Is the world’s oldest leather shoe in danger from neglect? Found in a cave in Armenia in 2008, the 5,500-year-old footwear has yet to be fully studied and conserved. Its excavators worry that the leather will dry out, but the director of the Yerevan Museum, where it is kept, says there is no cause for concern. [Editor’s note: the Armenia Now.com site is balky, perhaps receiving too much traffic. Try back later if need be.]

University of Leicester researchers in southern Africa are using a novel approach—urine analysis—to mapping climate change. Rock hyraxes, which resemble large guinea pigs, use communal toilets where urine crystallizes and accumulates, sometimes for millennia. Preserved in the urine are chemical markers of plants the hyraxes eat, which scientists have used to trace 30,000 years of climate variation.

The head of a Russian-German expedition working in the North Caucasus claims that his team has found a “Caucasian Stonehenge” built by a previously unknown Bronze Age civilization.

A 500,000-year-old pelvis and other bones found in Spain are evidence that early humans cared for a member of their group who had a painful spinal deformity that would have forced him to stoop over. The fossils are of a Neanderthal forebear known as Homo heidelbergensis.

Ancient Jericho is celebrating its 10,000th birthday! To mark the occasion, a 900-square meter floor mosaic from the bathhouse of an eighth-century Islamic palace has been temporarily uncovered.

Erosion of the Bering Sea coast is threatening a 700-year-old Inuit settlement site in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. Archaeologists have found remains of sod homes just under the tundra along with well-preserved artifacts, including wooden objects, which have been protected by the permafrost until now.
Archaeologists Vance Holliday and David Meltzer dispute a recent theory that a comet impact 12,900 years ago wiped out mammoths in North America and the Clovis people who hunted them. Whether or not a comet impact occurred, they say evidence shows the human population did not collapse. Instead, people developed new tools to hunt different prey as the “megafauna”—mammoth, mastodon, horse, and camel—died out.

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