Stephanie Langin-Hooper started to research a collection of mosaic fragments held by Bowling Green State University, but found very little paperwork about their purchase in 1965. “I became a little concerned. Some of the details and information was not as much as I was expecting,” she said. Now she and Rebecca Molholt of Brown University are working together to try to identify the mosaics, and the FBI has been contacted.

A development project in Cawston, England, has uncovered two cremation burials dating to the Iron Age. “A lot of the land is sandy ground in which organic material doesn’t survive, so we’re not sure what else we’ll find down there,” said project officer Vasileios Tsamis. He thinks the site may have been a farmstead.

More than one dozen ancient ships are known to have sunk off the Tuscan island of Giglio, where the hull of the Costa Concordiawas ripped open by treacherous rocks.

Using improved technology, molecular geneticist Svante Pääbo and a team at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig have created an improved genetic map of the Denisovans from the fragment of finger bone discovered in 2010. “Now we can look at variation. We have a complete catalogue of what makes a fully modern human,” he said.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Wednesday, February 8, 2012. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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