The iron “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign that spanned the entrance to the Auschwitz death camp has been stolen. “We believe that the perpetrators will be found soon and the inscription will be returned to its place,” said Pawel Sawicki, a spokesman for the Auschwitz museum. The sign was crafted in the summer of 1940 by non-Jewish Polish inmates of the camp.  

People have been eating cereal for more than 100,000 years, according to a new study by Julio Mercader of the University of Calgary. He found evidence of wild sorghum and the stone tools to process it in a limestone cave in Mozambique. The Stone Age cereal is “proof of an expanded and sophisticated diet much earlier than we believed,” he said.  

Human ancestors living it what is now Israel divided their living spaces into sleeping and cooking areas 800,000 years ago. “Seeing this at such an early site was surprising. This means there was some ability or some need or requirement of organization,” said Rivka Rabinovich of Hebrew University.  

Science says that the discovery of Ardipithecus ramidus, a 4.4-million-year-old hominid, is the greatest scientific breakthrough of 2009. “[Ardi] changes the way we think about early human evolution,” said Bruce Alberts, editor of the journal.  

No human remains have been recovered in the search for Spanish poet Frederico Garcia Lorca, who was killed in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War. As many as 100,000 people went missing.  

Analysis of the bones of medieval women living in northern England shows they were large and well muscled from tough labor. “The research underlines the way that the sexual division of labor was much less marked in rural areas than in the cities of the time,” said Simon Mays of English Heritage.  

Forensic dogs Eros, Rhea, Alice, and Riley, were unable to sniff most of Washington State’s Port Angeles waterfront, where an American Indian village and hundreds of burials were unearthed during bridge construction. “The whole point of the project is to see if the dogs work,” said Allyson Brooks of the state Office of Archaeology. But many of the private landowners would not allow the dogs on their property.  

Seventeen families are asking a federal appeals court to let them look for the remains of their relatives killed in the World Trade Center attacks in the debris at the Fresh Kills landfill. Attorney Norman Siegel says that archaeology students have offered to assist in the search for human remains.  

Here’s more on the chunk of granite pulled from Cleopatra’s sunken palace earlier this week.  

And, there’s more on the cooperation between archaeologists and the military in order to protect rock art and archaeological sites in the Mojave Desert. “Every weapon being used overseas right now was tested here,” explained civilian Navy public affairs officer Peggy Shoaf.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Friday, December 18, 2009. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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