Hera statue find

A 2,200-year-old statue of the goddess Hera has been found in a wall of a city under Mount Olympus, mythical home of Greece's ancient gods, archaeologists announced Thursday.

The headless marble statue was discovered last year during excavations in the ruins of ancient Dion, some 50 miles southwest of Thessaloniki.

Stonehenge's altar stone rediscovered?

Dennis Price, who is a renowned expert on the site and used to work with Wessex Archaeology, believes the two large stones standing at the side of a lane next to the B3083 could be parts of Stonehenge's mysterious altar stone.

The altar stone, which is believed to be the centrepiece of rituals carried out at Stonehenge, was first discovered in 1620 by the prominent architect, Inigo Jones, when he undertook the first ever investigation into the site. . .

Mr Price believes the altar stone might well have been taken to Berwick St James, where it was first used as a bridge over a stream and now stands in two pieces by the side of a road.

Captain Cook relics

A DRAWING of Captain Cook's ship Resolution in a stream of pack ice while he was attempting to confirm the existence of a Great Southern Continent – now known as Antarctica – has been discovered in the United States. The previously unknown picture by William Hodges, the official artist on Cook's second voyage, has been bought at auction for the Captain Cook Memorial Museum in Whitby for £80,275.

The sketch was made in 1772-73 as Cook headed towards the South Pole, accompanied by Adventurer. It depicts the Resolution under reduced sail in a choppy sea under overcast skies with streams of pack ice floating past.

A COPPER medallion struck in 1772 to mark Captain James Cook's voyage of discovery to Australia in the Endeavour is on its way back Down Under after being bought for £4,600.

Titled Resolution and Adventure - Cook's voyage, the medallion that had been fancied by a number of Welsh collectors went under the hammer at Halls in Shrewsbury yesterday, where a telephone bidder from Australia held off strong competition from dealers in New York and London to secure it.

Christina Trevanion, an auctioneer with Halls, was delighted with what she believes is a record price for the bronze medallion. She said, "From information that we have gathered from dealers and collectors it appears that Captain Cook took the bronze medallions with him on the voyage and gave them to natives when they went ashore. The silver medallions were struck at a later date and reputedly presented to the crew.

Neolithic lactose intolerance

Looks like I'm just an old-fashioned guy:

The first direct evidence that early Europeans were unable to digest milk has been found by scientists at UCL (University College London) and Mainz University.

In a study, published in the journal 'PNAS', the team shows that the gene that controls our ability to digest milk was missing from Neolithic skeletons dating to between 5840 and 5000 BC. However, through exposure to milk, lactose tolerance evolved extremely rapidly, in evolutionary terms. Today, it is present in over ninety per cent of the population of northern Europe and is also found in some African and Middle Eastern populations but is missing from the majority of the adult population globally. . .

Dr Thomas said: "To go from lactose tolerance being rare or absent seven to eight thousand years ago to the commonality we see today in central and northern Europeans just cannot be explained by anything except strong natural selection. Our study confirms that the variant of the lactase gene appeared very recently in evolutionary terms and that it became common because it gave its carriers a massive survival advantage. Scientists have inferred this already through analysis of genes in today's population but we've confirmed it by going back and looking at ancient DNA."

This study challenges the theory that certain groups of Europeans were lactose tolerant and that this inborn ability led the community to pursue dairy farming. Instead, they actually evolved their tolerance of milk within the last 8000 years due to exposure to milk.

Why does anybody use DHL?

Back in the late 1980s when I was working at a top-end Manhattan gallery, DHL was the courier service of choice. What has happened since? I don't know, but the fall from grace has been dramatic. None of my antiques-and-collectibles colleagues has a good word to say about the company. All have tales of packages damaged, lost, and misdelivered -- and most importantly, of total lack of responsiveness to their complaints.

And now I'm wrestling once again with DHL over a simple delivery. FedEx is consistently great, and UPS at least leaves the package, even if they can't be bothered to ring the doorbell. DHL neither delivers nor rings -- each time, all we get is a (non)delivery notice hung on the door, followed by days of being run around: forced to navigate a burdensome voice mail system in order to request redelivery that either never occurs, or which involves the furtive hanging of another "delivery attempt" tag on the door without so much as a ring or a knock.

Incidentally, notes on the door stating that we are in and the bell should be rung seem to have no effect, and when my wife called and asked that the DHL driver call us if he couldn't get a response with the doorbell, she was told that as a matter of company policy the drivers don't carry cell phones, just radios!

PS Immediately after posting, I stopped and wondered if I was going too far in criticizing a company based upon what might just be the fault of a single bad employee. But others have had parallel experiences, and then I called yet again trying to arrange delivery of the latest mishandled package (four alleged delivery attempts, one notice left -- all during a period we've always been home). I presented myself as frustrated yet sympathetic, wanting to report what would appear to be a terribly negligent driver. The manager was out, so I left my cell phone number for him to call me. I was told he'd be right back. Four hours later and it's nearly the end of the work day, and no response. Looks to me as if DHL is doing something fundamentally wrong when in comes to basic management, at least when it comes to deliveries.

