American Indians began farming in eastern North America at least 3,800 years ago, even though wild food was plentiful. Evidence of five different cultivated plants has been discovered at the Riverton site in Illinois. Brian Redmond of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in Ohio says that this “crop complex” may have “added to what was [already] a successful life,” for the Riverton people.

Two manuscripts were confiscated at Yemen’s Sana’a International Airport. It was not clear if they were ancient or not. “This prompts us to confiscate all items that we are suspicious of,” explained Waleed Al-Aghbari, antiquities inspector at the airport.   

A Civil War-era gun platform has been found at the Brunswick Town/Fort Anderson State Historic Site in North Carolina, overlooking the Cape Fear River.  

Traces of a medieval monastery were uncovered in Scotland’s Crarae Garden.   

Is modern life speeding up the pace of human evolution? Anthropologists say the growth of the world’s population has multiplied the size of the gene pool available to launch new, beneficial gene mutations. “Human evolution didn’t stop when anatomically modern humans appeared or when they expanded out of Africa. It never stopped,” said Henry Harpending of the University of Utah.

 Irish police recovered Bronze Age jewelry among other stolen goods from a safe in a Dublin pharmacy. Archaeologists from the National Museum of Ireland say that the gold lunula and two gold sun discs are “highly important.”

The bones of 25 ritually sacrificed dogs were discovered in the medieval Hungarian town of Kana. Dogs were a common sacrificial animal because they symbolized both loyalty and envy, according to archaeolozoologist Marta Daroczi-Szabo. “There was a very big difference between the hunting dogs of the nobility and the scavenging pariah dogs of everyday life,” she said.  

Chinese archaeologists are using a robot during excavations at an ancient tomb in Xi’an. The robot is equipped with infrared lights, a digital camera, and it can identify gases in the environment and take temperature and humidity readings. “With the robot, we can get some basic data and thus give out a more tailor-made digging plan,” said Tie Fude of the National Museum.  

The excavation of a preclassic Maya city in the Ichkabal region of theYucatan began this month. The city is estimated to cover 11.5 square miles and be well preserved.

Great Britain has returned 1,500 artifacts, confiscated at Heathrow Airport over a period of six years, to the Afghanistan National Museum. Most of the artifacts had been taken right out of the ground by looters to sell on the foreign market.  

Seven male skeletons and five additional skulls were unearthed at Marischal College in Aberdeen, Scotland. A Franciscan friary once stood on the site. “They were all buried with their hands clasped as if in prayer and may have been bound into that posture with cloth, which has since decayed in the soil,” said archaeologist Alison Cameron.   

Paleoanthroplogist Bruce Hardy of Kenyon College examined stone tools created by Neandertals and early modern humans, and found little difference between them, despite the larger variety of tools made by modern humans. “Neandertals stuck around for 150,000 years. That’s not a species that doesn’t know what it’s doing,” he explained.  

Archaeologists digging near the headwaters of the San Antonio River in Texas have found tools that are more than 5,000 years old. “These people were smart. They knew a Garden of Eden when they saw one,” quipped archaeologist Jon Dowling.  

The Los Angeles Times has published a photograph of the Roman fresco fragment due to return to Italy from the J. Paul Getty Museum.