A toe bone belonging to an archaic human has been found in Siberia’s Denisova Cave and turned over to Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. A tooth and a finger bone from the so-called Denisovans have already come to light. “We have no results we are ready to talk about yet,” Pääbo said.

The HMS Investigator sank in Arctic waters in 1854 while searching for the lost Franklin Expedition. Discovered last year, researchers say the wreck of the Investigatoris a treasure trove of nineteenth-century artifacts. (Some of the metal items from the ship had been salvaged by local Inuit before it sank.)

A 2,600-year-old painted wall  has been unearthed in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt.

The skeletal remains of a child, stone foundations of houses, wall plaster, and coins have been found at the site of a Roman settlement in Dorchester, England.

Archaeologist Jill Eyers continues to study the 97 infant skeletons that were excavated from a Roman villa complex in England 100 years ago. She thinks they may have been the unwanted offspring of women working in a brothel. But Brett Thorn of the Buckinghamshire County Museum thinks the site may have been home to a mother goddess cult. “The large number of babies who are buried there could be natural stillbirths, or children who died in labor,” he said.

A mini ball dating to the Civil War has been found in a tree on the Gettysburg Battlefield.

Here’s more information on the four men recently accused of smuggling Egyptian antiquities into the United States during the Arab Spring, and the growing demand for looted antiquities.

Investigators suspect that a fire at one of the Society for Commercial Archaeology’s ten most endangered roadside places was deliberately set. The fire destroyed the main building at the abandoned Dinosaur World theme park in northwest Arkansas last week.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Wednesday, August 10, 2011. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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