In a breathtaking discovery, scientists working on a remote Indonesian island say they have uncovered the bones of a human dwarf species marooned for eons while modern man rapidly colonized the rest of the planet.
One tiny specimen, an adult female measuring about 3 feet tall, is described as "the most extreme" figure to be included in the extended human family. Certainly, she is the shortest.
This hobbit-sized creature appears to have lived as recently as 18,000 years ago on the island of Flores, a kind of tropical Lost World populated by giant lizards and miniature elephants.
Well.
On the one hand, dwarfism is a common occurrence on islands for several species. On the other hand, this just sounds fishy to us.
Update: More here.
Macchu Picchu, Part Deux? Ancient city emerges from the clouds
The Peruvian government has presented ambitious plans to turn the stone fortress of Kuelap, a remote pre-Inca site in northern Peru, into one of the country's main tourism attractions.
Kuelap is located on a mountain top on the eastern ridge of the Andes, 3 000m above sea level and about 700km north of Lima.
The original inhabitants, the Sachapuyo or Chachapoyas, were known as the "people of the clouds" because their stone cities were built on a site where the cold Andean air meets the warm tropical air from the Amazon basin, resulting in a semi-permanent layer of mist and fog.
Cool amateur find I Found: 50,000 treasures unearthed by Britain's amateur archaeologists
When Peter and Christine Johnson decided on a whim to shut their fitness shop early one day last year to try their luck at treasure-hunting, their metal detectors had hardly been used.
Armed with a plastic bag for any swag, they expected to come back ruddy-cheeked and empty-handed after their first trek out into the fields of Kent.
Twenty minutes later, they had uncovered a precious hoard of 360 coins dating back to the Iron Age - two of them of a kind never previously found in Britain. The extraordinary collection has since been classified as an official treasure. The British Museum is also keen to acquire it.
Just don't make a profit at it.
Cool amateur find II Foil reveals Roman magic
The Norfolk gardener was quite irritated at finding bits of rubbish mixed with the expensive topsoil he had bought: he picked out what he took to be foil from a champagne bottle and unrolled it - to reveal a lost world of Roman magic.
Experts from the British Museum and Oxford University have been poring over the scrap of gold foil, no bigger than a postage stamp, which went on display for the first time yesterday, with other archaeological finds reported in the past year.
"It meant nothing to me at first, I wondered if it was a scrap of decoration from a garment or a piece of furniture," said Adrian Marsden, the finds officer in Norwich whose desk it first landed on. "Then I suddenly saw the Greek letter A, and I knew what we must have."
It is a lamella, a magical charm, one of five found in Britain, and of no more than a few dozen from anywhere in the Roman empire.
See, when we dig in the garden all we find is stuff the neighbor cat left for us.
And back in the US of A. . . Park dig yields picture of ancient camp
The lure of sleeping beneath the stars in Yellowstone apparently is nothing new.
Long before nylon tents and posh RVs, some of the park's earliest visitors arrived in the early summer on foot and camped on the shores of Yellowstone Lake.
While they were there, some 10,000 years ago, they made and repaired tools, hunted, prepared hides and may have rafted out to one or more of the lake's several islands.
When they left the beach, they left behind evidence of their stay. But over time those tools, flakes of stone and blood residue disappeared in the heaps of soil -- a buried story waiting to be told.
See? They find gold and magic foils; we find rocks and stones and sticks and bones.