Researchers found the skull last month in Xuchang in 16 fragments, resting with stone and bone artifacts and over 30,000 animal fossils. The skull features protruding eyebrows and a small forehead, but most intriguingly, it retains a fossilized membrane on the inside, so scientists can "track the nerves of the Paleolithic ancestors," said archaeologist Li Zhanyang.
After two years of excavation, the archaeologists discovered the skull just days before leaving to party down for Chinese New Year.
On Monday, archaeologists testing the soil for new utility lines in NYC’s Washington Square Park made an increasingly humdrum discovery: they found a bunch of human bones—enough, reportedly, to comprise two full skeletons. The Parks Department says that bones were also unearthed on one of three previous excavations. This comes as little surprise—an estimated 20,000 bodies repose beneath the park.
In the late 1700’s, long before the park became the ultimate destination to mobilize for various political rallies, cop nickel bags of oregano or engage in a round of ghetto chess, it functioned as a mass burial ground as the yellow fever epidemic (as well as other diseases) decimated the city’s burgeoning population. The park would go on to have a long and morbid affiliation with death: throughout the turn of the 19th century it was the sight of a public gallows where a great many African slaves, indentured Irish, highwaymen and assorted unfortunates saw their demise. It was also a designated dueling ground, before the practice was outlawed in 1828.
Park officials say that the bones will be subject to a forensic investigation before proper reburial. If finding bones in the heart of NYC hasn’t caused much of a stir, it’s because one can often find much more macabre things on the city’s streets (and still not be very shocked).
For years, the disappearance of North America's Clovis culture was attributed either to rapid climate change or a sudden uptick in Clovis hunting practices that wiped out the 35 genera of animals they subsisted on. But similar climate changes of the time hadn't resulted in mass extinctions, and the ethnographic record doesn't support such a rapid change in hunting habits among Clovis humans.
Instead, Douglas Kennett and 25 other researchers from the University of Oregon think that a major comet collision triggered the change. The new hypothesis is based on a thin black layer of soil retrieved at over 50 North American sites. This black soil possesses magnetic grains of iridium, thought to have extraterrestrial origins, along with metallic and carbon spherules, as well as melted charcoal, which remained after catastrophic, continent-wide fires swept the land in the comet's wake.
People have been ice skating for at least 3,000 years and the very earliest blades were fashioned from the metatarsi of horses (though cows were popular too). Skaters strapped the bones onto their feet with leather slipped through chiseled holes - as shown here, minus the 21st century buckle. Most of the ancient skates have been found in the cold northern parts of Europe where lakes cover more than 5 percent of the land.
As a kid, who didn't want unicorns or dragons to exist? I dedicated large portions of my childhood to finding these mythical creatures in the woods behind my house, but I never had any luck. I still remember all the kids at school laughing at me and telling me that dragons and unicorns aren't real. There's no quicker way to crush an 18-year-old's innocence, I can tell you.
I could've saved a lot of time if I'd only gone to the Field Museum in Chicago's exhibit "Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns & Mermaids," I could've saved a lot of time. The exhibit uses fossils, preserved specimens, recreated models, and ancient artifacts to explain how the mythical imagination grew around the fossil record. Ancient Greeks who unearthed skulls of dwarf elephants (pictured) on Mediterranean islands mistook the cavity in the center for a single eye hole — voila, the myth of the Cyclops is born.
(Click through for more pictures of fossils-turned-myths at the Field Museum).
Fijian chief Ratu Filimoni Nawawabalavu joined the villagers of Nubutautau last month in a weeping apology to 11 Australian descendants of a British missionary killed and eaten by the Ni Nubutautau 140 years ago, after a perceived slight to the sacred person of the Ratu's Great-great great great grandfather.
Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase and members of Fiji's Great Council of Chiefs attended a feast and a complex ritual reconciliation ritual known as ai sorotabu intended to lift the curse on the isolated village arising from the unfortunate Victorian's demise.
Footprints of both creatures have recently been discovered. But apparently the two didn't cross paths.
Reuters reports that a U.S. film crew's unveiling of fresh prints around Mt Everest has sparked a new fury of Yeti believers. Meanwhile, hunters spotted thousands of dino tracks in an ATV park in Utah, just north of the Arizona border.
"At the widest-angle view, one can see a whopping difference across the millennia that separate us from our pre-state ancestors... quantitative body-counts... suggest that pre-state societies were far more violent than our own."
(Incredibly, he's even including all the wars and genocides of the 21st century in that body count)
New data further supports that humans in the Americas arrived in a single wave from Siberia via the Bering Straight land bridge 12,000 years ago, fanning down the coast to today's South America.
Led by the University of Michigan, the study addresses a long debated topic among archaeologists and anthropologists: From where and when did people arrive in the New World. The land bridge's competing hypothesis strongly argues that people came by land and sea in successional waves over the past 30,000 years from various parts of Asia and/or Polynesia.
Writer John Scalzi visited and wrote about his trip to the Creation Museum, so you don't have to. You'll only really appreciate what a service this is if you've ever been there: Last time I visited, I got thrown out on my ass -- not because I disagreed with them, but because no one there would acknowledge me as the Creator and give me free funnel cakes. Ingrates.
In news sure to unite unhappy couples everywhere, a new archaeological discovery seems to indicate that chocolate was first enjoyed by prehistoric Mesoamericans as a "frothy, bitter brew of fermented roasted and ground cacao seeds." Do you hear that, disgruntled, Russell Stover-chomping wives and lethargic, Labatts-addicted husbands? You have a shared prehistory! You had each other at hello!
from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: A comet that until recently was invisible to the naked eye has become a shining star in the night sky, easily seen even through the bright lights of the Pittsburgh region. Comet Holmes last week was orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter when it inexplicably brightened about a million times. It went from being a nondescript object difficult to see through a telescope to a luminous, fuzzy blob -- without a discernible cometary tail -- that's visible virtually all night in the constellation Perseus, moonlight and light pollution notwithstanding. "We certainly have seen comets that have had a brightening period, a burst of some level, sometimes quite dramatic, but nothing a million fold," said John Radzilowicz, the Carnegie Science Center astronomer. "So that's got everybody's attention."
Prehistoric man, you keep on rocking: In what Chinese state media hails as "the greatest discovery since Peking Man," Chinese archaeologists from the Henan Cultural Relics and Archaeology Research Institute have found a nearly complete human skull fossil dating from 100,000 years ago. 
And you thought you were having a crap Friday: 13,000 years ago, 
As a kid, who didn't want unicorns or dragons to exist? I dedicated large portions of my childhood to finding these mythical creatures in the woods behind my house, but I never had any luck. I still remember all the kids at school laughing at me and telling me that dragons and unicorns aren't real. There's no quicker way to crush an 18-year-old's innocence, I can tell you.
In news sure to unite unhappy couples everywhere, a new archaeological discovery seems to indicate that chocolate was first enjoyed by prehistoric Mesoamericans as a 
