Ancient Roman Glue Sticks Around

Roman warriors repaired their battle accessories with a superglue that is still sticking around after 2,000 years, according to new findings on display at the Rheinischen Landes Museum in Bonn, Germany.

Running until Feb. 16, 2008, the exhibition "Behind the Silver Mask" presents evidence that the ancient adhesive was used to mount silver laurel leaves on legionnaires' battle helmets.

"It's a sensational find and a complete stroke of luck that we were still able to find traces of the substance after 2000 years," Frank Willer, the museum's chief restorer, told Discovery News.

Willer found traces of the superglue while examining a helmet unearthed in 1986 near the German town of Xanten, on what was once the bed of the Rhine.

"The helmet, which dates from the 1st century B.C., was given to the museum for restoration. I discovered the glue accidentally, while removing a tiny sample of metal from the helmet with a fine saw. The heat from the tool caused the silver laurel leaves on the helmet to peel off, leaving thread-like traces of the glue behind," Willer said.

Willer was amazed to discover that despite such a long exposure to water, time and air, the superglue did not lose its bonding properties.

He said that other Roman battle accessories kept by the museum have traces of silver decorations which most likely had been glued to the iron with the same adhesive and technique. Unfortunately, the objects are too deteriorated to find traces of the superglue.

However, the helmet unearthed at Xanten featured enough material to determine how the adhesive was made.

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Ancient Toolkit Gives Glimpse of Prehistoric Life

Toolkit Contents

Before the end of the last ice age, a hunter-gatherer left a bag of tools near the wall of a roundhouse residence, where archaeologists have now found the collection 14,000 years later.

The tool set -- one of the most complete and well preserved of its kind -- provides an intriguing glimpse of the daily life of a prehistoric hunter-gatherer.

The contents, as described to Discovery News by Phillip Edwards, a senior lecturer in the Archaeology Program at Melbourne's La Trobe University, show the owner of the bag was well equipped for obtaining meat and edible plants in the wild.

"There was a sickle for harvesting wild wheat or barley, a cluster of flint spearheads, a flint core for making more spearheads, some smooth stones (maybe slingshots), a large stone (maybe for striking flint pieces off the flint core), a cluster of gazelle toe bones which were used to make beads, and part of a second bone tool," he said.

Edwards outlines the finds, attributed to the Natufian culture from a site called Wadi Hammeh 27 in Jordan, in the latest issue of Antiquity.

He believes the tools were enclosed in a hide or wickerwork bag with a strap that would have been worn over the shoulder. Such bags rarely had compartments, so the owner probably protected valuable items by wrapping them in rolls of bark or leather before placing them at the bottom of the bag.

The sickle, constructed out of two carefully grooved horn pieces, was fitted with color-matched tan and grey bladelets. It would have been a marvel of form and function for its day and is the only tool of its kind ever linked to the Natufian people.

The rest of the items were designed to immobilize and then kill game such as aurochs, red deer, hares, storks, partridges, owls, tortoises and the major source of meat -- gazelles.

"A lone hunter or a group of hunters might wait for gazelles to cross their path while waiting behind a low 'hide' made of twigs and brush," Edwards explained.

"They might have worked on making bone beads to wile away the time. Then a hunter could get off a shot while the animals were off their guard. A first shot might wound, but not kill, and then a hunter or a group of them will track the wounded animal."

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Captain Kidd's Ship Located Off Dominican Island

Shallow Discovery

- A U.S. underwater archaeology team announced Thursday it has likely discovered the shattered remnants of a ship once captained by the notorious buccaneer William Kidd off a tiny Dominican Republic island.

The barnacled cannons and anchors found stacked beneath just 10 feet of crystalline coastal waters off Catalina Island are believed to be the wreckage of the Quedagh Merchant, a ship abandoned by the Scottish privateer in 1699, Indiana University researchers say.

"When I first looked down and saw it, I couldn't believe everybody missed it for 300 years," said Charles Beeker, a scuba-diving archaeologist who teaches at Indiana University. "I've been on thousands of wrecks and this is one of the first where it's been untouched by looters."

Beeker said the wreckage has been aggressively sought by treasure hunters, including a group with a permit from the Dominican government to scour Catalina for remnants of the ship, which historians believe was scavenged of treasure and burned shortly after Kidd abandoned it.

The Dominican government has licensed the U.S. university to study the wreckage and convert the sea floor where the cannons and anchors are marooned into an underwater preserve, where it will be accessible to divers and snorkelers.

"We believe this is a living museum," said Beeker, who has previously helped the Dominican government open underwater parks that feature cannons, jar fragments and other items recovered from early 18th-century shipwrecks. "The treasure in this case is the wreck itself."

The scattered cannons and anchors, partially hidden by swirling sand, were first spotted by a local man who reported his discovery to the Dominican government, according to Francis Soto, director of the National Office of Subaquatic Heritage and Culture.

Ice Skating Born of Necessity?

The Original Ice Skate

Ice skating, now a winter tradition around the world, may have been invented in Scandinavia 5,000 years ago, new research suggests.

According to Federico Formenti and Alberto Minetti from the University of Oxford, there is substantial evidence that ice skating began in southern Finland, where the concentration of lakes is the highest in the world.

"The peculiar shape and distribution" of lakes in that area can be credited for the advent of the "human-powered" means of transportation, the researchers wrote in the January issue of the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society of London.

"In this geographical region characterized by a harsh climate, especially in winter, our ancestors had to face the dilemma of walking around several frozen lakes --- an energetically demanding option -- or crossing them, which could prove to be more convenient in terms of distance traveled, metabolic cost, and/or speed," said the researchers.

