Archaeologists have found the remains of 33 people who were sacrificed 600 years ago at Chotuna-Chornancap, an Inca site in northern Peru. “The majority (of the bodies) are in good condition – skin tissues and hair have been preserved. They were found in a dry area more than 7 feet underground,” said lead excavator Carlos Webster.  

Scientists are investigating Maya artwork depicting plant life. “By determining what plants were important to the ancient Maya, it is my hope that identified plants can be further studied for pharmaceutical, culinary, economic, and ceremonial uses,” said natural historian and archaeologist Charles Zidar of the Missouri Botanical Garden.  

Traces of an urban settlement have been found in Persepolis. The residential area could be the city of Mattezish, where people from the Imperial Court lived between the sixth and fourth centuries B.C.  

Volunteers assist American military forces in the search for fallen World War II soldiers in Europe. But some say time is running out. “We have maybe four or five years left, and then it’s over. The old witnesses and memories will vanish. And without witnesses who remember what happened, it will be very, very difficult,” said French volunteer Fabrice Corbin.  

Early modern human populations had to reach a certain population density before the transmission of ideas and skills became widespread, according to a computer model using genetic and archaeological data. “You could imagine that there may have been very innovative individuals on occasion, but with very small population sizes and mobile foragers who didn’t run into other groups very often, those innovations were probably very short-lived and almost invisible in the archaeological record,” commented anthropologist Richard Potts of the Smithsonian Institution.  

Humans and great apes inherited laughter from a shared ancestor that lived more than ten million years ago, according to a study that investigated the sounds evoked by tickling human babies and orangutans, gorillas, chimps, and bonobos.  

Here’s more information on the recommendation made by a magistrate judge in Tampa, Florida, that Odyssey Marine Exploration hand over 600,000 gold and silver coins to Spain.

A Federal Court judge in Tampa has ordered Odyssey Marine Exploration to hand over 17 tons of gold and silver coins to Spain. Odyssey had code-named the treasure-laden shipwreck it discovered the Black Swan, and refused to reveal its location, but Spain believes the wreck to be the Nuestra Senora de las Mercedes, which sank off the coast of Portugal in 1804. “The Judge saw that the ship and its contents belong to Spain. It’s a hugely important ruling and one that will set a precedent for future claims,” said Angeles Gonzales-Sine, Spain’s minister of culture.  Odyssey will appeal the decision.

An intact seventeenth-century witch bottle was discovered in Greenwich, England. The stoneware bottle contained sharp objects, human hair, urine, fingernail clippings, belly-button fluff, and sulfur, or brimstone. “There was a genuine fear of witches. It was believed the bottle would reflect the spell on whoever cast it, and inflict excruciating pain on them when they passed urine,” said chemist Alan Massey.  

Experts from the University of Florida claim that a bone found by a local fossil hunter is inscribed with a 12,000-year-old image of a mammoth or mastodon. “It would be ancient evidence that people living in the Americas during the last Ice Age created artistic images of the animals they hunted,” said anthropologist Barbara Purdy. “I did everything in my power to show this thing was a fake,” she added.   

The nearly complete skeleton of one-million-year-old mammoth has been unearthed in an open-pit coal mine in Serbia.