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The skeleton, about 4,000 years old, was found at the site of Balathal, near Udaipur in northwestern India. Historians have long considered the Indian subcontinent to be the source of the leprosy that was first reported in Europe in the fourth century B.C., shortly after the armies of Alexander the Great returned from India.

The skeleton is described in the journal PLoS One by Gwen Robbins, an anthropologist at Appalachian State University, and colleagues in India. The authors say the skull shows signs of erosion typical of leprosy.

The authors say their find confirms that a passage in the Atharva Veda, a set of Sanskrit hymns written around 1550 B.C., indeed refers to leprosy, a reading that had been doubted because until now the oldest accepted written accounts of the disease were from the sixth century B.C.

The bacterium that causes leprosy seemed to have spread worldwide from a single clone, biologists reported three years ago. But for lack of sufficient samples, they could not tell whether the bacterium was disseminated when modern humans first left Africa about 50,000 years ago, or spread from India in more recent times.

Other biologists have contended that because the bacterium is not very transmissible, requiring prolonged intimate contact between people, it would not have started to spread until around the third millennium B.C., when people started living in dense populations in cities and long-distance trade sprang up.

This was the right period for leprosy to have spread from India to Europe, Samuel Mark, an anthropologist at Texas A&M, argued in an article in 2002. But he doubted that Alexander’s troops were the mode of transmission. More likely, in his view, is the possibility that leprosy arrived with women imported as slaves by ship from India to Egypt.

Using radiocarbon analysis scientists say the man or woman, it is still not possible to determine the sex, lived between 34,000 and 36,000 years ago.

Europe was then occupied by both Neanderthal man, who had been in the region for thousands of years, and anatomically-modern humans – Homo sapiens.

Modern humans first arrived in Europe from Africa.

The skull appears very like humans today, but it also displays more archaic traits, such as very large molar teeth, which led some scientists to speculate the skull may belong to a hybrid between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals – an idea discounted by other experts.

Erik Trinkaus, professor of anthropology at Washington University in Missouri, said the jaw was the oldest, directly-dated modern human fossil. “Taken together, the material is the first that securely documents what modern humans looked like when they spread into Europe,” he said.

These rogue black holes are thought to have originally lurked at the centers of tiny, low-mass galaxies. Over billions of years, those dwarf galaxies smashed together to form full-sized galaxies like the Milky Way.

The idea of such wandering black holes has been suggested before, but a new computer simulation calculated that hundreds of them should be left over, and predicted that they might now be shrouded by small star clusters.

“These black holes are relics of the Milky Way’s past,” said researcher Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “You could say that we are archaeologists studying those relics to learn about our galaxy’s history and the formation history of black holes in the early universe.”

It appears that Earth is safe. The closest rogue black hole should reside thousands of light-years away.

Astronomers are eager to locate them for the clues they will provide about the formation of the Milky Way, since they are thought to date from the universe’s galaxy-building days.

Back then, whenever two young galaxies with central black holes collided, their black holes would merge to form a single black hole. In the chaos of the merger, the black hole could be flung out toward the edges of the galaxy, the new computer model shows.

It predicts that hundreds of such black holes would still be around today in the outer reaches of the Milky Way, each containing the mass of 1,000 to 100,000 suns. They would be difficult to spot on their own, though, because a black hole is not visible. They can be detected, however, when matter they’re about to swallow is superheated as it accelerates inward.

Proteins such as collagen are far more durable than DNA, but they had not been expected to last the 65 million years since the dinosaurs died out. So palaeontologist Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University attracted wide attention when she reported finding first soft tissue and later collagen from a Tyrannosaurus rex leg bone that was intact until it was broken during excavation.

Yet critics said the extraordinary claim required extraordinary evidence, and asked for protein sequences, better handling of samples to prevent contamination, and confirmation analyses from other laboratories.

So Schweitzer took a look at the pristine leg bone of a plant-eating hadrosaur that had been encased in sandstone for 80 million years. She and colleagues exhaustively tested the sample, sequencing the proteins they found with a new and better mass spectrometer and sending samples to two other labs for verification.

