A marble sculpture stolen from an Albanian museum has been returned. Italian police discovered the bust of Asclepius in a private home in 2004.

Spiegel Online investigates the Henri Stierlin’s claim that the bust of Nefertiti in Germany’s Altes Museum is a modern fake. “You can prove a fake, but you can’t prove originals. That’s an epistemological problem,” said Stefan Simon, a material scientist at the Rathgen Research Laboratory.  

The bottom of Lake Champlain has been carefully mapped, and nearly 300 historic shipwrecks have been located, in addition to airplanes and railroad cars. You can view underwater video and photographs of one of the finds in this short introduction to the project.  

A team of students from the University of South Carolina, led by state archaeologist Jon Leader, will begin to map a Civil War naval yard that is now partially submerged. They will also look for three cannons from the CSS Pee Dee, which was scuttled in March, 1865.  

Scientists are coming forward to respond to the claims made about “Ida,” the fossilized skeleton of a 47-million-year-old primate. “They claim in the paper that by examining the anatomy of adapids, these animals have something to do with the direct line of human ancestry and living monkeys and apes. This claim is buttressed with almost no evidence. And they failed to cite a body of literature that’s been going on since at least 1984 that presents evidence against their hypothesis,” said paleontologist Richard Kay of Duke University.  

Greg Stemm, CEO of the salvage company Odyssey Marine Exploration, is in the press again today, too. Times Online writer Tim Bouquet describes him as “a fusion of Jacques Cousteau, Ernest Hemingway, and Donald Trump.”  

The Maine Department of Transportation will try to excavate a rock that some locals believe was used by American Indians to grind corn. Archaeologist Leon Cranmer of the Maine State Historic Preservation Commission hasn’t found any evidence of occupation in the area, but others want to save the rock from road crews anyway. “If this is a legend only and not an Indian rock, my idea is it might carry more weight as a legend, not so much to preserve it but to create something for the tourists to see,” explained one resident.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Thursday, May 21, 2009. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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