A shrunken mummified brain may be contained within the fossilized skull of the newly discovered Australopithecus sediba.

Soft parts of the body normally do not fossilize. Still, an extended low-density area in the rock still inside the skull could suggest brain tissue after bacterial decay.

“We saw this cavity near the frontal part inside the skull that had a strange shape,” said researcher Paul Tafforeau, a paleoanthropologist at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility.

“One way to explain that cavity is that when this individual died, it was mummified, and the mummification made the brain shrink by losing water, leading to an odd shape,” Tafforeau said. “Later you had water with sediment come up, fossilizing the individual and filling the brain case, but you still had that brain remnant inside.”

If it is a shrunken brain, it is perhaps one-twentieth of its original size of 420 and 450 cubic centimeters, which was already small when compared to the human brain of about 1,200 to 1,600 cubic centimeters. The shrinkage would make teasing apart its original structure virtually impossible, and the possibility of it holding any useful amounts of protein, DNA or other biomolecules is slim.

“It’s quite an unexpected discovery, but for the moment, I’m not sure we can find any important information in it,” Tafforeau said. “I hope that I’m wrong. It’s too early to say.”

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The discovery of a 2.5 million-year-old fossil of a bull’s skull may show that beef has been on the dinner menu for a long, long time.

The discovery of a new “missing link” species of bull dating to a million years ago in Eritrea pushes back the beef steak dinner to the very dawn of humans and cattle.

Although there is no evidence that early humans were actually herding early cattle 2.5 million years ago, the early humans and early cattle certainly shared the same landscape and beef was definitely on the menu all along, say researchers.

The telltale fossil is a skull with enormous horns that belongs to the cattle genus Bos. It has been reassembled from over a hundred shards found at a dig that also contains early human remains, said paleontologist Bienvenido Martinez-Navarro of the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, Spain. Martinez is the lead author of a paper reporting the discovery in the February issue of the journal Quaternary International.

“This means that the humans have been eating Bos since the beginnings of the genus Homo,” said Martinez, referring to the genus to which humans belong.

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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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A nail-pierced skull belonged to the medieval pirate Klaus Störtebeker has been stolen from a museum in Hamburg, Germany. [Thx @deep470]

“We are all very upset about the theft,” museum director Lisa Kosok said in the press release. “We very much hope that it will either be returned or found.”

The museum said it was offering a reward of several thousand euros for information leading to the recovery of the skull, but didn’t give an exact amount

The skull, impaled on a large rusty nail, was discovered in 1878 during construction for a warehouse district in an area where pirates had earlier been beheaded and their heads displayed on spikes as a warning against other pirates.

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A skull fragment which may have belonged to a pioneer on the Oregon trail has been found in Wyoming.

It’s not uncommon for burial sites to be discovered along the Oregon, California and Mormon trails, according to Rick Weathermon, senior research scientist with the university’s Department of Anthropology.

He can recall about a dozen such discoveries being reported to the university during his roughly 15 years with the school. Many more don’t get reported, he added.

“Just in terms of the number of people buried along those trails, it’s actually surprising more of them don’t turn up,” he said.

Some settlers were buried where they died along the trail, Weathermon said. Other times, bodies were carried for a few days so they could be buried next to other graves.

On some occasions, someone in the wagon train would build a coffin, but other times, the body might have been just rolled up in blankets and buried.

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