Newsdesk Archive

People in North America were voyaging by sea some 8,000 years ago, boosting a theory that some of the continent's first settlers arrived there by boat. That is the claim of archaeologists who have found evidence of ancient seafaring along the Californian coast. The traditional view holds that the first Americans were trekkers from Siberia who crossed a land bridge into Alaska during the last Ice Age.

A US appeals court has given permission to scientists to study a 9,000-year-old skeleton - despite the objections of some Native American tribes. The bones were found by two teenagers near Kennewick, Washington, in 1996. Native Americans want to bury what they call the remains of a distant relative, but scientists say the unusual features of the skeleton need further study.

"The website, Eternal Egypt, brings to light over five thousand years of Egyptian civilization. Eternal Egypt is a living record of a land rich in art and history, people and places, myths and religions. The stories of Eternal Egypt are told using the latest interactive technologies, high-resolution imagery, animations, virtual environments, remote cameras, three-dimensional models and more."

Archaeologists claim that they have found material evidence that China went through a "Jade Age" more than 5,000 years ago. Guo Dashun, a leading member of the Archaeology Society of China, said their conclusion was based on the research results of many jade items unearthed at Niuheliang, a site of the Hongshan Culture dating back 5,500 to 6,000 years ago.

A regional conference in Egypt has called on Western museums to return "stolen" Middle Eastern artefacts to their country of origin. Lawyers taking part in the event said monuments such as the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum had been plundered and should be handed back.

Europe's Rosetta space mission, which aims to chase and then land on a comet, is standing by for blast-off on an Ariane-5 rocket at 0736 GMT, Thursday. The probe will depart from Kourou in French Guiana on the first stage of its 7bn-kilometre, 10-year journey to reach the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

Astronomers have revealed how they came within minutes of alerting the world to a potential asteroid strike last month. Some scientists believed on 13 January that a 30m object, later designated 2004 AS1, had a one-in-four chance of hitting the planet within 36 hours.

Fantasy worlds created by virtual reality have been shown to provide a novel form of relief to patients suffering from intractable pain. Dr Hunter Hoffman, research fellow at the Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, has tested his virtual worlds on victims of burns injuries who suffer excruciating pain during their daily dressing changes which conventional drug therapy fails to control.

A coin that solved the mystery of a little-known Roman emperor is going on display at a new exhibition. The bronze coin, that bears the face of Emperor Domitianus was found by Brian Malin as he combed a field in Oxfordshire with a metal detector.

Chinese archaeologists claim they have discovered material evidence explaining the belief that "Chinese people are descended from the dragon," an old saying that dates back thousands of years.

GREEK archaeologists hope a priest who convinced a gold digger to give up ancient artifacts he unearthed by accident will let them know where the treasures came from, a representative said on February 19. Georgia Karamitrou-Medesidi, director of a local archaeological commission in the Kozani prefecture in northern Greece said the man had gone digging for gold coins. "During confession, he told a priest what he dug up, and the priest convinced him to give him the artefacts to deliver to us. The priest is a deeply spiritual man and won't divulge the identity of the man," she told Reuters. "We just hope he can convince the finder to disclose the area he was digging in."

Two of the oldest mummies ever found in Peru went on display briefly. The mummies of a young boy and a man in his mid-30s were found at a building site south of the country's second city, Arequipa. The mummies were shown to the media for just 30 minutes before the remains were taken away to undergo further study by archaeologists. Officials from the country's National Institute of Culture said the two mummies were between 700 and 900 years old. They were found by builders working on a new sports facility at a school.

An Egyptian scholar based in London, England, has been delighting Arab audiences with his inquiries into the recondite world of medieval Muslims who wrote about ancient Egypt and had some insights into hieroglyphic writing.

US scientists are warning of a potentially "serious risk to human health" after the discovery that traditional varieties of major American food crops are widely contaminated by DNA sequences from GM crops. Crops engineered to produce industrial chemicals and drugs - so-called "pharm" crops - could already be poisoning ostensibly GM-free crops grown for food, warns the study by the Washington-based Union for Concerned Scientists, released on Monday.

Researchers are creating 3D images of the Martian surface using photographs taken by Nasa's robot rovers. Using techniques originally applied to paintings, the researchers have written software that works out what flat images would look like from different viewpoints. The result is a navigable 3D model created from one or more pictures snapped by the Mars buggies.

