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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Three unfinished Byzantine tombs have been found in a recently discovered a cave in Wadi al-Zahab, Syria.

Head of the Department Farid Jabbour said the cemetery was discovered during the excavations carried out by the General Establishment for Water studies to keep off floods.

The expedition also surveyed the areas of Tal al-Safa, Tal Marah and Jaftlik, which date back to prehistoric ages. The expedition studied, documented and photographed the area, collecting samples of pottery fragments and making drawings of stone sculptures.

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Prehistoric rock art, including scratchings of a half-man/half-lizard, has been found in the province of Papua Barat, Indonesia.

The other pre-historic paintings which were scratched at the niche surfaces are in the motifs of lizard, fish, tortoise, crocodile, cuscus, snake, bird and sea horse which belong to the fauna group.

In the geometrical motif, there are the pictures of sun, direction mark, rectangular and circle. The pictures of man`s cultural objects include those on the shapes of boat, boomerang, spear, rock axe, sago hammer and mask.

Pre-historic men scratched paintings on niche surfaces with natural color substance and their works were called rock arts which served as media to express ideas or thoughts concerning certain events.

An archaeological expedition calims to have found the remains of the worlds oldest human brain, dating back over 5,000 years.

An analysis performed by the Keck Carbon Cycle Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Laboratory at the University of California, Irvine confirmed that one of three human skulls found at the site contains particles of a human brain dating to around the first quarter of the 4th millennium BC.

The preliminary results of the laboratory analysis prove this is the oldest of the human brains so far discovered in the world, said Dr. Boris Gasparian, one of the excavations leaders and an archeologist from the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology in Yerevan.

Of course, the mummies of Pharaonic Egypt did contain brains, but this one is older than the Egyptian ones by about 1,000 to 1,200 years, he added.

The bases of seven Roman statues have been found underwater in the Blue Grotto cave on the island of Capri, leading archaeologists to speculate that the sculptures they supported may lie nearby.

A number of ancient Roman statues might lie beneath the turquoise waters of the Blue Grotto on the island of Capri in southern Italy, according to an underwater survey of the sea cave.

Dating to the 1st century A.D., the cave was used as a swimming pool by the Emperor Tiberius (42 B.C. – 37 A.D.), and the statues are probably depictions of sea gods.