Newsdesk Archive
Mesolithic Britain was thought to have been inhabited by hunter-gatherers, constantly on the move in search of food; however, the recent excavation of a dwelling in Northumbria reveals our Stone Age ancestors to have been ingenious and elaborate house builders. Julian Richards re-assesses a distant past.
There are few names to which more diverse persons and disciplines lay claim than the term "Hermetic." Alchemists ancient and contemporary apply the adjective "Hermetic" to their art, while magicians attach the name to their ceremonies of evocation and invocation. Followers of Meister Eckhart, Raymond Lull, Paracelsus, Jacob Boehme, and most recently Valentin Tomberg are joined by academic scholars of esoterica, all of whom attach the word "Hermetic" to their activities.
Graham Hancock is scheduled to give a lecture in Glastonbury on March 8th. If you live in the UK, or are planning a visit in early March, don't miss this opportunity to hear Graham in person at the Glastonbury Town Hall, from 7:30pm-10pm. Tickets are £15.00 (£10.00 for senior citizens, £5.00 for students).
To the primitive hands that deftly shaped it from rose-colored quartz 350,000 years ago, the glittering stone ax may have been as dazzling as any ceremonial saber.
Somewhat surprisingly, the phrase stems from an ancient Greek proverb. "There is always something new coming out of Africa," wrote Aristotle more than 2,300 years ago in his book on natural history.
Eight anthropologists who want to study an ancient skeleton must want until a federal court has heard an appeal of the case by four Northwest tribes that consider the bones sacred.
The area east of Luxor temple is being released from urban encroachment and, a Roman military encampment is being revealed
The latest archaeological finds of arrow heads and stone tools prove that human activity at Guangzhou City, capital of south China's Guangdong Province, existed as early as 3,500 to 4,000 years ago.
What the Howick site shows is that if the living was good then people stayed put for much longer than was previously thought. The nearby freshwater Howick Burn and the seashore provided fish and shellfish, and the surrounding woodland was a larder of game, nuts and berries and apparently tempted the Northumberland prehistoric group to put down roots for long stretches of the year. The dig began after amateur archaeologists noticed evidence of ancient human habitation.
A mystery sarcophagus found in the tomb of the overseer of works during the reign of Queen Hatshepsut was opened on the Theban necropolis last week. Nevine El-Aref was there
A 1,900-year-old stone stele has been rescued from being submerged in the huge reservoir of the Three Gorges dam project in Zhongxian county, southwest China's Chongqing municipality.
A high-level delegation from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization ( UNESCO) is here inspecting the status of conservation of seven zones that make Nepal's Kathmandu Valley a world heritage site.
The Chinese have raised another army of remarkable dimensions - reason for antiquarian surmise, not alarm. The army is hundreds of foot-tall terra-cotta warriors, along with horses and chariots, that come from the depths of a tomb site.
Uruguay's rich history spans more than 11,000 years. On the wetlands of Rocha, declared by UNESCO as one of the most diverse environments on Earth, mound-building people thrived 4000 years ago. They built planned villages, made pottery and other tools, grew corn, squash, beans, and tubers, and developed an elaborate belief system. This video shows Uruguayan archaeologists leading teachers and students from Rocha in archaeological exploration of the prehispanic past of their province, inspiring them to bring archaeology into their classroom.
The well-preserved villages of the Anasazi and other native peoples who lived in what is now the high desert of the U.S. Southwest more than a thousand years ago suggest that the canyon cities were suddenly abandoned. But new evidence presented by researchers at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Monday indicates that occupation of many of the ancient pueblos was an on-again, off-again thing over the centuries.
New dates from an important archaeological site in Australia have removed a serious challenge to a theory about the origin of modern humans.
Professor Linda Cordell, director of the CU Museum, said many sites that appear to be abandoned are settlements that were relocated nearby. Understanding the frequent movements of prehispanic farmers involves looking at their environment and subsistence patterns, the accuracy of archaeological investigations and the peoples' social landscape, or "sense of home," she said.
Ancient DNA in skeletons has a tendency to show damage in a particular region, resulting in misleading genetic data and mistaken conclusions about the origin of the skeleton, British scientists said.
