Carbon-dating indicates that an inscribed piece of pottery found at the Elah Fortress bears the earliest known writing used by ancient Hebrews. The 3,000-year-old text “is a social statement, relating to slaves, widows, and orphans,” said Gershon Galil of the University of Haifa.

A Sumerian settlement has been discovered in southern Iraq.  

French scientists have shown that the lead in ancient Egyptian eye make-up helped protect against infections.  

You can follow the University of Pennsylvania’s excavation at the UNESCO World Heritage site of Luang Prabang in Laos at a daily blog written by Amy Ellsworth. The team is investigating a cave that had been used as a Buddhist temple, and an Iron Age burial.  

Martin Beckmann of the University of Western Ontario examined the wear and tear on the Alexander mosaic, unearthed at Pompeii in 1831, and presented his analysis at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in Anaheim, California. “The patches basically show us the mosaic through the Romans’ eyes, and tell us what interested the ancient viewer,’ he said.   

How much contact did Neanderthals have with modern humans? Steven Churchill of Duke University is experimenting with stone points and pig carcasses. He is trying to determine if the Neanderthal male known as Shanidar 3 was injured by another Neanderthal or in a hunting accident, or if he was killed by a modern human with a projectile weapon. 

 Japanese scientists have found 40-million-year-old relics of bornavirus in the human genome. Bornavirus replicates in the nuclei of infected cells, and may have caused genetic mutations. 

A French court has ruled that Korean books dating to the nineteenth century will stay in the National Library of France, where they were spotted in 1975 by a visiting scholar. Korean historians say the books were looted by the French from a Korean royal library on Ganghwa Island in 1866.  

Five rare Soay sheep from the flock that lives at England’s Flag Fen were killed by marauding dogs. “We are not keeping the sheep to sell them, it’s to remind people of what the sheep were like in the Bronze Age,” said park manager James Beatty.  

Amos, a 4,000-year-old Carian city near Turkey’s southwestern coast, will be opened to tourists.  

The government of Mexico has told the Starbucks Corporation to pay up for using Aztec images on a line of coffee mugs for sale in its stores.