Scientists from around the world are flocking to a small Indian village to try to find out why an extraordinarily large number of identical twins are being born there.

NASA scientists are excitedly speculating that discoveries made by a Mars rover over the weekend will help them finally unravel whether water played a role in the red planet's geologic history, a science team member said on Monday.

A magazine is offering readers the chance to win a holiday with a tribe of cannibals in Papua New Guinea. The winner of the Zoo Weekly competition will travel to the Baliem Valley to live with cannibals for two weeks. He, or she, will team up in the jungle with seasoned hand Reg Barker, from Devon, and the Korowai tribe.

The city is ancient Tiberias - the renewal of which, it is hoped, will lift modern Tiberias out of its socioeconomic doldrums. Mayor Zohar Oved speaks of a "new chapter" in the city's history; those involved with the project call it "a national vision." Tiberias was founded in 20 C.E. and its Jewish community continued in existence until the 11th century. At its height, from the 3rd to the 8th century, some 25,000-30,000 people lived there. According to Hirschfeld, "the city was full of life, with crowded streets, a busy fishing port and a market for the entire Galilee." Tiberias served as a spiritual and political hub for the Jewish people, as well as a center for halakha (Jewish religious law).

Archaeologists excavating New Zealand's best-preserved early settlement, at Westport's Carter's Beach, have found far more riches than they expected. A team from the Historic Places Trust and Otago University uncovered the site near the Buller River on a recent three-week excavation. It was first discovered in the 1970s by archaeologist D. Wayne Orchiston. Senior archaeology lecturer Dr Richard Walter dates the site at between AD1300 and AD1400. "It was a much larger and richer site than we'd anticipated. We've excavated a number of small houses and some large moa ovens for the communal cooking of moas, seals and dogs."

The proof that the Tudor monarch played the beautiful game has been discovered by an academic at Southampton University. Textile expert Maria Hayward has found what could be the first ever specific reference to football boots. The pair of boots, costing four shillings, were in an inventory of Henry VIII's clothes when he died.

Not since Mikhail Baryshnikov defected from the Soviet Union has there been such a fuss over a man in tights. For centuries, Robin Hood, the dashing, chivalrous hero to the oppressed, has been the property of Nottinghamshire in the midlands - land of Sherwood Forest, Nottingham Castle and one nefarious sheriff. But now, in a brazen grab for bragging rights, Yorkshire, an adjacent county, is laying claim to the 800-year-old legend and demanding, by way of a parliamentary motion, immediate redress.

Students at Manchester University no longer need to thumb through dusty texts when reading classics of English literature. They don't even have to visit the library, for the university has made every book published in English between 1453 and 1800 available online. It means students can log on and read extracts from The Canterbury Tales, Hamlet or the works of Isaac Newton from anywhere in the world using their personal computers.

Australia's Great Barrier Reef will lose 95 per cent of its living coral by 2050 - predicts a new report. And this devastating situation will occur if the best-case scenario for global warming unfolds. However, the damning predictions have sparked debate, with some researchers saying the claims are exaggerated. They do not reflect the current level of uncertainty about either the impact of warmer waters on the Reef, or likely climate change, say critics.

Japanese researchers have observed mice behaving strangely after being exposed to electric and magnetic fields similar to those sometimes detected before earthquakes. The levels of exposure were far smaller than humans are capable of perceiving.

An Israeli documentary Wednesday claimed the James ossuary, the ancient burial box bearing a discredited inscription mentioning Jesus, is just the tip of a long-running forgery ring that has duped antiquities collectors worldwide for the last 15 years.

The European Space Agency's Proba spacecraft imaged the Nasca region of Peru; famous for its giant lines and animal figures. The photos were taken from an altitude of 600 km, and clearly show the straight lines (the animals are too faint to see with this spacecraft). Although the markings were created more than 2,000 years ago, the region is so dry they've barely been weathered.

The Hubble Space Telescope has further confirmed the existence of "Dark Energy" - a mysterious force that seems to be accelerating the expansion of the Universe. The giant space observatory examined some of the most distant supernovae ever seen and found that this force seems to have been acting at a constant rate for as far back as astronomers can see. This is good news. If dark energy continued to accelerate, some physicists believe the fabric of the Universe could tear apart in an event called "The Big Rip".

