The Maya who lived in the city of Kiuic fled the city in a hurry, leaving behind half-constructed walls. But why?

“Why did they leave? That’s the question,” says archaeologist George Bey of Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss. The ancient Maya fled Kiuic, nestled in the Puuc (pook) foothills of the Yucatan, around 880. “Things were going full-bore, construction was underway. And things stopped,” Bey says.

Archaeologists have explored Kiuic’s ruins for more than a century, but working since 2000, Bey and colleagues are now reporting the first evidence of this rapid abandonment. USA TODAY was invited to the site to see what has been uncovered in the latest excavations.

The “classic” Maya peopled the lowland forests of Central America during Europe’s Dark Ages, building a civilization of pyramids, palaces and slash-and-burn “milpa” farms made by burning trees and planting seeds in the ash. Maya rulers oversaw city-states that warred with one another, created elaborate calendars and lasted centuries. The abandonment of those monument-strewn centers stands as one of archaeology’s most-debated mysteries. The “collapse” was underway in modern-day Guatemala by 800, but didn’t take place at Kiuic until almost a century later.

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Archaeologists in Utah have doscovered evidence of a dietary shift from meat to mush that occurred 11,000 years ago.

Archaeologists and anthropologists at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Utah, USA have been excavating the North Creek Shelter in that state and discovered what was for dinner there 11,000 years ago.

Joel Janetski, PhD, anthropologist and professor at BYU, led the study and explained in a BYU August 23 announcement that, “Ten thousand years ago, there was a change in the technology with grinding stones appearing for the first time. People started to use these tools to process small seeds into flour.”

Prior to the grinding technology that produced mush and flour made from “sage, salt bush and grass seeds,” the menu supposedly consisted of “duck, beaver and turkey,” then “sheep became more common,” and “deer was a staple” both pre- and post-mush.

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Flint tools dating back to the Ice Age have been found during road repairs in Nottinghamshite, England.

The Highways Agency said the finds included ancient flint tools and flint knapping debris dating back to about 11,000 BC – around the end of the last Ice Age when Stone Age hunter-gathers returned as the climate began to warm up.

A46 Highways Agency project manager Geoff Bethel said: ”As the A46 follows the route of the old Roman road, we expected to uncover a number of artefacts from Roman Britain and we were not disappointed.

”But to uncover such rare flint tools dating back to the end of the Ice Age was very exciting.”
Evidence of such early people had been found in caves, but the pieces of flint found at Farndon appeared to show these people were making things out in the open, possibly in a temporary campsite, the Highways Agency said.

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Check out this beautiful Kodak Kodachrome film test from 1922, 13 years before the first full length colour feature film.

The mummified body of a World War I soldier has been found frozen in a glacier on an Italian ski resort.

Dino De Bernardin made the grim find as he walked in mountains close to his home, which had been the scene of bitter fighting between Italian and Austro-Hungarian troops between 1915 and 1917.

At an altitude of 2,800metres, his attention was drawn to a ‘bundle of rags’ that he saw emerging from the melting ice.

When he went to investigate, he was shocked to find the soldier’s skeleton complete with rotting boots.

Police were called to the scene just below a cable car station at Serauta close to Canazei in the Marmolada mountain range of the Dolomites in north-east Italy. Close to the border with Austria, the area is a popular ski resort in the winter.

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