Rusazus (Grand cap), Port Gueydon (du nom de l’amiral français Comte Louis Henri de Gueydon - gouverneur général de l’Algérie d’avril 1871 à juin 1873), Thaddart Uzeffoun ou tout simplement Azeffoun village : ces noms résument à eux seuls la riche histoire de cette petite bourgade de Kabylie qui fait face à la Méditerranée. Le nom Azeffoun viendrait du berbère uzzaf qui désigne une colline de forme conique isolée. Situé à 500 mètres au-dessus  du niveau de la mer, ce village a été bâti par les Phéniciens puis les Romains y ont installé leur citadelle, dominant la vue des quatre coins de la zone entourant le plateau qui a accueilli aussi les Phéniciens dont les traces de la présence sont encore visibles dans les étroites rues de Rusazus. Ces ruines qui portent en elles des pages entières de l’histoire de la région se trouvent malheureusement menacées de disparition par l’avancée du béton comme c’est le cas à Aït R’houna. [...]

Ils ne savaient plus où donner de la tête, les amoureux d'archéologie, tant l'offre était abondante et variée, les 18 et 19 septembre. Deux chapelles étaient ouvertes au public. Celle du lycée privé, abritant la collection archéologique de Jean Puech, dont une partie est répertoriée et présentée par les amis du patrimoine. Mais aussi celle du couvent, Sainte-Anne, restée intacte avec ses trésors de l'imagerie chrétienne, son chemin de croix, ses vitraux qui feront bientôt l'objet d'une conférence, son gisant de Sainte-Justine, sa chaire, ses tribunes, ses statues de saints, sa façade de style romano-byzantin datant de 1856. Son portail est surmonté d'une baie à trois arcades, auquel on arrive par un vaste perron entouré de colonnades, encadré par d'élégants clochetons qui mènent jusqu'au dôme massif servant de piédestal à la statue de la Vierge Marie. [...]

Cranial features distinctive to Australian Aborigines are present in hundreds of skulls that have been uncovered in Central and South America, some dating back to over 11,000 years ago. Evolutionary biologist Walter Neves of the University of São Paulo, whose findings are reported in a cover story in the latest issue of Cosmos magazine, has examined these skeletons and recovered others, and argues that there is now a mass of evidence indicating that at least two different populations colonised the Americas. He and colleagues in the United States, Germany and Chile argue that first population was closely related to the Australian Aborigines and arrived more than 11,000 years ago. The second population to arrive was of humans of 'Mongoloid' appearance - a cranial morphology distinctive of people of East and North Asian origin - who entered the Americas from Siberia and founded most (if not all) modern Native American populations, he argues. [...]

No human endeavour has sparked such controversy as the 4,500-year-old statue that lies a mere stroll from the great pyramids of Giza in Egypt. A huge, ancient lion sporting a human head seemingly guards over something on the rocky, desert plateau - but over what, no one can say. For thousands of years the Sphinx has teased visitors with its secrets - its name, its purpose, its history. And it was a twisting path that led an American archaeologist, Mark Lehner, to solve the riddles of the Sphinx and become one of the world's leading Egyptologists. Back in 1971, Lehner was just a typical bored college student at the University of North Dakota, who was "looking for something, a meaningful involvement." He became an enthusiast for the late clairvoyant Edgar Cayce - who, in a trance, had seen refugees from the lost city of Atlantis bury their secrets in a hall of records under the Sphinx. In an attempt to ease the restlessness of his youth, Lehner dropped out of school and sought out Cayce's son, Hugh Lynn, the head of a holistic medicine and paranormal research foundation his father had started in Virginia. When the foundation sponsored a group tour of the Giza plateau, on the western outskirts of Cairo, Lehner tagged along. "It was hot and dusty and not very majestic," he remembers. He also failed to see any evidence of the fabled library of Atlantis. [...]

A fossil of an unknown predator fish species, which is believed to be 200 million years old, has been found by workers during the construction of Bulgaria's Lyulin Highway. The rock containing the fish fossil was dug out and is already on display in the Regional History Museum in the city of Pernik, which was contacted immediately by the two workers that stumbled upon the find - Emil Mitushev and Dimitar Borisov. Local archaeologists believe the fish got stuck in the slime as a local body of water that occupied the area around Pernik dried out; subsequently, the slime turned into rock, preserving the fossil. Geological data shows that the body of water – and respectively the fish – existed in the region during the Triassic period, 250-200 million years ago. The fossil is 58 cm in length. [...]