Recent historical and archeological research is providing a much different and richer picture, concluding that much of the food served on the medieval dinner table would be recognized and enjoyed today, and pointing out that even medieval etiquette frowned on unsanitary dogs at the dinner table.
One of the ancient mysteries of the south Atlantic coast, huge oyster shell rings, might be more than just the leftovers of prehistoric fish camps. A leading archaeologist studying rings claims new discoveries on private land in Edisto suggest the 6,000-year-old rings were ceremonial sites. The claim rubs right at the nub of the biggest controversy over the rings, whether the wide-as-a-house, taller-than-a-person enclosures were erected purposefully or simply built up over time from discards.
The Northern Cherokee Nation of the Old Louisiana Territory has recently shocked the world by claiming their ancient Oral legends tell of a Cherokee migration made to America from the area known as Masada.
The first human beings appeared in Australia 50,000 years ago and managed to overcome hostile dry conditions which wiped out the continent's large animals, according to a paper to be published in the journal Nature on Thursday.
Dr. Robert Schoch stunned the world when he redated the Sphinx, proving it was much older than thought. Now he tells us about his new discoveries and his revolutionary book, Voyages of the Pyramid Builders. Linda Moulton Howe has a report on the secret Aurora aircraft and a stunner about a scientist who is using an ordinary printer to create transplantable, living organs.
Bulgarian archaeologists discovered an oval ritual hall fitting the description that ancient historians gave to the Dionysus Temple in the Rhodope range famous for its splendor and mysteriousness in antique times and for the many failed attempts to determine its exact location in modernity.
Last summer, the Culture Ministry appointed a special committee of experts to prove that the Saraswati was not merely a mythological river, dismissed by historians as nothing more than a figment of the imagination of Hindu sages who praise it as the "greatest of mothers, greatest of rivers and greatest of goddesses" in the Vedas.
New archaeological evidence points to an independent origin of agriculture in coastal Ecuador 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. Suddenly, the remains of larger squash plants appear in the record. The Las Vegas site, described by Dolores Piperno of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) and Karen Stothert, University of Texas at Austin in the February 14th issue of Science, may predate plant domestication sites in the Mesoamerican highlands.
The last secret of one of the greatest historical hoaxes in the history of the West has finally been revealed -- it was a joke pulled on an eminent UC Berkeley professor by members of E Clampus Vitus, which describes itself as either a historical drinking society or a drinking historical society.
Ocean explorer Robert Ballard has used underwater robot technology to find the wreck of the Titanic as well as a mystery of biblical proportions on the bottom of the Black Sea. Now he wants to use the Internet to help bring the world with him on a Black Sea sequel this summer.
Depardieu, who has played transvestites, thieves, 19th century heroes and even Asterix's friend Obelix in his prolific career, discovered St Augustine's writings several years ago and was deeply taken by his conversion from a power-hungry sybarite to a pious Christian.
In an unusual case of ghostwriting turned on its head, one of the world's top medical journals announced today that it was retracting an article it published last year because several listed authors said they had little or nothing to do with the research.
Ambition, pedantry, hauteur -- common intellectual vices...serve to turn institutions of inquiry into fortresses of repression. Embittered academics with no power but unbounded arrogance often become gurus for academic hooligans or apologists for Nazi-type systems. Martin Heidegger, rector of the university of Freiburg, is an oft-cited example...
When physicist João Magueijo suggested doing away with the central tenet of relativity - that the speed of light is constant and unsurpassable - he risked his career. Magueijo survived, but in his book, he pushes even harder. He also reveals his contempt for the underpinnings of modern science. He reckons, for example, that the process of peer review is largely useless. Michael Brooks caught up with him - just before the lawyers
Paleontologists recently uncovered a nearly complete 55-million-year-old skeleton of a mouse-size creature known as Carpolestes simpsoni. Like modern primates (or euprimates, as they are termed), it has long fingers and toes, as well as nails on its opposable digits--good for grasping spindly tree limbs. But unlike euprimates, this animal exhibits laterally positioned eyes and legs built for climbing, not leaping.
