Archaeologists can trace the change from a hunter-gatherer existence to one of farming based upon the changes in stone tools. “Intensive woodworking and tree-felling was a phenomenon that only appeared with the onset of the major changes in human life, including the transition to agriculture and permanent villages,” said Ran Barkai of Tel Aviv University. Early Neolithic farmers needed to clear the land of brush. As they eventually built homes and animal pens, they needed heavy-duty woodworking tools.

The skeletal remains of sixteen severed right hands have been discovered in a Hyksos palace in the Egyptian city of Avaris. The hands had been buried in pits in an area thought to have been a throne room 3,600 years ago. Ancient Egyptian writing and art suggests that soldiers were able to present rulers with the right hands of enemies in exchange for gold. “Our evidence is the earliest evidence and the only physical evidence [of this practice] at all,” said Manfred Bietak, Austrian archaeologist and director of the excavation.

In eastern Portugal, archaeologists have unearthed some 20 ivory statuettes estimated to be 4,500 years old. The carvings were found at the Archaeological Complex of Perdigões, which is known for its megalithic temple, standing stones, graves, and cremations. The ivory figurines were probably funerary objects. “This is the first time pieces with such characteristics have appeared in Portugal,” said archaeologist António Valério.

A volunteer digging in Maryport, which was originally a Roman town located on the coast of Cumbria, England, discovered an intact altar dedicated to Jupiter. “There was a lot of rock around and I noticed a piece with a line on it. I thought it might be a piece of something,” he said. The excavation team carefully removed the altar and transported it to the nearby Senhouse Roman Museum. The altar had been reused as building material in antiquity.

Paleontologist Meave Leakey of Nairobi’s Turkana Basin Institute has discovered three hominid fossils in northern Kenya. The fossils, two lower jaws and a juvenile’s lower face, could belong to Homo rudolfensis, which until now has only been represented by flat, upright, upper skull pieces. In fact, some scholars have considered those skull pieces to represent large individuals of other Homospecies. But the new jaws are nearly rectangular in shape. “It was such an extended excitement as the juvenile face slowly emerged from the encasing rock, and its similarity to the 1972 specimen became so striking,” she said.

DNA tests of the skeletal remains of 2,000-year-old turkeys found within El Mirador’s Jaguar Paw Temple in Guatemala show that the birds were a variety that is native to central Mexico, and not a local bird, as had been thought. Erin Kennedy Thornton of Trent University thinks that turkeys from Mexico may have been imported to the Maya world, along with jade, obsidian, and pottery, as early as 300 B.C. She also plans further testing to find out if those transported turkeys were wild or domesticated. It had been thought that the Maya started keeping turkeys only about 1,000 years ago.

Looting and smuggling artifacts is big business all over the world. This article describes how one illegal dealer operates in northwestern Pakistan, where ancient Buddhist objects from the Gandhara civilization are found. “Whenever I’m on a digging mission, I pay 10,000 rupees ($100) to the relevant police station as a bribe in advance and 1,000 rupees ($10) a day while the work continues,” he said. The artifacts are then transported out of the country to contacts in galleries in Asia, Europe, and the United States. Computerization and increased awareness are making the trip more difficult, however.

Harry Ostrer of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine has conducted a genetic study using samples from hundreds of people belonging to 15 different Jewish groups from around the world, in an effort to reconstruct the history of the Jewish Diaspora. He found that genetic information often coincided with the historical record. “I like to think of Jewishness as a tapestry with these DNA segments representing the threads that weave the tapestry together,” he said.