A jury has found Raphael Golb guilty of identity theft, criminal impersonation, forgery, harassment, and unauthorized use of a computer in a case involving the Dead Sea Scrolls. Golb tried to undermine Dead Sea Scroll scholars he perceived to be rivals of his father, Norman Golb, who is a professor of Jewish history at the University of Chicago.

People were living in a high altitude, cold environment in Papua New Guinea 50,000 years ago, according to an international team of archaeologists. They found charred nut shells from the pandanus tree and stone tools 2,000 meters above sea level. “It demonstrates that Australasia’s most ancient colonists were really able to get right out there into the most difficult, hard to reach places and actually live successfully,” said Andrew Fairbairn of the University of Queensland.  There’s more to the story at Australian Geographic.  

A new paper on the fossils known as Homo floresiensis states that they represent individual Homo sapiens affected by hypothyroid cretinism, and not a new species. Emeritus professor Charles Oxnard of the University of Western Australia and his colleagues first proposed this explanation in 2008. The new paper mathematically compared the bones of cretins to chimpanzees, unaffected humans, and H. floresiensis. “Cretinism is caused by various environmental factors including iodine deficiency – a deficiency which would have been present on Flores at the period to which the dwarfed Flores fossils are dated,” he added.  

The new luxury hotels surrounding Cambodia’s ancient temples of Angkor are using up the groundwater and threatening to destabilize the temples’ sandy foundations.  

A prehistoric campsite at Minnesota’s Spring Lake Park Reserve yielded a fire pit and burned animal bones to add to artifacts recovered in the 1950s.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Friday, October 1, 2010. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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