Archaeologists working in a cave near Tel Aviv have found the world’s oldest known disposable knives.

Dating to the Stone Age, the tiny knives are believed to be at least 200,000 years old. A Tel Aviv University excavation team found the tools around a fireplace littered with charred animal bones.

Archaeologist Ran Barkai said he believes Stone Age hunter-gatherers used the rough, round-shaped cutlery — ranging from the size of human teeth to guitar picks — for slicing through cooked meat because they were found next to the animal bones. The bones were used to determine the age of the knives.

The number of knives found, coupled with the fact that they had no signs of sharpening, indicates they were disposable because they would have dulled after several uses, he said.

The knives were made from recycled material — parts of larger knives and tools designed for other uses such as butchering animals and scraping hides, he said.

“They are made in a special way. On the one hand, they are very efficient and on the other, very simple,” Barkai said.

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The 10,000-year-old remains of a child have been found in an underwater cave in Mexico.

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Artworks hidden under 2,000 years of soot and grime in Petra, Jordan, have been restored.

Spectacular 2,000-year-old Hellenistic-style wall paintings have been revealed at the world heritage site of Petra through the expertise of British conservation specialists. The paintings, in a cave complex, had been obscured by centuries of black soot, smoke and greasy substances, as well as graffiti.

Experts from the Courtauld Institute in London have now removed the black grime, uncovering paintings whose “exceptional” artistic quality and sheer beauty are said to be superior even to some of the better Roman paintings at Herculaneum that were inspired by Hellenistic art.

Virtually no Hellenistic paintings survive today, and fragments only hint at antiquity’s lost masterpieces, while revealing little about their colours and composition, so the revelation of these wall paintings in Jordan is all the more significant. They were created by the Nabataeans, who traded extensively with the Greek, Roman and Egyptian empires and whose dominion once stretched from Damascus to the Red Sea, and from Sinai to the Arabian desert.

Such is the naturalistic intricacy of these paintings that the actual species of flowers, birds and insects bursting with life can be identified. They were probably painted in the first century, but may go back further. Professor David Park, an eminent wall paintings expert at the Courtauld, said that the paintings “should make jaws drop”.

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Bones found in a Spanish cave show that cavemen cannibalized one another for food.

In the journal Current Anthropology, a team led by archaeologist Eudald Carbonell of Spain’s University of Rovira and Virgili, report fossil evidence of continuous cannibalism – cut marks and butchering remains – as a way of life among the Homo antecessor inhabitants of the Atapuerca Mountains archeological site.

From a sample of some 1,039 bones that included mammoths, buffalo, cats and other butchered species found in the cave level deposited more than 800,000 years ago, there also emerged 159 bones from 11 H. antecessor individuals, they report:

“Cut marks (slicing, chop, and scraping marks) on the cranial segment are abundant on the base of the temporal bones, face, and zygomatic bones: segments with a large amount of muscular attachments and ligaments. Cut marks found on the face indicate skinning and defleshing activities. Cranial fragments also display abundant evidence of breakage (percussion pits and adhered flakes) mainly located on the lower part of the cranium. The majority of zygomatic bones are broken in a similar manner to those documented in Native American cannibalized remains and Neolithic (post 9500 BC) individuals,” says the study.

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Petroglyphs and other prehistoric artworks have been discovered in a cave in the Dominican Republic.

The cavern has 61 petroglyphs and two bas-relief sculptures, the newspaper learned from Spanish archaeologist Adolfo Lopez, who is in charge of researching the area and believes that the petroglyphs and sculptures could be 5,000 years old.

Lopez, a specialist in cave art at Madrid’s Universidad Complutense, said that one of the Monteclaro sculptures is among the three most important ever found of pre-Columbian cave art, due to its particular shape and because such works are so rarely found, the daily said.

“This sculpture is the last bas-relief of quality to be found in the Antilles. It portrays a figure sitting in a fetal position, which gives the idea that it is dedicated to fertility,” he said.

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