Looters digging near Bodrum, Turkey, unearthed a 2,400-year-old tomb stone. “The discovery revealed that the tomb stone belongs to Hekataios’s father Mausolos. Mausolos was the satrap of Karia,” said Ozgur Ozarslan, undersecretary of the Culture and Tourism Ministry.

A trial date has been set for Raphael Golb, who is accused of impersonating Dead Sea Scroll scholars online in an attempt to discredit them and further his own father’s career. In one instance, Golb allegedly impersonated New York University scholar Lawrence Schiffman and sent out 400 emails in which he “confessed” to being a plagiarist, prompting an NYU investigation. “If I had been found guilty, I would have lost my job, my tenure, my reputation, and my livelihood,” said the real Schiffman.  

A bison kill site that was used at least 1,000 years ago has been found in a remote area of northwestern Montana, within the Blackfeet Indian reservation.  

Several scientists explain that the modern human brain has been put together from “suboptimal parts” from jellyfish, lizards, and mice in this installment of NPR’s series on human evolution. “It’s like adding scoops to an ice cream cone. So if you imagine the lizard brain as a single-scoop ice cream cone, the way you make a mouse brain out of a lizard brain isn’t to throw the cone and the first scoop away and start over and make a banana split – rather, it’s to put a second scoop on top of the first scoop,” said neuroscientist David Linden of Johns Hopkins University.  

A 4,000-year-old scalpel made of obsidian has been unearthed in Turkey, near the Black Sea. “Obsidian beds are generally situated in the Central Anatolian region of Cappadocia. We think obsidian was brought to this region through trade,” said archaeologist Onder Bilgi.  

Traces of the 166 homes destroyed by William the Conqueror when he decided to build a castle in Lincoln, England, have been uncovered by archaeologists. “The Saxons would not have been able to do anything about this. The Norman Conquest remodeled Anglo-Saxon England,” explained Cecily Spall of Field Archaeology Specialists.  

It’s been ten years since the Confederate submarine H. L. Hunley was discovered in the waters off South Carolina. This article summarizes what has happened since then.  Scientists now plan to rotate the Hunley to an upright position.  

Would-be Roman gladiators are training in Austria. “If the blades were sharp, we would have killed ourselves several times already,” said student participant David Volgelbacher of Regensburg University.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Monday, August 9, 2010. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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