An analysis of fat residue on pottery shards from North Africa suggests that people may have been eating yogurt 7,000 years ago. The fermented milk product may have made dairy products more digestible at a time when not many adults possessed the genetic adaptation necessary to digest the lactose found in unprocessed milk. The pottery shards were discovered in Libya’s Takarkori rock shelter, which is decorated with undated rock art depicting cattle and milk cows.

Additional portions of the Calvert House  foundation and cellars have been uncovered in St. Mary’s City. The house was the home of Maryland’s first governor, Leonard Calvert, and it also functioned as an inn, a court house, and the first state house, beginning in 1662. The site was discovered in the 1980s.

A rare Egyptian artifact has been identified at Swansea University, where Carolyn Graves-Brown, curator of the Egypt Centre, had been studying a collection belonging to another school. The faience bell is in the shape of Bes, a dwarf god that protected children and pregnant women, and may have been worn to fend off evil spirits or left at a temple as a gift to the gods. “Faience is very often used for objects that have a magical or religious significance in ancient Egypt,” she explained.

The construction of a gas pipeline across Germany has uncovered a treasure trove of artifacts, including nearly four pounds of gold in Lower Saxony. The gold had been fashioned into wires and linked as chains, then wrapped in linen and buried some 3,300 years ago. “Using a mass spectrometer, we examined more than 20 trace elements, allowing us to determine the fingerprint of the metal. The gold vein must have been created deep in the mountains of Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, or Uzbekistan over a period of millions of years,” said Robert Lehmann of the University of Hanover. But not everyone agrees with his analysis, since he was able to compare the treasure’s fingerprint to only a few Scythian gold coins.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Thursday, June 21, 2012. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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