Archaeological evidence suggests humans started skating on ice approximately in the second millennium B.C. The oldest known ice skates, found throughout Scandinavia, were made mostly of horse and cow bones, pierced at one end and bound to the foot with leather straps.

Bones lack the edge necessary for the modern skating stride, so forward propulsion came from the person's upper limbs: a stick was pushed backward between the legs, which were kept almost straight.

"Compared to walking, these bone skates actually do not offer any advantage in terms of speed," Formenti told Discovery News. "I asked myself, what was the meaning of building such a tool?"

Neanderthals Stitched Too Little Too Late

Keeping Warm

Neanderthals probably froze to death in the last ice age because rapid climate change caught them by surprise without the tools needed to make warm clothes, finds new research.

Ian Gilligan, a postgraduate researcher from the Australian National University argues his case in the current issue of the journal World Archaeology. By the time some Neanderthals developed sewing tools it was too little too late, said Gilligan.

Neanderthals began to die out just before the last glacial maximum, 35,000 to 30,000 years ago and were replaced by modern humans. Previous studies have argued that one of the key reasons for this is that modern humans had better hunting tools, providing them with the extra food they needed to survive the cold.

But Gilligan disagrees that the development of hunting tools was so important to modern humans' survival over the Neanderthals.

For a start, he argues, Neanderthals were already successful hunters, surviving in Europe and Eurasia for over 100,000 years. Most of the tools supposed to have given modern humans the edge over Neanderthals were actually more useful for making warm clothes.

The important tools developed by modern humans included stone blades, bone points and eventually needles, which could cut and pierce hides to sew them together into multi-layered clothes including underwear, said Gilligan.

"They're not related to hunting, they're related to clothing," he said. "These tools are related to tailored, fitted clothing, what I call complex clothing."

Modern humans were more vulnerable to the cold than Neanderthals and developed these tools as far back as 90,000 years ago to cope with cooler parts of Africa, before the peak of the ice age.

Earliest Shoe-Wearers Revealed by Toe Bones

Shod? Look at the Toes

- People started wearing shoes around 40,000 years ago, according to a study on recently excavated small toe bones that belonged to an individual from China who apparently loved shoes.

Most footwear erodes over time. The earliest known shoes, rope sandals that attached to the feet with string, date to only around 10,000 B.C. For the new study, the clues were in middle toe bones that change during an individual's lifetime if the person wears shoes a lot.

"When you walk barefoot, your middle toes curl into the ground to give you traction as you push off," explained co-author Erik Trinkaus, who worked on the study with Hong Shang.

"If you regularly wear Nikes, moccasins or any other type of shoe, you actually wind up pushing off with your big toe, with less force going through the middle toes," added Trinkaus, a Washington University anthropologist who is one of the world's leading experts on early human evolution.

Small toe bones are rare in the archaeological record, so Trinkaus and Hong jumped at the chance to study the 40,000-year-old skeleton, which was found in Tianyuan Cave near Zhoukoudian, China.

They also analyzed a recently found 27,500-year-old Russian skeleton with middle toe bones, as well as Neanderthal and modern Puebloan and Inuit skeletons, also with such bones.

The findings have been accepted for publication in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

The researchers determined that both the Chinese and Russian individuals had more lightly built middle toe bones relative to their body size. The Russian skeleton was also found with other individuals who had an abundance of ivory beads around their ankles and feet, suggesting these individuals likely wore some fairly flashy shoes.

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The Neanderthal-Human Split: (Very) Ancient History

Distant Relative

Neanderthals and humans once shared a common ancestor, but we split from the stocky, hairy hominid group as long as 400,000 to 350,000 years ago, concludes a new study.

That estimate matches prior DNA studies, putting a date to the time when human beings first emerged on the planet. But would these first humans have been anatomically just like us? Probably not, suggests lead author Timothy Weaver, an anthropologist at the University of California at Davis.

"Early fossils along this lineage are quite different from later ones," he told Discovery News.

Fast evolution, in fact, probably drove the initial Neanderthal/human divergence, which likely began as genetic drift -- random changes in DNA. As the two groups parted ways, their changing environments likely drove more substantial changes in body shape and size, in response to differing needs.

Weaver and colleagues Charles Roseman and Chris Stringer created a model to determine how long it would have taken genetic drift to create the cranial differences observed between Neanderthal and modern human skeletons.

The model used prior information on how microsatellites, aka "junk DNA," can change, or drift, over time in a species. Over time, those changes can accumulate enough for an entirely new species to evolve.

The researchers applied the model to 37 cranial measurements collected on 2,524 modern and 20 Neanderthal specimens. Their findings are published in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Shroud of Turin's Authenticity Probed Anew

Authentic or Not? View a slideshow of the Shroud's history.

The Shroud of Turin, the 14- by 4-foot linen believed by some to have been wrapped around Jesus after the crucifixion, might not be a fake after all, according to new research.

The director of one of three laboratories that dismissed the shroud as a medieval artifact 20 years ago has called for the science community to reinvestigate the linen's authenticity.

"With the radiocarbon measurements and with all of the other evidence which we have about the shroud, there does seem to be a conflict in the interpretation of the different evidence," said Christopher Ramsey, director of England's Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, which carried out radiocarbon dating tests on the cloth in 1988.

Venerated by many Catholics as proof that Christ was resurrected from the grave, the yellowing cloth is kept rolled up in a silver casket in Turin's Cathedral.