What may be the longest continuous record of tropical sea surface temperatures and marine productivity has been constructed from a core drilled beneath the eastern equatorial Pacific. The resulting high-resolution record, accurate to within about 3,000 years, makes it possible to evaluate the response of equatorial surface waters to Earth's main orbital parameters during the early Pleistocene epoch.

Chemicals brought to Earth on meteorites may have provided templates for the building blocks of life, say researchers. The idea could explain why DNA, the molecular basis of our genetic code, always curls in one direction.

Archaeologists are celebrating after a stolen collection of mummified human remains were returned to the Philippines area in which they were buried for several hundred years. The group of Filipino mummies, made by members of the Ibaloi tribe between 1200 and 1500AD, were originally found in caves in an area around Kabayan, a town north of Manila.

The scientist who led the team behind Dolly the Sheep has declared he would support the cloning of human babies "under certain circumstances". Professor Ian Wilmut, from the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, said the technique could help to eradicate inherited disorders. Cloning a child would give doctors the opportunity to fix faulty genes.

GUATEMALA CITY (Reuters) - Archeologists are exploring a ruined kingdom in Guatemala to work out how it survived centuries of conflict in the ancient Mayan Indian world before being abandoned to the jungle more than 1,200 years ago. Known as Naachtun, the city-state played a strategic and possibly unique diplomatic role in the turbulent politics of the Mayan civilization. In early February, a 32-person expedition team led by Canadian archeologist Kathryn Reese-Taylor left Guatemala City for the remote Peten jungle area near the border with Mexico to excavate at Naachtun, a Mayan name meaning "distant stone."

DEXTER the labrador proved he had a nose for history when he unwittingly helped his owner make a significant archaeological discovery dating back more than 3,000 years. Harvey Jones, of Cranleigh Gardens, Northwood, was walking boisterous two-year-old Dexter on Bembridge Down when he ran off into a massive gorse bush, dragging Mr Jones along with him. The Bronze Age artefact was lying on the top of a rabbit hole in the middle of the bush - catching the eye of Mr Jones, who said: "It was only thanks to Dexter that I actually saw it.

By Deepak Bhattacharya and L M Mukherjee Skeletal picture & role of muscles are indicated clearly in temple stone art of 7th AD. Name, nativity parentage of a surgeon, a hospital, its sovereign, possible manager or administrator are indicated in rock inscription dated to 9tth AD. This paper subtly & latently seeks to bring out the hitherto hidden chapter of material evidence of ancient Indian school of medicine in extant cognate group of man made stone art archaeology, presented on a background of acknowledged secondary evidence of such ancient school and contrasted vis-a-vis modern science based knowledge.

Scientists say they want to send 15 mice into space to help prepare for possible human missions to Mars.US and Australian university space researchers say they hope to launch the so-called "mouse-onauts" sometime in 2006. The rodents will spend five weeks in low Earth orbit before parachuting back to Earth.

Bulgarian archeologists will start some researches into the history of the Roman treasure of a total of 800 golden Republican-period coins dated from the period of II-I century B.C. as well as some Roman denars dated from the I century B.C. Some experts say that this will prove to be one of the greatest finds in the northern region of Vidin. The treasure was found during excavations in the Lozyata region near the Pokraina village.

NEW YORK - Unexpectedly high visitor interest has forced the Metropolitan Museum of Art to close two Egyptian tombs that were opened for unrestricted viewing last month. The museum had removed protective glass screens from the tombs of Raemkai and Perneb Jan. 29, allowing visitors full views of interior limestone carvings for the first time in 90 years. But a crush of some 24,000 visitors since the unveiling "has put the humidity at unacceptable limits," said Harold Holzer, the Met's vice president for marketing and communications. They had been scheduled to remain open to the public until mid-March, but will instead close Thursday, he said.

MOSCOW, Russia (AP) -- Russian engineers have begun design work on a new spacecraft that would be twice as big and spacious as the existing Soyuz crew capsules, the nation's top space official said Tuesday. The new craft will be able to carry at least six cosmonauts and have a reusable crew section, Russian Aerospace Agency director Yuri Koptev said at a news conference. Soyuz carries three cosmonauts and isn't reusable.

