A Turkish and German team has unearthed a 5,000-year-old Venus figurine and a stone seal at Çanakkale. “We also found stone axes, [and] well-processed and embellished pots and spindle-whorls, which were used for spinning wool,” said Rüstem Aslan of the University of Tubingen.

French archaeologists have decided that a prehistoric site on an island in the United Arab Emirates isn’t a butchering site for the Dugong dugon, or sea cow, but a sanctuary dedicated to worshipping it.    

Today’s Scandinavians are not the direct descendants of hunter-gatherers who lived in the region during the Stone Age, according to a DNA study conducted by teams from Sweden, Denmark, and the United Kingdom. “Some form of migration to Scandinavia took place, probably at the onset of the agricultural Stone Age. The extent of this migration is as of yet impossible to determine,” said Petra Molnar of Stockholm University.  

When a gravestone turned up in a driveway in South Dakota, the homeowners were concerned that bones would turn up, too.  

Students from Mainz University are excavating a second or third century A.D. Roman site near a U.S. Army housing construction project in Wiesbaden, Germany. “Up to four legions of the Roman army were stationed here, which is significant because there were 25 to 30 legions in the entire army,” said student Guido Schnell.  

More than 1,400 illegal artifacts and some human bones recovered from a collector in Washington State have been repatriated to local American Indian tribes. Other artifacts will remain in government custody. “It saddens me to think my ancestors may have been lying in somebody’s basement,” said Jim SiJohn, an elder with the Spokane Tribe of Indians.  

There’s a reported dispute between English landowner Fred Johnson and his friend, Terry Herbert, who discovered the Staffordshire Hoard with his metal detector on Johnson’s farm. “Me and Terry agreed to keep it all low-key and I thought that would be the case. It is not about the money for me. It’s an incredible find for the country and that’s what is more important,” Johnson told journalists.  

That tiny gem engraved with the likeness of Alexander the Great was excavated from Tel Dor by Megan Webb, 28, of Philadelphia. This article tells her story.

Terry Herbert was out on a friend’s farmland in South Staffordshire, England, with his metal detector when he discovered the largest Anglo-Saxon treasure ever found-1,500 gold and silver weapon fittings. “This is going to alter our perceptions of Anglo-Saxon England as radically, if not more so, as the Sutton Hoo discoveries. [It is] absolutely the equivalent of finding a new Lindisfarne Gospels or Book of Kells,” said Leslie Webster, formerly of the British Museum.   More photographs of some of the items are available.   And, Michael Lewis, head of the British Museum’s Portable Antiquities Scheme, explains how The Staffordshire Hoard fits into the Anglo-Saxon world of the seventh century.

A team of researchers led by Emma Nelson of the University of Liverpool examined intact index and ring finger fossils from two Neandertals and one Australopithecus afarensis. The scientists speculate that long ring fingers, thought to be a marker for high levels of male hormones, could indicate males who were more sexually competitive and less likely to be pair bonded.  

A new DNA analysis indicates that India’s many distinct peoples sprang from two ancient populations, and that gene flow has been limited by the current caste system.  

Rangers from New Mexico’s El Morro National Monument and scientists from the University of Pennsylvania are working together to try to preserve the historic inscriptions carved on a huge sandstone outcrop at the park. Some of the carvings were made by Spanish explorers, others by people traveling west on wagon trains.  

Just east of the Minnesota River’s “Little Rapids” sits the Dakota Indian “Village of the Rapids,” which was occupied between 500 and 1851 A.D. “The rapids you see today there might look different from the rapids there in history, in times before people have tried to get rid of them,” said Minnesota state archaeologist Scott Anfinson.   

New Hampshire has banned the sale of skeletal remains and grave goods. An auction house in the state had wanted to sell the remains of a Civil War soldier who had been illegally disinterred in Virginia, but the Sons of Union Veterans stepped in and contacted a state archaeologist.