Stephanie Langin-Hooper started to research a collection of mosaic fragments held by Bowling Green State University, but found very little paperwork about their purchase in 1965. “I became a little concerned. Some of the details and information was not as much as I was expecting,” she said. Now she and Rebecca Molholt of Brown University are working together to try to identify the mosaics, and the FBI has been contacted.

A development project in Cawston, England, has uncovered two cremation burials dating to the Iron Age. “A lot of the land is sandy ground in which organic material doesn’t survive, so we’re not sure what else we’ll find down there,” said project officer Vasileios Tsamis. He thinks the site may have been a farmstead.

More than one dozen ancient ships are known to have sunk off the Tuscan island of Giglio, where the hull of the Costa Concordiawas ripped open by treacherous rocks.

Using improved technology, molecular geneticist Svante Pääbo and a team at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig have created an improved genetic map of the Denisovans from the fragment of finger bone discovered in 2010. “Now we can look at variation. We have a complete catalogue of what makes a fully modern human,” he said.

Erik Thorsby, an immunologist from the University of Oslo, found genetic markers in blood samples taken from Easter Islanders that he thinks could indicate contact with South Americans before the arrival of Europeans in the New World.

A seal bearing an image of an ibex has been discovered in the Indus Valley by archaeologists from Punjab University. The seal was carved from steatite sometime between 2,500 and 2,000 B.C.

Forty-four artifacts that had been boxed up and misplaced during World War II have been found in eastern Germany. The objects have been returned to the Bode Museum in Berlin.

Thick stone walls have been uncovered on the Hill of Jonah in Ashdod, Israel. Pottery at the site is estimated to be almost 3,000 years old.

A Navy research boat staffed with scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is investigating a shipwreck site off the coast of Rhode Island. The team will survey what could be the remains of Oliver Hazard Perry’s ship, the Revenge, with an autonomous underwater vehicle.

A retired postal worker in Orlando has built himself an Egyptian-style coffin in his workshop.