A suddenly cold climate about 5,500 years ago coincided with the advent of ancient Chinese civilization, implying some relationship between the two events, Chinese scientists said Monday.
Join us in March, in The Mysteries forum, for a month-long discussion of John Grigsby's Warriors of the Wasteland.
The National Geographic magazine has stated their intense interest in Bulgaria's archeological and historical landmarks at a meeting of the senior editors with the country's Foreign Minister Solomon Passy. According to the minister who is in New York for the session of the UN Security Council, Bulgaria's rich history and natural beauty make for a huge potential ideal for projects that National Geographic is interested in.
The Biblical Archaeology Society (BAS) educates the public about archaeology and the Bible through magazines, books, visual materials and seminars. Our readers rely on us to present the latest that scholarship has to offer in a fair and accessible manner. BAS serves as an important authority and as an invaluable source of reliable information.
The largest site from the Pre- and Protodynastic period (3800-3100 B.C.), Hierakonpolis the City of the Hawk is the most important site for understanding the foundations of Egyptian civilization. Here, nearly 400 miles south of Cairo, archaeological investigation over the past century has confirmed this vast site's central role in the transition from prehistory to history.
'The compositions published in Mrs. Shelley's lifetime afford but an inadequate conception of the intense sensibility and mental vigour of this extraordinary woman.'
Large asteroid impacts have nasty side effects, as any dinosaur could have told you were she not obliterated by one of these calamity combos 65 million years ago. The ground shakes. Fire arcs across the sky and beyond the horizon. Clouds of debris race around the planet and blot the Sun out for months.
For more than three centuries botanists and mathematicians have marveled at the complex and beautiful spiral patterns that form as plants develop. As they generate leaves around a stem, or seeds or flowers in a blossom, plants as diverse as broccoli, pinecones, artichokes and water lilies create intricate spirals that follow a well-known mathematical sequence of numbers.
Time Magazine carried a headline that aroused curiosity: "Digging for the Baptist." The reference was to an archaeological dig being carried out for the past two years or so in Qumran, near the shore of the Dead Sea.
Early humans approximately 100,000 years ago traveled from Africa to Asia via a southern route that likely passed along the coasts of what are now Pakistan and India, according to researchers at Oxford University.
Recent findings about the exotic properties of monatomic gold and the platinum group metals are rediscoveries of an advanced science understood or at least known by the ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Israelite priests.
My colleague Robert Schoch's previous book VOICES OF THE ROCKS was a state-of-the-art statement on 'catastrophe theory', the idea that in the not so distant past (ca. 12000 BC) the earth was rocked by a tremendous catastrophe (possibly a strike by an asteroid, bolide or comet) that almost instantly annihilated a large proportion of the larger land mammals then roaming the globe -- mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, saber-toothed tigers and many others
Hidden somewhere in an anonymous Athens office building lies an adventurer's ultimate dream - a modern-day map charting in detail more than 1,000 ancient shipwrecks still submerged in Greek seas.
When most of the academics trained in the study of the ancient world look at pyramids on different continents, they see proof of humankind's division into distinct, separate civilizations. We see something quite the opposite: compelling evidence of the underlying unity of civilization.
New research shows that the Gulf Stream has little effect on the contrast in winter temperatures between Europe and eastern North America, dispelling a long-held assumption. Instead, atmospheric circulation, augmented by the Rocky Mountains, plays a larger role, say Dr. Richard Seager of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Dr. David Battisti of the University of Washington, and their colleagues.
People of the Bronze Age traded and travelled more widely along a network of ancient highways in the the Middle East than previously thought, newly-released satellite images show.
The recent discovery that exotic microbes teem in the rocks hundreds of metres beneath the floor of the Pacific Ocean looks set to fuel the controversy over where and when life began. And it will also considerably boost hopes for life on Mars.
The Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty recently ruled that Bjørn Lomborg's book The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the True State of the Planet constitutes "scientific dishonesty." Far from proving that Lomborg engaged in academic or scientific fraud, however, the report reveals the highly politicized state of environmental science: Lomborg's real sin is environmental incorrectness.
