The Independent goes way back, digging up the history of the diva of the pharaohs:

It is the only tomb of a woman not related to the ancient Egyptian royal families ever found there, said Mansour Boraiq, the top government official for the antiquities ministry in the city of Luxor,
…
The singer’s name, Nehmes Bastet, means she was believed to be [...]

Discovery savors the very faint aroma of a 1,300-year-old Mayan tobacco flask – the first physical evidence that Mayans used super-strong tobacco:

None of the nicotine by-products associated with the smoking of tobacco was detected, likely ruling out the use of the vessel as an ashtray.

“The tobacco found in that container was probably not used for smoking. It was [...]

Next thing you know, they’re going to be showing up in our back yards. But Past Horizons says the last Neanderthals were about 8,000 years younger than we thought:

Remains found near the Arctic Circle in May 2011 are characteristic of the Mousterian culture and have recently been dated at over 28,500 years old, which is more than 8,000 [...]

Past Horizons may have revealed the secret origins of man’s best friend – among the domesticated wolves of Southeast Asia:

Data on genetics, morphology and behaviour show clearly that dogs are descended from wolves, but there’s never been scientific consensus on where in the world the domestication process began. “Our analysis of Y-chromosomal DNA now confirms that wolves were [...]

SONG: “Shining Stone (Calcite Double Refraction).” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”)

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: Based on “Magical Viking stone may be real”, The Telegraph, 2 Nov 2011, as used in the post “How Vikings found the sun”.

ABSTRACT: Viking navigators. I wanted to make a song that sounded like a saga. Like an ancestral [...]

The Telegraph finds the truth behind a navigational legend – a stone that Vikings used locate the sun on cloudy days:

Now experiments have shown that a crystal, called an Iceland spar, could detect the sun with an accuracy within a degree – allowing the legendary seafarers to navigate thousands of miles on cloudy days and during short Nordic [...]

From around 900 CE, in a boat on Scotland’s west coast, comes a dead Viking warrior. BBC reports on the most complete Norse grave site found in the UK:

Archaeologist Dr Hannah Cobb said the “artefacts and preservation make this one of the most important Norse graves ever excavated in Britain”.

Dr Cobb, from the University of Manchester, a co-director [...]

Der Spiegel probes the long-buried secrets of the Erdstalls – Bavaria’s ancient underground mazes:

At least 700 of these chambers have been found in Bavaria alone, along with about 500 in Austria. In the local vernacular, they have fanciful names such as “Schrazelloch” (“goblin hole”) or “Alraunenhöhle” (“mandrake cave”). They were supposedly built by elves, and legend has it [...]

Click to embiggen

It’s a party!

I can’t tell if those are balloons or knobkerries. Either way, windows would have been broken… were there windows to break.

[Book preserved in archive.org, found via Archaeological News.]