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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The remains of one of the earlist members of the English royal family may have been found in a German cathedral.

They believe a near-complete female skeleton, aged 30 to 40, found wrapped in silk in a lead coffin in Magdeburg Cathedral is that of Queen Eadgyth.

The granddaughter of Alfred the Great, she married Otto I, Holy Roman Emperor, in 929. She died 17 years later, at 36.

The team aims to prove her identity by tracing isotopes in her bones.

Professor Mark Horton, of Bristol’s department of archaeology and anthropology, said: “We know that Saxon royalty moved around quite a lot, and we hope to match the isotope results with known locations around Wessex and Mercia, where she could have spent her childhood.

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Workers doing construction at the Yorkshire Museum in England uncovered a buried skeleton.

The skeleton was found in a shallow grave as work was carried out on the museum’s drains.

The remains have been removed by archaeologists. They will be examined by experts to try to work out how long the skeleton had been there for.

The museum was built on the site of the medieval St Mary’s Abbey. A 4m (13ft) deep well was also discovered.

Its curator of archaeology, Andrew Morrison, said: “At this stage it is very hard to work out much about him or her, but they were buried east to west which suggests a Christian burial.

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