Pieces of 38-million-year-old jawbones and teeth found in Myanmar represent a new type of primate, according to paleontologist Chris Beard of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. “This new fossil Ganlea definitely helps us argue – and we think the argument is pretty close to settled now – that when you go back this far in time, the common ancestor of monkeys, apes, and humans was definitely in Asia, not in Africa,” claimed Beard.

A large Roman floor mosaic discovered near Tel Aviv in 1996 had been reburied for lack of funding to preserve it.  A gift from the Leon Levy Foundation, and the late financier’s wife, Shelby White, will reportedly fund a new center to house the mosaic in Israel. Last year, Shelby White agreed to return ten antiquities from her collection to Italy.

More photographs of the man-made cave recently discovered in Israel by archaeologist Adam Zertal are now available at National Geographic News.  

Bulgarian speleologists say they have discovered a Thracian sanctuary in a cave along the Danube River.  

Analysis of core samples from a lake near Peru’s Machu Picchu has shown that warmer temperatures made it possible for the Inca to grow surplus crops in the Andes at high elevations. “This period of increased temperatures allowed the Inca and their predecessors to expand, from A.D. 1150 onwards, their agricultural zones by moving up the mountains,” the team of American and English scientists state in their report, published in Climate of the Past, an online journal.  

Turkey’s minister of the environment said that construction of the Ilisu Dam could begin as soon as the suspensions placed by loan organizations were lifted.    

Here’s an update on one of the defendants in the federal illegal-artifacts-trafficking case in Utah.  

A birchbark canoe thought to be the oldest in the world has returned to Canada after spending 180 years in Ireland. Called the “Grandfather Akwiten Canoe,” it was built in the early 1820s by Maliseet craftsmen in New Brunswick.  

At Canada’s McMaster University, an archivist found a bill of treason from the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837 in a cabinet drawer.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Wednesday, July 1, 2009. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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