A huge cemetery from China's Western Han Dynasty (206 B.C. to 24 A.D.) has been discovered at the Three Gorges area's Tujing town of southwest China's Chongqing municipality.

Celera completed a draft of the human genome three years ago at the same time that a rival, publicly funded, group of scientists finished its own draft. Both groups announced the scientific milestone together at the White House. Experts say the two versions of the human genetic code complement each other, and form the basis for finding the genetic causes of disease.

A controversial technique for identifying a criminal mind using involuntary brainwaves that could reveal guilt or innocence is about to take centre stage in a last-chance court appeal against a death-row conviction in the US.

A study showing that gene therapy can make muscles respond much better to exercise has raised the prospect of genetically modified athletes.

Controversy has erupted over British government plans to tunnel beneath the World Heritage site of Stonehenge. The famous circle of standing stones sits on the Salisbury Plain in the south of England.

Should humanity get a little too full of itself and its intellectual prowess, there's always Clark's nutcracker to think about. This pale-gray bird with black wings and a long beak flits through woodlands in the West, collecting seeds during times of plenty and tucking them away for a hungry winter's day. During a year, each bird buries 22,000 to 33,000 seeds in up to 2,500 locations, and scientists estimate that the bird recovers two-thirds of them up to 13 months later.

How will global warming affect life on Earth? Uncertainties about future climate change and the impact of human activity make it difficult to predict exactly what lies ahead. But the past offers clues, say scientists who are studying a period of warming that occurred about 55 million years ago. "As the warm spell continued, the animals showed an intriguing response: they became smaller. For example, "horses from this period that had been the size of a small dog were reduced to the size of a Siamese cat," Gingerich said. When the climate returned to normal, the animals became normal size again."

A new close-up image of the Martian surface reveals more of the tiny spherical objects that have been puzzling scientists for several days. Researchers reiterated that they don't know what process created the spheres but that they don't think biology is involved.

When it surfaced in 1957, it was too good to be true: a purported 15th-century world map depicting an island to the far west labeled Vinilandia Insula the fabled Vinland proof positive, it seemed, that Norse explorers had reached North America long before Columbus. Thanks, but no thanks,the British Museum told the intermediary who offered to sell it to them. It's a phony.

Francis Drake had plenty to crow about as he as sailed into England's Plymouth Harbor in the fall of 1580. After all, since setting out three years earlier, he had succeeded in circumnavigating the globe. But if a renegade historian is correct, the story of his accomplishment has been only partly told. In the recent book The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake, Samuel Bawlf argues that Drake also explored the Alaskan coast, finding an inlet that he believed was the entrance to the Northwest Passage, a fabled trade route that would have opened up the Orient's riches to British ships.

British archaeologists believe they have uncovered the remains of the ship Charles Darwin used to sail across the world. Marine archaeologist Robert Prescott of Scotland's University of St. Andrews told London's Observer newspaper that he is "quietly confident" that the Beagle has been located.

People were keeping warm by a fire in a rock shelter at least 56,000 years ago, according to new analysis of what may be the oldest known human record in the Americas. This is about 40,000 years earlier than generally agreed for when people first arrived in the Americas.

Prehistoric poo could help scientists solve some of the greatest mysteries of early human evolution. Researchers are extracting DNA from fossilised faeces in the search for clues about the origin of language and the fate of the Neanderthals. The coprolites are being dug up from the floor of caves in Israel, along with sediment containing ancient DNA from people and animals.

Twinkling in the sky is a diamond star of 10 billion trillion trillion carats, astronomers have discovered. The cosmic diamond is a chunk of crystallised carbon, 1,500 km across, some 50 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus.

New technologies may soon allow scientists to identify some of the genes of humankind's oldest ancestors. This raises the possibility of plotting the evolutionary tree of humanity from five million years ago to the present.

Europe's weather could flip from droughts to floods every year as climate change kicks in, according to scientists who have modelled the mechanisms behind the continent's most recent bouts of extreme weather. In the summer of 2003, an intense heatwave across Europe was responsible for the deaths of up to 35,000 people and dried up many rivers. Yet in 2002, central Europe was awash with water after a massive river burst its banks.

