July/August 2018 Issue

AUSTRALIA: When workers constructing a rail line south of Sydney discovered a trove of Aboriginal artifacts, archaeologists at first were baffled. Many of the stone tools were crafted from flint, which is not native to the area. A subsequent investigation concluded that the flint was actually chemically identical to samples found along the Thames River in London. The flint cobbles were likely loaded onto ships in England for ballast and then discarded in Australia, where they were repurposed by Aboriginal artisans.

SAUDI ARABIA: A finger bone from the Al Wusta site in the Nefud Desert is again changing the story of how and when modern humans dispersed from Africa. Dating to between 85,000 and 90,000 years ago, it is the oldest Homo sapiens fossil ever found outside of Africa and the Levant. It was once thought that humans migrated out of those areas only around 65,000 years ago, but this new discovery suggests that they had already arrived in the Arabian Peninsula and, likely, other places, earlier than that.

SOUTH AFRICA: Lidar technology helped relocate a lost settlement in the Suikerbosrand hills south of Johannesburg. The Tswana-speaking city thrived from the 15th to the mid-19th century before civil wars caused its collapse. Although previous excavations had exposed some ruins in the area, the full extent of the site was unknown until now. The temporarily named SKBR settlement was once spread across a 6-mile-long area and contained as many as 850 homesteads.