Writing in the October issue of Current Anthropology, archaeologists David Meltzer, Southern Methodist University, and Vance Holliday, University of Arizona, argue that there is nothing in the archaeological record to suggest an abrupt collapse of Clovis populations. "Whether or not the proposed extraterrestrial impact occurred is a matter for empirical testing in the geological record," the researchers write. "In so far as concerns the archaeological record, an extraterrestrial impact is an unnecessary solution for an archaeological problem that does not exist." Comet theory devised to explain apparent disappearance The comet theory first emerged in 2007 when a team of scientists announced evidence of a large extraterrestrial impact that occurred about 12,900 years ago. The impact was said to have caused a sudden cooling of the North American climate, killing off mammoths and other megafauna. It could also explain the apparent disappearance of the Clovis people, whose characteristic spear points vanish from the archaeological record shortly after the supposed impact. The findings are reported in the article "The 12.9-ka ET Impact Hypothesis and North American Paleoindians." As evidence for the rapid Clovis depopulation, comet theorists point out that very few Clovis archaeological sites show evidence of human occupation after the Clovis. [...]

No human endeavour has sparked such controversy as the 4,500-year-old statue that lies a mere stroll from the great pyramids of Giza in Egypt. A huge, ancient lion sporting a human head seemingly guards over something on the rocky, desert plateau - but over what, no one can say. For thousands of years the Sphinx has teased visitors with its secrets - its name, its purpose, its history. And it was a twisting path that led an American archaeologist, Mark Lehner, to solve the riddles of the Sphinx and become one of the world's leading Egyptologists. Back in 1971, Lehner was just a typical bored college student at the University of North Dakota, who was "looking for something, a meaningful involvement." He became an enthusiast for the late clairvoyant Edgar Cayce - who, in a trance, had seen refugees from the lost city of Atlantis bury their secrets in a hall of records under the Sphinx. In an attempt to ease the restlessness of his youth, Lehner dropped out of school and sought out Cayce's son, Hugh Lynn, the head of a holistic medicine and paranormal research foundation his father had started in Virginia. When the foundation sponsored a group tour of the Giza plateau, on the western outskirts of Cairo, Lehner tagged along. "It was hot and dusty and not very majestic," he remembers. He also failed to see any evidence of the fabled library of Atlantis. [...]

A new defense of the fossil Ida as a precursor to today's primates, including humans, has emerged from the research team that last year bought and promoted the 47-million-year-old remains. Ida, or Darwinius masillae, was described in 2009 by Jens Franzen at the Research Institute and Natural History Museum of Senckenberg in Frankfurt, Germany, and colleagues, who identified it as a haplorrhine, precursors to modern-day monkeys and apes. However, two studies by other groups since then citing evidence from a new fossil and an independent study of similar primate fossils concluded Ida was closer to the strepsirrhine branch, precursors to today's lemurs. "If you say 'I have something in the line of hominids', another paleontologist will say you are wrong," says paleontologist John de Vos of the National Museum of Natural History in Leiden, the Netherlands, the author of a 2008 article in the Journal of the History of Biology on scientific disagreements about Neanderthals, Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis. But this particular disagreement is smaller than those, de Vos adds, because Ida is much further removed from modern primates and fewer paleontologists study this area. [...]

As an archaeologist my work is rooted in the past. As an inhabitant of the 21st century, I try to be "green". As an academic I am keen to re-awaken interest in the ancient hunter-gatherer population who lived in Britain before the arrival of farming 6,000 years ago. In my recent research, I found that all three come together and, what is more, they help me to show that archaeology has relevance – it is not just old stones and bones. There is a growing realisation that life, as we live it, is not sustainable. We devote books, magazines, courses and thinktanks to the problem. But the existing analysis is shallow; it focuses on the present and on the status quo. For this reason, there is no quick fix for us today; to talk about climate change, renewable energy or staycations is merely to scratch the surface of something much deeper. In reality, the roots of our situation go back 6,000 years to the radical changes in lifestyle that came about with the introduction of farming. Why, and how, the change took place is still an archaeological mystery. For my part, I am interested in the consequences rather than the mechanism of this introduction. Within a couple of hundred years of the arrival of the first sheep on British shores, it seems that the hunter-gatherer way of life had all but disappeared across the UK. [...]

They're not as photogenic as pandas, nor as captivating as tigers: among conservationists, plants have tended to attract rather less attention than animals. That could start to change with the publication this week of the first list of extinction risks for the world's plants. The Sampled Red List Index for Plants indicates that 22 per cent of all wild plant species face extinction, comparable to the figure for mammals (21 per cent) and higher than that for birds (12 per cent). Of the threatened plant species, 63 per cent are found in tropical rainforest areas which could soon be cleared. The aim is to provide a baseline for future assessments, and to put plants firmly on the conservation agenda. "If all the plants vanish, so will all animals and birds," says Eimear Nic Lughadha of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, London, who led the project. The UK Natural History Museum and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature were also involved. What makes this list different from previous efforts is that it is based on scientifically defensible data, Lughadha says. Her team concluded that it was impossible to comprehensively evaluate the status and fate of all 380,000 known plant species, as has been done for the world's 10,000 bird species. [...]