An unnamed Swiss art gallery has surrendered 251 artifacts to Italy. The artifacts had been looted from Etruscan tombs and burials in southern Italy.

Greek antiquities police have returned to Italy two medieval frescoes looted from a tomb near Naples in 1982. The Greek authorities recovered the paintings in a raid in 2006.  

Greece in turn received artifacts, including a Byzantine statue and ancient pottery and coins, from Germany, Belgium, and Britain.  

Colin Cooke of the University of Alberta has found evidence of pre-industrial mercury pollution in ancient sediments from lakes in the Andes Mountains of Peru. The pollution was produced by the Inca during the large-scale production of the red pigment, vermilion, from cinnabar. “Once we radiocarbon-dated the cores, we realized it went back many, many centuries – a few millennia even – and that was pretty shocking. The idea that they were mining there as early as 1400 B.C. had never really been suggested before,” he said.   

Letters written by a boy who discovered a Roman villa in 1947 and protected it from developers have been uncovered in the archives of England’s Bristol City Museum. “I mean, both the builders, while digging drains and so forth, and the inhabitants of the houses, are absolutely bound to disturb the Roman stuff and certainly find all sorts of things,” wrote the young George Boon, who became a leader in Romano-British archaeology.   

Here’s more information on the almost complete, 47-million-year-old fossil that could be the common ancestor of all primates.  

Officials from the U.S. Joint Prisoners of War, Missing in Action, and Accounting Command (JPAC), and South Korea’s Agency for Killed in Action Recovery and Identification, are working together to excavate the remains of American soldiers killed in battle in June, 1951. JPAC archaeologist Jay Silverstein estimates it will take six months to identify the bones.  

The number of tourists traveling to Egypt has dropped. “Twelve-point-six percent of our total work force directly and indirectly works in the travel industry,” said Zoheir Garana, minister of tourism.   

Ornamental dentistry in Mesoamerica was available to men from all walks of life.

Over the weekend, archaeologists and volunteers experimented with special flares to study how early Navajos could have used towers and smoke signals to warn their neighbors about invaders. “If you hear an enemy approaching, you climb into these things and pull up the ladder, and you can seal yourself in for a while,” said Ron Maldonado of the Navajo Nation Historic Preservation Department.

Find out why we yell “Geronimo!” when jumping off something, and other folklore about the Apache medicine man.   

Greece objects to the Macedonian plan to erect a giant statue of Alexander the Great, the ancient king of Macedon, in its modern capital, Skopje.   

A new study of the Waorani, called “the most murderous people on Earth,” has found that the Waorani warriors’ endless cycle of revenge has led to less reproductive success than that of the Yanomamo, whose violence is followed by peaceful times. It had been thought that aggressive men ended up with more wives and children.  

A 47-million-year-old fossil discovered in Germany may be a possible ancestor of higher primates.   

An excavation and preservation project is planned for the Laetoli footsteps, in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area in Tanzania.  The fossilized footsteps show that two Australopithecus afarensis individuals were walking upright, side-by-side, 3.6 million years ago.  

In the Al Dour area of the United Arab Emirates, archaeologists have uncovered artifacts spanning a 3,000-year-long period, including pottery dating to the third millennium B.C., bronze spearheads from the first millennium B.C., and 2,000-year-old iron tools, beads, and fish bones.  

A new exhibition spread across three German museums revisits the defeat of the Romans at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest and the idea that the Roman Empire withdrew from Germany afterwards. Historians now suggest that the Romans appointed Germanic tribal leaders and probably maintained a system of client states. “They interfered using diplomatic rather than military methods,” said Guenther Moosbauer.  

The Serpon Sugar Mill in Belize has been declared an archaeological reserve. The sugar mill, established in 1865, was abandoned in 1910.  

Here’s a bit more information on the stucco panels depicting scenes from the Popol Vuh that were found in Guatemala by Idaho State University’s Richard Hansen. The panels date to 300 B.C. “We can now extend the authenticity of the creation myth back another 1,000 years,” he said.  

A Colorado man faces federal looting charges after his ex-wife reported him to the authorities. She said she didn’t want the man to teach their son to loot.