Archaeologists in York believe a hoard of treasure recently found by metal detectorists could lead to the first discovery of a Viking boat burial in England. Simon Holmes, Finds Liaison Officer for the Portable Antiquities Scheme in Yorkshire, told the 24 Hour Museum that certain artefacts suggest this "awesome" find could be one of the most significant discoveries in the British Isles.

The farthest object in the Universe yet detected has been seen by scientists using the Hubble and Keck telescopes. It is so distant its light must have set out when the Universe was just 750m years old to reach the Earth now. Details of the discovery were revealed by a team of astrophysicists from the California Institute of Technology. They said the work underlined again the remarkable capabilities of Hubble and called on Nasa to reverse its decision to stop servicing the telescope.

A prehistoric lost world deep under the North Sea where man once hunted animals has been mapped by scientists with the help of earthquake data. A team of archaeologists, geologists and engineers from the University of Birmingham have combined the latest computer techniques to devise a 3D reconstruction of the 10,000-year-old plain. The virtual features they have developed include a 600m-wide river the length of the Thames which disappeared when its valley flooded due to glaciers melting. The plain, part of a land mass that once joined Britain to northern Europe, disappeared about 8,000 years ago and was previously unknown to scientists.

"In their view of themselves, they were always right, and their enemies were always monsters." This is a quote from a Democratic candidate for the U.S. presidency describing George W. Bush and company's policies over Iraq, right? Wrong. It's a partial quote from a York University professor explaining to Star feature writer Olivia Ward an allegedly crucial difference between the Greeks of Homer's time and "the ancient Egyptians." According to York University's David M. Johnson, a philosopher and the author of a new book, How History Made The Mind, there is a huge difference between how moderns ever since Homer think and the way earlier peoples such as the Egyptians thought. The crucial difference, he says, is "objectivity."

Deep in the Grampians, Ricci Marks perches on a ledge in an Aboriginal rock shelter. He and his cousin, Sonny Secombe, are among a group of young indigenous people examining Aboriginal art. As one of the youths presses a plastic sheet on to the rock, Mr Marks, 21, takes a thick pen from his pocket to trace the outline of a left hand painted in ochre on the ancient rock face. Whose hand is it? They can't solve that mystery, but the group - attending a week-long field school in the Grampians - is mastering new techniques to record their history.

Archaeologists have confirmed the discovery of a 1000 year-old Viking settlement off South Main Street in Cork. The discovery has been described as one of the "most exciting" in the country. Sections of mud walls, doorposts, the prow of a Viking boat and metal artefacts were uncovered.

Native Americans called him "The Ancient One", while anthropologists speculated he could reveal who first settled the Americas. Then, for over seven years, the skeleton of Kennewick Man became the subject of a court battle between the two parties, crystallising the debate over who should lay claim to ancient human remains and artefacts.

The fraction of left-handed people today is about the same as it was during the Ice Age, according to data from prehistoric handprints. They were found in caves painted during the Upper Palaeolithic period, between 30,000 and 10,000 years ago.

Linea Sundstrom sees clues to past peoples' daily lives. Bill Goehring sees an ancient piece of art that can teach but also simply exist. Both are looking at the same petroglyph, one of several types of rock art. Their perspectives differ, but their goals are the same - to change the way petroglyphs are perceived and protected. Petroglyphs are carved rather than painted. South Dakota's images stretch back thousands of years.

Europe's Mars Express space probe in orbit around the Red Planet has produced a stunning image of the highest volcano in the Solar System. The probe produced images of Olympus Mons, a 22 kilometre-high volcano.

The history of Valentine's Day -- and its patron saint -- is a mystery. But it is known that February has long been a month of romance. St. Valentine's Day, as we know it today, contains both Christian and ancient Roman traditions. According to the History Channel, one legend contends that Valentine was a priest who served during the third century in Rome. When Emperor Claudius II decided that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and families, he outlawed marriage for young men -- his crop of potential soldiers. Valentine, realizing the injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. When Valentine's actions were discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death.

An amateur astronomer in the US has detected the emergence of a young star from the cocoon of gas and dust in which it was born. Such an event has only rarely been recorded by astronomers.

Is Lucifer loose on Sicily? No lesser figure than the honorary president of the International Association of Exorcists believes he may be. "What is happening is what normally happens when the devil enters the lives of those who let him in," Father Gabriele Amorth said yesterday as scientists and officials confessed themselves unable to explain a string of fires and explosions which began in the middle of last month in the fishermen's quarter of a Sicilian village.

