Paleoanthropologists from the University of New England think that it may be necessary to reclassify Homo floresiensis. Peter Brown, who originally named the Hobbits, and colleague Tomoko Maeda, write that it is possible that the Hobbits left Africa “before the evolution of the genus Homo,” in a paper due to be published in a special edition of the Journal of Human Evolution.

Archaeologist Francoise Villedieu says her team has uncovered a massive pillar that supported Nero’s rotating dining room in the Domus Aurea.   Here’s a little more information on the latest discovery in Rome.

British archaeologist Peter Sharrock spotted the missing legs of a twelfth-century Buddhist sculpture while visiting Angkor Thom this summer. French archaeologists removed the bust of the statue in 1925, which is now housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.  

Four skeletons dating to 320 B.C. were unearthed in a Chilean family’s yard. The human remains are thought to have been buried by the Batos culture.  

In New Zealand, a midden was uncovered on land occupied by a Maori settlement before 1850.  

American scientists have examined a skull fragment and jaw bone held in Russia and said to have come from Adolf Hitler. “What the DNA told us is that it was female,” said Linda Strausbaugh of the University of Connecticut. “From the point of view of archival integrity, (the skull) has no standing whatsoever,” added Christopher Browning of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

 It has been confirmed that beams pulled from the banks of the Hudson River by dredging equipment belonged to Fort Edward’s water bastion. The colonial-era fort blocked the French from moving south toward Albany during the French and Indian War. Archaeologists will continue to dig underwater and deeper into the river bank.

Timbers from a Stone Age structure have been unearthed in the Solent River in southern England. “It’s an elaborate framework and the timber appears to be linked. It could be a collapsed structure, or perhaps a platform built close to the waterway,” said Garry Momber, director of the Hampshire and Wight Trust for Maritime Archaeology.  

Work will soon end along the Erie Canal, at a site where a lock tender worked and lived. Pottery, nails, a horseshoe, and an iron wheel were among the artifacts unearthed by the Montezuma Historical Society. 

A network of canals in the Tucson basin suggests that people were farming and living a sedentary village life in Arizona 3,000 years ago. “We’ve uncovered dozens of these fields. We can see the actual holes where they planted the corn in many instances,” said geologist Fred Nials.  

“For thousands of years, Britons have been failing to take proper care of their possessions, littering the country with everything from abandoned Bronze Age forts to Elizabethan dinner sets, and creating what has become a treasure hunter’s paradise,” William Langley writes in The Telegraph. What are the laws and guidelines for British metal detectives, and what do archaeologists think about them?   And, here’s more information about what the Staffordshire Hoard can tell us about the Anglo-Saxon world that produced it.  

After a three-year-long archaeological survey, experts say that England’s Battle of Bosworth, which marked the end of the War of the Roses and the beginning of the Tudor era, has been commemorated in the wrong place.  

Archaeologist Michelle Lelievre is studying the settlement patterns and social life of the Mi’kmaq people of Nova Scotia, in the period following European contact.   

In Turkey, artifact smuggling statistics, including looting and thefts from museums, continue to rise every year.