Instead it encompasses all human experience, arts and endeavour. Holistically, it embraces evidence from ancient civilisations as well as the latest space probes. The result is an astounding concordance between modern plasma physics and the ancient testimony of battling planets.
If You go down to the woods today, or into the hills, you may find Bigfoot alive and well and living in the wilds of northern Scotland. Geoff Lincoln, of British Hominid Research, claims there is a steady influx of reported sightings of the elusive beast throughout the UK, including several in the North.
Everyone will have heard at one time or another the name of Atlantis mentioned, we can come across it in various contexts. Almost any encyclopaedia is sure to have an article on Atlantis, which usually reads something like this: "Atlantis - according to an ancient Greek myth recorded by Plato, there had once existed a vast island in the Atlantic Ocean to the west of Gibraltar, with fertile soil and densely populated, which sank to the bottom of the sea because of an earthquake. Questions of whether Atlantis has ever existed, and if so, why it vanished, today continue to arouse as much controversy among scientists as ever."
Members of a joint U.S.-Bulgarian research expedition discovered the wreck on August 1, 2002 in 275 feet (84 meters) of water off the eastern coast of Bulgaria. Using a three-person submersible vehicle launched from the 180-foot (55-meter) Bulgarian research ship Akademik, the team dove on a target previously identified by sonar on the last day of a 14-day expedition.
The world's glaciers are slowly melting, and as they do, artifacts from the near and distant past are emerging from the ice. NPR's Eric Niiler reports on the discovery of archaeological treasure.
Scientists are seriously challenging a recent, fascinating proposal that Noah's epic story -- setting sail with an ark jam-full of animal couples -- was based on an actual catastrophic flood that suddenly filled the Black Sea 7,500 years ago, forcing people to flee.
`Burial art' is not unusual in the Christian world. Here and there, it can be found in the crypts of churches - a reminder of death lurking around the corner.
In the simmering heat of a Yucatán afternoon, the imposing sixteenth-century Franciscan monastery and church of San Miguel at Maní looms over an empty plaza, its congregants taking refuge from the sun in their tidy cement-block homes and businesses. Once an important Maya and Franciscan center, Maní is now a humble hamlet, and its once-thriving monastery looks lonely and out of place.
St. Paul of Tarsus visited Rome four times from A.D. 44 to 62 to spread the message of Christianity and, while traveling through Anatolia, stopped twice at Ephesus. He caused violent protests when he preached sermons in monotheistic Jewish synagogues in order to spread the word of Christianity in polytheistic Ephesus. St. Paul was killed on his fourth visit to Rome. St. Theoklia, who accompanied him on some of his journeys, later died in Antioch, modern Antakya.
The following pages are intended to serve as a general introduction to Greek literature and thought, for those, primarily, who do not know Greek. Whatever opinions may be held as to the value of translations, it seems clear that it is only by their means that the majority of modern readers can attain to any knowledge of Greek culture; and as I believe that culture to be still, as it has been in the past, the most valuable element of a liberal education....
The ancient Greeks traced their history to mythological events and their genealogy to the gods and goddesses. Perhaps the most pivotal event in the early history of ancient Greece was the Trojan War -- the most important record of which is The Iliad of Homer -- which was started, according to the ancient reports, by a conflict among the goddesses.
"Unique" is not a word any writer should use lightly; and truly "unique" archaeological sites are few and far between. I don't mean the oldest sites or the sites with the most golden artifacts, I mean the the kind of sites that the more you learn about them, the more startling and fascinating they become. The Early Middle Archaic Windover Bog site, a pond cemetery on Florida's Atlantic coast near Cape Canaveral, is just one of those sites.
By grinding up millennia-old pottery, scientists have detected traces of milk some 6,000 years old in Britain, the earliest direct evidence known of human dairy activities.