Virtual museums could offer a way of travelling back in time to experience the past, say researchers. A team at the University of Geneva have been using sophisticated 3D computer modelling technology to bring historical monuments to life. They have developed virtual reality models of two Turkish mosques dating from the Ottoman era of the 16th century which let you move around and explore the buildings in real-time.

Tourists traversing Egypt's desert may solve a mystery that has puzzled archaeologists for centuries: what happened to the 50,000-man Persian army of King Cambyses. Set up by tourist operator Aqua Sun Desert, the Cambyses project will comb the desert sands using four-wheel-drive vehicles packed with paying tourists eager to find the remains of the lost army swallowed in a sandstorm in 524 B.C., according to the account of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus.

A group of nine Chinese scientists will go to west China's Qinghai Province this month to closely examine the relics thought by some to have been left by extraterrestrial beings. It will be the first time scientists seriously study the mysterious site near Delingha City in the depths of the Qaidam Basin, according to government sources with the Haixi Mongolian and Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, where Delingha is located.

Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval will join other speakers at the forthcoming Ancient Mysteries conference in March. Graham Hancock who will present a lecture on the "Search for mans Lost Origins"" is joined by long standing co-author Bauval who is to talk on "Symbolism and the Sky-Nature Religion of Ancient Egypt. Also on the bill are the inimitable Colin Wilson, Achmed Osman and Ury Stoyanov along with a not very ancient mystery "The Mystery of the Crop Circles" from Karen Douglas.

ARCHAEOLOGISTS working for Tesco have dug up more than they bargained for at the site of the company's planned new supermarket in Ballymoney. Hoping to discover traces of a medieval castle, believed to have once occupied the site, the archaeologists were amazed when they unearthed remains which date back some 9,000 years.

US space agency Nasa has pinpointed the position of its robot explorer Opportunity, the second of two rovers which are now on the Martian surface. Images taken from space show the lander sitting in a tiny impact crater on Meridiani Planum, a flat plain rich in the iron-rich mineral grey haematite.

Developers in Washington City are making room for another few families. Ence Homes is seeking permission to develop property between 300 and 900 East and 250 and 500 South, but found out someone had already lived there. It turns out, the Anasazi used part of the site many centuries ago. Some residents feared the archaeological find would be bulldozed. The developer instead has slated open space for the majority of the area where archaeological sites were found and planned to allow for other major sites by making slight adjustments to plots.

THE PROPOSED site for seven huge wind turbines on Denshaw Moor is home to more than 200 archaeological remains, with many more, including a Roman road, still waiting to be discovered. Saddleworth Archaeological Trust has registered an objection to the windfarm application which will be discussed at a public meeting on Wednesday, April 28, at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

The Russian-US crew on board the International Space Station (ISS) have noticed an unidentified object outside the orbiting craft, US and Russian space officials revealed. US astronaut Michael Foale and his Russian colleague Alexander Kaleri last week observed "a 20-centimetre long strip of soft material" which was floating in space, a NASA (news - web sites) representative Sergei Puzanov told AFP on Tuesday.

The Three Wise Men who followed the star to Bethlehem bearing gifts for the baby Jesus may not have been all that wise -- or even men. The traditional infant Nativity play scene could be in for a drastic rewrite after the Church of England indulged in some academic gender-swapping over the three Magi at its General Synod in London this week. A committee revising the latest prayer book said the term "Magi" was a transliteration of the name used by officials at the Persian court, and that they could well have been women. "Magi is a word which discloses nothing about numbers, wisdom or gender embodied in the term," a Synod spokesman said on Tuesday after the revision was agreed by the Church of England's parliament which meets twice a year.

A tiny fossil preserved in red sandstone from Scotland has been identified as the oldest known insect. The fossil suggests insects were among the earliest animals to live on land and that winged flight may have emerged earlier than previously thought.

Egypt's ancient pyramids are probably a byproduct of a decision to build walls around the tombs of kings, a leading expert on early Egyptian royal burials said Wednesday. Guenter Dreyer, director of the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo, said he based his theory on similarities between Egypt's first pyramid, built at Saqqara south of Cairo for the Pharaoh Zozer in about 2650 BC, and the structure of the tomb of one of his immediate predecessors.

