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Fancy yourself a bit of an urban Ray Mears? A Starbucks-guzzling Bear Grylls, perhaps? Now's your chance to relive those Indiana Jones dreams with us, and get paid for the pleasure! We're looking for a pair of exciting presenters - a man and a woman - to join us on our Ancient World in London series, beginning the end of this month.

This is a great chance to get your face seen all over the world, and visit some of Britain's best and most hidden historical sites.

How does one transport a 1.8 million-year-old skull that might rewrite the history of mankind and has never before left the vault of the National Historic Museum in Tbilisi, Georgia? Very carefully, of course! The only person allowed to travel with the The 'Dmanisi Skull' - which suggests a Eurasian chapter in the long evolutionary story of man - is Professor David Lordkipanidze, director of the Georgian National Museum who brought the extra-ordinary find to the Naturalis Museum, Leiden for a special exhibition to end their one-year celebration of evolutionary scientist Charles Darwin.

A new video has been released on YouTube that shows the University of Western Ontario’s dig at Gallinazo Group in Peru.

Gallinazo Group is a 2,000 year old Peruvian city that was built by a poorly understood culture known as the “Gallinazo.” As Heritage Key reported recently archaeologists have discovered that the 70 hectare city had giant holes in it.  People lived in crowded, adobe brick, mounds with large empty fields in-between them. It’s a mystery why they chose to live this way, even though there was plenty of free land available.

This video was shot to give students – who are interested in spending a summer digging there – an overview as to what the experience is like (so there is a promotional element to it).

While most people are still able to (albeit it probably a bit incorrectly) answer what an archaeologist does, anthropologists are a species less known to the general public and media. Derived from the Greek 'anthropos' (human), anthropology means, 'the social science that studies the origins and social relationships of human beings' according to the Princeton WordNet, and is most often used to refer to 'cultural anthropology'.  But anthropology student Dai Cooper is doing her bit to make the discipline just that bit more famous... on YouTube. In just a few weeks, the 'Anthropology Song: A little bit Anthropologist' has become immensely popular, especially for a song about anthropology, even threatening to beat the usual YouTube hits 'cat being cute' and 'cat acting like a typical cat' in the charts.

Update: The issue is resolved. We can access our account again, all information is still there, and embeds still working. Yet, no word of explanation from YouTube.

I walked into the office this morning and our Youtube account was shut down. Why? No idea. We have about 20 videos up on our channel which were commissioned or created directly by Heritage Key, many from Sandro Vannini. A few of the videos we posted only after getting permission from the creators. All the content was credited. We made captions for most files as well.  We have the entire transcripts posted on our site. If we made some mistake we certainly would have addressed immediately. Our many popular Heritage Key videos including King Tut's Death Mask, Animal Mummies Explained or Zahi Hawass Discovers New Tombs in the Valley of Kings are not available on Youtube right now.

There are nearly 1,000 prehistoric stone circles in Britain and Rupert Soskin - together with producer Michael Bott - has visited over 100 of them, making an astonishing documentary about these magnificent Neolithic and Bronze monuments, focussing on a lot of the lesser known prehistoric stone monuments from megalithic Britain. Barrows, henges, borrows, cists, thrilitons and solitary megaliths, Soskin covers them all. 'Standing with Stones' wants to take the viewer beyond Stonehenge - that all-too familiar icon of Stone Age Britain - on an incredible journey of discovery that reveals the true wealth and extent of Neolithic and Bronze Age Britain & Ireland.

Try if you can to imagine this scenario: you are in the Roman town of Pompeii and the date is mid August, 79 AD. There is one week to go before Vesuvius spews its molten lava everywhere and obliterates the place. Sulphur is in the air and the earth is creaking and trembling. There are no two ways about it: you are facing an environmental disaster and the 'world' as you know it is about to end. Well, in the face of such certain doom, what would you do? Run – or hide? Remember that the bodies of both those who hid and those caught as fleeing on the road out of town have been found carbonised at Pompeii. Another solution would be: divide your household rubbish up, and put it into separate bins of glass, plastic, tin, etc.

But this modern solution to a very ancient catastrophe isn't part of some new archaeological discovery – Roman recycling bins have not yet been discovered at Pompeii. It's a scene set in Pompeii from the latest series of comedy sketches by British comedy duo Mitchell and Webb – now on youtube (for those outside the UK who can't watch BBC iPlayer), and brought to my attention thanks to Blogging Pompeii.

With the Terracotta Warriors, Guardians of China's First Emperor exhibition by National Geographic upcoming  in Washington DC and excavations at Xi'an starting again, there are again some great - and non ripped-off - videos related to the Terracotta Army appearing on YouTube. My favourite 3 at the moment:

1. Making of the Terracotta Warriors

It can be said that the more or less 8000 Terracotta Warriors (and acrobats, and horses, and generals and ...) were one of the first 'items' ever to be constructed in bulk on an assembly line - together with the weapons for the First Emperor's real soldiers -, as the figures had their separate body parts manufactured by different workshops that were later assembled to completion. Each workshop then inscribed its name on the part they manufactured to add traceability for quality control. This is clearly visible in this video by Galleria Pangea, where they are working on the torso part of a clay warrior:

Although traces of nicotine and even of cocaine have been found on Egyptian mummies that date as long as 3000 years back - French scientists examining the stomach of the Egyptian Pharaoh Rameses II's mummy found fragments of tobacco leaves most likely used in the embalming process - and discussion is still ongoing on how these plants exactly got to Egypt without the help of the Spanish conquistadores - a 1997 Discovery Channel show suggests ancient international trade: a Pacific crossing and then delivery via the Silk Route.

Regardless if the Pharaohs were junkies or not, we doubt if Queen Nefertiti would have condoned the use of her name and lovely face for this commercial. Yet we find this very colorful animated 1970 ad from Egypt promoting a brand of cigarettes called Nefertiti highly entertaining. Mind the cigarettes magically appearing from the pyramid!

(Mostly) fictional English rock band Spinal Tap made a much-anticipated come back at the Glastonbury music festival last weekend, followed swiftly by their 25th anniversary One Night Only World Tour show at London’s Wembley Arena on Tuesday. The band’s magnum opus remains Stonehenge, their mystical hard rock mini-opera tribute to Salisbury’s millennia-old Neolithic masterpiece, "Where a man's a man, and the children dance to the pipes of pan."