Shroud Science: Chapter One

Scientific interest in the linen, which has survived several blazes since it was discovered, began in 1898, when it was photographed by lawyer Secondo Pia. The negatives revealed the image of a bearded man with pierced wrists and feet and a bloodstained head.

In 1988, three reputable laboratories in Oxford, Zurich and Tucson carried out radiocarbon tests on the cloth and declared it a brilliant, medieval fake produced between 1260 and 1390.

Nevertheless, the piece of linen made of fine, tightly woven herringbone twill has remained an unquestioned object of veneration. When it last went on public display in 2000, more than three million people saw it. Many more visitors are expected for next public display in 2025.

Shroud scholars, known as sindonologists, have always argued that no medieval forger could either have produced such an accurate fake or anticipated the invention of photography.

Yet, despite arguments and claims of revisionist scholars, all theories on how the radiocarbon tests could have been inaccurate have been rejected by the scientific community.

A Question of Contamination

In this latest chapter, Ramsey's call to revisit the subject follows tests taken by Ramsey, himself, to investigate a contamination hypothesis by John Jackson, a U.S. physicist who conducted the first major investigation of the shroud in 1978.

Ancient Humor: Raunch, Riddles and Religion

Ancient History?

- In the ancient Greek poem "The Odyssey," the story's hero, Odysseus, tells the Cyclops that his name is "Nobody." When Odysseus instructs his men to drive a fiery iron spit into the monster's single eye, the Cyclops yells out in vain, "Friends, Nobody is killing me now," so no one comes to help.

This action-adventure humor, dating to around 800 B.C., is one of the first recorded jokes, according to the classics scholar Owen Ewald, who recently presented his findings on "Humor in the Ancient World" at Seattle Pacific University.

The world's first one-liners, however, were likely delivered tens of thousands of years before Homer, author of "The Odyssey," was born.

The Earliest Evidence for Humor

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, anthropologists Louis Schulze and Charles Chewings became the first outsiders to record contact with Australian aboriginals, who had been genetically and culturally isolated from the rest of the world for at least 35,000 years. They witnessed evidence of a comedic tradition that could date as far back, according to Joseph Polimeni, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Manitoba.

Polimeni recently authored a paper on the evolutionary origins of humor, published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology.

Schulze and Chewings got caught in a terrifying thunderstorm they thought would scare the Australians. Instead, as they later wrote: "When the thunder rends the air in deafening claps...the natives show no fear. On the contrary, they will converse freely, make light of it, and even burst out laughing at an unusually loud or peculiar clap of thunder."

The ability to be amused by life's inevitable surprises goes back at least 35,000 years, Polimeni said, citing the isolated Australians' genetic capacity for humor.

"Since archaeologists believe that modern Homo sapiens date to 100,000 to 200,000 years ago, it's actually not a very provocative statement," he added. "In fact, humor is probably at least as old as that."

The Co-Evolution of Humor and Spirituality

The 35,000-year-ago mark is significant because many milestones in human evolution began to surface at that point. Polimeni thinks people were beginning to develop the brainpower for more abstract thinking. One of the earliest symbolic pieces of art, a figurine with the head of a lion and the legs of a person, dates to this period.

Evidence for the earliest spirituality also dates to the same era, through archaeological depictions resembling contemporary shamanistic art, Polimeni said. Zombies -- still a comedic B-movie favorite --represent the sort of early beliefs that mixed spirituality with the contradictions that often form the basis of humor.

"A zombie, a spiritual concept in many hunting and gathering societies, is a person who is dead," explained Polimeni. "Being both dead and an active person is a contradiction...a violation, a concept reflecting opposite positions," qualities present in many a joke.

Polimeni theorizes that humor and spirituality emerged together, perhaps as ways for humans to relieve stress, communicate and make social connections in lieu of grooming, roughhousing and other, more direct means used by our primate ancestors.

"Given that the basis of humor may conceivably be rooted in the same cognitive machinery that allows animals to play and tease, it is certainly possible that the cognitive processes that allow spirituality may have piggy-backed on this humor cognitive substructure," he said.

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Oldest Human Ancestor Fossil Found

A small piece of jawbone unearthed in a cave in Spain is the oldest known fossil of a human ancestor in Europe and suggests that people lived on the continent much earlier than previously believed, scientists say.

The researchers said the fossil found last year at Atapuerca in northern Spain, along with stone tools and animal bones, is up to 1.3 million years old. That would be 500,000 years older than remains from a 1997 find that prompted the naming of a new species: Homo antecessor, or Pioneer Man, possibly a common ancestor to Neanderthals and modern humans.

The new find appears to be from the same species, researchers said.

A team co-led by Eudald Carbonell, director of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleo-Ecology and Social Evolution, reported their find in Thursday's issue of the scientific journal Nature.

The timing of the earliest occupation of Europe by humans that emerged from Africa has been controversial for many years.

Some archeologists believe the process was a stop-and-go one in which species of hominins -- a group that includes the extinct relatives of modern humans -- emerged and died out quickly only to be replaced by others, making for a very slow spread across the continent, Carbonell said in an interview.

Until now the oldest hominin fossils found in Europe were the Homo antecessor ones, also found at Atapuerca, but at a separate digging site, and a skull from Ceprano in Italy.

Carbonell's team has tentatively classified the new fossil as representing an earlier example of Homo antecessor. And, critically, the team says the new one also bears similarities to much-older fossils dug up since 1983 in the Caucasus at a place called Dmanisi, in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. These were dated as being up to 1.8 million years old.

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Earliest Voice Recording Features French Song

At first listen, the grainy high-pitched warble doesn't sound like much, but scientists say the French recording from 1860 is the oldest known recorded human voice.