Nasa has given a final "no" to requests for it to change its mind and grant a reprieve to the Hubble Space Telescope. It follows opposition to Nasa's chief, Sean O'Keefe's decision, that servicing missions should be cancelled because of astronaut safety concerns.

The government on Saturday warned that Ethiopia's historical and cultural artefacts were continuing to be plundered, and called for greater protection of its antiquities. It stressed in a statement that the looting was serving to obstruct ongoing vital survey work and research aimed at fully exploring and documenting the country's historical background. "Regrettably the theft and smuggling of our cultural heritage has not yet been brought to a halt up until now," the information ministry said in the statement. "The task of conserving and preserving our heritage must include efforts to retrieve the numerous historical and palaeontological resources looted and taken abroad."

FOR LINGUISTS, it's like hitting a home run in the bottom of the ninth to win the World Series. Terrence Kaufman and John Justeson struck that blast in 1993 when they cracked one of the planet's few remaining undeciphered writing systems - a hieroglyphic script from the mysterious Isthmian civilization, which occupied southern Mexico 2,000 years ago. "It's one of the intellectual glories of the world, to be able to decipher an extinct writing system," said Brigham Young University linguist Stephen Houston. But did their home run clear the fence? Houston and another researcher now say no. In fact, they call the translation "gobbledygook."

Both Neanderthals and the first humans to reach Europe struggled with the changing conditions brought by increasingly cold temperatures, according to a study by 30 scientists. The two species coexisted in Europe from roughly 45,000 to 28,000 years ago when the Neanderthals died out. Why humans survived and the Neanderthals didn't has puzzled archaeologists for over a century.

A village from the Copper Age was found in northern Bulgaria. The village is situated just 800 metes away from the place where the bridge Vidin -Kalafat is to be built. The archaeological treasure was found near the Antimovo village when a study in connection to the Danube Bridge 2 construction was made.

A botanist at the University of Tromsø claims the women who were burned alive as witches in Finnmark may have gotten hallucinations after eating a fungus. The women, who were sentenced for witchcraft in northern Norway during the 1600s, admitted to both witchcraft and contact with dark forces. They may have been poisoned by ergot, the first stage of a parasite fungus which among other things led to severe hallucinations, cramps and gangrene, according to the university paper Tromsøflaket. Torbjørn Alm, botanist and associate professor, presented the theory in a newly published article in the international trade magazine BioOne. Alm has studied documents from a number of the witch hunts during the 1600s in Finnmark. According to Alm, the documents states that the women who were accused of having taught witchcraft after they had ingested ergot, most common in the form of bread or other flour products but also by drinking beer or milk.

Evelyn Hucke wants her son to speak in the language of the king who settled this remote island more than a millennium ago, the same Polynesian tongue spoken by the people who carved the totemic statues that rise above the powder-blue waters of the South Pacific. Hucke, 30, grew up speaking that language, known as Rapa Nui. But as she walks the streets of Hanga Roa, Easter Island's only town, she hears the Polynesian-faced children chattering and arguing in Spanish, the language of the island's current rulers, the Chileans.

US space agency Nasa says one of its unmanned rover vehicles on Mars has drilled into a rock, the first time this has been done by a robot vehicle. A Nasa scientist said the vehicle, called Spirit, took nearly three hours to drill the 2.7mm (0.1 inch) hole.

Ancient rock art has been dated by analysing the rock surface beneath the paint rather than the paint itself, by Australian and U.K. researchers. This form of carbon dating revealed South African rock art to be at least 3000 years old rather than 1000 years old as earlier researchers had thought.

Jietai Temple, or temple of the ordination altar, is located 35 km (22 miles) west of Beijing. It takes its name from the famous Ming marble ordination altar. Built some 1,300 years ago, this altar is nearly 5 meters (16 feet) high and decorated with delicate, exquisite carvings. Renovation on the Thousand-Buddha Pavilion, a major part of the Jietai Temple, will start this year. The geological survey has now finished and bidding work is under way. However, the whereabouts of Buddha statues, wooden frameworks and some historical documents such as architectural techniques relating to the pavilion is still unknown. The management staff of the pavilion have called on the whole country to bring back these Buddhas.

