* Astronomy

Some 300 paleoanthropologists gathered in Beijing Tuesday to mark the 80th anniversary of the discovery of the first complete skull of Peking Man, the homo erectus that lived near Beijing 700,000 years ago.

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Archaeologists shed light on life, diet and society
Contestants on TV shows like Top Chef and Hell's Kitchen know that their meat-cutting skills will be scrutinised by a panel of unforgiving judges. Now, new archaeological evidence is getting the same scrutiny by scientists at Tel Aviv University and the University of Arizona.
Their research is providing new clues about how, where and when our communal habits of butchering meat developed, and they're changing the way anthropologists, zoologists and archaeologists think about our evolutionary development, economics and social behaviours through the millennia.
Presented in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, new finds unearthed at Qesem Cave in Israel suggest that during the late Lower Palaeolithic period (between 400,000 and 200,000 years ago), people hunted and shared meat differently than they did in later times. Instead of a prey's carcass being prepared by just one or two persons resulting in clear and repeated cutting marks - the forefathers of the modern butcher - cut marks on ancient animal bones suggest something else.

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4.4 million-year-old hominid skeleton 'Ardi' discovered in Ethiopia
The discovery of a 4.4 million-year-old skeleton in Ethiopia has allowed scientists to retrace the first evolutionary steps of our ancestors after they split away from those of modern chimpanzees.

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Stone tools found in Shimane thought to date back 120,000 years

A team of Japanese archaeologists claim to have unearthed the oldest stone tools in Japan - 20 artifacts dating back some 120,000 years - in Izumo, Shimane Prefecture.
The discovery has suggested humans existed here long before 40,000 years ago as currently thought by researchers.
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