The skeletal remains of a youth who died 8,000-11,000 year ago have been found in a cave in Malaysia.

The bones were found in the Bewah Cave near Kenyir Lake in the northeastern state of Terengganu in November.

DNA samples had been sent to the United States for radiocarbon dating with results expected in March, it said.

Nik Hassan said pieces of pottery, some bearing apparent rock paintings and believed to date back to the Neolithic Age, were also found in the area.

The oldest human remains in Malaysia were discovered in 1991 in the northern state of Perak. The skeleton of “Perak Man” was believed to be 11,000 years old, the New Sunday Times newspaper said.

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Residents in Essex, England, are racing to save a 2,000-year-old, 350-metre Roman chariot track.

There was considerable excitement among archaeologists when, in 2005, a firm of housing developers unearthed the only Roman chariot-racing track in Britain, on a site in Colchester, Essex.

Five years later, residents have less than a month to save the site. The racetrack is still hidden beneath local roads, gardens and old army buildings, but campaigners are hoping to buy a large Victorian garden which covers the key part of the circuit.

Buried beneath are eight stone enclosures, originally having been fitted with wooden double doors, like giant greyhound racing traps. The land is the garden of a listed but derelict sergeants’ mess, which will become an exhibition if the campaign succeeds. If it fails, however, the building will become apartments, and the garden will be the apartment block’s private land again.

For almost 2,000 years, the 350-metre outline of the track has remained intact. The site lay undiscovered until the Colchester Archaeological Trust (CAT) began excavating after the Ministry of Defence sold the barracks for housing in 2005. Archaeological digs suggest the racetrack was built in the early 2nd century, and lasted about 150 years before falling out of use, perhaps because a day at the races became prohibitively expensive for the local gentry – crowds received free admission and also expected to receive gifts.

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Five 100-year-old crates of Scotch whisky and brandy that were taken to the South Pole by Ernest Shackleton’s expedition have been recovered. [Related post]

They were buried beneath Shackleton’s Antarctic hut, built in 1908 for a failed expedition to the South Pole.

Some of the crates have cracked and ice has formed inside, which means experts will face a delicate task in trying to extract the contents.

The ice-bound crates were first discovered three years ago.

The master blender at whisky company Whyte and Mackay said the find was a “gift from the heavens” for whisky lovers.

Richard Paterson, whose firm supplied the Mackinlay’s whisky for Shackleton, said: “If the contents can be confirmed, safely extracted and analysed, the original blend may be able to be replicated.

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Coming hot on the heels of last week’s post regarding the colour of dinosaurs, scientists have been able to decode the full-body colour patterns of an Achiornis huxleyi.

The subject of the new study—the 155-million-year-old Anchiornis huxleyi—turns out to have looked something like a woodpecker the size of a chicken, with black-and-white spangled wings and a rusty red crown (see animation above).

The color patterns on Anchiornis’s limbs are “quite similar to the silver-spangled Hamburg chicken, a domestic breed of ornamental chicken,” said ornithologist Richard Prum of Yale University. Prum is a co-author of the new study and has received funding from the Committee for Research and Exploration of the National Geographic Society (which owns National Geographic News).

Only a short time ago Anchiornis was completely unknown to science. The chicken-size dinosaur species’ color patterns were decoded after the researchers had used a scanning electron microscope to study pigment samples taken from fossil feathers all over a specimen and then compared the samples to pigment from modern birds.

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Google Earth has implemented a new layer which shows how WWII bombing raids affected various cities.

Many of us have heard stories, read books and watched films which show the many impacts of WWII across the world. Today we’re giving you another way to understand this period in time – by exploring a new set of historical aerial images, taken over European cities during World War II, via the historical imagery feature in Google Earth. They can now be compared directly to images from the present day.

The historical imagery feature gives people a unique perspective on the events of the past using today’s latest mapping technology. We hope that this World War II imagery will enable all of us to understand our shared history in a new way and to learn more about the impact of the war on the development of our cities.

Images taken in 1943 show the effect of wartime bombing on more than 35 European towns and cities. Imagery for Warsaw, which was heavily destroyed at the time, is available from both years 1935 and 1945. They remind us all of the devastating impact of war on the people in those cities and also the remarkable way in which urban environments are reconstructed and regenerated over time.

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