In many ways, the Lemba tribe of Zimbabwe and South Africa are just like their neighbours.

But in other ways their customs are remarkably similar to Jewish ones.

They do not eat pork, they practise male circumcision, they ritually slaughter their animals, some of their men wear skull caps and they put the Star of David on their gravestones.

Their oral traditions claim that their ancestors were Jews who fled the Holy Land about 2,500 years ago.

It may sound like another myth of a lost tribe of Israel, but British scientists have carried out DNA tests which confirm their Semitic origin. [continue]

When this painting of Queen Elizabeth I was last displayed to the country in 1921, curators at the National Portrait Gallery noticed spots of discolouration which cast a spiralling shadow across the Tudor posy the monarch held in her right hand. The gallery put the discrepancy down to wear and tear, and removed the work – created by an unknown artist in the 1580s or early 1590s – from permanent display.

Ironically, it is that very deterioration which has now led specialists to make a startling discovery: the anonymous artist who painted the Virgin Queen had originally depicted her clasping a snake, coiled suggestively around her right hand.

However, the artist appeared to have panicked at the last minute about depicting the Queen holding a serpent – associated with evil and original sin in Christian iconography – and hastily replaced it with an anodyne image of Tudor roses. [continue]

Physicists have applied the same laser techniques commonly used for tattoo removal to clean several famous works of art, including wall paintings.

Laser cleaning is well established for stone and metal artefacts already.

It has now been successfully applied to the wall paintings of the Sagrestia Vecchia and the Cappella del Manto in Santa Maria della Scala, Siena, Italy. [continue]

Archaeologists announced today that they have located not just the site of the Battle of Bosworth, but the spot where – on 22 August 1485 – Richard III became the last English king to die in battle when he was cut down by Tudor swords.

Nearby Henry Tudor was crowned Henry VII, with the crown which had tumbled from the dying Richard’s head.

The crucial evidence, including badges of the supporters of both kings, sword mounts, coins and 28 cannonballs, was found in fields straddling Fen Lane in the Leicestershire parish of Upton, where no historian had looked before. [continue]

There’s something about the visitors’ centre being in the wrong place that really delights me. In other news, I should have become a military historian, because I’d love the sort of job that would let me ride around England in Tudor costume.

They are giants of medicine, pioneers of the care that women receive during childbirth and were the founding fathers of obstetrics. The names of William Hunter and William Smellie still inspire respect among today’s doctors, more than 250 years since they made their contributions to healthcare. Such were the duo’s reputations as outstanding physicians that the clienteles of their private practices included the rich and famous of mid-18th-century London.

But were they also serial killers? New research published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (JRSM) claims that they were. A detailed historical study accuses the doctors of soliciting the killing of dozens of women, many in the latter stages of pregnancy, to dissect their corpses. [continue]

A 13th-century letter from Genghis Khan’s grandson demanding homage from the pope is among a collection of documents from the Vatican’s Secret Archives that has been published for the first time.

The Holy See’s archives contain scrolls, parchments and leather-bound volumes with correspondence dating back more than 1,000 years.

High-quality reproductions of 105 documents, 19 of which have never been seen before in public, have now been published in a book. The Vatican Secret Archives features a papal letter to Hitler, an entreaty to Rome written on birch bark by a tribe of North American Indians, and a plea from Mary Queen of Scots. [continue]

A 4,000-year-old lentil seed found during an archeological excavation has germinated, exciting scientists as the event might lead to invaluable data for comparisons between the organic and genetically engineered plants of today. It would be the first seed from very old times whose genes were never modified, say the scientists. [continue]

Scientists studying a 160-year-old can of soup found in the Canadian Arctic have detected lead levels in its broth and sealant that are off the scale — further evidence, they say, of the lead poisoning believed to have doomed the 19th-century Franklin Expedition during its quest to transit the Northwest Passage.

Researchers from McMaster University in Hamilton and Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum — which had the historic tin of ox-cheek soup in its collection — performed tests on the can and its contents to try to confirm a controversial theory about the ill-fated polar voyage of the British ships Terror and Erebus in the late 1840s. [continue]

The fearsome northern woman of legend and cliche, broadchested and with a frying pan poised to whack sense into her man, has proved to have genuine historic origins.

Analysis of bones from Britain’s biggest medieval excavation has unearthed a race of real-life Nora Battys, ruling a Yorkshire roost nearly 1,000 years ago.

Skeletons from Wharram Percy, a village on the Yorkshire Wolds abandoned after the 14th century Black Death, have much larger bones than those of contemporaries elsewhere. [continue]

Signs of what could be a previously unknown ancient civilisation are emerging from beneath the felled trees of the Amazon. Some 260 giant avenues, ditches and enclosures have been spotted from the air in a region straddling Brazil’s border with Bolivia.

The traditional view is that before the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese in the 15th century there were no complex societies in the Amazon basin – in contrast to the Andes further west where the Incas built their cities. Now deforestation, increased air travel and satellite imagery are telling a different story. [continue]

A crofter has uncovered what is believed to be a Viking anchor while digging a drain on the Isle of Skye.[continue, see photo]

A team of archeologists working for the City of Ottawa has uncovered the oldest aboriginal camp yet found within the city limits, including stone tools and pieces of artfully decorated pottery dating from 300 BC to 700 AD.

Archeologists believe that the camp on the Rideau River was used periodically by Algonquin people because it was a good site for fishing, hunting and perhaps for gathering berries. [continue]

The Staffordshire Hoard is by some distance the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold ever found, in terms of both the number of items (over 1,300) and the total mass (around 5kg of gold, and 1.3kg of silver).

The majority of the finds are fragments of decorative fittings from swords or helmets, all of high quality, reflecting the high status of the original owners.

Even a single new find of this type is highly significant, and to find so many objects together is unprecedented. As a group, the hoard will add massively to our understanding of the metalwork of the period, and will allow archaeologists to re-evaluate the significance of existing material. [continue]

Thanks to Cynthia for telling me about this photo gallery of the hoard on the CBC website.

How many people in England do you suppose went out to buy metal detectors when they read this story?

A rare textile made from the silk of more than a million wild spiders goes on display today at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

To produce this unique golden cloth, 70 people spent four years collecting golden orb spiders from telephone poles in Madagascar, while another dozen workers carefully extracted about 80 feet of silk filament from each of the arachnids. The resulting 11-foot by 4-foot textile is the only large piece of cloth made from natural spider silk existing in the world today. [continue, see photos]

A team of British and Italian archaeologists have discovered the remains of a lavish villa belonging to the emperor Vespasian, exactly 2,000 years after his birth.

The archaeologists have unearthed reception rooms, colonnades, mosaic floors and traces of a hot bath complex at a site in mountainous countryside near the town of Rieti, north of Rome.

The villa is close to the ancient Roman village of Falacrinae, where Vespasian was born in AD 9. [continue]