A specialist in prehistoric archaeology discovered something very exciting recently while doing work on Astypalaia, an island off the coast of Greece: dicks and dicks galore. According to Dr. Andreas Vlachopoulos, the erotic graffiti and inscriptions he discovered are the oldest on earth.

No, this isn't a Bloomberg joke.

Good news for you hardcore genealogy enthusiasts: scientists have almost completely reconstructed the oldest DNA yet found in a humanlike species.

Asteroid tails! Clean bacteria! Dinosaur gore! See-thru snails! Desert farming! Traffic math! Moon craters! And toothy fish that can't be killed! It's your Thursday Science Watch, where we watch science—with rancor!

Had you asked me last week if the number of known pyramids in the world was likely to substantially increase anytime soon, I might have said no; how wrong I would have been. LiveScience recently reported that in the last three years "at least 35" petite pyramids have been uncovered for the first time in millennia at a single site in Sudan.

We're all jealous of Kate Middleton now. The shiny hair. The castle home. But in 500 years she'll be just another monarch buried underneath a Pizza Hut parking lot, so who cares, really?

Simcha Jacobovici, the Canadian documentary director who claimed in 2011 to have found two of the nails used to crucify Jesus, is suing archaeologist Joe Zias for libel. There are few things more enjoyable than fights between academics, particularly when one of the academics is being accused of pandering and sensationalism. The blog posts fly thick and fast, the Change.org petitions sing with wounded intellectual pride ("we the undersigned simply and collegially request that Mr. Jacobovici abandon his lawsuit"), and everyone gets a chance to play.

There is no form of intrigue more delicious than archaeological intrigue, and this story is just riddled with it: royal exhumations, parking lots, anonymous sources, whiffs of conspiracy and official denials. Select your finest knife and heftiest fork; draw a damask napkin over your lap, and prepare to tuck in.

This brutal, heartbreaking love letter was found in 1998, lying on the mummified body of Eung-Tae Lee, a 30-year-old Korean man who'd died in 1586, some four hundred years before. Lee was tall and bearded — "The dark mustache made me feel that he must have had a charming appearance," says the former director of the Andong National University Museum — and left behind him a pregnant wife, the letter's author. Here it is, via Letters of Note:

Long, long ago (the 1970s), in a faraway and strange land (the 1970s), there existed a tiny anarchistic tribe called the Sex Pistols. Though noted mainly for their music, they also dabbled in the visual arts—decorating their London cave dwellings with whimsical pictures called "graffiti."

Mars rocks! Skinny gene! Saffron cancer! Body odor! Beetle drones! Intergalactic traffic! Antibiotic resistance! Old fossils! And a whole new theory of prehistoric hand axe timing! It's your Friday Science Watch, where we watch science—coleopteristically!

Yesterday, the Egyptian government fired the man widely credited with discovering long lost treasures of the ancient Egyptian world that had already been discovered by real archaeologists, when they let Minister of Antiquities Zahi Hawass go. Poor guy.

Pyramids, being rather large, are not really the kinds of things one expects to be lost easily. And yet! Seventeen new (well, not "new," but) pyramids have been identified through the use of satellite imaging, which can see underground.

Paleoentomologist Bruce Archibald has identified a Wyoming fossil as a "monstrously big ant." How big? About the size of a two-inch hummingbird, as you can see above. So, yes, "monstrously big."

Who wants to read ancient books made of metal? Scientists, that's who! And some of them are very excited to get their hands on these particular ancient metal books, which might "be more significant than the Dead Sea Scrolls."

Looks like Egypt's ancient artifacts will survive the uprising relatively unscathed: Not only are civilians detaining would-be looters, but 288 items stolen from a storage site were "left in the street" after antiquities chief Zahi Hawass asked for their return.

Archaeologists in China have dug up what they believe is a 2,400-year-old bowl of bone soup, as well as a pot of wine, near China's former capital Xian.

New evidence could strengthen the argument that the Stone Age domestication of cereals—which in turn led to farming and "settled behavior"—was intended for beer, not food. Yes, that's right: Without beer, there might never have been civilization.

Archaeologists in Sweden have discovered a stone age antler carving in an "erected-penis-like-shape." Is it an "ancient dildo"? Maybe! It could also be a tool for "chipping flakes of flint." But, come on, that's not as fun. [Live Science]

[Workers examine the remnants of an 18th century ship found 20 or 30 feet below Ground Zero during construction. The ship is 30 feet long and believed to be from the mid-1700s.] (Pic Getty)