The behavior of a male chimp at Sweden’s Furuvik Zoo is said to be the first clear evidence that a non-human animal can engage in planning. Santino collects rocks before the zoo opens and stores them as ammunition to hurl at human onlookers later in the day. “This ape must have learned that during displays he would run out of things to throw and, from this, he must have extrapolated that it would be good to have a pile of projectiles at the ready,” commented Frans B.M. de Wall of Emory University.   National Public Radio also has a story on Santino.

A first-century Gallo-Roman vineyard has been unearthed in Burgundy, France.  

A fragment of a medieval pot unearthed in the Old City of Jerusalem bears a verse from the Rubaiyat, the love poem by Omar Khayyam.  

German computer “archaeologist” David Ward has recreated a program that generated love poetry on the world’s first computer in 1952.  

Italian Renaissance artist Caravaggio was the first painter to use the “camera obscura,” or darkroom, to “photograph” his models 200 years before the invention of the camera.  

Archaeologists have stopped digging a drain to remove damaging rainwater from Mohenjo Daro. They have uncovered beads, pottery, and bones, but do not have a laboratory to analyze them.  

Maritime archaeologist Cheryl Ward of Florida State University, a naval architect, modern shipwrights, and an Egyptian archaeologist worked together to build a replica of a 3,800-year-old ship and sail it on the Red Sea. Well-preserved timbers from the original ships were discovered in the caves of Wadi Gawasis in 2006. Those ships are thought to have been used in a voyage to the land of Punt that was undertaken during the reign of Hatshepsut.   

Gold jewelry has reportedly been found in the tomb of Gahouti, the head of the treasury under Hatshepsut.   

Here’s more information on an unidentified, early nineteenth-century shipwreck from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Artifacts from the wreck are being studied in Louisiana. “We just got a lead this morning that came as an email from a researcher in Oklahoma who happened to be studying privateering in the Gulf,” said federal archaeologist Jack Irion.   This second article has a few more details.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Tuesday, March 10, 2009. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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