Twenty-nine artifacts have been seized by police in southern Iraq before they could be smuggled out of the country.

A team of German and Russian scientists has been able to distinguish between 30,000-year-old human mitochondrial DNA taken from the Markina Gora skeleton, unearthed in 1954, and modern contamination from people who had handled the bones.   

There’s more information on the 200 geometric earthworks in the Amazon Basin that have been spotted in satellite images. It had been thought that some of these areas had been uninhabited. “Traditionally, if you would have asked an anthropologist or archaeologist how many people lived [in these Amazon uplands], they’d say almost zero. And so this is astounding that there were 60,000 people making a go of it where there aren’t supposed to be any,” said William Woods of the University of Kansas.   

Discovery News has posted photographs of the huge rock-hewn tomb discovered at Saqqara.