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Early signs of elephant butchers

Bones and tusks dating back 400,000 years are the earliest signs in Britain of ancient humans butchering elephants for meat, say archaeologists.

Remains of a single adult elephant surrounded by stone tools were found in northwest Kent during work on the Channel Tunnel Rail Link.

Scientists believe hunters used the tools to cut off the meat, after killing the animal with wooden spears. The find is described in the Journal of Quaternary Science...BBC NEWS | Science/Nature

Front garden in Kent yields ancient tools

The Britons of 250,000 years ago were a good deal more sophisticated than they are sometimes given credit for, new archaeological evidence suggests. It comes in the form of giant flint handaxes that have been unearthed at a site at Cuxton in Kent (England). The tools display exquisite, almost flamboyant, workmanship not associated with this period until now. The axes - one of which measured 307mm (1ft) in length - were dug up from old sand deposits in a front garden...Stone Pages Archaeo News

Stone-age tools dug out of ‘tiger hole’

An assortment of stone-age tools buried in a cave in the western coastal district of Maharashtra’s Ratnagiri has provided the first evidence of a cave shelter of human ancestors on India’s coastline.

What local village folk had shunned as a “tiger hole”, archaeologists from the Deccan College and Postgraduate Research Institute in Pune have shown was a shelter that preserved relics of ancient craftsmanship.

“The shape and features of the tools indicate that they are about 90,000 years old,” said Ashok Marathe, a prehistory specialist at the Deccan College who had excavated the cave as part of an effort to scour Ratnagiri for stone-age human settlements...The Telegraph

Shells May Have Been Earliest Jewelry

Ancient beads that may represent the oldest attempt by people at self-decoration have been identified from sites in Algeria and Israel.The beads, made from shells with holes bored into them, date to around 100,000 years ago, some 25,000 years older than similar beads discovered two years ago in South Africa, researchers report in Friday's issue of the journal Science...Newsvine

Study: Earth 'likely' hottest in 2,000 years

It has been 2,000 years and possibly much longer since Earth has run such a fever.The National Academy of Sciences, reaching that conclusion in a broad review of scientific work requested by Congress, reported Thursday that the "recent warmth is unprecedented for at least the last 400 years and potentially the last several millennia" ... CNN.com

Mapping A Glacial Path Of Destruction

The dangerous power of glacial outburst floods - or jokulhlaups - will be easier to predict thanks to new models developed by a Leeds researcher and presented at the International Glaciological Society symposium in Iceland this Friday (June 23).

These spectacular outburst floods happen as dams of ice and earth give way or, as from Vatnajokull in Iceland in 1996, when a volcano erupts beneath a glacier. That outburst flood was 10km wide, swept away a bridge and left behind icebergs 10m high ... ScienceDaily

Monkeys use weather clues to find food

Humans have been known to check the weather forecast before shopping for food – think ice cream and barbecues. Now it seems some monkeys also use weather clues to decide when and where to forage ... New Scientist Breaking News

Ducklike Fossil Points to Aquatic Origins for Modern Birds

Modern birds--the rulers of the sky--appear to have gotten their start in the water, scientists say. The fresh insights derive from the fossilized remains of a bird that lived some 110 million years ago and was preserved in the soft muddy bottom of an ancient lake in what is now the Gansu province of northwestern China. The amphibious, ducklike creature--named Gansus yumenensis--is the oldest known member of the so-called ornithuran group that includes modern birds ... Science & Technology at Scientific American.com

Tooth gives up oldest human DNA

Scientists have recovered DNA from a Neanderthal that lived 100,000 years ago - the oldest human-type DNA so far. It was extracted from the tooth of a Neanderthal child found in the Scladina cave in the Meuse Basin, Belgium ... BBC NEWS | Science/Nature