The 10-second clip of a woman singing "Au Clair de la Lune," taken from a so-called phonautogram, was recently discovered by audio historian David Giovannoni. The recording predates Thomas Edison's "Mary had a little lamb" -- previously credited as the oldest recorded voice -- by 17 years.

The tune was captured using a phonautograph, a device created by Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville that created visual recordings of sound waves.

Using a needle that moved in response to sound, the phonautograph etched sound waves into paper coated with soot from an oil lamp.

Giovannoni and his research partner, Patrick Feaster, began looking for phonautograms last year and in December discovered two of Scott's -- from 1857 and 1859 -- in France's patent office. Using high-resolution optical scanning equipment, Giovannoni collected images of the phonautograms that he brought back to the United States.

"What Scott was trying to do in 1861 was establish that he was the first to arrive at this idea," Giovannoni said. "He was depositing with the French Academy examples of his work."

"We took those images back to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and found that (Scott's) technique wasn't very developed," Giovannoni said. "There were squiggles on paper, but it was not recording sound."

So Giovannoni, who collaborates with many other audio historians, including scientists at Berkeley, asked the French Academy of Sciences to send digital scans of more of Scott's papers. Those scans arrived on March 1.

"When I opened up the file, I nearly fell off my chair," Giovannoni said. "We had beautifully recorded and preserved phonautograms, many of which had dates on them."

While Giovannoni was excited by the images, they still needed to be translated into sound.

Early Weapon Evidence Reveals Bloody Past

- New research concerning some of the world's earliest weapons suggests that while some Stone Age Africans benefited from spurts of high-tech brilliance, Neanderthals and modern humans in Europe battled big beasts in face-to-face combat that must have been bloody and brutal.

The recent discoveries shed light on Paleolithic life in ancient Europe and push back the invention of the bow and arrow in Africa by at least 20,000 years. They paint a picture nearly as vivid as a scene from The Lord of the Rings, with modern humans, Neanderthals and archaic humans all struggling for survival with their various favored weapons in hand.

Early weapon usage may even go back to our primate ancestors.

From Poop Throwing to Rocks

In fact, the roots of today's technologically advanced warfare may be traced back to primates throwing feces. For defense or possibly out of anger, many primates toss poop or vegetation, such as sticks, at intruders.

"Primates have broad hips and they throw poorly," John Shea, a leading expert on ancient weaponry, told Discovery News.

"No one's ever been killed by a thrown turd, but the roots of aimed throwing are there," added Shea, who is an associate professor of anthropology at New York's Stony Brook University.

He explained that humans evolved a rib cage, a pelvis and rotating hips and shoulders suitable for fast movement and running. These anatomical modifications gave us better throwing ability, enabling us to do serious damage with just a tossed rock hurled while sprinting.

"Not long ago I watched an East African kid drop a gazelle with a single stone," he said.

Stone and Bone Arrows

As humans became more skilled at shaping stones, arrows and darts emerged. At some point, certain human groups in Africa switched to developing bone tools, including arrowheads made out of animal bones.

One bone tool-making operation, called the Howiesons Poort Industry, was based at Sibudu Cave along the north coast of South Africa. Researchers Lucinda Backwell and Lyn Wadley of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and Francesco d'Errico of the University of Bordeaux recently analyzed three bone tools from the site.

The tools, dating to more than 61,000 years ago, include a slender, needle-like implement likely used in piercing tasks, a polished spatula-shaped piece that probably smoothed and softened animal hides and, most importantly, an arrow point that was likely used for hunting small prey.

Their findings have been accepted for publication in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

The scientists believe the bone arrowhead was part of the first known bow and arrow set.

Sleek and Safe

Although the wooden bow part of the set probably eroded long ago, Backwell and her team identified the set by comparing the bone arrowhead with a wide range of bone tools from Southern African Middle and Later Stone Age deposits, an Iron Age occupation, nineteenth century Bushmen hunter-gatherer toolkits and bones that she and her team shaped experimentally.

"The Sibudu point parallels a specific type of large, unpoisoned bone arrow head used [with a bow] by Kalahari Bushmen, Iron Age and Stone Age people," said Backwell of the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

"According to this discovery, the oldest bows and bone arrows are now dated to just over 60,000 years old and are associated with Howiesons Poort people in the Middle Stone Age," she added. "These large bone points were securely fixed to reed shafts to make one solid projectile implement."

To this day, hunter-gatherer groups use similar tools without poison to kill small mammals and birds. It's probable the ancient South Africans did the same, especially since plant and animal remains suggest the region was a humid forest at around 60,000 years ago.

Pat Shipman, adjunct professor of biological anthropology at Penn State, told Discovery News that the new research "is convincing in its conclusions and has enormous implications for our understanding of changes in human culture."

Shipman explained that when historians debate when modern human behavior first arose, tool and weapon usage are often a big part of that discussion.

If humans were already making sophisticated, multi-part weapons, like bows and arrows, during the Middle Stone Age, then it's possible that modern human behavior "accompanied, or closely followed, the physical evolution of anatomically modern humans in Africa around 200,000 years ago," she said.

With bows and arrows, humans could also hunt more safely.

"Both bows and arrows and spears enable distance killing of species, thus greatly lessening the danger to the hunter of taking large game animals," Shipman said. "Combined with the use of poisons on the points, these new inventions let hunters kill large animals that would previously have been rarely taken by our ancestors."

