Researchers say more bodies of Herero and Nama people from early 20th century concentration camp could be in waters around port The Namibian authorities are being urged to halt plans to extend a port on the Shark Island peninsula after the discovery of unmarked graves and artefacts relating to the Herero and Nama genocide. Forensic Architecture, a non-profit research agency, said it had located sites of executions, forced labour, imprisonment and sexual violence that occurred when the island was used by the German empire as a concentration camp between 1905 and 1907 ..read more

La Chimera looks like a crime caper about looters in 1980s Italy. But it’s about way more than that. The great director, loved by everyone from Scorsese to Gerwig, talks about the dark secrets of the heart – and her debt to bees Alice Rohrwacher could be the European arthouse made flesh, or its distilled essence, bottled and preserved for the ages. She’s quoting Italian poets one minute and German poets the next. She’s discussing nature, civilisation and the power of collective memory. She says she makes films to shake us from our lethargy and invite us to reflect on the state of the world. It ..read more

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical concepts A 12-sided, 1,700-year-old object with no known purpose was found in Lincolnshire last summer and has just gone on display at Lincoln Museum. What could it have been used for? Paul Elliott, by email Post your answers (and new questions) below or send them to nq@theguardian.com. A selection will be published next Sunday ..read more

Guardian readers speculate on the purpose of a mysterious object unearthed at Norton Disney, near Lincoln I wonder if the object (Mysterious Roman dodecahedron to go on display in Lincoln, 29 April) could be some kind of puzzle (quite apart from being a puzzle to archaeologists). Unless some Roman puzzle book survived, it seems unlikely that a puzzle object would crop up in Roman literature. It is small enough to be held in the hand, and possibly the puzzle was to wrap a string around each protuberance and to go into or come out of one of the holes, without going in or out twice? Tom Wilson Pr ..read more

My husband, Alex Hooper, who has died aged 82 after a long illness, had an extraordinarily varied career, including as an archaeologist, film-maker, merchant seaman, teacher and gallery curator. In the late 1960s, while doing an MA in film studies at the Slade School of Fine Art, Alex became close friends with Peter Gibson of Brett Marvin and the Thunderbolts, and the pair made a documentary about the blues musician John Mayall, The Turning Point (1969). Through going on tour with Mayall, and making the film, Alex hung out with musicians such as Fleetwood Mac, Mick Taylor of the Rolling Stones ..read more

Genetic analysis of Winchester samples shows similar strains of disease and supports theory that fur trade played role in spread Leprosy passed between humans and red squirrels in medieval England, research suggests, supporting the theory that the fur trade could have played a role in the spread of the disease. Leprosy is one of the oldest infectious diseases recorded in humans and is typically caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium leprae ..read more

Researchers and Silicon Valley are using tools powered by AI to read what had long been thought unreadable More than 2,000 years after Plato died, the towering figure of classical antiquity and founder of the Academy, regarded by many as the first university in the west, can still make front-page news. Researchers this week claimed to have found the final resting place of the Greek philosopher, a patch in the garden of his Athens Academy, after scanning an ancient papyrus scroll recovered from the library of a Herculaneum villa that was buried when Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD79 ..read more

Advances in fields such as spectrometry and gene sequencing are unleashing torrents of new data about the ancient world – and could offer answers to questions we never even knew to ask. By Jacob Mikanowski ..read more

Suspicious neighboursMuseum of the yearOfstedOne word for the ToriesRoman dodecahedron Arwa Mahdawi can be assured that over-suspicious neighbours are not restricted to New York (It’s not stranger danger you should be afraid of, it’s video doorbell derangement syndrome, 1 May). A local Facebook page went into meltdown about a man who was seen driving down the road in the early hours, stopping regularly and running up people’s drives, clearly looking for easy access. We were urged to be ultra-vigilant. Shortly afterwards, it became clear that the milkman was getting an early start to his day. A ..read more

MP says trade in remains is ‘gross violation of human dignity’, as skulls from Pitt Rivers collection removed An auction house has withdrawn 18 ancient Egyptian human skulls from sale after an MP said selling them would perpetuate the atrocities of colonialism. Bell Ribeiro-Addy, the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Afrikan reparations, believes the sale of human remains for any purposes should be outlawed, adding that the trade was “a gross violation of human dignity ..read more