Newsdesk Archive

From the depths of a small Andean lake scientists have pulled up evidence of pre-Incan silver smelting that is nearly 1,000 years old. The discovery of metals associated with smelting in Bolivia's Laguna Lobato suggests that people practiced large-scale silver ore mining some 400 years before 15th-century Incans began their silver industry in the area. The findings, published today in the journal Science, clarify a record of New World technology that was partly destroyed by the extensive plundering and recycling associated with Spanish conquest.

Egypt will not permit any new foreign expeditions to begin excavations in southern Egypt for the coming decade in an attempt to preserve the monuments, the antiquities chief said on Wednesday. Zahi Hawass, head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said concentration is instead needed at sites in the Nile Delta and in the desert.

This month began the installation of a detector that will allow to determine if hidden rooms existwithin the Pyramid of the Sun , Teotihuacan. From the results of the study, the anthropologists will have a solid theory on the type of government who prevailed to the teotihuacanos. The precedents of this analysis date from 40 years ago. 40 years ago Luis Alvarez, of the University of Berkeley, installed a muon detector (particles with negative electrical charge) in the underground camera of the Pyramid of Kefrén to determine if cavities within her existed. The detector placed in the Camera of the King allowed to determine the trajectory and number of muons that crossed the Pyramid.

A team of geneticists studying the ancestry of Jewish communities has found an unusual genetic signature that occurs in more than half the Levites of Ashkenazi descent. The signature is thought to have originated in Central Asia, not the Near East, which is the ancestral home of Jews. The finding raises the question of how the signature became so widespread among the Levites, an ancient caste of hereditary Jewish priests. The genetic signature occurs on the male or Y chromosome and comes from a few men, or perhaps a single ancestor, who lived about 1,000 years ago, just as the Ashkenazim were beginning to be established in Europe. Ashkenazim, from whom most American Jews descend, are one of the two main branches of Jews, the other being the Sephardim, whose ancestors were expelled from Spain. The new report, published in the current issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics, was prepared by population geneticists in Israel, the United States and England, who have been studying the genetics of Jewish communities for the last six years. They say that 52 percent of Levites of Ashkenazi origin have a particular genetic signature that originated in Central Asia, although it is also found less frequently in the Middle East. The ancestor who introduced it into the Ashkenazi Levites could perhaps have been from the Khazars, a Turkic tribe whose king converted to Judaism in the eighth or ninth century, the researchers suggest.

Remains of ceramics, figurines, burned objects and other seemingly innocuous artifacts found throughout Central America have been identified as evidence for violent destruction rituals enacted against buildings and their inhabitants, according to a new book. Entitled "The Archaeology of Settlement Abandonment in Middle America," the book describes evidence supporting fierce termination rituals enacted by the Maya and other early Central American civilizations. Previously, researchers believed the remains were just random debris.

Endangered cultural heritage monuments listed this year range from ancient Ephesus in Turkey to Paraguay's railroad. (Courtesy World Monuments Fund) or the first time, the World Monuments Watch list of 100 Most Endangered Sites covers every continent, including its first Antarctica nomination, Shackelton's Hut. The list, announced today by the World Monuments Fund (WMF), also features for the first time sites in Australia, Ecuador, Finland, the Palestinian Territories, Paraguay, Slovenia, South Africa, Taiwan, and Trinidad and Tobago. Also of interest this year are multi-national nominations such as the Jesuit Guaraní Missions submitted by Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay; and industrial sites of cultural value such as the company towns of Chile's nineteenth-century saltpeter industry.

Call it North America's most mysterious mass killing. After millions of deaths, and with a chief suspect in custody, the case remains surprisingly circumstantial. The defendant is humanity. At the end of the last ice age, most of North America's biggest animals disappeared. Mammoths, mastodons, saber-toothed cats and ground sloths all bit it - right after people first showed up by crossing a land bridge from Asia.

How did the men of the oldest northern Italian populations organise their villages? How did they live and with what rites did they pass on to the other world? An answer to these question might also come from the hundreds of tombs found in Casinalbo, near Modena, where research done by the Modena Archaeological Museum, in collaboration with the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and with the City of Formigine, brought the discovery of an important necropolis from the Bronze Age, between 1500 and 1200 BC. About 400 tombs have already been discovered in the archaeological site. It is quite an important archaeological find. No necropolis of this size and age had ever been found south of the Po River. The site, directed by Andrea Cardarelli, professor of prehistory and proto-history at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and scientific consultant to the Archaeological Museum, was excavated by many university students in the degree course of applied science to the arts, who worked together with archaeological operators of the museum.

A 35,000-year-old jawbone found last year by cavers in Romania has turned out to be the oldest known modern human fossil in Europe, according to a new study that may revive a long-running debate over the role Neanderthal people played in modern human evolution. The person the fossil came from was unusual in having archaic anatomical features, possibly from interbreeding of modern humans and Neanderthals, suggests a team led by U.S. researcher Dr Eric Trinkhaus, of Washington University in St Louis, in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

Northeast of Cabo San Antonio, marked in yellow, and down about one-half mile off the western tip of Cuba are large stones in rectangular and pyramidal shapes. There are also huge unidentified structures that have 90 degree corners and are spread along straight corridors on the white sea floor sand.

