Kevin Hatala of George Washington University compared the 1.5 million-year-old footprints uncovered in Kenya at the Ileret site with footprints made by 38 Daasanach herders now living in Kenya who don’t wear shoes. His findings suggest that the hominid that left the prints may have had a gait different from modern humans. The footprints may have been left by Homo erectus, thought to be a direct human ancestor, or by Paranthropus boisei, an offshoot on the human family tree.

A team of researchers from the University of Cincinnati and the Southern Albania Neolithic Archaeological Project is investigating the rise of farming  during the Early Neolithic period in southeastern Albania, at the site of Vashtëmi. The 8,500-year-old site, located near a wetland, has yielded plant and animal remains. The farmers grew emmer, einkorn, and barley, and raised pigs, cattle, and sheep or goats. The bones of wild animals have also been found, suggesting that the early farmers were not completely reliant upon domesticated food sources.

Swiss archaeologists have opened the grave believed to belong to Jürg Jenatsch, a Protestant preacher remembered for his fighting skills and ruthlessness during the Thirty Years’ War. He later converted to Catholicism, was assassinated in 1639, and then buried in Chur Cathedral. The researchers want to confirm the identity of the bones in the grave, which were exhumed once before in 1959, with DNA testing. “Jenatsch was most certainly a man of his times – and those times were characterized by instability and a crisis of identities,” explained historian Randolph Head of the University of California, Riverside.

Fangjin Zhang, a student at England’s Loughborough Design School, is using scanners and 3D printers to try to restore damaged artifacts in the Emperor Qianlong Garden in China’s Forbidden City. The scans of damaged areas are “cleaned up” and then reproduced at a much lower cost than traditional restoration techniques. A similar process has been used to create reproductions of artifacts for traveling museum exhibitions and scaled-down replicas of dinosaurs.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Tuesday, April 17, 2012. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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