Now they report recovering not just collagen – which conveys little evolutionary information because it is the same in almost all animals – but also haemoglobin, elastin and laminin, as well as cell-like structures resembling blood and bone cells. The proteins should reveal more about dinosaur evolution because they vary much more between species.

Authorities said Wednesday that Teresa Tambunting, 50, of Scarsdale, N.Y., a longtime employee of Jacmel Jewelry, brought a suitcase filled with 66 pounds of gold worth an estimated $868,000 back into the company’s office after an investigation was launched in January, The New York Times reported. Authorities allegedly found another 447 pounds of stolen gold at the vault manager’s home in February, the newspaper said.

“With gold trading at nearly $900 an ounce, the defendant is accused of establishing a virtual mining operation in Long Island City which siphoned off millions of dollars’ worth of the precious metal from her employer,” District Attorney Richard A. Brown said in the statement.

“It is alleged that this once-trusted employee carried out her long-term scheme by concealing jewelry and raw gold in the lining of her pocketbook.”

She was released on $100,000 bail after being arraigned in Queens Criminal Court Tuesday on charges of grand larceny and criminal possession of stolen property. She is expected to enter a plea May 19.

Tambunting, who had worked at the store for 28 years, faced up to 25 years in prison if convicted.

The move immediately provoked resistance from pig farmers. At one large pig farming center just north of Cairo, farmers refused to cooperate with Health Ministry workers who came to slaughter the animals and the workers left without carrying out the government order.

“It has been decided to immediately start slaughtering all the pigs in Egypt using the full capacity of the country’s slaughterhouses,” Health Minister Hatem el-Gabaly told reporters after a Cabinet meeting with President Hosni Mubarak.

Egypt’s overwhelmingly Muslim population does not eat pork due to religious restrictions. But the animals are raised and consumed by the Christian minority, which some estimates put at 10 percent of the population.

Agriculture Minister Amin Abaza told reporters that farmers would be allowed to sell the pork meat so there would be no need for compensation.

The Utleys, of Rochester, had set up an outdoor display Saturday at a flea market in Waterford Township, 25 miles northwest of Detroit. Tinker Bell was standing on their platform trailer when she was swept away.

Dorothy Utley tells The Detroit News that her cherished pet “just went wild” upon seeing her.

His family lives in the 3,000-population village of La Gloria in the state of Veracruz, where a flu outbreak was reported on April 2. State officials arrived and tested dozens of people.

Lab tests confirmed that Edgar was the only patient in Veracruz to test positive for the swine flu virus; the others had contracted a common flu. Health officials had returned to Edgar’s sample only after cases of the new flu strain were spotted around the country.

“In this case, there’s a patient who turned out to be positive for the swine-flu virus, with the exception that at that time in no region of the world it had been established as an etiological, epidemic cause,” said Mexico Health Secretary Jose Angel Cordova.

Edgar has managed to bounce back from his symptoms and playfully credits ice cream for helping him feel better.

His mother blamed a huge pig farm in the neighborhood for the virus.

At 2,500 pounds, Titanoboa could eat crocodiles. It lived after dinosaurs died out.

Modern boas and anacondas, which average less than 20 feet in length and reach a maximum of 30 feet, have been known to swallow Chihuahuas, cats and other small pets, but this prehistoric monster ate giant turtles and primitive crocodiles.

The estimated length, 43 feet, “is the same as the largest Tyrannosaurus rex that we know of, although it only weighs one-sixth as much.

The find sheds new light on snake evolution, but it also provides telling insights into climate. Because Titanoboa cerrejonensis, as it has been named, was coldblooded, the tropical climate had to be six to eight degrees warmer than it is today for a snake that large to survive.

The fossils of several specimens of the snake are from a cache of fossils excavated from the open-pit Cerrejon coal mine in Colombia. Paleontologists are excited about the find because there are few fossils of tropical vertebrates from the 10-million-year period after the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.