A well-preserved leather shoe reported to be a few hundred years older than the leather shoes worn by Otzi the Iceman has been discovered in a pit in a cave in Armenia. “Enormous similarities exist between the manufacturing technique and style of this (Armenian) shoe and those found across Europe at later periods, suggesting that this type of shoe was worn for thousands of years across a large and environmentally diverse region,” said Ron Pinhasi of University College Cork.  Sheep dung is responsible for the remarkable preservation of the 5,500-year-old shoe.  Here’s a photograph of the cave where the shoe was discovered.

Discovery News has an excellent slideshow, narrated by Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologist Edwin van den Brink, on the 3,500-year-old Canaanite religious vessels unearthed in northern Israel.  

Archaeologists working ahead of road crews in Orange County, California, uncovered an 1,800-year-old burial of a small dog. The dog had been covered with a stone bowl. “It might have been just a pet burial. But it could be destruction of property. It was common to kill the dog along with burning or destroying any other personal property upon the death of the owner,” said Paul E. Langenwalter II of Biola University.  

An excavation planned for this summer in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, could yield artifacts from the Revolutionary War. Some 800 American soldiers guarded the Clove Road site during the Battle of Brooklyn.  

Tourists may one day be able to scuba dive on the ruins of Cleopatra’s palace in the harbor at Alexandria.

Closed for the past eight years, Spain’s Caves of Altamira will re-open to a limited number of visitors, despite scientists’ warnings that human warmth and breath damages the prehistoric paintings. As many as 3,000 people a day visited the famed caves in the 1970s. “Altamira is an asset we cannot do without,” said Miguel Angel Revilla, president of the Cantabria region.

Lion bones unearthed at the Gran Dolina site in Sierra de Atapuerca suggest that Neanderthals likely ate the big cat, in addition to red deer, horses, foxes, and bears. 

Here’s a review of Otzi the Iceman’s last days, before he was supposedly murdered in the Italian/Austrian Alps.  

A researcher from Sweden’s Uppsala University has examined thousands of rune inscriptions, and has concluded that many of the carvings are meaningless. “What you wrote wasn’t so important since no-one could read it anyway,” explained Marco Bianchi.  

Some more gold coins have been uncovered in Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria’s medieval capital. These coins came from the mint of John III Doukas Vatatzes, the Emperor of Nicaea.  

The 3,000-year-old chalk monument known as the Uffington White Horse has been defaced with purple spray paint. “It is particularly sad as only last weekend members of the public helped re-chalk the horse as part of a traditional community volunteering event,” said Richard Henderson of England’s National Trust for Oxfordshire. 

Archaeologists are looking for a long-lost monastery that is described in the margins of Scotland’s oldest surviving manuscript.  

National Geographic Daily News has more to say about the addition of sticky rice soup to the mortar mix in ancient China.  

And there’s more information on the 3,000-year-old beehives discovered at Tel Rehov, in northern Israel. “Although texts and wall paintings suggest that bees were kept in the ancient Near East for the production of precious wax and honey, archaeological evidence for beekeeping has never been found,” wrote Guy Bloch and his team in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  

A letter written by the seventeenth-century philosopher Rene Descartes, and stolen in the nineteenth century from the library at the Institut de France, was found in the library at Haverford College by a Dutch Descartes scholar. “I am, of course, a bit amazed at what a simple search at home from your home computer late at night can bring about,” he said. When the scholars at Haverford learned that the letter was stolen, they returned it.