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Oldest Bling Found in Peru

Evidence of Free Time

- The earliest known gold jewelry made in the Americas has been discovered in southern Peru. The gold necklace, made nearly 4,000 years ago, was found in a burial site near Lake Titicaca, researchers report in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The discovery "was a complete shock," said Mark Aldenderfer, an anthropologist at the University of Arizona.

"It was not expected in the least," he said in a telephone interview. "It's always fun to find something and go, 'Wow, what is that doing here?'"

In the past, it had been assumed that a society needed to be settled to produce agricultural surpluses that can support activities such as making ornamental objects, he explained.

But the people living in this region at the time were still primarily hunter-gatherers, he said. "They were on their way to becoming settled peoples, but they were not quite there yet."

Someone, though, had the time and knowledge to make this ornament, which he speculates is a sign of importance.

"These folks are obtaining this by their effort, accumulating more wealth and using objects for prestige," Aldenderfer said. It says: "Pay attention to me, I'm successful."

There is no evidence at the site that shows how it was made, he said. But it looks like a nugget of native raw gold, which occurs near the area, was pounded flat in a stone mortar and pestle.

Then the gold was probably wrapped around a piece of wood and pounded until it was folded into a tube, he said.

The researchers restrung the necklace, alternating nine small gold tubes with a series of round stones, identified as either greenstone or turquoise, with holes in them that were found in the same grave.

Cleopatra's Suicide by Snake a Myth?

"The Death of Cleopatra"

- Popular lore holds that in Cleopatra's last moments, the distraught queen -- who had just lost her kingdom and learned of her lover's demise -- smuggled a poisonous snake into her locked chamber and died, along with two ladies-in-waiting, of a self-inflicted snake bite.

Such a scenario is next to impossible, according to Egyptologist Joyce Tyldesley, who shatters the "snakebite suicide" myth in her new book, Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt, just published in Europe and slated for an upcoming U.S. release.

"It seems to me that the snake theory is just too difficult to sustain, as it leaves too many loopholes," Tyldesley, a lecturer at the University of Manchester in England and museum fellow, told Discovery News.

She posed the following questions: Do we imagine one snake killed all three women, or were three snakes brought in? How did the snake(s) get into the room? Where did the snakes then go? Since not all snakes are poisonous, how did the women ensure their own deaths?

"Basically, I think there are better and more reliable ways of killing oneself," she said, adding that some elements of the story are probably true.

Based on a number of historical accounts, Cleopatra did die in Alexandria at around 30 B.C., and there is no historical evidence of a prior illness. The moments leading up to her death are also plausible to Tyldesley, particularly Cleopatra's dismissal of her servants, save for two women, Charmian and Eiras.

"The decision to die in front of her female servants made good practical sense, as even the dead (according to ancient Egyptian spiritual beliefs) needed a chaperone," she explained.

"One of the horrors of female suicide was that the body might be glimpsed partially naked, by strangers," she added. The queen therefore safeguarded her virtue in life and in death by retaining the company of her ladies-in-waiting.

In accounts written about by the Greek historian Plutarch and the Roman historian Cassius Dio, Cleopatra had a snake smuggled into her chamber inside a jar of figs or water, but both historians expressed doubts about the scenario.

Druid Grave Unearthed in U.K.?

- Historical records tell of a mystical, priestly and learned class of elite individuals called Druids among Celtic societies in Britain, but there has been no archaeological evidence of their existence. Until, perhaps, now.

A series of graves found in a gravel quarry at Stanway near Colchester, Essex, have been dated to 40-60 A.D. At least one of the burials, it appears, may have been that of a Druid, according to a report published in British Archaeology.

Mike Pitts is the journal's editor and an archaeologist. He studied classical Greek and Roman texts that mention the Druids in early France and Britain. The most detailed description, Pitts found, dates to 55 B.C. and comes from Roman military and political leader Julius Caesar.

"Druids, he says, were prestigious ritual specialists who performed human sacrifices, acted as judges in disputes, were excused action in battle and taught the transmigration of souls -- when you die, your soul is passed on to another living being," Pitts told Discovery News.

Other historians link the Druids to soothsaying and healing practices.

Within the wooden, chambered burial site, researchers have excavated a wine warmer, cremated human remains, a cloak pinned with brooches, a jet bead, divining rods (for fortune-telling), a series of surgical instruments, a strainer bowl last used to brew Artemisia-containing tea, a board game carefully laid out with pieces in play, as well as other objects.

"This person was clearly a specialist and also clearly wealthy and powerful, as indicated by the special grave and its apparent location within the compound of a 'chief.' That would all fit Caesar's Druid," he said, adding that Caesar likely also visited Stanway during his lifetime.

The surgical kit found in the grave includes iron and copper alloy scalpels, a surgical saw, hooks, needles, forceps and probes. Pitts said the collection mirrors basic medical tools from other parts of the Roman world.

The board game and its arranged pieces, however, are anything but common. None other like it has ever been found at Roman-era sites in Great Britain.

Surviving metal corners and hinges from the board allowed Pitts to reconstruct it as an 8-inch by 12-inch rectangle. Raised sides suggest dice might have been used. The white and blue glass counters were positioned with care. Some were straight across the sides, another in a diagonal line and one white marker close to the board's center.

Pitts believes the game may have been another "divination tool," along with the rods, jet bead and scent bottles also excavated at Stanway.

Philip Crummy, director of the Colchester Archaeological Trust, told Discovery News that the person in the burial could very well have been a Druid "given the healing and divination attributes -- assuming that Druids could be trained in these skills."

Crummy agrees with Pitts that such individuals would have been "near the top of the social scale in Iron Age Britain."