A living example of an insectivore native to Cuba, but believed for years to extinct, has been found in the island's eastern mountains, a Cuban news agency reported. The discovery of the male insect-eating mammal known as an almiqui (pronounced ahl-mee-KEE) raises hopes "that it will not wind up in the catalog of the irretrievable animals disappearing from the face of the Earth," Prensa Latina said in reporting the discovery. The creature looks like a brownish woolly badger with a long, pink-tipped snout and can measure up to about 19 inches, according to Prensa Latina's Monday dispatch.

An archaeological excavation in North Portland is uncovering tools and other signs of a Chinookan village thought to have existed from about 200 to 600 years ago. Archaeologists are exploring two 6-foot-deep trenches that have been dug between the Columbia Slough and North Lombard Street near the entrance to the Rivergate industrial area.

A small rock about five metres across flew past the Earth a few days ago. Only four other such celestial bodies have come closer since monitoring began. It is actually next to the bright, arrowed object The rock, designated 2003 SW130, was far too small to pose any risk. Had it entered the Earth's atmosphere, it would have fragmented in a spectacular meteor display.

A devastating burst of gamma rays may have caused one of Earth's worst mass extinctions, 443 million years ago. A team of astrophysicists and palaeontologists says the pattern of trilobite extinctions at that time resembles the expected effects of a nearby gamma-ray burst (GRB). Although other experts have greeted the idea with some scepticism, most agree that it deserves further investigation. GRBs are the most powerful explosions known. As giant stars collapse into black holes at the end of their lives, they fire incredibly intense pulses of gamma rays from their poles that can be detected even from across the universe for 10 seconds or so.

A crucial skull fragment belonging to the famous 500 000-year-old Peking Man is being shown to the public for the first time ever, Chinese state media said on Monday. The priceless bone fragment is on display at a museum 48km south-west of Beijing, near the place where Peking Man was first discovered almost a century ago, the Xinhua news agency reported.

AN emergency meeting has been called to save an Iron Age fort in East Lothian threatened by a massive blaze which has burned for a fortnight. Council bosses and environment watchdogs are drawing up an action plan to salvage the fort and hidden archaeological treasures on Traprain Law which may have been destroyed by the huge grass fire.

The largest ice shelf in the Arctic has fractured, releasing all the water from the freshwater lake it dammed. The Ward Hunt Ice Shelf is located on the north coast of Ellesmere Island in Canada's Nunavut territory. The huge mass of floating ice, which has been in place for at least 3,000 years, is now in two major pieces.

A cave in the Mendip Hills in southwest England has been revealed as the earliest scientifically dated cemetery in Britain. The site at Aveline's Hole, near Burrington Combe, contained human bone fragments that have now been confirmed to be between roughly 10,200 and 10,400 years old.

A jawbone found in a cave in Romania may be evidence of the earliest modern humans in Europe, living at the same time as the last of the Neanderthals. Erik Trinkaus, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, has dated the bone at 34,000 to 36,000 years ago. His findings are reported in this week's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

NASA's Galileo spacecraft was purposely destroyed today, ending its scientific career in a blaze of glory, disintegrating at high altitude within Jupiter's turbulent atmosphere. Its propellant gauge reading near empty, the nuclear-powered spacecraft was put to rest in a 21st century form of techno-euthansia. The spacecraft fell silent at 12:40:51 p.m. Pacific Time.

A Japanese mountaineer is attempting to settle once and for all the decades-long debate over the existence of the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas, claiming that his years of study have shown that the legendary apelike monster is in fact a brown bear. Makoto Nebuka, 56, a senior member of the Japanese Alpine Club, plans to publish the results of his 12 years of research which led him to conclude the mysterious creature, known as the "Yeti," is really the endangered Himalayan Brown Bear (Ursus Arctos).

Archaeologists excavating the site of a huge iron factory on Exmoor believe it might have been used to help produce weapons for the Roman army. Experts working at the dig near Brayford in north Devon believe what they have found is far more important than they first thought. The factory is on such a massive scale they are wondering whether the Romans may have had a greater influence in the South West than previously believed.

Herds of reindeer and horses migrated across its plains, huge forests covered much of the countryside and men and women made their homes by rivers and lakes. Then came the deluge, and this ancient Arcadia - which stretched across the North Sea, and covered the Channel - was inundated. All signs of human and animal activity were covered by several hundred feet of water. Only the occasional stone tool, bone harpoon and mammoth tusk, trawled from the sea bed by fishing boats, has provided reminders of this lost world's existence.

Archaeologists have discovered a 5000-year-old polished stone axe head during an investigation of an area that forms part of the Stonehenge World Heritage Site. Dating back to the Neolithic Age - 3000 to 2500 BC - the axe head was found, along with a leaf-shaped arrowhead, during a three-week field walk of farmland by Wessex Archaeology.

After the release of the final report of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, NASA is focusing on the return to flight of the Space Shuttle fleet and the development of an Orbital Space Plane. But, are there even larger plans in the works to transform this nation's space program and catapult it towards greater goals?

NASA may replace its troubled fleet of space shuttles with a new generation of Apollo-type space capsules, a top space agency official said. "Certainly we have considerable amount of experience flying with capsules," Dr. John Rogacki, director of NASA's space transportation directorate, told Reuters on Wednesday. "One might say on the capsule side it could be that that design experience may lead to a capsule being available sooner than a winged vehicle."