Archaeologists from UCLA and the University of Delaware have unearthed the most extensive remains to date from sea trade between India and Egypt during the Roman Empire, adding to mounting evidence that spices and other exotic cargo traveled into Europe over sea as well as land. "These findings go a long way toward improving our understanding of the way in which a whole range of exotic cargo moved into Europe during antiquity," said Willeke Wendrich, an assistant professor of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA and co-director of the project. "When cost and political conflict prevented overland transport, ancient mariners took to the Red Sea, and the route between India and Egypt appears to have been even more productive than we ever thought."

Until recently, researchers believed our North American roots stretched back only about 11,200 radiocarbon years before present (YBP). These earliest settlers, from a culture now called Clovis, traveled from northeast Asia across the "Beringia landbridge," hunting large mammals with stone tools and colonizing the Americas via an "ice-free corridor" east of the Canadian Rocky Mountains However, in 1989, archaeologist Tom Dillehay at the University of Kentucky published a two-volume work entitled Monte Verde: A Late Pleistocene Settlement in Chile, which describe a human settlement dated to 12,500 YBP, approximately 1,300 years before Clovis. This site contained non-Clovis stone tools, a child's footprints and a community of dwellings constructed in part from animal skins. Archaeological sites like this and others found south of areas glaciated during the last ice age, and dated to between 12,500 and 11,500 YBP, imply that people had reached the southern tip of South America prior to the recession of the giant ice sheets, leading archaeologists to postulate alternative migration routes. Now geologists are also working on these alternative routes, exploring the region's glacial past to reconstruct a potential path for early peoples along the northwestern coast of North America.

The small robotic probe that Europe is despatching to land on a comet has been named "Philae" by a 15-year-old girl. Philae is the island in the river Nile which played a crucial role in cracking the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone to unlock the secrets of ancient Egypt.

Thiruvananthapuram,Kerala : The state will represent to the centre for getting declared the Padmanabhapuram Palace in Kanniyakumari district of Tamil Nadu as a world heritage property, Minister for Archaeology and Archives T M Jacob told the assembly today. Answering questions from K A Chandran (Cong) and others, he said the palace taken over from the Travancore royal family was one of the 85 protected monuments maintained by the state government.

A fossil of a human footprint presumed to be 50,000 years old has been discovered on a beach on Jeju Island. The Cultural Properties Administration (CPA) announced Friday that the fossil, measuring 21 to 25 centimetres long, was discovered along with about 12,000 fossils of animal footprints and plants in Daejeong-eup, South Jeju County.

New radio-carbon dating technology shows some South African rock art to be three times older than previously believed, Newcastle University in the United Kingdom said. A study by archaeologists at the institution estimated that rock art at the World Heritage Site of uKhahlamba-Drakensberg in KwaZulu-Natal could be 3,000 years old.

There was a surprise in the pipeline for archaeologists on a Roman fort dig at Vindolanda in Northumberland.They unearthed 30 yards of wooden mains which fed the fort with water from nearby springs. And to their amazement, the mains were still working and carrying water - almost 2,000 years after they were first installed.

The idea that dinosaurs survived for some time after the asteroid impact blamed for wiping them out 65 million years ago has been dealt a blow. Dinosaur egg fragments dug out of rocks in China seem to postdate the dramatic extinction event popularly believed to have extinguished the creatures.

If tombs are discovered in the Pyramid of the Sun, they could shed light on the governing style in the ancient city of Teotihuacan, Mexico. Does the Pyramid of the Sun harbour any tombs? What might such tombs reveal about the society that two millennia ago built one of Mesoamerica's largest pyramids? In an experiment à la Luis Alvarez, who in the late 1960s concluded that there are no tombs in Egypt's Chephren pyramid, a collaboration of physicists and archaeologists hopes to glean answers to these questions by monitoring the passage of muons through the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan, 50 kilometres northeast of Mexico City.

Court rejects tribes' appeal to bury ancient bones The scientific community should be allowed to study the 9,000-year- old human bones known as Kennewick Man, a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled yesterday, rejecting an appeal by several tribes claiming kinship and seeking to rebury the remains. "I'm absolutely thrilled that the court has affirmed the public's right to knowledge and rejected this attempt, on religious grounds, to limit scientific inquiry," said Jim Chatters, the archaeologist who identified the remains after they eroded out of the banks of the Columbia River in 1996.