Paleontologist Meave Leakey of Nairobi’s Turkana Basin Institute has discovered three hominid fossils in northern Kenya. The fossils, two lower jaws and a juvenile’s lower face, could belong to Homo rudolfensis, which until now has only been represented by flat, upright, upper skull pieces. In fact, some scholars have considered those skull pieces to represent large individuals of other Homospecies. But the new jaws are nearly rectangular in shape. “It was such an extended excitement as the juvenile face slowly emerged from the encasing rock, and its similarity to the 1972 specimen became so striking,” she said.

DNA tests of the skeletal remains of 2,000-year-old turkeys found within El Mirador’s Jaguar Paw Temple in Guatemala show that the birds were a variety that is native to central Mexico, and not a local bird, as had been thought. Erin Kennedy Thornton of Trent University thinks that turkeys from Mexico may have been imported to the Maya world, along with jade, obsidian, and pottery, as early as 300 B.C. She also plans further testing to find out if those transported turkeys were wild or domesticated. It had been thought that the Maya started keeping turkeys only about 1,000 years ago.

Looting and smuggling artifacts is big business all over the world. This article describes how one illegal dealer operates in northwestern Pakistan, where ancient Buddhist objects from the Gandhara civilization are found. “Whenever I’m on a digging mission, I pay 10,000 rupees ($100) to the relevant police station as a bribe in advance and 1,000 rupees ($10) a day while the work continues,” he said. The artifacts are then transported out of the country to contacts in galleries in Asia, Europe, and the United States. Computerization and increased awareness are making the trip more difficult, however.

Harry Ostrer of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine has conducted a genetic study using samples from hundreds of people belonging to 15 different Jewish groups from around the world, in an effort to reconstruct the history of the Jewish Diaspora. He found that genetic information often coincided with the historical record. “I like to think of Jewishness as a tapestry with these DNA segments representing the threads that weave the tapestry together,” he said.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Thursday, August 9, 2012. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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