Photo of the Week: Footsteps of a Famous Fete Students from Berkeley's Center for Theater Arts circled senior music major Stephanie Pan in a Renaissance round dance Feb. 20 at the inaugural production of campus's new Consortium for the Arts. The reconstruction of Catherine de Medici's Fete at Fontainebleau, before a standing room-only audience in the International House auditorium, featured Renaissance song, French geometrical ballet, country dances, a banquet atmosphere and period costumes of 16th-century France. The Consortium is a new organization supporting interdisciplinary collaborations in the arts. Noah Berger photo.

Three Berkeley graduate students have thrown cold water on last year's highly publicized claim that Neanderthals could talk.

Close human relatives known for their protruding brow and squat, heavy bodies, Neanderthals apparently branched off from our early ancestors some 400,000 years ago and disappeared about 30,000 years ago.

The original claim that Neanderthals could use language was made by a team of Duke University researchers based on an analysis of the size of the hypoglossal canal, a hole on either side of the base of the skull that accommodates the nerves innervating the tongue and controlling its movement (continues)