Radiocarbon dating has been used to determine that charcoal drawings in the Northern Territory are the oldest in Australia. Bryce Barker of the University of Southern Queensland says that the rock art, which is located in the Nawarla Gabarnmang rock shelter, is 28,000 years old. Archaeological evidence suggests that the rock shelter had been occupied for 45,000 years.

A large boulder covered with 500-year-old petroglyphs has been moved out of the Museum of Vancouver and repatriated to the Stswecem’c Xgat’tem First Nation. A gold prospector uncovered the boulder in the 1920s, when it was moved to a park, and then it was transferred to the museum in 1992. Members of the Stswecem’c Xgat’tem First Nation and Bruce Miller of the University of British Columbia found the exact location where the boulder once sat along the Fraser River, but they decided it should be placed in a protected area. “It was taken during a time when we didn’t have a say and we had no rights, but now times are changing and we can help undo the wrongs of the past,” said Phyllis Webstad, who is coordinating the repatriation.

A skeleton estimated to be 12,000 years old has been discovered in Sri Lanka’s Fa-Hien Cave. The anatomically modern human is of a type known as Balangoda Man. Previous finds from the cave include two 37,000-year-old human skulls.

The remains of two severed heads uncovered during a gardening project in James Green, Kilkenny, Ireland, are thought to have belonged to Oliver Cromwell’s soldiers. Seven of his men were killed in County Laois in 1642, and their heads were hung in Kilkenny on the next market day. The heads were later buried. Archaeologists think that a pilgrimage church dating to the 1300s may also be located in the area.

A new study of soil cores taken in central and western Amazonia suggests that pre-Columbian people did not practice wide-spread clearing of the forest, nor intensive agriculture, as they did in the eastern regions. The soil cores contained bits of charcoal and phytoliths of burned grasses and other plants, but not of common crops. “If humans were in those areas, they didn’t stay very long, and they didn’t farm,” said archaeobotanist Dolores Piperno of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History.

A smudged red disk painted on a cave wall in northern Spain has been dated to more than 40,800 years ago using a technique that measures the radioactive uranium in the calcite patina covering the painting. The new dates suggest that these paintings are almost 10,000 years older than cave paintings in central France. Alistair Pike of the University of Bristol thinks the painter could have been one of the first modern humans to reach the Iberian Peninsula, estimated to have arrived 42,000 years ago, although he adds that Neanderthals lived in the area for 200,000 years. “There is a very good chance that this is Neanderthal,” he said.

Excavators from Wilfrid Laurier University are working at the War of 1812 site of Fort Erie, Ontario, where they have found traces of an earthwork constructed by American troops that had captured the British fort. They have also uncovered traces of a small building along the earthwork, which was probably used as an officers’ mess. “They were so well-entrenched here, it was impossible to dislodge them,” said archaeologist John Triggs.

Researchers thought that a World War II-era plane discovered in the Baltic Sea may be a rare JU87 Stuka dive bomber, but after examining some of the parts recovered by German military divers, they have identified it as a larger JU88. “It looked just like the Stuka in the underwater pictures – everything that we had brought up had been pieces that were used in the JU87 – so there was no reason to doubt it. But this find is perhaps historically even more important,” said Captain Sebastian Bangert of the German Military Historical Museum. The JU88 was used as a dive bomber, but it also served as a tactical bomber and was flown at night.

Scientists at the University of Oxford have tested skeletal fragments found in a stone box in an ancient church in Bulgaria. An inscription on the box claimed that the bones belonged to the first-century Christian figure John the Baptist. “We got some dates that are very interesting indeed. They suggest that the human bone is all from the same person, it’s from a male, and it has a very high likelihood of an origin in the Near East,” said researcher Thomas Higham. Animal bones were also found in the small sarcophagus.