* Astronomy

For the Santa Cruz Water Department, most construction projects are uneventful, encountering nothing more than dirt, rocks and an occasional root.
That was not the case when city workers installing a water pipe on the Westside unearthed the bodies of two Ohlone people now believed to be the oldest human remains ever found in the city.
Studies over the past six months date the bones back 5,000 years, when construction on the Great Pyramids in Egypt had just begun and Europe was still in the Stone Age.

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The discovery of America: the revolutionary claims of a dead historian Dr Alwyn Ruddock, a former reader in history at the University of London, was the world expert on John Cabots discovery voyages from Bristol to North America (1496-98). What she was said to have found out about these voyages looked set to re-write the history of the European discovery of America. Yet, when Dr Ruddock died in December 2005, having spent four decades researching this topic, she ordered the destruction of all her research.

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A Colorado geochemist and his Texas colleague say they have dealt the mortal blow to Clovis First, the long-held idea that the first Americans were spear-toting hunters who crossed into an uninhabited continent from Asia.
For decades, schoolchildren were taught that small bands of hide-clad hunters walked into a virgin world over a "land bridge" that linked Siberia to Alaska during the last ice age, about 13,600 years ago.
They quickly dispersed across North America, slaughtering mammoths with a new and highly efficient stone weapon: the Clovis spear point. Clovis hunters and their descendants then rapidly spread through Central America and to the southernmost tip of South America, according to the Clovis First scenario.
But evidence for pre-Clovis occupation of the Americas has been mounting for years at archaeological sites from Wisconsin and Pennsylvania to Chile.
Now Colorado's Thomas Stafford Jr. and Michael Waters of Texas A&M University report findings that Waters says "puts the final nail in the coffin of the Clovis First model."
New radiocarbon dates from Clovis-site bone, ivory and seeds show that the hunters arrived nearly 500 years later than researchers had thought, at a time when unrelated peoples already lived in North and South America, the researchers conclude.
And it now appears that the Clovis culture bloomed and vanished in just two centuries. It seems "humanly impossible" that a group of hunters and their descendants could have spread across the Americas in such a short time span, Stafford said.
Combining the new radiocarbon dates with previous ages they considered reliable, Waters and Stafford assembled a new Clovis time range: 13,125 to 12,925 calendar years ago.
Previously, archaeologists thought Clovis arrived in North America about 13,600 years ago and vanished about 12,900 years ago. If Clovis hunters weren't the first Americans, then where did pre-Clovis peoples come from, and when did they arrive? That's one of the most hotly debated topics in archaeology.
Some researchers suggest the earliest American explorers sailed boats from northeastern Asia, then navigated down the West Coast, beginning 20,000 or more years ago.

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A team of researchers, led by Oregon State University anthropologist Deanna Kingston, has discovered a prehistoric village on a tiny island in the Bering Sea. The archaeological site, shown by carbon dating to be 800 to 900 years old, indicates that King Island, Alaska, was inhabited by Inupiat walrus hunters for at least a millennium.
The effort is part of a four-year study of the plants, birds, place names, dialect and culture of King Island, supported by two grants from the National Science Foundation, one for $540,000 and another for $23,000. Kingston — whose team includes an archaeologist, an ornithologist, a botanist, a linguist and 30 elder King Island volunteers — is working to preserve the traditional ecological knowledge of King Islanders, who today use their homeland only as a seasonal hunting camp.

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