An analysis of mitochondrial DNA in present-day African populations suggests that two groups of Homo sapiens may have been isolated from one another between 150,000 and 40,000 years ago. “They came back together again during the Late Stone Age–driven by population expansion,” said Spencer Wells, director of the Genographic Project. A second article on the study focuses on the idea that the two isolated groups were so small that they were close to extinction.

Scientists from the University of Manchester measured the amount of energy expended by women while carrying different loads, including a mannequin child, to see if walking upright could have been an evolutionary response to child-care needs. “Unless infant carrying resulted in significant benefits elsewhere, the high cost of carrying an asymmetrical weight suggests that infant carrying was unlikely to have been the evolutionary driving force behind bipedalism,” concluded Jo Watson, who was a member of the research team.  

It had been thought that one of the two Viking women buried in the Oseberg ship, which was discovered in 1904, was a servant sacrificed to be buried with her queen. Recent examination of the bones shows that the younger woman’s broken collar bone had been healing for several weeks. “We have no reason to think violence was the cause of death,” said Per Holck of Oslo University.  

Dody Fugate of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is collecting information about dog burials in the southwestern United States. She has found that dog burials were most common between 400 B.C. and 1100 A.D. “The earlier the [human burial], the more likely you are to have dog in it,” she said.  

This video clip shows the excavation of a 2,000-year-old settlement near Bogota, Colombia.  

Government officials in Pakistan met to discuss removing thousands of rock carvings from areas that would be submerged by the proposed Basha Dam.  

Four-thousand-year-old pottery was uncovered in a large cave in Thailand, along the border with Cambodia.  

A nineteenth-century homestead owned by Melinda Jackson, an African-American woman and freed slave, was discovered along the route of a highway being built in Maryland.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Friday, April 25, 2008. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

Comments posted here do not represent the views or policies of the Archaeological Institute of America.