He is, however, not yet convinced the person was Celtic, since the medical kit was "fairly Romanized" and the individual may have acted "like a Roman surgeon/doctor would have done."

"Divination was widely practiced in the Roman world too," he added.

Because of site's age and location, Pitts is more inclined to believe the person was indeed a Celtic Druid and could have been closely related to Cunobelin, a chief or king of the Catuvellauni tribe.

William Shakespeare immortalized Cunobelin as "Cymbeline" in a play of that same name. Cunobelin's sons led a heroic, yet failed, resistance against Roman Emperor Claudius' invasion of England in 43 A.D.

Neanderthal Teeth Reveal Wandering Ways

Hidden History

- Analysis of a 40,000-year-old tooth found in southern Greece suggests Neanderthals were more mobile than once thought, paleontologists said Friday.

Analysis of the tooth -- part of the first and only Neanderthal remains found in Greece -- showed the ancient human had spent at least part of its life away from the area where it died.

"Neanderthal mobility is highly controversial," said paleoanthropologist Katerina Harvati at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Some experts believe Neanderthals roamed over very limited areas, but others say they must have been more mobile, particularly when hunting, Harvati said.

Until now, experts only had indirect evidence, including stone used in tools, Harvati said. "Our analysis is the first that brings evidence from a Neanderthal fossil itself," she said.

The findings by the Max Planck Institute team were published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

The tooth was found in a seaside excavation in Greece's southern Peloponnese region in 2002.

First Americans Endured 20,000-Year Layover

The first New World entrants, who likely came from Asia, endured a 20,000-year "layover" on a strip of land called Beringia that once connected Alaska to Siberia, according to a new research model.

The model combines genetics with climate, archaeological and geological information to paint a vivid picture of how the Americas were first populated by approximately 1,000 to 5,000 people, instead of just 100, as was previously believed.

The findings, published this week in the journal PLoS ONE, also explain why Native Americans are genetically similar to east central Asians, but show noticeable differences too.

"Twenty thousand years is sufficient time to create the genetic polymorphisms that distinguish Native Americans, although I don't think Native Americans are a different race," co-author Connie Mulligan told Discovery News.

"The genetic variation that distinguishes all Native Americans from other, non-Native American groups would have evolved during...the Beringian occupation," added Mulligan, who is a professor of anthropology at the University of Florida and serves as assistant director of the university's Genetics Institute.

She and her colleagues believe two massive glaciers prevented the Beringians from entering the New World over the multi-millennial period. They seemed to be eager to leave, however, and for good reason.

"Although Beringia was not covered in glaciers, it still would have been a cold, harsh climate, such that life would have been possible, but not luxurious," Mulligan said. "I would compare it to modern-day Siberia or Mongolia in the winters."

When the glaciers diminished, the melting was probably rapid, "a difference that could be seen over a person's lifetime," she said.

Oldest Oil Paintings Found in Afghanistan

Earliest Oil Paintings

- The oldest known oil painting, dating from 650 A.D., has been found in caves in Afghanistan's Bamiyan Valley, according to a team of Japanese, European and U.S. scientists.

The discovery reverses a common perception that the oil painting, considered a typically Western art, originated in Europe, where the earliest examples date to the early 12th century A.D.

Famous for its 1,500-year-old massive Buddha statues, which were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001, the Bamiyan Valley features several caves painted with Buddhist images.

Damaged by the severe natural environment and Taliban dynamite, the cave murals have been restored and studied by the National Research Institute for Cultural Properties in Tokyo, as a UNESCO/Japanese Fund-in-Trust project.

"Since most of the paintings have been lost, looted or deteriorated, we are trying to conserve the intact portions and also try to understand the constituent materials and painting techniques," Yoko Taniguchi, a researcher at the National Research Institute for Cultural Properties in Tokyo, told Discovery News.

"It was during such analysis that we discovered oily and resinous components in a group of wall paintings."

Painted in the mid-7th century A.D., the murals have varying artistic influences and show scenes with knotty-haired Buddhas in vermilion robes sitting cross-legged amid palm leaves and mythical creatures.

Most likely, the paintings are the work of artists who traveled on the Silk Road, the ancient trade route between China, across Central Asia's desert to the West.

The researchers analyzed, with different methods, hundreds of samples. Three different centers -- Tokyo's National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France and the Los Angeles-based Getty Conservation Institute -- carried out the tests.

Infrared microscope, micro X-ray diffraction, and micro X-ray fluorescence produced accurate chemical images of the paintings. Gas chromatography confirmed and refined the identification of organic compounds.

"We discovered that a particular group of caves were painted with oil painting technique, using perhaps walnut and poppy seed drying oils. They also have multi-layered structure as if they were like canvas paintings of Medieval period," Taniguchi said.

Synchrotron beam analysis made it possible to identify the compounds used in the different layers of painting.

"These layers are very thin, and it was really important to analyze each of them selectively. Indeed, the paintings are done with a mixture of several ingredients. They are never present as a pure compound," Marine Cotte, a researcher at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, told Discovery News.

Analysis showed the layers were made up of natural resins, proteins, gums, oil-based paint layers and, in some cases, a resinous, varnish-like layer.

Poop Fossil Pushes Back Date for Earliest Americans

The Evidence

- New evidence shows humans lived in North America more than 14,000 years ago, 1,000 years earlier than had previously been known.

Discovered in a cave in Oregon, fossil feces yielded DNA indicating these early residents were related to people living in Siberia and East Asia, according to a report in Thursday's online edition of the journal Science.

