A wide range of foods may have been traded by the ancient Greeks, along with plenty of wine. Scientists have found DNA traces from nuts and herbs, olives, and ginger on jar fragments using methods borrowed from police forensics experts.

Here’s more information on the American Embassy’s involvement with the excavation of Mes Aynak, a Buddhist site situated on a copper mine, and other cultural heritage projects in Afghanistan.

Six 3,000-year-old wooden boats, textile fragments, wicker baskets, and containers of food have been unearthed near the edge of England’s Flag Fen Basin. “Often at an excavation, it takes much imagination for it to become apparent. This site doesn’t need that. It’s intact. It feels as if we’ve actually caught up with the Bronze Age people,” said Mark Knight of Cambridge University.

A house dating to the seventh century A.D. has been discovered in the Yorkshire Dales. “We uncovered a small, rectangular, partly stone-built building with two rooms and in it we found 16 pieces of charcoal impressed into the compacted soil floor,” said archaeologist David Johnson.

What noises could our earliest ancestors make? Bart de Boer of the University of Amsterdam created anatomically correct vocal tracts with plastic tubes in order to find out.

Well-preserved bone marrow from a mammoth thigh bone could give scientists enough information to clone the ancient beast.

Neanderthals may have been the first to build structures with mammoth bones, according to a study published in Quaternary International. No fossils have been unearthed at the 44,000-year-old Ukrainian site to confirm the identity of its suspected inhabitants, however.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Monday, December 5, 2011. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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