Christie’s auction house in New York has listed a pair of neo-Assyrian gold earrings for sale that the former director of the Iraq Museum, Donny George, says are from Nimrud. George witnessed the excavation of gold earrings from a royal tomb at Nimrud by an Iraqi team in 1989. The earrings were displayed by the Iraq Museum once before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and the looting of the museum.

A new study of sophisticated obsidian tools from the Ethiopian site of Gademotta indicates that they are 276,000 years old, or older than the oldest known Homo sapien bones, which are about 195,000 years old. “The new date for Gademotta changes how we think about human evolution, because it shows how much more complicated the situation is than we previously thought,” explained archaeologist Laura Basell of the University of Oxford.  

The body of Afghanistan’s first president, Mohammad Daud Khan, has been identified in a mass grave at a military base outside of Kabul through dental records, and a small golden Koran that had been given to him by the king of Saudi Arabia. Khan and 17 members of his family were executed during a communist coup in 1978.  

Eighteen research specialist positions at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology have been eliminated, and the Applied Science Center for Archaeology has been disbanded. This article, from the university newspaper The Daily Pennsylvanian, states that the departing employees have a combined total of 300 years of experience in archaeology. “There was pressure from the director’s office to make it more profitable and run it more like a business,” commented a student who still works at the noted museum.  

Meanwhile, the city finance committee of Florence, Alabama, has endorsed a plan to move its Indian Mound Museum to a former golf shop. The current building floods, has a leaky roof, and is a fire hazard. “We’ve got a good collection, but we would have a better collection if we had more room to display,” said museum director Barbara Broach.   

More information on the Stone Age figurines carved from mammoth bones that were discovered in Russia is now available at CNN.

A Chachapoyas citadel has been discovered in the remote Amazonian rainforest of northeastern Peru. 

Bloomberg investigates recent archaeological finds in Israel, and the claims made by some that they support the existence of a biblical King David and his kingdom.  

Mihalis Liapis, Greece’s Culture Minister, honored three academics for their efforts to have the Parthenon Marbles returned to Athens. A fragment of the marbles was also returned by a Swedish citizen, who had inherited it from her grandfather.  

Construction workers converting Philadelphia’s Lombard Central Presbyterian Church into a private home stumbled upon the remains of its founder, abolitionist Stephen Gloucester. Gloucester, his wife, and a church member’s remains were moved to a cemetery.   

If Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki approves of the idea, Saddam Hussein’s former palace in Basra will be converted into an archaeological museum.   Here’s a photograph of the palace.