At least 25 small skeletons thought to belong to insular dwarfs living between 900 and 2,800 years ago have been discovered on the Pacific islands of Palau. Lee Berger of the University of Witwatersrand and his colleagues say the remains are similar to those dubbed Homo floresiensis from Indonesia, with small heads and some features that are considered primitive from modern Homo sapiens.   Watch Lee Berger visit the cave where he found the little bones in this video from National Geographic News.   There’s also an article explaining the discovery. 

 In Iran, archaeologists think they have found an Elamite temple dedicated to the “Father of the Weak.”  

The skeletal remains of a young woman whose skull bears evidence of trepanation have been found in northern Greece, according to this story from the AFP. Click on the National Geographic link to the left of the article to see a photograph of the bones in question. The two articles differ in opinion on whether or not the woman survived the wound.  

In Egypt, three smugglers were arrested with four looted mummies and small statues.  

This press release from Wessex Archaeology offers photographs and more information about the 28 Paleolithic handaxes dredged from the North Sea.  

The Axum Obelisk will be re-erected in Ethiopia in September. The obelisk spent more than 70 years in Italy after it was taken by Mussolini’s invading army in 1937.

Subway construction in the Greek city of Thessaloniki has uncovered some 1,000 graves dating between the first century B.C. and the fifth century A.D.  

In 2003, donkey skeletons were discovered in a burial complex belonging to one of Egypt’s first pharaohs. Now scientists say the animals’ joint damage represents the first clear evidence of the domestication of the wild ass.  

Here’s another article on the 28 Paleolithic hand-axes recovered from the North Sea. “Up until now, it has been believed that the northwest European peninsula was devoid of human activity at that time,” said Mark Dunkley, an archaeologist with English Heritage.  

A smuggler’s tunnel and a curtain wall from the medieval Bridgwater Castle were revealed during sewer repairs in Somerset County, England.  

In County Durham, England, archaeologist Percival Turnbull spotted a 700-year-old grave-cover stone in the wall of the Blacksmiths Arms while he was smoking outside. “I’ve run the pub for ten years and walked past the stone many hundreds of times without noticing it. Nobody would ever have known about it, but for the smoking ban,” said landlord Billy Nettleton.

Archaeologist Jacqui Woods says that she has found evidence of seventeenth-century pagan rituals at a community of five houses in Corwall, England, including pits lined with the pelts of swans.  Magpies, eggs, quartz pebbles, human hair, leaves, and other items were then left in the so-called feather pits.  

A large Roman building dating between the second and fourth centuries A.D. is being investigated in Bedford Purlieus, a woodland nature preserve in Cambridgeshire, England.  BBC News has more background information on the villa. 

The House of Augustus on Rome’s Palatine Hill opened to visitors yesterday.