PPS And now in the news, DHL misdelivers human body parts to a couple expecting parts for a table -- while two similar packages "broke open, scattering their contents" in transit. The fun isn't over, either: "Authorities believe 28 more bubble-wrapped human organs and body parts could be dispersed across the country". Hat tip to reader Chris S. for the link.

Picasso theft in Paris

And it's a big one, at least in terms of value:

Two paintings by Pablo Picasso worth an estimated 50 million euros ($66 million) were stolen in Paris from the home of the painter's granddaughter, police said.

The two canvases disappeared during the night of Feb. 26- 27, Robert Martin, a spokesman for Paris police, said in a telephone interview today. The spokesman declined to give the granddaughter's name; Agence France-Presse identified her as Diana Widmaier Picasso.

The works were ``Maya a la poupee,'' a painting of Picasso's daughter, and a portrait of his second wife, Jacqueline, the police said. Diana Widmaier Picasso is Maya's daughter, AFP said.

The police didn't find any sign of forced entry into the Left Bank seventh arrondissement apartment, AFP said. Police were called yesterday and the organized crime unit opened an investigation, Martin said.

Heinz Berggruen obit

Heinz Berggruen, a German-born Jewish art collector who in the mid-1990’s made a powerful gesture of reconciliation by moving his modern art collection to Berlin, died outside Paris on Friday. He was 93. . .

Mr. Berggruen, who fled Hitler’s Germany for the United States in 1936, made his name in postwar Paris as a gallery owner who enjoyed a close relationship with Picasso and was also considered a specialist in the works of Van Gogh, Cézanne, Matisse, Paul Klee, Hans Arp and Giacometti.

Like many leading art dealers, he became a collector in his own right and, in 1980, gave up his gallery in order to focus his energy on enriching — and sharing — his collection. He continued to acquire new art, but he also loaned works to major exhibitions and donated others to museums in the United States and Europe.

But it was his decision to display a good part of his collection in the city he had fled decades earlier that turned him into a celebrity outside the world of art.

For Germany, the move not only symbolized a German Jew’s willingness to turn the page on the past, but it also filled a hole in Berlin’s art collections which had been largely stripped of so-called degenerate modern art by the Nazi regime.

Just this past weekend some of us were discussing the American vs the European art scene, and in particular the difficulty European artists have getting recognized in Europe (and especially mainland Europe). The Nazis are in large part to blame, for killing or driving out the leading dealers -- many of whom were Jewish, and many of whom ended up in New York or London. But Europe's present-day rulers haven't exactly been dealer-friendly, either. A friend in Paris recently registered as a business, and was shocked to receive a demand from the authorities for a 10,000 Euro downpayment on taxes on income he had yet to earn! Is "entrepreneur" really a French word?

The extent to which dealers have influenced taste, patronage, and historical judgment has often been underappreciated. As a counterexample, however, the Ambroise Vollard exhibition which recently closed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art should be noted (it has just opened at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it will stay until May; it will make its final stop at the Musée d’Orsay).

Authors above the law in Romania

An American historian jailed in Romania for paedophile offences has been released more than two years early because he wrote a book about Dracula.

According to the law, Kurt Treptow was entitled to early release because his writing counted as work in prison.

Stranded by ice and snow . . .

. . . luckily, it was in sunny Manhattan Beach, California. I was supposed to fly out Saturday night from LAX, but was only able to get out last night, and to Boston rather than Providence.

I'm not one to blame the airlines for the weather. Nonetheless, American Airlines could have done a lot better in keeping customers informed. After a friend came back from the airport after his afternoon flight was cancelled, I did everything I could to find out if my redeye might, against all odds, still be leaving. Telephone access to American Airlines was essentially cut off: calling the public number, you got a recording telling you to call back later and were then disconnected. The Platinum access line was still accepting calls, but 30-40 minutes on hold wasn't enough to get through.

What was really unforgivable, however, was American's failure to make proper use of its website, and to notify passengers who had signed up for SMS notification. I got no less than four text messages telling me about minor delays and gate changes for the LAX to O'Hare leg of my trip, but no mention of the cancellation of all continuing flight to Providence for the next two days -- which I had to stand in line at the airport to find out, wasting two taxi fares from and back to my hotel as well.

Another major failure was the FAA flight delays website, which showed problems only at Milwaukee -- even long after hundreds of flights through O'Hare had already been cancelled. I'd relied on the FAA WAP site for the past few years when traveling, but at this point I'm about to delete the bookmark.

The one good thing I gleaned from this trip was the belated discovery of how easy and inexpensive it is to get from Logan to Providence by taking the Silver Line bus ($2) to South Station, and MBTA commuter rail ($7.75) from there. The rail connections are much fewer on weekends, and would be uncomfortably crowded during rush hour. Nonetheless, when available it is an excellent alternative to the hole-filled schedule of the Peter Pen/Bonanza bus -- especially now that the bus is no longer direct, which makes for a much longer (1:45) ride.