The skeleton of a mongrel who went down with the Mary Rose on July 19, 1545 has been pieced together.

The dog, now preserved as an almost complete canine skeleton, acquired the nickname Hatch after divers discovered her remains near the sliding hatch door of the Mary Rose’s carpenter’s cabin.

Experts believe the hound, estimated to have been between 18 months and two years old, earned her keep as the ship’s ratter – superstitious Tudor seafarers did not have cats on board ship as they were thought to bring bad luck.

And she was probably very good at her job – only the partial remains of rats’ skeletons have been found on board the Mary Rose.

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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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A 2,000-year-old tomb found in eastern Mongolia contains the remains of a man of multi-ethnic heritage.

Dead men can indeed tell tales, but they speak in a whispered double helix.

Consider an older gentleman whose skeleton lay in one of more than 200 tombs recently excavated at a 2,000-year-old cemetery in eastern Mongolia, near China’s northern border. DNA extracted from this man’s bones pegs him as a descendant of Europeans or western Asians. Yet he still assumed a prominent position in ancient Mongolia’s Xiongnu Empire, say geneticist Kyung-Yong Kim of Chung-Ang University in Seoul, South Korea, and his colleagues.

On the basis of previous excavations and descriptions in ancient Chinese texts, researchers suspect that the Xiongnu Empire — which ruled a vast territory in and around Mongolia from 209 B.C. to A.D. 93 — included ethnically and linguistically diverse nomadic tribes. The Xiongnu Empire once ruled the major trading route known as the Asian Silk Road, opening it to both Western and Chinese influences.

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The remains of an East Asian man, the first ever discovered, has been found in a Roman cemetery in Vagnari, Italy.

The surprise is that the DNA tests show that one of the skeletons, a man, has an East Asian ancestry – on his mother’s side. This appears to be the first time that a skeleton with an East Asian ancestry has been discovered in the Roman Empire.

However, it seems like this contact between east and west did not go well.

Vagnari was an imperial estate during this time. The emperor controlled it and at least some of the workers were slaves. One of the tiles found at Vagnari is marked “Gratus” which means “slave” of the emperor. The workers produced iron implements and textiles. The landscape around them was nearly treeless, making the Italian summer weather all the worse.

The man with East Asian ancestry may well have been a slave himself. He lived sometime in the first to second century AD, in the early days of the Roman Empire. Much of his skeleton (pictured here) has not survived. The man’s surviving grave goods consist of a single pot (which archaeologists used to date the burial). To top things off someone was buried on top of him – with a superior collection of grave goods.

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Scientists in Italy are seeking permission to exhume the bones of artist Leonardo da Vinci.

Scientists seeking permission to exhume the remains of Leonardo da Vinci plan to reconstruct his face to discover whether his masterpiece, the Mona Lisa, is a disguised self-portrait.

A team from Italy’s National Committee for Cultural Heritage, a leading association of scientists and art historians, has asked to open the tomb in which the Renaissance painter and polymath is believed to lie at Amboise castle, in the Loire valley, where he died in 1519, aged 67.

Giorgio Gruppioni, an anthropologist, said the project could throw new light on Leonardo’s most famous work. “If we manage to find his skull, we could rebuild Leonardo’s face and compare it with the Mona Lisa,” he said.

The identity of the Mona Lisa has been debated for centuries, with speculation ranging from Leonardo’s mother to Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a Florentine merchant.

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