Deep in the Amazon forest of Brazil, archaeologists have found a network of 1,000-year-old towns and villages that refutes two long-held notions: that the pre-Columbian tropical rain forest was a pristine environment that had not been altered by humans, and that the rain forest could not support a complex, sophisticated society. A 15-mile-square region at the headwaters of the Xingu River contains at least 19 villages that are sited at regular intervals and share the same circular design. The villages are connected by a system of broad, parallel highways, Florida researchers reported in yesterday's issue of Science.

A 1,500-year-old Anglo-Saxon "warrior queen" has been found buried just two feet under the surface of a county field. Lincolnshire's own 6ft tall "Boadicea" has been described as one of the best Anglo-Saxon finds of its kind in the county. She was still holding her shield and had a dagger at her side when she was found. On either side of her at the site just outside Lincoln were the remains of a man and a woman who were possibly her attendants.

The Galileo space craft is about to make its final close encounter with the planet Jupiter. It will hit the dense atmosphere around the planet on Sunday, burning up in a trail of fire. The destruction of Galileo brings to an end one of the most successful voyages of planetary exploration ever.

The Amazon is known today as a rainforest whose natural resources are under threat from human incursion. But before Europeans arrived in the 15th century it was home to dense populations served by a complex of public plazas, roads and canals. Researchers from the University of Florida at Gainesville challenge the traditional view that it was a "pristine" habitat containing only small numbers of scattered villages. Michael Heckenberger, an assistant professor at the university's department of anthropology, says the jungle was being tamed and altered by humans well before Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World in 1492.

Graham Birdsall, Editor of Britain's UFO Magazine, passed away at approximately 5.00 a.m. yesterday, September 19, 2003, in England. Graham brought serious UFO research into the public domain and delivered a vociferous message to enthusiasts and researchers around the globe. He will be greatly missed.

Mars has a case of the munchies. That is, the red planet is spotted with vegetation with some sort of life feasting on the foliage. So says Arthur Clarke, the noted sci-fi writer and space visionary, making the claim during a recent conference on the space elevator. Clarke was keynote speaker at the 2nd annual international conference on the space elevator, held in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Sir Arthur beamed into the gathering by satellite link on September 13.

Astronomers have been so horrified by press scares over asteroids that they are toning down the scale they use to rate the threat posed in an attempt to discourage journalists from covering potential collisions. The most prominent recent furore involved asteroid QQ47, which briefly had a one-in-a-million chance of crashing into our planet in 2014.

The Amazon River basin was not all a pristine, untouched wilderness before Columbus came to the Americas, as was once believed. Researchers have uncovered clusters of extensive settlements linked by wide roads with other communities and surrounded by agricultural developments. The researchers, including some descendants of pre-Columbian tribes that lived along the Amazon, have found evidence of densely settled, well-organized communities with roads, moats and bridges in the Upper Xingu part of the vast tropical region.

Join us in October, in The Mysteries forum, for a month-long discussion of Peter Novak's The Lost Secret of Death: Our Divided Souls and the Afterlife - the culmination of a fifteen year effort to track an archaic belief-system with extraordinary connections to modern afterlife research, neuropsychology, and ancient history. The binary soul doctrine is probably as close as the human race has ever come to having a single world religion; thousands of years ago, people all across the globe once believed virtually the same thing about what happened after death - that human beings possess not one, but two souls, which were in danger of dividing apart from one another when a person died. Click on the Bookshop section of the website to read more.

Physicists have created blobs of gaseous plasma that can grow, replicate and communicate - fulfilling most of the traditional requirements for biological cells. Without inherited material they cannot be described as alive, but the researchers believe these curious spheres may offer a radical new explanation for how life began.

Case Western Reserve University astronomers have announced the discovery of a new galaxy, termed Andromeda VIII. The new galaxy is so widespread and transparent that astronomers did not suspect its existence until they mapped the velocity of stars thought to belong to the well-known and nearby large Andromeda spiral galaxy and found them to move independently of Andromeda.

French archaeologists say they are a step closer to solving the mystery of Afghanistan's legendary lost "third Buddha" of Bamiyan. After five weeks of excavations in the famed valley of the Buddhas in central Afghanistan, the team of archaeologists say they have found evidence which could cast light on the whereabouts of the "reclining Buddha" mentioned by ancient travellers to the region.

Investigators have recovered the Lady of Warka, one of the most valuable exhibits stolen from the Iraqi National Museum in the chaos during Saddam Hussein's fall, Iraq's new culture minister said Wednesday. The alabaster sculpture is believed to be one of the earliest artistic representations of the human face, dating from around 3500 BC.

The meteorite that revived hopes of finding life on Mars is to be analysed by scientists working on the British-led Beagle 2 mission. Claims in 1996 that experts at the US space agency (Nasa) had found fossilised bugs inside a chunk of Mars rock remain highly contested.

