Ancient tools dating back to 35,000 years ago by the Martidja Banyjima people have been unearthed in a rock shelter in the northwestern part of Australia. These artifacts are considered to be the oldest archaeological finds in that part of the country. To know more about this, head on over to the full article.

It was recently revealed that an almost complete fossilized human skull estimated to be around 80,000 to 100,000 years old has been unearthed in Xuchang. The skull was dug up last month after over two years of excavation.

Interestingly enough, the significance of the find is still being debated on. For more information on this find and the issues surrounding it, head on over to the full article.

A group of researchers led by Vladimir Ploskikh, vice president of the Kyrzgys Academy of Sciences, were able to uncover a 2,500-year-old civilization in Lake Issyk Kul in the Kyrgyz mountains.

Their findings suggest that the people back then already had an advanced culture with a socio-economic system. More on what they were able to uncover after the jump.

Ian Crawford, a researcher from University of London’s Birkbeck College in the UK recently told a SETI specialist meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) in London last week that astronauts returning to the Moon should keep their eyes peeled for extraterrestrial artifacts. Although the chances of such a find are small, it's still worth a shot.

“This is not a primary reason to go back to the Moon – there are very strong scientific reasons for going back. But if we go back to the Moon in the next 20 or 30 years, then amongst those things we might like to keep our eyes open for are alien artefacts,” Crawford said.

The main topic of discussion was the history and status of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Thus far, the search has relied on large radio telescopes listening for electromagnetic signals from other technological civilisations.

Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, thinks the possibility of finding alien artifacts makes the small additional effort required to sift through lunar soil worthy of consideration.  "On the Moon, I think it’s certainly worthwhile taking a couple hundred square feet or so of material and looking it over," he says.

The idea of finding small artifacts, probes or time capsules in our solar system is not a new one in the SETI community, Shostak notes. In fact, it has been the basis of much science fiction, and our own civilization has taken this approach as well. Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft carry metal plaques showing the spacecraft's time and place of origin.  The Voyager 1 and 2 probes carry gold-plated records bearing messages, images and sounds depicting life on Earth for any extraterrestrials who might one day find them.

Two years ago, a paper in Nature suggested that a "message in a bottle" - a physical artifact to tell other intelligent life forms something about their existence - might be an excellent method for extraterrestrials with lots of time to spare. Crawford believes the moon would be a good target for such "inscribed matter", given its lack of geologic activity and airless environment. Even if extra-terrestrial civilizations never travelled beyond their own solar systems, they may have produced enough space debris to make it possible that micron-sized particles traveled to our own solar system. Such material may lie a mere 10 or 15 meters (10-14 yards) beneath the lunar surface.

Skepticism remains, however: Apollo astronauts brought a total of 842 pounds (382 kilograms) of lunar material to Earth, and the samples are still being studied.  Gary Lofgren, curator of the Johnson Space Center Museum in Houston says, "People have gone through the samples in excruciating detail and haven't found anything that would suggest extraterrestrial activity."