A group of archaeologists and paleobiologists say they have discovered flax fibers in a cave in the Republic of Georgia that are more than 34,000 years old, making them the oldest fibers known to have been used by humans.

The flax, which would have been collected from the wild and not farmed, could have been used to make linen and thread, they say. The cloth and thread could then have been used to fashion garments for warmth, sew leather pieces, make cloths, or tie together packs that might have aided the mobility of our ancient ancestors from one camp to another.

There's been a surprising archaeological discovery at Tel Dor in Israel, a place that was only on the periphery of the Hellenistic world; a gemstone engraved with a portrait of Alexander the Great.

Alexander was probably the first Greek to commission artists to depict his image – as part of a personality cult that was transformed into a propaganda tool. Rulers and dictators have implemented this form of propaganda ever since. The excavations were done by an archaeological team directed by Dr. Ayelet Gilboa of the University of Haifa and Dr. Ilan Sharon of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The buried town of Venta Icenorum at Caistor St Edmund in Norfolk is one of the most important, though least understood, Roman sites in Britain.

Caistor lies in the former territory of the Iceni, the tribe of Boudica Celts who famously rebelled against Roman rule in AD 60/61.

The survey revealed numerous circular features that apparently predate the Roman town. These are probably of prehistoric date, and suggest that Caistor was the site of a large settlement before the Roman town was built. This had always been suspected because of numerous chance finds of late Iron Age coins and metalwork, but until the survey was carried out there had never been any evidence of buildings.

The Bar-Kokhba revolt of the Jews against the Romans was the third and last, establishing a new Jewish state for two years before the Romans crushed it. Along with a massacre in approximately 136 AD, the Romans renamed the region Syria Palaestina out of spite, which has caused no end to problems since (and demonstrates 'colonialism' is only bad when it's not being used in your favor) and they banned religious practices.

The oldest submerged town in the world is about to give up its secrets — with the help of equipment that could revolutionise underwater archaeology.

The ancient town of Pavlopetri lies in three to four metres of water just off the coast of southern Laconia in Greece. The ruins date from at least 2800 BC through to intact buildings, courtyards, streets, chamber tombs and some thirty-seven cist graves which are thought to belong to the Mycenaean period (c.1680-1180 BC). This Bronze Age phase of Greece provides the historical setting for much Ancient Greek literature and myth, including Homer’s Age of Heroes.

2008 excavations at Hohle Fels Cave in the Swabian Jura of southwestern Germany recovered a female figurine carved from mammoth ivory from the basal Aurignacian deposit. The figurine is the earliest depiction of a human and one of the oldest known examples of figurative art worldwide and is at least 35,000 years old.

If you're looking closely at the Venus of Hohle Fels below, you may also notice those are breasts, which radically changes our views of the context and meaning of the earliest Paleolithic art; maybe it's porn-eolithic.

A University of Leicester student will be presenting his discovery of 425 million year-old fossils found in rocks from the Silurian period of geological time in Herefordshire. The fossils represent a great range of animal groups and their study has tremendously increased knowledge of the evolution of life.

David Riley’s research represents the first major attempt by scientists to understand the preservation pathway giving us a rare ‘window’ into a Silurian sea floor environment.

Dating human migration has always been something of a guess, especially without corroborating archaeological evidence.

Researchers at the University of Leeds say they have devised a more accurate method . That's good news, because the most widely used genetic method works back to find the last common ancestor of any particular set of lineages using samples of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), but this method has recently been shown to be unreliable, throwing 20 years of research into doubt.

More than 100 feet deep in Lake Huron, on a wide stoney ridge that 9,000 years ago was a land bridge, University of Michigan researchers have found the first archeological evidence of human activity preserved beneath the Great Lakes.

The researchers located what they believe to be caribou-hunting structures and camps used by the early hunters of the period.

"This is the first time we've identified structures like these on the lake bottom," said John O'Shea, curator of Great Lakes Archaeology in the Museum of Anthropology and professor in the Department of Anthropology. "Scientifically, it's important because the entire ancient landscape has been preserved and has not been modified by farming, or modern development."

The largest artificial underground cav in Israel has been exposed in the Jordan Valley in the course of a survey carried out by the University of Haifa's Department of Archaeology. Prof. Adam Zertal, who headed the excavating team, reckons that this cave was originally a large quarry during the Roman and Byzantine era and was one of its kind. Various engravings were uncovered in the cave, including cross markings, and it is assumed that this could have been an early monastery.

"It is probably the site of "Galgala" from the historical Madaba Map," Prof. Zertal says.