"This is the first time we have been able to get dates that are undeniably human, and they are 1,000 years before Clovis," said Dennis L. Jenkins, a University of Oregon archaeologist, referring to the Clovis culture, well known for its unique spear-points that have been studied previously.

Humans are widely believed to have arrived in North America from Asia over a land-bridge between Alaska and Siberia during a warmer period. A variety of dates has been proposed and some are in dispute.

Few artifacts were found in the cave, leading Jenkins to speculate that these people stayed there only a few days at a time before moving on, perhaps following game animals or looking for other food.

The petrified poop -- coprolites to scientists -- is yielding a look at the diet of these ancient Americans, Jenkins said.

While the analysis is not yet complete, he said there are bones of squirrels, bison hair, fish scales, protein from birds and dogs and the remains of plants such as grass and sunflowers.

The oldest of several coprolites studied is 14,340 calendar years old, said co-author Eske Willerslev, director of the Center for Ancient Genetics at Denmark's University of Copenhagen.

"The Paisley Cave material represents, to the best of my knowledge, the oldest human DNA obtained from the Americas," he said. "Other pre-Clovis sites have been claimed, but no human DNA has been obtained."

The date for the new coprolites is similar to that of Monte Verde in southern Chile, where human artifacts have been discovered, added Willerslev.

Jenkins said it isn't clear exactly who these people living in the Oregon caves were, since there were few artifacts found. He said there was one stone tool, a hand tool used perhaps to polish or grind or mash bones or fat.

"We are not saying that these people were of a particular ethnic group. At this point, we know they most likely came from Siberia or Eastern Asia, and we know something about what they were eating, which is something we can learn from coprolites. We're talking about human signature," he said.

"If you are looking for the first people in North America, you are going to have to step back more than 1,000 years beyond Clovis to find them," Jenkins said.

The Clovis culture has been dated to between 13,200 and 12,900 calendar years ago and is best known by the tools left behind.

Michael Waters, director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M University, said the find, along with indications of human presence at other locations, adds to the evidence for a pre-Clovis human presence in North America.

Ancient Knives Unearthed in Australia

Easy to Miss

Tools dating back at least 35,000 years have been unearthed in a rock shelter in Australia's remote northwest, making it one of the oldest archaeological finds in that part of the country, archaeologists said Monday.

The tools include a piece of flint the size of a small cell phone and hundreds of tiny sharp stones that were used as knives. One local Aboriginal elder saw it as vindication of what his people have said all along -- that they have inhabited this land for tens of thousands of years.

"I'm ecstatic, I'm over the moon, because it's now indisputable," Slim Parker, an elder of the Martidja Banyjima people, said.

The tools, along with seeds, bark and other plant material, were found nearly 6 1/2 feet beneath the floor of the shelter -- a slight crevice in the hillside protected by an overhang of rock -- on the edges of an iron ore mine site about 590 miles northeast of Perth, the capital of Western Australia.

"This area of land, in regard to our culture and customs and beliefs, is of great significance to us," Parker said. "We have songs and stories relating to that area as a sustaining resource that has provided for and cared for our people for thousands of years."

The excavation was carried out between October and February by archaeologists from Australian Cultural Heritage Management who were hired by the local Aborigines to find and preserve heritage sites within the mine area run by resource giant Rio Tinto.

Rio Tinto, which had been expanding its Hope Downs mine, halted all work when the rock shelter was discovered, company spokesman Gervase Greene said.

Bejeweled Anglo-Saxon Burial Suggests Cult

- In seventh century England, a woman's jewelry-draped body was laid out on a specially constructed bed and buried in a grave that formed the center of an Anglo-Saxon cemetery, according to British archaeologists who recently excavated the site in Yorkshire.

Her jewelry, which included a large shield-shaped pendant, the layout and location of the cemetery as well as excavated weaponry, such as knives and a fine langseax (a single-edged Anglo-Saxon sword), lead the scientists to believe she might have been a member of royalty who led a pagan cult at a time when Christianity was just starting to take root in the region.

"I believe it is a cult because of the arrangement of graves, the short period of the cemetery's use and the bed burial and burial mound that is almost in the center of the very regular cemetery," archaeologist Stephen Sherlock, who directed the project, told Discovery News.

"The whole focus of the cemetery is based upon the bed burial -- it is our view that this was erected first and the other graves were dug around it," added Sherlock, who worked with the Teesside Archaeological Society, which recently published a report on the research.

A summary of the finds also appears in the latest issue of British Archaeology.

The cemetery, named Street House, consists of 109 graves, most of which were dug in a square around the bed burial.

"This square formation is unparalleled in Anglo-Saxon England," Sherlock said.

Remains of a sunken-floored building, possibly used as a mortuary chapel where the body might have been laid to rest prior to her funeral, exist near the cemetery's entrance. A roundhouse and the burial mound also stand within the square.

The bed burial itself consists of a wooden bed held together, and decorated with, iron. Artifacts within the grave included two gemstone pendants, gold and glass beads, a jet pin or hairpiece, and the shield pendant that was unique for the time, according to Sherlock and colleague Mark Simmons.

Mounted by a central blue gemstone, the piece has scalloped-shaped carving with 11 separate lobes and a scalloped lower edge. Small red gems resting on gold foil, which would have reflected light when the piece was worn, surround the central stone.

Although the site's acidic soil eroded the woman's remains, the age of the cemetery and its location provide clues to her identity. Sherlock believes "likely suspects" include Ethelburga, the wife of King Edwin of Northumbria, who converted to Christianity and was made a saint. Other possibilities are Eanflaed, the wife of King Oswiu, or Oswiu's daughter, Aelflaed.