Archaeologists at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture had no idea what they would learn when they sent Nellie, the museum's Egyptian mummy, to the University of Washington Medical Center to undergo a CT scan three years ago as the first step in a conservation process. As it turns out, they learned a lot. For one thing, Nellie, who dates back to the Ptolemaic period between 305 and 34 B.C., has four feet. The pair that had been displayed with Nellie for years did not belong to her, according to Peter Lape, the Burke's curator of archaeology and a UW acting assistant professor of anthropology, and Laura Phillips, the Burke's archaeology collections manager. They also found that most of the bones from the mummy's body, including her original feet had been removed sometime in the 20th century, and her chest cavity had been filled with chicken wire and polyurethane foam. Scans of the skull also revealed Nellie's lips faintly curled, enigmatically, like some Egyptian Mona Lisa.

Dr Michael Malin has released the latest images of the so-called 'D & M Pyramid' on the surface of Mars. These images, the most detailed so far, may soon pale into insignificance as Dr Malin has suggested that due to popular demand, the D & M Pyramid, named after researchers Vincent DiPietro and Gregory Molenaar, may be targeted again soon in even greater detail. Hopefully this spells a new era in relations between NASA and the general public who have demanded for years that these anomalous objects be photographed again.

AN asteroid hurtling towards the Earth could wipe out all human life within 30 years, The People can reveal. The 1.5 mile-wide lump of space rock is travelling at 21,000 mph - six miles a second. And it is set to cross Earth's orbit at 10pm on May 19, 2031. Science minister David Sainsbury stunned the House of Lords with news of the devastating discovery by astronomers. Asteroid expert Kevin Yates warned: "If it hit us it would vaporise at least a continent. The climate change would cause a nuclear winter which would potentially mean the extinction of the human race."

From ancient Troy to today's Iraq, warfare forms the backdrop of human history. But anthropologists, archaeologists and other scholars tend to disagree on war's origins: Some see it as an ailment of civilization and others say it has deeper roots. Two anthropologists from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, suggest that although people could have come into conflict before civilization, archaeological remains of burning homes, fleeing refugees and slain captives show simple raids steadily maturing into full-scale warfare as humans settled into villages and society became more stratified.

A Frenchman tore down part of an ancient Inca wall to build a hotel in the Peruvian city of Cusco, capital of the Inca empire, that he ironically wanted to call The Archaeologist. El Comercio newspaper said yesterday that Joel Raymund was planning to slap up a concrete wall in place of the large, finely cut bricks that had been there since before the 16th-century Spanish conquest. Peruvian authorities have halted construction

Jupiter or Mars-like planets beyond our Solar System may be serious contenders for harbouring life, says a British astrophysicist. According to Professor Tim Naylor, of Exeter University, planets that do not resemble home should not be ruled out in the search for primitive lifeforms.

Scientists probing the paranormal say they hope to set up a major experiment in Britain trying to find out once and for all whether the mind can step outside the body at the brink of death. The proposed study would involve interviewing people who had survived cardiac arrest to see if they had had an out-of-body experience while on the operating table.

NASA plans to crash its $1.5 billion Galileo spacecraft into Jupiter next weekend to make sure it doesn't accidentally contaminate the planet's ice-covered moon Europa with bacteria from Earth. After Galileo's orbit carries it behind Jupiter at 3:49 p.m. EDT Sunday, the aging probe will plunge into the planet's stormy atmosphere at a speed of nearly 108,000 mph. Its suicide dive comes at the end of its 35th orbit of the planet -- far longer than the 11 orbits the spacecraft originally was planned to complete.

The vast and mysterious Sahara-like sea of sand that once covered much of western North America came from an Amazon-like river that brought sand from the far-off Appalachians, not the Rockies, geologists said. Thick remnants of the 190 million-year-old sand sea are found today in the scenic, buff-colored Navajo Sandstone cliffs of Utah, New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado. By studying durable minerals in the sandstone called zircons, Yale University geologist Jeffrey Rahl and his colleagues have found a chemical signature that reveals their surprisingly distant Appalachian origin. Rahl's report is in the September issue of the journal Geology.

A dugout canoe that may date from Viking times has been found in Norway, yielding clues to the lives of people who fished a small lake perhaps 1,000 years ago. The pine vessel was dragged from Royraas lake in southern Norway Monday after a tip from the family of two elderly men who had spotted the boat when they swam in the lake as children in the 1930s.

The astronomers, physicists and mathematicians of ancient Greece were true innovators. Ancient Greeks used letters and extra symbols to represent digits. But one thing it seems the ancient Greeks did not invent was the counting system on which many of their greatest thinkers based their pioneering calculations. New research suggests the Greeks borrowed their system known as alphabetic numerals from the Egyptians, and did not develop it themselves as was long believed.

It's a tone no one can hear, generated by a body no one can see, yet its reverberations may be huge. Astronomers reported this week that they have for the first time detected sound waves generated by a black hole. Using a 53-hour-long observation of Perseus with NASA's orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory, Fabian's team found circular ripples in the cluster's gas, similar to those created when a rock is dropped into a pool of water. The ripples are separated by about 35,000 light-years, which produces a B-flat 57 octaves below middle C. The black hole's tone is far lower than the human ear can discern.

Minister of Culture, Farouk Hosni, will inaugurate at the end of this year the Abu Seir archeological site in Giza governorate for the first time. Restoration work in the site has been carried out by the Supreme Council for Antiquities (SCA) at a cost of L.E. 3 billion.

If you were given a chance to aim the camera on NASA's Mars Global Surveyor Mars Orbiter and take a picture of something on the red planet, what would you shoot? Now we know, after NASA released today the first picture selected from hundreds of public suggestions. The photo reveals a thick layer of dust blanketing the floor and wall of the summit crater atop a tall volcano called Pavonis Mons.

