There is a new lead in the case of the missing Peking Man fossils, which were discovered near Beijing in the 1930s. Some of the fossils had been boxed up for transport to the American Museum of Natural History in New York for safekeeping during World War II, but they never arrived, and may have ended up buried at Camp Holcomb, an American military base at the port city of Qinhaungdao, instead.

Tourism Development Committee Chairwoman Leslie Combs of Kentucky’s legislature refused to call for a vote on a proposed measure that would have allowed treasure hunters to look for artifacts in state parks and historical sites with metal detectors. The session closes in a few days. The proposal had been passed Kentucky’s Senate.

Scientists estimate that Hawaiians harvested many more fish annually between 1400 and 1800 than is possible today, according to a new study published in Fish and Fisheries. John Kittinger of the Center for Ocean Solutions explains that Hawaiian rules for fishing were community based, strictly enforced, and based upon knowledge of individual reef systems.

Nicholas Dunning of the University of Cincinnati, Timothy Beach of Georgetown University, and Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach of George Mason University suggest some non-environmental factors that may have contributed to the collapse of Classic Maya societies in this article for Live Science.

The debate over whether climate change or hunting caused the mass extinction of megafauna rages on. A new study published in Scienceconcludes that humans alone are to blame for the loss of large-animal life in Australia 40,000 years ago.

A shipyard that produced iron warships for navies around the world before it closed in the early twentieth century has been uncovered in east London. “There are no longer any detailed plans of the final layout of the works and these results will help piece together how the site operated,” said archaeologist Jay Carver.

A ceremonial club presented to Captain James Cook by the Nuu-chah-nulth people of Nootka Sound in 1778 has returned to British Columbia. The carved club was donated to the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. It has been held in private collections since the early nineteenth century.

In southwestern Germany, archaeologist Bettina Arnold of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has uncovered evidence of competitive feasting and clothing and adornments worn by Celtic people 2,600 years ago. By encasing blocks of earth in plaster and putting them through a CT scanner, she and her team members have been able to see the fine details of fragile metal hairpins, jewelry, weapons, and clothing fasteners. “You could tell whether someone was male, female, a child, married, occupied a certain role in society and much more from what they were wearing,” she said.

A cave in County Clare, Ireland, has yielded the skeleton of a teenager who died in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, and a hammerhead made from a red deer antler. “The discovery of the fabulous antler hammerhead is hugely exciting. I can’t find any other parallels in Irish archaeology,” said archaeologist Marion Dowd.

Road work in St. Andrews, Scotland, revealed what could be the skeletal remains of fifteenth-century Franciscan monks beneath just six inches of dirt. “A Franciscan friary is known to have existed somewhere in the near vicinity and because of the order they weren’t buried in the local cemetery but in their own little one,” said archaeologist Douglas Spiers.

A long-lost section of what could be the Great Wall of China has been spotted with Google Earth in southern Mongolia. Western scientists have investigated parts of the wall, which was made from mud, desert shrubs, and quarried black volcanic rock, in the Gobi Desert, sometime between A.D. 1040 and 1160.

There are new images  of the wreck of the Titanic at National Geographic.