The head of a statue of Agrippina the Younger, Nero’s mother, has been recovered by Italian police. The terra cotta artwork was stolen more than twenty years ago from Pompeii. An art trafficker in Piacenza had reportedly tried to sell statue for a dentist.

Human remains buried in twelve basalt boxes were uncovered in western Mexico near the Ceboruco volcano by archaeologists from the National Institute of Anthropology and History. The boxes also contained statuettes of elderly women and pottery. “Each of the basalt boxes, which are separated at about three or four meters (nine feet to 13 feet) from each other, are built with about eight basalt stones and covered with sandstones that were intentionally fragmented as a part of some unknown ritual,” said archaeologist Lourdes Garcia. The scientists estimate the unique cemetery to be about 1,000 years old.

The large and impressive Alepotrypa Cave in southern Greece was used by Neolithic people as a shelter for their village, a cemetery, and a worship space before the entrance to the cave collapsed 5,000 years ago, possibly due to an earthquake. “It’s sealed, and not opened again until the 1950s,” said William Parkinson of Chicago’s Field Museum and a member of The Diros Project, which is excavating Alepotrypa Cave. Evidence of funeral rituals involving setting the cave walls on fire and painted funeral vases suggest that the massive cave and its enormous, cathedral-like hall and lake could have inspired the myth of Hades. “It’s a very awesome place, in the literal sense of the word,” added Parkinson.

Germany’s Society of Maritime Archaeology has begun a campaign to attach signs to shipwrecks in the Baltic Sea. The signs warn that the wrecks are protected monuments and that taking anything from them is a crime. “The technical equipment generally available keeps on improving, which means that hobby divers and people who don’t have the best intentions are able to reach ever more wrecks,” said archaeologist Detlef Jantzen. The area had been off limits to recreational divers during the Communist era in East Germany.

Eight-thousand-year-old carvings in stone have reportedly been destroyed in Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains by Salafists, Muslims who strictly prohibit idolatry. The carvings depicted the sun as a divinity. “One of the carvings, called the ‘plaque of the sun,’ predates the arrival of the Phoenicians in Morocco,” said Aboubakr Anghir of the Amazigh League for Human Rights. He reported the damage to the government’s ministry of culture and is waiting for a response.

In the northwest highlands of Scotland, archaeologists have found a pit connected to a channel leading to a nearby stream. The stone-lined structure may have served as a bathing area or sauna, or it may have even been used for brewing during the Bronze Age. “There were no animal bones or anything to suggest its use as a cooking site and its size would have made it well-nigh impossible to bring to boiling point,” said Gordon Sleight of Historic Assynt.

What do we know about Neanderthals?  “It’s increasingly difficult to point to any one thing that Neanderthals did and Homo sapiens didn’t do and vice versa,” said John Shea of Stony Brook University. Neanderthals buried their dead, they cooked grains for food and used pigments, they may have made jewelry, and some made complex tools. The genome of the average human living outside of Africa today is made up of 2.5 percent Neanderthal DNA. Did that DNA come from interbreeding after modern humans left Africa, or could it have come from an earlier, common ancestor of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens? Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology analyzed the length of these segments of Neanderthal DNA and found that the two groups likely interbred, and it most likely occurred between 47,000 and 65,000 years ago. “[Neanderthals] are not just some extinct group of related hominids. They are partially ancestors to people who live today,” he said.

Researchers Andrew Bernhard and Mark Goodacre have combined forces and suggested that the text on the “Jesus’ wife” fragment of papyrus could be a forgery because of similarities between it and an online version of the Coptic “Gospel of Thomas.” There even appears to be a direct copy of a typo from the online document in the “Jesus’ wife” papyrus. New media makes it possible for scholars to compare notes quickly. “Some people are experts in Coptic language, some people who are experts in the literary relationship among ancient texts. It’s a combination of different voices talking to one another—things just move a little bit more quickly now than 30 or 40 years ago,” added Goodacre.