Neanderthals ate a wider variety of foods than previously thought. Bones of seals and dolphins, and open mussel shells that may have been heated, were found in caves in Gibraltar. “They were also heating bones, not to cook the meat but to get at the marrow inside. By putting bones in fires, they were making them more brittle so they could get them open more easily,” said Chris Stringer from London’s Natural History Museum.

Chimpanzees in captivity clearly prefer cooked food over raw, supporting the idea that early humans probably began cooking shortly after mastering the use of fire.   

Here’s more information from the recent excavation at Stonehenge from The Guardian.  

Part of the sixteenth-century Venetian bastion of Nicosia, Cyprus, was uncovered by archaeologists working in the city’s historic center. “When the British wanted to connect Stasinou Avenue with Ledra and Onasagorou streets sometime before the 1930s, they either knocked the wall down where Eleftheria Square is now, or they simply covered it. So we were expecting something,” said Pavlos Flourenzos, director of the antiquities department.  

The story of the skeletons discovered beneath the floorboards of St. Peter’s Church in St. George, Bermuda, has popped up again.  

The New Lynn Hotel was built in Aukland the late nineteenth century, and torn down in July. “There aren’t many hotel sites that have been excavated to that extent in New Zealand and certainly not many of that era in Waitakere city, it’s quite important,” said archaeologist Hans Bader.  

Scientists used a particle accelerator to examine a painting by Van Gogh, and found another painting beneath it. “Normally we work on minerals, biological cells, bone samples, trying to establish their molecular composition,” said Wolfgang Drube of the electron synchrotron research center in Hamburg, Germany. “With this new technique we can reveal the image in color,” he added.  

Some 150 stolen artifacts recovered in Miami in 2006 will be returned to Ecuador today.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Tuesday, September 23, 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.