Bones from the foot of a hominin with an opposable big toe have been discovered in the Afar region of Ethiopia, where Australopithecus afarensisfossils have also been found. Both creatures lived some 3.4 million years ago, but while Lucy lived on the ground and walked upright, this new hominin could still climb trees. Bruce Latimer of Case Western Reserve University explains what the foot bones can tell us about the evolution of walking.

Here’s more information on the piece of notched wood discovered in a cave on Scotland’s Isle of Skye. It is thought to be the bridge of a 2,300-year-old lyre, making it the oldest stringed instrument in Western Europe. “It pushes the history of complex music back more than a thousand years, into our darkest pre-history,” said music archaeologist Graeme Lawson of Cambridge.

A wall built of chalk blocks was uncovered by members of the Marlow Archaeological Society in Buckinghamshire, England. It may be part of a sixteenth-century chapel or farmhouse, and was found beneath walls from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century structures.

The final resting place of the Titanic is littered with garbage  from ships passing overhead and memorabilia left by private deep-sea excursions, according to James Delgado of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “We even found a detergent box lying in the middle of the wreck site,” he said.

Students from North Carolina’s Craven Community College assisted archaeologists from East Carolina University at an excavation at the Foscue Plantation House, which is located on the Trent River. The current house was built in 1824, but family papers suggest that there was an earlier house on the property, in addition to a burial vault.

Police have recovered a sixth-century B.C. statue hidden in a goat pen near Athens. The four-foot tall statue depicts a young woman of the kore type, with elaborately braided hair and an ankle-length gown. Her extended left arm is broken. Two men have been arrested, and detectives are trying to determine where the statue was originally found.

Police recovered two first-century bronze statues in Jaén, Spain. The male figures are thought to have been taken from the Roman site of Sacilis Marcialis, and to be part of a larger sculpture. The suspected antiquities smugglers have been arrested, but agents from Interpol are still looking for the proposed buyer.

Archaeologist Carol Redmount of the University of California talks about the looting that has taken place at the Egyptian site of El-Hibeh with Marco Werman at Public Radio International. She has launched a Facebook campaign to raise awareness about looting in Egypt and to try to gain some security measures for El-Hibeh.

Lebanon has handed over 78 Sumerian artifacts to Iraq that had been seized by border guards.

Turkey has claimed a Roman sarcophagus discovered by customs officials during a check of a free port area in Geneva. Turkish officials say the second-century B.C. sarcophagus was looted from Antalya.

A box of bone fragments, the remains of eighteenth-century British soldiers killed at Fort William Henry during the French and Indian War, will be returned to New York by Waterloo University. The bones had been excavated in the 1950s. Most of the excavated bones were reburied in a ceremony in 1993.