A lab mistake in 2004 led researchers to think they had found the remains of an extinct breed of horse at Pompeii. It seems that the animal was actually a donkey related to the Somali wild ass.  

Exposure to sex hormones in the womb is thought to determine future finger length and adult behavior. If this is so, does the ratio between the lengths of fossilized index fingers compared to fossilized ring fingers indicate promiscuity among different hominin species? “Although finger rations provide some really exciting suggestions about hominin behavior, we do accept that the evidence is limited and to confirm these findings we really need more fossils,” said Emma Nelson of Liverpool University. 

Forensic experts have confirmed that Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was buried in a grave in Bucharest in 1989.  

A skeleton estimated to be several hundred years old and a cache of World War II firearms were discovered during the reconstruction of a fire-ravaged pub in Norfolk, England.  

Discovery News offers photographs of the mud-brick wall uncovered at Egypt’s Giza plateau. The wall once protected the Sphinx from desert winds and sands.  

Doctors at Children’s Hospital in St. Paul, Minnesota, used their CT scanner to examine 3,500-year-old Egyptian mummies of a man, a bird of prey, and a human hand from the Science Museum of Minnesota. “There’s always the possibility we can learn something else,” said Ed Fleming, curator of archaeology at the museum.

Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities announced that a 3,400-year-old wall that once protected the Sphinx from desert winds has been uncovered on the Giza plateau.

Here’s a summary of five papers published in the current issue of the Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists. The topics include the use of cabbages to pay interest on loans and Roman spelling mistakes.  

Yersinia Pestis, the bacterium that causes plague, originated in China 2,600 years ago, according to a new study by an international team of medical geneticists. “What’s exciting is that we are able to reconstruct the historical routes of bacterial disease over centuries,” said Mark Achtman of University College Cork.  

You can explore the 14,000-year-old art inside a French cave with this GigaPan from National Geographic.