White-lipped peccaries may not be glamorous-looking, but like their truffle-sniffing cousins, they sometimes turn up treasure.

On the trail of the pig-like creatures in Brazil, researchers made an unexpected and rare discovery: cave drawings showing armadillos, birds and reptiles, etched into stone thousands of years ago.

Archaeologists who examined the rock art say hunter-gatherers likely created the drawings 4,000 to 10,000 years ago.

Researchers with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) made the find while surveying white-lipped peccaries in Brazil's Cerrado plateau, a vast savanna region, in 2009. The animals, which travel long distances, are considered environmental indicators of healthy forests.

"Since we often work in remote locations, we sometimes make surprising discoveries, in this case, one that appears to be important for our understanding of human cultural history in the region," Alexine Keuroghlian, a researcher with WCS's Brazil program, said in a statement.

Normally, intentionally elongated or flattened skulls are associated with ancient Mesoamerican cultures. But this exquisite specimen, which dates back some 1,500 years, was recently found at a dig in Alsace, France.

There's an industrial park in Pays de Sainte Odile, France, that's about to be developed, prompting archaeologists to perform a major search over 7.5 acres. It resulted in the discovery of a whopping number of artifacts and human and animal remains from Neolithic, Gallic, Gallo-Roman, and Merovingian societies. That's over 6,000 years worth of stuff.

The History Blog does a good round-up of the various items found, including a Bronze Age grave containing both children and dogs, Gallic glass ornaments, coins, pottery, and a Gallo-Roman bathing complex.

Just over a century ago in the Mediterranean Sea in between Greece's Peloponnese and the Isle of Crete, a sponge diver came across an amazing discovery: an ancient shipwreck from classical times, filled with pottery, jewels, wine and so many marble and bronze statutes that, upon surfacing, he "gabbled that he had found a heap of dead, naked women".

The most significant piece from the find, however, was only about the size of a shoebox, and at first seemed to be merely a few unremarkable lumps of corroded bronze. Overshadowed by its flashier fellow castaways, the Antikythera Mechanism drew no serious attention from scholars until many years later.

In fact, it wasn't until 1971 that scientists began to realize the intricate workings, precise measurements and astronomical expertise that the device displayed. So complex, and shrouded in centuries of deterioration, even today, researchers are still uncovering the secrets of this unique artifact.

Archaeologists have unearthed the ancient 'curse' tablet near the city of David in Jerusalem.

If revenge is a dish best served cold, then Israel may have the world's coolest piece of vengeance.

In an archaeological dig near the City of David, archaeologists have unearthed a 1,700 year old lead tablet, a tablet inscribed with a sorcerer's curse. The Antiques Authority have confirmed the details of the find, which is 'a curse tablet,' bearing a spell that was likely written by a sorcerer on behalf of an aggrieved female client named Kyrilla," according to The Jerusalem Post.

The tablet has had quite the journey.

Discovered "a few months ago in one of the rooms of an enormous building from the Roman period" that suffered an earthquake in 363 B.C.E., the tablet was unearthed only recently. After being carefully extracted, it was packed up and sent to Dr. Robert Daniel at the University of Cologne, Germany. Daniel was responsible for translating the artifact, which revealed quite the story.

In a play on the old adage 'if walls could talk', a mural has been discovered that could be the world's earliest warning sign.
The 9,000-year-old painting, found on a wall buried in the ancient Turkish settlement of Catalhoyuk, shows a village in front of an erupting volcano. Researchers now believe, through the use of mineral dating and geochemical tests, that the volcano shown in the painting is the nearby Mount Hasan, found 70 miles from the settlement site.

It is thought the mural was painted to warn about the dangers of this stratovolcano, yet it may also have been the first landscape painting or even the first news report.

Centuries of economic theory have been based on one simple premise: when given a choice between two items, people make the rational decision and select the one they value more. But as with many simple premises, this one has a flaw in that it is demonstrably untrue.

The fields of psychology and behavioral economics have experimentally identified a laundry list of common biases that cause people to act against their own apparent interests. One of these biases -- the mere fact of possessing something raises its value to its owner -- is known as the "endowment effect."

A new interdisciplinary study from the University of Pennsylvania has delved into whether this bias is truly universal, and whether it might have been present in humanity's evolutionary past.

The study was led by Coren Apicella, an assistant professor in Penn's School of Arts and Sciences' Department of Psychology, and Eduardo Azevedo, an assistant professor in Wharton's Department of Business Economics and Public Policy. They collaborated with Yale's Nicholas Christakis and the University of California, San Diego's James Fowler.

