Clouds blocked the view of the sunrise this morning at Stonehenge, but some 18,000 people still attended the summer solstice festivities.

In Cyprus, Gisela Walberg of the University of Cincinnati found a Bronze Age fortress that may have been built to protect the ancient city of Bamboula, which was located further inland. “It’s quite clear that it is a fortress because of the widths and strengths of the walls. No house wall from that period would have that strength. That would have been totally unnecessary,” she explained.

Thirty-two-thousand-year-old fossils of modern humans of the Gravettian cultural tradition have been unearthed in a cave in Ukraine. Cut marks indicate that flesh had been removed from the bones for ritual purposes. “These people had knives, lightweight tools, open air camps, they used mammoth bones to make tents,” said Clive Finlayson of the Gibraltar Museum.

Remains of at least three American Indian individuals have been unearthed at a construction site in Washington State’s Whidbey Island. It has yet to be decided if the bones will be removed or reburied at the site.

Five years later, the FBI is still looking for 26 Caddo Indian artifacts that were stolen from Southern Arkansas University.

Scientists from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History have uncovered a staircase and a stuccoed floor from the earliest stages of the Templo Mayor at Tlatelolco. Historical records suggest that the city was founded in 1337, but the staircase and floor may be older.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Tuesday, June 21, 2011. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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