of a hair salon in Lincolnshire, England, revealed a sixteenth-century Inglenook, or chimney corner fireplace with a cozy alcove. “I knew there was a lot of history to the building so I requested an archaeological contractor to work alongside the project,” said building owner John French.  

Indian Head Rock will return to Kentucky today, where it is registered as a historic artifact. Ohio residents pulled the 8-ton boulder from the Kentucky side of the Ohio River three years ago.  

A 3D model of the A.J. Goddard, which sank in 1901 while transporting gold prospectors, was made this past summer in Canada. Underwater archaeologists also discovered a phonograph and discs, corked bottles, and shoes on board. “The A.J. Goddard is not only a testament to the ingenuity, sense of adventure and determination of those men and women who took part in the Klondike Gold Rush, but also to the key role that the river and sternwheelers played in the economic development of Yukon,” said Elaine Taylor, tourism and culture minister.  

Prospectors in Alaska relied on Hills Brothers Coffee because it was packed in vacuum-sealed cans. Bureau of Land Management archaeologist Steve Lanford has created a chronology from 1900 to 1963 based upon those cans. “These coffee cans show up often enough in their dumps to give us good information,” he explained.