The matchstick figures and images of hands lining the Gua Saleh Cave in southeast Borneo were made at least 9,900 years ago, a team of French archaeologists has determined. That date suggests that people inhabited the Asian island, the third largest in the world, some 4,000 to 5,000 years earlier than scientists had previously believed.

Researchers using sophisticated radio-dating techniques have concluded that a tunnel running under ancient Jerusalem was indeed constructed around 700 B.C., during the reign of King Hezekiah, just as it is described in the Bible. The tunnel, which is about 500 meters (550 yards) long, brings water from the Gihon Springs, located some 300 meters (330 yards) outside the walls of old Jerusalem, to the Siloan Pool inside the ancient city. It was built to protect the city's water supply during an Assyrian siege.

A panel of experts working at NASA's request has recommended a bold new search for potentially dangerous asteroids, including smaller objects that could cause regional damage in an Earth impact. The price tag: At least $236 million. The recommendation for a search effort far more expensive than the existing asteroid detection program, appears to have strong support among asteroid experts.

Egypt will use science to dispel the curse of the pharaohs, which popular myth blames for the deaths of those who have opened the tombs of Egypt's ancient rulers, Egypt's antiquities chief says. Zahi Hawass told Reuters a study would examine unexcavated tombs for dangerous substances, gases or germs, to explain the curse, whose fame spread in the 1920s following the death of a British aristocrat who entered King Tutankhamun's tomb.

University of Vermont archaeologists have identified what is unequivocally the first Late Paleoindian site 10,000-9,000 B.P.) in the state-and one of very few known to exist in the eastern United States-near Sunderland Brook in Colchester. The site was discovered last week during an archaeological investigation of property that will be impacted by the construction of an off-ramp for the proposed Chittenden County Circumferential Highway. Preliminary analysis suggests the site was a hunting camp where Native Americans removed and replaced spear points broken during hunts. Other tools recovered suggest that animals may have been butchered and their hides prepared at the site, according to John G. Crock, director of UVM's Consulting Archaeology Program and research assistant professor of anthropology.

The definition of "Native American" is at stake in deciding whether the 9,300-year-old skeleton known as Kennewick Man belongs to scientists or Indian tribes, lawyers for both sides told a federal appeals court Wednesday. The Interior Department has fought with scientists since the bones were discovered in 1996 along the banks of the Columbia River near Kennewick.

CAMBODIAN experts have uncovered seven ancient temples in the Siem Reap area that had been lost to the encroaching forest and years of civil war in the country, an official said today. The most recently discovered temple, found in early September some 15 kilometres north of Angkor Wat, was a late-9th to early-10th century Brahman temple that was unrecorded in any known documents, the official said.

Archaeologists have stumbled across the first underwater evidence of Stone Age settlements in Britain. A team from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in northeast England say they found flint artifacts including tools and arrowheads off the coast near Tynemouth during a training session to prepare them for dive searches elsewhere. They say the items pinpoint two sites dating as far back as 10,000 years ago which would once have been on dry land but were gradually submerged as sea levels rose after the end of the last Ice Age. Dr. Penny Spikins, the archaeologist leading the team, said she had originally applied for funding to search for this type of site in Scotland and had been amazed to find the items lying undisturbed on the sea bed near such a built-up area.

The hellish climate of Venus may have arisen far more recently than previously supposed, suggests new research. If so, pleasant Earth-like conditions probably persisted for two billion years after the planet's birth - plenty of time for life to have developed. Venus is virtually the same size as Earth and, on average, is our nearest neighbour. Today, its atmospheric temperatures are hot enough to melt lead and concentrated sulfuric acid continuously drizzles down from thick sulphurous clouds that completely block out the Sun.

For nearly 2,000 years, legends have swirled about the excesses of the Roman emperor Caligula. It's said he commandeered a sacred temple for his palace foyer. That he made his horse a senator. And that his orgies were so spectacular they inspired an X-rated movie by Penthouse magazine. Historians have long doubted many of these outrageous claims. But now, a team of Stanford archaeologists say they've found the ruins of Caligula's palace -- and that it was, indeed, built around the sacred temple dedicated to the military gods Castor and Pollux.

Archaeologists digging at a prehistoric trade center in the Mexican state of Chihuahua have unearthed a connection to New Mexico. The researchers have found turquoise that might have come from the hills around Cerrillos along with two tons of marine shells from the Gulf of California. They believe the region -- called Casas Grandes -- is a geographical bridge between the pueblos of the Southwest and the cultures of Mesoamerica.

Around 600 years ago, the Pericú people roamed the southern tip of what is now Mexico's Baja peninsula, a finger of land that extends below California. Although the Spanish conquest spelled their demise in the 16th century, the Pericú were living links to America's first settlers, according to a new anthropological study. Pericú skulls closely resemble 8,000- to-11,000-year-old human skulls unearthed in Brazil, say Rolando González-José of the University of Barcelona, Spain, and his colleagues. The Brazilian skulls look strikingly like those of today's Australian aborigines

The discovery of only three comet-sized objects in the Solar System's shadowy Kuiper belt has flummoxed astronomers over the origins of short-period comets. While long-period comets - the kind that appear once and are never seen again - are thought to plunge in directly from a vast cloud called the Oort cloud far beyond the outermost planets, recurring comets with short runs such as Halley's comet were believed to come from the Kuiper belt.