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Grunt Work: Scientists Re-Create Neanderthal Speech

Say What?

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After a nearly 30,000-year silence, Neanderthals are speaking once more, thanks to researchers who have modelled the hominids' larynx to replicate the possible sounds they would have made, scientists say.

The work, led by Robert McCarthy, an anthropologist at Florida Atlantic University at Boca Raton, is based on Neanderthal fossils found in France.

The item includes an audio snippet in which a computer synthesizer replicates how a Neanderthal would say an "e" and compares this with the same sound as made by modern humans.

A study published last October in the journal Current Biology found that Neanderthals carried the only human gene that has so far been linked to language.

This implies Neanderthals had at least some of the genetic prerequisites for acquiring language.

Even so, experts question whether Neanderthals had the necessary biological gear, such as fine nerves connected to tongue muscles and lips, that would enable them do more than just grunt.

Their vocal tracts lacked the ability to make "quantal vowels" that underpin modern speech, and so oral communication would have been limited, McCarthy believes.

"They would have spoken a bit differently. They wouldn't have been able to produce these quantal vowels that form the basis of spoken language," he said.

Squat and slope-browed, Neanderthals are our closest extinct ancestors.

They lived in parts of Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East for around 170,000 years, then died out mysteriously some 28,000 years ago or more.

Two main theories have emerged to explain their disappearance: either they were wiped out by Homo sapiens -- the new, smarter hominid on the block -- or they interbred with the newcomers, which implies that our genome today may have Neanderthal DNA.

Parthenon Marbles Threatened by Pollution

One of a Kind

- A senior Greek archaeologist warned this week that the last original sculptures still adorning the Parthenon, Athens' iconic ancient temple, face a major pollution threat and must be removed to a museum.

"There are still 17 original metopes (sculpted plaques) which must be protected because they can no longer endure atmospheric conditions," Acropolis site supervisor Alexandros Mantis said on Friday.

Mantis has proposed that the endangered sculptures be replaced by replicas and kept safe in a new museum located below the Acropolis that is scheduled to open in September.

He singled out 14 plaques on the Parthenon's western facade which are in a "pitiful" condition, plus two more on the northern side.

One of them is the so-called "Annunciation" plaque featuring two goddesses, which was spared by early Christians when the temple was turned into a church around 600 AD.

Athens' most recogniseable landmark and part of the ancient Acropolis citadel overlooking the city, the Parthenon dates back to the golden age of Athenian democracy which began in the fifth century B.C.

Few sculptures dating from the Acropolis' creation are still on-site, having been gradually removed by Greek archaeologists in the last 30 years during restoration works.

The famous Caryatids, statues of young women that acted as pillars to the Erechtheion temple, were themselves removed in 1979.

The issue was discussed last week by the Greek archaeological council (KAS), the influential 34-member state body that advises the culture ministry on heritage issues.

Neanderthals Conquered Mammoths, Why Not Us?

No Dummy | Discovery News Video: The Human Animal

-- They may have been stronger, but Neanderthals looked, ate and may have even thought much like modern humans do, suggest several new studies that could help explain new evidence that the early residents of prehistoric Europe and Asia engaged in head-to-head combat with woolly mammoths.

Together, the findings call into question how such a sophisticated group apparently disappeared off the face of the Earth around 30,000 years ago.

The new evidence displays the strengths and weaknesses of Neanderthals, suggesting they were skilled hunters but not as brainy and efficient as modern humans, who eventually took over Neanderthal territories.

Neanderthal Vs. Woolly Mammoth

Most notably among the new studies is what researchers say is the first ever direct evidence that a woolly mammoth was brought down by Neanderthal weapons.

Margherita Mussi and Paola Villa made the connection after studying a 60,000 to 40,000-year-old mammoth skeleton unearthed near Neanderthal stone tool artifacts at a site called Asolo in northeastern Italy. The discoveries are described in this month's Journal of Archaeological Science.

Villa, a curator of paleontology at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History, told Discovery News that other evidence suggests Neanderthals hunted the giant mammals, but not as directly. At the English Channel Islands, for example, 18 woolly mammoths and five woolly rhinoceroses dating to 150,000 years ago "were driven off a cliff and died by falling into a ravine about 30 meters (over 98 feet) deep. They were then butchered."

Villa, however, pointed out that "there were no stone points or other possible weapons" found at the British site.

"At Asolo, instead there was a stone point that was very probably mounted on a wooden spear and used to kill the animal," she added.

Several arrowheads were excavated at the Italian site, but the one of greatest interest is fractured at the tip, indicating that it "impacted bone or the thick skin of the mammoth."

Other studies on stone points suggest that if such a weapon were rammed into a large beast, it would be likely to fracture the same way.

What's For Dinner?

There is no question that Neanderthals craved meat and ate a lot of it.

A study in this month's issue of the journal Antiquity by German anthropologists Michael Richard and Ralf Schmitz found that Neanderthals went for red meat, not of the woolly mammoth variety, but from red deer, roe deer, and reindeer.

The scientists came to that conclusion after grinding up bone samples taken from the remains of Neanderthals found in Germany and then analyzing the isotopes within. These forms of chemical elements -- in this case, carbon and nitrogen -- reveal if the individual being tested lived on meat, fish or plants, since each food group has its own carbon and nitrogen signature.

Richard and Schmitz conclude that the Neanderthals subsisted primarily on meat from deer, which they probably stalked in organized groups.

The researchers say their findings "reinforce the idea that Neanderthals were sophisticated hunters with an advanced ability to organize and communicate."

Villa agrees.