Three Neanderthal teeth have reportedly been discovered in a cave in Poland, along with stone and bone tools and the bones of woolly mammoths and woolly rhinoceros.

Machu Picchu will be closed until the railway and roads can be repaired after massive flood damage. The last of the stranded tourists were flown out by helicopter late Friday afternoon. “There are no travelers here now and we have nothing to do. Everyone is leaving because there’s no work. Without tourism there’s no reason to be here,” said Jadira Mendez, a local resident who is waiting for the helicopters to return and take her to Cuzco.    

German archaeologist Ernst Pernicka has tested a collection of gold artifacts held at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and he has found that the finely crafted artifacts, purchased more than 40 years ago from an antiquities dealer, are similar to the gold treasures excavated by Heinrich Schliemann from Troy in the 1870s.   

Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt’s Department of Antiquities, is planning a press conference for later this month, when he will announce the results of DNA testing on Tutankhamun. Apparently waiting for the news has become news in and of itself.  

Writer Paul Sussman shares his experiences working on the Amarna Royal Tombs Project in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings.  

Photographs of a few of the 6,000 personal objects recovered from Fromelles, France, are shown at BBC News. The remains of World War I soldiers who were killed in battle and buried in mass graves have been exhumed and will be reburied in a new military cemetery.   Here’s an article on the reburial of the first of the unidentified men.  

Visitors to the World Heritage Site of Borobudur will be asked to refrain from wearing hard sandals and high heels, or carrying umbrellas with metal heads. The new measures should protect the stones of the ninth-century Buddhist temple. Priests have also asked visitors cover up their legs as a sign of respect.  

There’s a digital reconstruction of a tomb containing human sacrifice victims in northern Peru at National Geographic Daily News. The tomb is part of an eighth-century temple complex built by the Lambayeque.  

The German secret service is said to have collected testimony that in 1999, lead 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta attempted to sell artifacts from Afghanistan to an archaeologist at the University of Gottingen.

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

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