Homer knew his geography, say US researchers. The ancient Greek writer's description of the war fought around Troy is consistent with a new reconstruction of the way the region looked about three millennia ago,
Claims of having discovered the world's oldest human settlement in the Gulf of Cambay off the coast of Gujarat were just "bunkum", renowned marine biologist S R Rao has said. Such a "flippant and premature" announcement to the media prior to publishing the data in a peer-reviewed journal "puts credibility of Indian science at stake", Rao said here. [EDITOR'S NOTE: Please see Graham Hancock's Response here: http://www.grahamhancock.com/phorum/read.php?f=1&i=129566&t=129565 ]
RAO's opinion on the Cambay find is just that, an opinion. He has not dived at the site (actually he does not dive and never has). No-one else has dived at the site. No new information has been forthcoming since the original scans and dredges. As such Rao's opinion does no more than echo the opinions voiced last year by most Western scientists and quite a few Indian scientists...
[DON'T MISS THIS ONE. IT'S ONE TO BOOKMARK! - Web Editor] As previously demonstrated in Part I of this article series, there are four axes which radiate outward from the "hub" of the summit's main stupa platform in the cardinal directions, representing the four quadrants of the annual "Sun wheel" of the solar cycle. The Sun's symbolic presence is further confirmed by the cruciform shape of the entire summit area, which is a universal symbol across cultures of the crossroads of solar time.
Today, scientists are busy searching for the biological cocktail that makes barren earth productive. If they can succeed in recreating the Amerindians' terra preta, then a legacy more precious than the gold the Conquistadors sought could spare the rainforest from destruction and help feed people across the developing world.
We hypothesise that a reduction in population density across most of the region during the coldest part of the Younger Dryas (around 12,800-11,400 cal. y.a.) may have been followed by a sudden rebound phase, when climate switched back to warm, moist Holocene conditions over only a few decades. A 'sparse wave' of hunter-gatherers migrating rapidly out of a refugial area (possibly located in southern Europe and/or the Near East) would have made a disproportionate contribution to the genetic and linguistic legacy of the region.
Archaeologists have excavated a Buddhist site, which could date back to the period of Emperor Ashoka, in Udhamsingh Nagar district of Uttaranchal, a senior police official said on Friday.
The discovery of an ancient sandstone tablet with inscriptions attributed to contemporaries of King Joash of Judea claims to provide proof of a parallel Biblical passage describing renovations on the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. Israeli archaeology experts say the unknown origin of the tablet and the use of contemporary Hebrew idiom in its inscription, point to a forgery attempt reminiscent of the recently discovered "Jesus box."
New scientific findings have backed traditional Maori accounts that New Zealand was settled about 30 generations ago.
Using charcoal, someone drew over several pictographs in Dry Canyon in the Badlands east of Bend, defacing about five and destroying at least one of the irreplaceable images.
Chinese archaeologists have discovered the ruins of a prehistoric city dating back an estimated 4,300 years in southwest Sichuan province, state press said.
In a cafe in Cyprus, the University of Cincinnati scholar overheard conversations about an ancient tomb. Her interest piqued, she listened intently as the locals described an apparently undisturbed archaeological site. It might be only a tall tale or a local legend, Gisela Walberg thought, but what if...?
Archaeological evidence from prehistoric hunters in Washington and Alaska adds new fuel to the ongoing debate over the belief that humans have a propensity to over-exploit their natural resources, and also indicates that early Indians' harvest of northern fur seals was sustainable. "The research clearly indicates that over-exploitation is not a universal characteristic of subsistence economies," said Michael Etnier, who earned his doctorate in anthropology from the University of Washington last month.
[The Daily Grail] If we do cover 'new paradigm' ideas, then who is to decide what is a genuine 'contender', and what is merely tabloid pap? As editor of TDG, I suppose that should be my decision - but as I doubt my tentatively held beliefs almost continually, I am often unwilling to impose my judgement upon others' research.
Evolutionary biologists have long believed that evolving faster, adapting better, and learning more quickly should always be beneficial for a species. In a recent paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig/Germany and from the University of Washington/USA reveal that this is not always the case.
That enduring metaphor for the randomness of evolution, a blind watchmaker that works to no pattern or design, is being challenged by two European chemists. They say that the watchmaker may have been blind, but was guided and constrained by the changing chemistry of the environment, with many inevitable results.
It has been with great surprise that researchers have greeted a paper in the current Nature in which an international team of researchers reports evidence that wingless stick insects have re-evolved wings at least four times in the history of the group.
Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Geoffrey West [says] the number four plays a key role in how all life on earth takes shape. West has been investigating how basic systems common in animals - such as metabolism, heart rate and blood flow - differ among animals of greatly contrasting sizes. He's found four is fundamental in all of the equations that calculate those rates.
The Mahabharata, the largest ancient Indian epos, is at least 2000 years old. It was written down a long time ago before the technology which is described in some parts of it, was (re)invented in our time. Even at the time of the complete literal and close english translation, in the years 1886-1890, by Kisari Mohan Ganguli, published by Pratap Chandra Roy, no aircraft ever flew and the first combustion engine was just invented a few month ago.
Tutankhamun: Anatomy of an Excavation is ambitious in its scope but simple in its aims: to make the complete records of Howard Carter's excavation of the tomb of Tutankhamun available on these web pages.
The Giant's Causeway is not the work of men or monsters, but a natural consequence of how lava cools and solidifies, new computer simulations suggest.
Granite statues and stelas of pharaohs who ruled from northern Sudan some 2,600 years ago, including the last "black pharaohs," have been found by a team of French and Swiss archeologists, a statement said Sunday.
The oldest image of a star pattern, that of the famous constellation of Orion, has been recognised on an ivory tablet some 32,500 years old. The tiny sliver of mammoth tusk contains a carving of a man-like figure with arms and legs outstretched in the same pose as the stars of Orion.
Part of the base of a pre-Hispanic pyramid was uncovered in Mexico City's historic downtown during reconstruction work on the areas' manifold colonial structures, city officials said Monday.
Chinese authorities mishandled the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of people being moved to make way for the giant Three Gorges Dam, an environmentalist group charged Monday.
Archaeologists have discovered evidence of an invasion of the Middle East by one of the world's first superpowers, which destroyed much of the region 33 centuries ago.
A French yacht taking part in the Jules Verne round-the-world sailing trophy was gripped by a giant squid for about an hour in the mid-Atlantic, its skipper announced by radio-link.
The world's first truly artificial organism has been engineered by researchers in California. The bacterium makes an amino acid that no other organism uses to build proteins.
Physicists leveled heavy criticism Thursday on a report from last week that claimed the speed of gravity had been determined by observation and was equal to the speed of light. One physicist called the interpretation of the finding "nonsense". Others were more diplomatic.
Can you imagine that an Ancient Egyptian physician once fitted a patient with a prosthetic toe? (see Al-Ahram Weekly Issue 599, 15-21 August 2002). It is hard to believe that a person who died 3,000 years ago had a custom-made wooden toe. I considered it important enough to be included in the exhibition the "Hidden Treasures" now open to the public in the basement of the Egyptian Museum [Zahi Hawass]
An astonishing 95,000 people visited the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) between 16 November and 29 December 2002 to view the so-called ossuary of James, brother of Jesus Christ. The exhibit had been hurriedly restored after being seriously damaged in transit from Jerusalem.
Bord Gais has published a calendar highlighting some of the significant archaeological discoveries made during construction of the pipeline carrying natural gas to Galway and Limerick. The 318km pipeline from Scotland comes ashore at Gormanston in Co Meath, where one of the most interesting finds was made last summer, a prehistoric dug-out canoe which had become buried in the seabed.
The lost city of Naachtun -- mysteriously abandoned at the height of its powers -- beckoned Reese-Taylor, one of only a handful of archeologists in the past 80 years to visit the site.
"In my opinion, the only theory that provides a fully comprehensive explanation for the Pyramid Complex...is the theory that the complex basically represents --in its entirety and simultaneously-- cosmology, cosmic renewal and cosmic governance." [David O'Connor, Stazionen: Beitrage Zur Kult. Agypt.Rainer Stadelmann Gewidmet, Mainz 1998]
The land bridge animation is based on the best available digital information, and reveals large-scale patterns of shifting coastlines and environments as the land bridge evolved. Bathymetry and elevation are color-coded in 1000 calendar-year time steps.
Writers in antiquity tell of dried fish, a staple of the ancient Greek diet, being imported from great distances. Now there's evidence of just how far from Crimea, in what is now Ukraine.