It will be published in the American Economic Review.

A classic endowment effect experiments involves giving participants one of two items, such as a chocolate bar and a mug, and then asking whether they would like to trade for the other. As the starting item is selected at random, there should be a 50 percent chance that participants initially receive the item they like best and thus a 50 percent chance that they will trade.

"What we see, however, is that people trade only about 10 percent of the time," Azevedo said. "Simply telling someone they own something makes them value it more. That is, the way you ask the question changes what item people prefer, unlike what you would expect from rational economic behavior."

One problem with these experiments is that they generally involve participants from so-called "WEIRD" -- western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic -- societies. Apicella drew on her decade-long study of the Hadza people of Tanzania to provide a new perspective. The Hadza are one of the last hunter-gatherer societies on Earth, living in small, nomadic camps that communally share nearly all their possessions.

A British scientist has linked supposed hair samples from the legendary Yeti, or "Abominable Snowman," to a breed of ancient Arctic bears that he says could have survived to the modern day - but other experts say the results need to be published before any conclusions can be drawn.

Bryan Sykes, a respected geneticist at Oxford University in the U.K., this week reported the findings of a yearlong project that aimed to rigorously test hair and tissue samples that were claimed to have belonged to the elusive creature.

"I put out a call for Yeti, Bigfoot, and Sasquatch hairs in 2012, and I received a good response from all over the world," Sykes told NBC News.

One of the most promising samples that Sykes received included hairs attributed to a Yeti mummy in the northern Indian region of Ladakh; the hairs were purportedly collected by a French mountaineer who was shown the corpse 40 years ago. Another sample was a single hair that was found about a decade ago in Bhutan, some 800 miles (1,290 kilometers) away from Ladakh.

According to Sykes, the DNA from these two samples matched the genetic signature of a polar bear jawbone that was found in the Norwegian Arctic in 2004. Scientists say the jawbone could be up to 120,000 years old.

Sykes's findings will be the focus of Bigfoot Files, a documentary series premiering on Britain's Channel 4 this Sunday. (A two-hour special will air in the U.S. on Sunday, November 17, at 8:00 p.m. ET/PT on the National Geographic Channel.)

Drought triggered the collapse of previously thriving civilizations in around modern-day Israel more than 3,200 years ago, researchers found. The discovery, published in Tel Aviv: Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University, solves a long-held mystery regarding the region's history.

Led by researchers from Tel Aviv University and the University of Bonn in Germany, the report included an unusually high-resolution analysis of pollen grains retrieved from sediment beneath the Sea of Galilee and the western shore of the Dead Sea. This, as well as a chronology of radiocarbon dating, placed the time of the crisis between 1250-1100 BC.

"Pollen is the most enduring organic material in nature," Dafna Langgut, a pollen researcher from Tel Aviv University who carried out the work of sampling, said in a statement. "These particles tell us about the vegetation that grew in the vicinity of the lake in the past and therefore testify to the climatic conditions in the region."

Santa Fe - Where did the first Americans come from? Most researchers agree that Paleoamericans moved across the Bering Land Bridge from Asia sometime before 15,000 years ago, suggesting roots in East Asia. But just where the source populations arose has long been a mystery.

Now comes a surprising twist, from the complete nuclear genome of a Siberian boy who died 24,000 years ago - the oldest complete genome of a modern human sequenced to date. His DNA shows close ties to those of today's Native Americans. Yet he apparently descended not from East Asians, but from people who had lived in Europe or western Asia.

The finding suggests that about a third of the ancestry of today's Native Americans can be traced to "western Eurasia," with the other two-thirds coming from eastern Asia, according to a talk at a meeting* here by ancient DNA expert Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen. It also implies that traces of European ancestry previously detected in modern Native Americans do not come solely from mixing with European colonists, as most scientists had assumed, but have much deeper roots.

"I'm still processing that Native Americans are one-third European," says geneticist Connie Mulligan of the University of Florida in Gainesville. "It's jaw-dropping." At the very least, says geneticist Dennis O'Rourke of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, "this is going to stimulate a lot of discussion."

The World Heritage List includes Hierapolis Antic City that is in the Aegean province of Denizli, Pamukkale and new historical ruins were found in there that named as “gate of hell”.

The Italian team discovered a head of Aphrodite statue, oil lamps and a twin flutiste figure a few days ago. Professor Francesco D'Andria of Italy's Lecce University d historical ruins to public.

A historical marble sculpture of three head dog Kerberos was found in the old temple. Hierapolis is home to some historical artifacts from the Hellenistic period until the ancient age, B.C. 600.