Wars and calamities aside, civilizations have a way of sustaining themselves. Ask Ricardo Eichmann, an archaeologist who is applying science to the story of the queen of Sheba, and has found no sign that she ever existed. Eichmann is not the first skeptic to doubt the existence of the legendary monarch. But in speaking today at a symposium about the glamorous queen, the German archaeologist will add a degree of expertise that comes from a series of twice-yearly, two-month visits to the Middle East. His lecture also will focus on the ability of an ancient culture to thrive and overcome harsh natural challenges.

An ice core recently shipped from Antarctica has yielded its first, eagerly awaited results. The tests confirm that the 3200-metre core dates back at least 750,000 years, making the ice the oldest continuous core ever retrieved. Gases and particles trapped in the layers of an ice core provide information about the Earth's climate and atmosphere. Oxygen and hydrogen isotopes reveal the temperature when the ice formed, for example, while high carbon dioxide and methane levels indicate periods of global warming.

The planet Mars may well have been the scene of the solar system's "second genesis," where forms of life vastly different from Earth's emerged deep beneath the Martian surface billions of years ago, a leading space scientist proposed Wednesday. Christopher McKay, of NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, said that life on early Mars might have been based on DNA, genes and proteins unlike anything found on Earth. If true, it would signal that life should be possible throughout the solar system in forms hitherto inconceivable to Earth-bound scientists, McKay suggested.

Blundering archaeologists were red-faced yesterday after "ancient carvings" found on a giant rock turned out to have been made just eight years ago. The engravings of two intertwined serpents, a dragon and runic symbols on a two-tonne lump of flat-faced granite were spotted in July by holidaymakers on a beach. Local historians were immediately alerted to the find on one of the rocks imported from Norway in the 1980s to make sea defences at Gorleston near Great Yarmouth, Norfolk. Excited archaeologists from Norfolk county council decided that they could date back 2,000 years.

A $1.2 billion observatory recently launched into space has successfully taken its first pictures, NASA said this week. The images were taken as part of a test of the Space Infrared Telescope Facility's infrared array camera. Since it will take another month to further focus and cool the telescope, the early images are not as sharp or polished as they will be those once the mission begins in earnest this fall, NASA said.

Reed huts more than 3,000 years old belonging to workers, perhaps slaves, and with the same floor plan as ancient Israelite four-room houses have been identified at Medinet Habu, opposite Luxor in Egypt. These reed huts may represent extra-Biblical evidence of Israel in Egypt. If true, Israelite, or proto-Israelite, workers were in Egypt in the second half of the 12th century B.C.E., more than a half century later than has previously been thought. This evidence, in turn, would have important implications for the historicity of the Biblical narrative.

EUGENE, Oregon -- Martian biology is likely alive and well on the red planet, but tucked away in caves or dwelling underground, sustained by pockets of water.That prospect has spurred scientists to look for exotic life forms here on Earth, far from the maddening crowd of topside biota that covers our planet. This quizzical quarry for life is helping devise the strategies, the tools, and the procedures for unearthing the biological leftovers from an ancient Mars, or hardy microbes that might exist on that distant world today.

Well, you can all breath a sigh of relief, Asteroid 2003 QQ47 isn't going to smash into Earth on March 21, 2014 and cause widespread death and destruction. But then, if you've been a regular follower of space news, you're probably not really surprised. Astronomers release a warning almost every year that a space rock has some outside chance of striking the Earth, and then revise their estimates shortly afterwards thanks to more observations. The first big rock to freak out the public was Asteroid 1997 XF11; it was supposed to strike the Earth in October 26, 2028. Even though the original threat was still remote, the mass media picked up on this. There were full-page articles in major newspapers, the cover of magazines, and on the evening news. Astronomers quickly followed up the story with a retraction. Not only would XF11 miss the Earth, it would miss by almost a million kilometres, or 2.5 times further than the Moon.

A centuries-old Arctic mystery may be weeks away from resolution as an Icelandic anthropologist prepares to release his findings on the so-called "Blond Eskimos" of the Canadian North. "It's an old story," says Gisli Palsson of the University of Iceland in Reykjavik. "We want to try to throw new light on the history of the Inuit." Stories about Inuit with distinct European features - blue eyes, fair hair, beards - living in the central Arctic have their roots in ancient tales of Norse settlements and explorations.

30,000-year-old carving might be work of Neanderthals or modern humans. Intricate ivory carvings said to be the oldest known examples of figurative art have been uncovered in a cave in southwestern Germany. Researchers say that the finding could change our understanding of early man's imaginative endeavours. The artefacts - including a figurine depicting a Lowenmensch ('lion man') - have been carbon-dated to around 30,000 years ago, when some of the earliest known relatives of modern humans populated Europe.

Archaeologists have found fragments of human bone at a downtown construction site near where an American Indian ruin known as the Miami Circle was found five years ago. Archaeologist Bob Carr, who directs the exploration, said his team found a skull fragment and four bones from human fingers. The skull bone and three finger bones were found Tuesday and another finger bone was discovered Thursday. They were the first human remains found on the six-acre site where developers plan to build luxury condominiums, stores and offices. The nearby Miami Circle is thought to have been carved by Tequesta Indians more than 2,000 years ago.

