This photo essay from Discovery News shows the 2,700-year-old grave of a shaman who had been buried with a “stash” of marijuana. The grave was unearthed at the Yanghai Tombs in China’s Gobi Desert.

Christie’s auction house in New York says it is cooperating with an investigation into whether or not ancient gold earrings it had planned to sell had been stolen from Iraq. The artifacts, thought to have come from Nimrud, have been withdrawn from Monday’s planned auction.  

Chemical signatures in a piece of calcite from a cave near Jerusalem indicate that periods of dry weather coincided with the fall of both the Roman and Byzantine empires. “Whether this is what weakened the Byzantines or not isn’t known, but it is an interesting correlation,” said geologist John Valley, of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.  

Scaffolding is due to be removed from the façade of the Parthenon in the next few days, according to this report from the Athens News Agency.   Listen to a short report on National Public Radio about the return of a Parthenon Marble fragment to Greece. The fragment had been taken by a soldier during World War II.  

Earlier this year, it was announced that 14,300-year-old human coprolites had been uncovered in a cave in Oregon by archaeologist Dennis Jenkins. Here’s how the discovery of the oldest evidence of human presence in North America happened.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Friday, December 5, 2008. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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