A 67,000-year-old foot bone discovered deep in the Callao cave network suggests that the Philippines were settled 20,000 years earlier than previously thought. The bones of deer and wild boar were found near the foot bone, and although they bear cut marks, no tools were recovered. Scientists will look for more fossils in order to determine if the foot bone belonged to a modern human or a human ancestor.  

Paleoanthropologist Pat Shipman of Penn State University thinks that caring for animals shaped human evolution and is therefore still deeply ingrained in many people today. “If you have a dog that can hunt, you don’t need to turn into a fast-moving animal with sharp teeth,” she explained.  

The modern human shoulder allows the arm to move in almost any direction, and to throw with power and accuracy, especially with an atlatl, or “catapult for the arm.” NPR reporter Christopher Joyce visited archaeologist John Shea at Stony Brook University to learn about the human shoulder and evolution.   Joyce has also written about how eating meat and learning to cook fueled human evolution. “Ultimately, of course, what makes us intellectually human is our brain. And I think that comes from having the highest quality of food in the animal kingdom, and that’s because we cook,” said Richard Wrangham of Harvard University.  All of the installments in this NPR series on human evolution are still available.  

Stones decorated with painted designs during the Neolithic period have been found in Scotland. “This is a first for the UK, if not for northern Europe,” said Nick Card of the Orkney Research Center for Archaeology.  

UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee has added 21 sites to its list, bringing the total to 911.  

The excavation of Timbuctoo, New Jersey, a free African American community dating to the early nineteenth century, is still making headlines. This article in The Washington Post also has a photo gallery featuring the site and archaeologists from Temple University.  

A tract of land slated for industrial development in Etna, Ohio, was a fall and winter camp for a Hopewell family group 1,500 to 2,000 years ago.  

German archaeologists have reconstructed 60 Aramaean artifacts from Syria from stone fragments that survived the bombing of Berlin’s Tell Halaf archaeological museum during World War II. “We didn’t know how far we’d get because we didn’t know how much of the original material was recovered from the destroyed museum,” said chief restorer Stefan Geismeier.  

Irving Finkel of the British Museum has examined two fossilized horse bones incised with cuneiform text and thinks they are authentic. The bones, which have been housed in China, have been assumed to be fakes. “The text used by the copier on the bones was not the Cyrus Cylinder, but another version, probably originally written in Persia, rather than Babylon,” he said.

A campsite in southern Jordan that was used by Lawrence of Arabia’s army during the 1916-1918 Great Arab Revolt has yielded two tobacco containers, bullets, cartridges and their clips, and British military buttons.

The skeleton of a person who suffered from a rare bone disease has been uncovered at a monastery hospital in east Iceland. “We have found many cases of syphilis and tuberculosis but this one is different as the disease causes overgrowth and deformation of the bones,” said archaeologist Steinunn Kristjansdottir. The hospital was in use between 1490 and 1550.  

Sit in on a class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with archaeologist Jonathan Mark Kenoyer. He helps his students to understand ancient technologies by encouraging them to experiment with making stone and metal tools, beads, oil lamps, pottery, arrows, and more.  

Karina Croucher of the University of Manchester says that the arrival of Westerners caused the destruction of Easter Island civilization. “There is little archaeological evidence to support the history of internal warfare and collapse before contact with the outside world,” she said.  

Recent work at Ohio’s Fort Ancient, including new computer models of the 2,000-year-old earthworks, indicate that its gateway was aligned with the rising sun on the summer solstice. At the center of the mounds, archaeologist Robert Riordan has found evidence of rings of wooden timbers, a circle of reddish burned soil, pottery fragments, and signs that someone lived there. “I think this was the ceremonial center of Fort Ancient for a period of time,” he said.  

Photographs of the Moche sacrificial chamber discovered at Peru’s Huaca Bandera site are available at National Geographic Daily News.  

Using a magnetometer, Parks Canada archaeologists have found the three graves belonging to crew members of HMS Investigator on Banks Island. The men died during the two years that the ship was trapped in the ice at Mercy Bay while searching for the lost Franklin Expedition. The archaeologists have also located a cache of provisions from the ship’s stores.  

A total of more than 36,000 artifacts have been recovered and returned to Iraq in the past seven years.  

Excavations on St. Ivan Island, a Bulgarian island in the Black Sea, have unearthed a reliquary built into the altar of a church. The reliquary is presumed to hold bones of the Christian saint John the Baptist.