Egyptian civilization is one of the oldest in history. It is a civilization created by the minds, efforts and religious beliefs of an ancient people who were eager to observe religious rituals in the burial of their dead prompted by a strong belief in the afterlife. Archaeologists however widely disagree on the birthplace of Egyptian civilization, although they mainly refer to Upper Egypt as the land from which it emerged.

Thursday is the deadline for people to express their views over a proposed £193m road development around Stonehenge. It is hoped that the re-routing of the A303 road, and a £57m visitor centre, will rescue the World Heritage site from its label as "a national disgrace". The scheme proposes making the single-carriageway road dual at its busiest section and re-routing it out of sight of the stones by boring a tunnel. More than 1,000 people have already made their views known and a public inquiry is to be held early next year. But the National Trust, while supporting the overall scheme, has reiterated its call for the 2.1 km tunnel proposed by the government, to be lengthened.

Skull measurements on the remains of an isolated group of people who lived at the southern tip of Mexico's Baja California has stirred up the debate on the identity of the first Americans once again. The earliest inhabitants of North America differed subtly but significantly from modern native Americans. The difference is clearly seen in the skull shapes of the first people to colonise the continent, who had longer, narrower skulls than modern people. One theory says it is because two distinct groups of people migrated to North America at different times. But another theory says that just one population reached the continent and then evolved different physical attributes, except for a few isolated groups.

GAZIANTEP - New mosaics and frescos have been excavated from Ancient Zeugma City located in Belkis Village 10 km east from Nizip town of southeastern Gaziantep province, by the River Euphrates. Officials told the A.A correspondent on Saturday that excavation which was started by Gaziantep Governor Lutfullah Bilgin on July 23 in Ancient Zeugma City continued.

Bulgarian archaeologists say they have found evidence of the earliest known metalworking foundry in Europe. At a site in southern Bulgaria, they found a stone age fireplace and traces of copper slag, the residue of copper melting. The fireplace dates from about 6,000, BC Archeologists say this would be proof of metalworking at least 1,500 years earlier than it was previously thought to have originated in Europe.

PLANS to begin quarrying in a new area close to important Neolithic henges near Nosterfield are to be submitted to the council within the next few months, an action group formed to protect them has learned. Jon Lowry, chairman of the Friends of the Thornborough Henges, has received a letter confirming that Tarmac Northern Ltd, which is already quarrying in other areas around the henges, "is shortly to submit a planning application for the Ladybridge Farm area."

CAIRO (Reuters) - The mummy a British Egyptologist says could be the ancient Egyptian Queen Nefertiti, renowned for her beauty, is much more likely to be a man, Egypt's antiquities chief Zahi Hawass says. Nefertiti, wife and co-ruler with the pharaoh Akhenaten and stepmother of legendary boy King Tutankhamun, has long been considered one of the most powerful women of ancient Egypt.

In 1694, an 80-gun British warship called the HMS Sussex set sail for southern France loaded with as much as 3 million pounds sterling and 6 tons of gold. The bounty was intended for the Duke of Savoy, a bribe to keep him allied with England in its war against Louis XIV. The Duke never did get the money. Severe gales whipped up off the north coast of Africa. The Sussex foundered along with a dozen other ships in the British fleet, taking all its riches (and the lives of 1,200 crew members) to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. Ultimately, the Duke threw his support to Louis XIV, and England's battle with France raged for seven more years before ending in a stalemate.

ALEXANDRIA, Egypt -- Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak inaugurated a new antiquities museum Sunday, displaying mummies as well as pharaonic and Roman artifacts, in this Mediterranean port city. The Alexandria National Museum, located in a restored mansion, will hold up to 1,800 artifacts from the country's pharaonic, Roman, Coptic and Islamic eras and some modern pieces. Mummies are shown in a special underground chamber.

A Russian cargo rocket has docked safely at the International Space Station, bringing much-needed supplies to the two astronauts on board. Since the Columbia disaster put America's space shuttle programme on hold, Russian cargo rockets and crew capsules have been the only link between the space station and Earth. Sixteen nations were involved in building the station, but Russian officials say they are now shouldering most of the burden of keeping it going.

Fish are socially intelligent creatures who do not deserve their reputation as the dim-wits of the animal kingdom, according to a group of leading scientists. Rather than simply being instinct-driven, the group says fish are cunning, manipulative and even cultured. The three experts from the universities of Edinburgh, St Andrews and Leeds said there had been huge changes in science's understanding of the psychological and mental abilities of fish in the last few years.

The team behind an attempt to break the world manned balloon altitude record say their flight will begin from Cornwall on Tuesday. British pilots Andy Elson, from Somerset, and Colin Prescot, from Hampshire, aim to break a 42-year-old record. They hope to ascend 132,000 feet (25 miles) into the stratosphere with the 1,270-ft (387 m) tall QinetiQ 1 balloon. The revolutionary craft is expected to launch between 0600 BST and 0800 BST on Tuesday from QinetiQ's vessel Triton - a prototype trimaran warship - off St Ives.

Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni Saturday received a report by the joint legal-archaeological committee that recently went to Switzerland to examine a suspicious parcel kept at the Geneva Airport customs. The report read that the parcel contains valuable archaeological pieces dating back to Pharaonic, Greek and Roman periods, which were stolen from Egypt in illegal excavations near the areas adjacent to archaeological sites. All the seized artifacts have no traces of figures of stores or museums. Zahi Hawas, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), said the general prosecutor had approved dispatching a state security official within a delegation to attend investigations on a suspicious parcel exported from Egypt to Zurich.

Hundreds of deep-sea species new to science are disappearing before they can be identified or studied, oceanographers are warning. The organisms are being pushed to extinction by trawlers targeting undersea volcanic mountains called seamounts. In the past two years, scientists have found that seamounts are home to an astonishing diversity of species, with 40 per cent endemic to each mountain. Thousands of new species have been discovered in recent years - 600 on just five seamounts.

The beautiful Trifid Nebula (aka M20), a photogenic study in cosmic contrasts, lies about 5,000 light-years away toward the nebula rich constellation Sagittarius. A star forming region in the plane of our galaxy, the Trifid alone illustrates three basic types of astronomical nebulae; red emission nebulae dominated by light from hydrogen atoms, blue reflection nebulae produced by dust reflecting starlight, and dark absorption nebulae where dense dust clouds appear in silhouette. The bright emission nebula on the right, separated into three parts by obscuring dust lanes, lends the nebula its popular name. Many details are apparent in this gorgeous high-resolution image of the Trifid. For example, light-year long pillars and jets sculpted by newborn stars - visible here in the upper right-hand corner of the emission nebula - appear in Hubble Space Telescope close-up images of the region.

It was in a stubble field near St Andrews that Sandy Lyon almost walked away from the biggest find of his metal detecting career. "There was a huge signal but I thought it was just a beer can," he says. "They're big and usually near the surface so they give a really big signal. I walked away from it, but then thought I'd dig it, just in case. It was within four to six inches of the surface - most stuff comes up at that depth - and as soon as I got it out of the ground I knew exactly what it was." Drawing on his eight years of detecting experience and know-ledge of archaeological relics, he identified the find as a Middle Bronze Age Palstave axe and dated it as 3500 years old. "I found it hard to believe I was holding it, because they're never usually seen in Scotland," says Sandy, a full-time carer and secretary of the Scottish Detector Club. "It was only the third one to be found. It was in great condition."

With a Panama hat glued to his head, a spirited personality and an appreciation for the power of the media, Zahi Hawass is one of the most colorful secretaries general to have graced the office of Egypt's Supreme Council for Antiquities (SCA). In recent months, Hawass has launched a noisy campaign to retrieve precious antiquities stolen from Egypt lately, as well as those spirited out of the country in earlier times. While Hawass' agenda has won the hearts of many an Egyptian nationalist, his often ready-aim-fire comments - none of which the media appears to have missed - have caused an uproar on several occasions.

An archaeology project got under way earlier this week in Old Town Kenai to try to uncover some of the city's buried past. Several archaeologists joined forces and employed cutting edge technology in an effort to locate the foundation of what was Fort Kenay. "We're looking for structures, a possible fort location and late 19th and early 20th century features that can be tied to historic events of this area," said Alan Boraas, Kenai Peninsula College professor of anthropology and one of the archaeologists involved in the project.

Long before the first legends of the silver screen planted their stars in the sidewalk of Hollywood Boulevard, celebrity-conscious Athenians had pioneered the first Walk of Fame, which reopened this week. After more than a century buried in the sprawl of the modern Greek capital, the fourth-century BC Tripodon Street has re-emerged into the light in Plaka, under the Acropolis. Constantine Kazamiakis, the architect who oversaw the excavation, believes dramatic history has been uncovered, because the street was once flanked by tributes to the greatest actors, playwrights and producers of the age.

When Frank Gillespie began work on his garden wall in Culmore he had little idea that just below his feet lay a large stone axe estimated to be around 8-9,000 years-old. Frank's father Hugh Gillespie, of Lone Moor Road, had been digging the foundation for the wall when he unearthed the ancient tool. "My father found it and left it to one side, paying little notice, but when I spotted it I knew it was some kind of artefact as it was chipped from work," said Frank (38)."We were in the back garden digging a foundation for a small wall at the time - we weren't looking for anything," added the electronics engineer.

Experts meeting in Central Asia are debating water issues amid controversy over the possibility of catastrophic flooding from a huge mountain lake located high in the Pamir mountains. In early August, an expedition by civil defence experts and Russian mountaineers concluded that an earthquake in nearby Afghanistan could destroy the natural barrier which holds back Lake Sarez, in south-eastern Tajikistan. Fears have been expressed that the resulting flood could surge down the Panj and Amu Darya rivers, devastating large areas of inhabited land and displacing hundreds of thousands of people. Lake Sarez was itself created by a major earthquake in 1911. Its waters are held back by a natural barrier of rocks and boulders over 500m (1640ft) high.

Nuclear reprocessing was once seen as the key to a virtually unlimited supply of power. But British Nuclear Fuels (BFNL) has acknowledged that one of Britain's best known nuclear plants - Sellafield, in Cumbria - is likely to cease its reprocessing activities in the next decade. Its thermal oxide reprocessing plant - Thorp - is running at only about half capacity and major difficulties have been encountered trying to dispose of a highly radioactive liquid by-product.