About 30 human skeletons that have been dated to the second millennium BC have been discovered in the cave of La Grave, in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, and could provide vital clues relating to the first settlers in the Americas according to archaeologists from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).
Oldest genetic lineagesBased on osteometric studies, ancient DNA and radiocarbon tests that have been applied to the skeletal remains which began to be recovered in 2011 near the town of Tula, it is possible this area has signs of one of the oldest genetic lineages in the Americas, associated with the men who crossed into the continent around 12 thousand years ago.
The exploration and excavation of burial caves in Tamaulipas seeks to “better understand the origin, development, quality and lifestyle of ancient cultures who settled in the region,” said physical anthropologist Jesús Ernesto González Velasco who works at the INAH Centre, Tamaulipas.
The dry spell blanketing Bulgaria for the past two months has resulted in an unexpected archaeological discovery, with the remains of a 7000-year-old defensive wall emerging from the waters of the Ticha accumulation lake near the town of Shoumen in northeastern Bulgaria.
The wall is more than five meters tall, made of rocks that are being held together by clay. The wall has an arrowslit and appears to be better built than other fortifications dating back to the same period in this part of Europe, historian Stefan Chohadjiev from Veliko Turnovo University told Bulgarian National Television.
The colorful secret of a 1,600-year-old Roman chalice at the British Museum is the key to a supersensitive new technology that might help diagnose human disease or pinpoint biohazards at security checkpoints.
The glass chalice, known as the Lycurgus Cup because it bears a scene involving King Lycurgus of Thrace, appears jade green when lit from the front but blood-red when lit from behind—a property that puzzled scientists for decades after the museum acquired the cup in the 1950s. The mystery wasn’t solved until 1990, when researchers in England scrutinized broken fragments under a microscope and discovered that the Roman artisans were nanotechnology pioneers: They’d impregnated the glass with particles of silver and gold, ground down until they were as small as 50 nanometers in diameter, less than one-thousandth the size of a grain of table salt. The exact mixture of the precious metals suggests the Romans knew what they were doing—“an amazing feat,” says one of the researchers, archaeologist Ian Freestone of University College London.
The ancient nanotech works something like this: When hit with light, electrons belonging to the metal flecks vibrate in ways that alter the color depending on the observer’s position. Gang Logan Liu, an engineer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who has long focused on using nanotechnology to diagnose disease, and his colleagues realized that this effect offered untapped potential. “The Romans knew how to make and use nanoparticles for beautiful art,” Liu says. “We wanted to see if this could have scientific applications.”
When various fluids filled the cup, Liu suspected, they would change how the vibrating electrons in the glass interacted, and thus the color. (Today’s home pregnancy tests exploit a separate nano-based phenomenon to turn a white line pink.)
Mystery of the ancient kingdom discovered in Nepal where thousands of caves are carved 155ft off the ground
Hidden within the Himalayas, 155ft from the ground, these man-made caves are one of the World’s greatest archaeological mysteries.
Thousands of holes are carved into the fragile, sandy-coloured cliff in a gorge so large it dwarfs the Grand Canyon.
The astonishing number of caves, some dug into the cliffside, others tunnelled from above are thousands of years old but who built them and why remains a mystery.
Return of the Black Death: Boy, 15, dies after eating groundhog infected with bubonic plague in Kyrgyzstan
An outbreak of the deadly bubonic plague has tormented the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan after the death of a 15-year-old boy.
Three more people showed symptoms of the ‘Black Death’, and in total 131 came into contact with the victim.
More than 800 people have been screened in the town of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.
The disease wiped out tens of millions in 14th century Europe.
It was reported that 15-year-old Temirbek Isakunov died after eating a barbecued groundhog infected with the lethal virus, yet another account suggests he became infected after being bitten by an oriental flea carried by a marmot that he reportedly prepared for food.
Eastern districts of the mountainous country were in ‘lockdown’ last night as officials sought to prevent the plague spreading.
THE world’s oldest temple, Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey, may have been built to worship the dog star, Sirius.The 11,000-year-old site consists of a series of at least 20 circular enclosures, although only a few have been uncovered since excavations began in the mid-1990s. Each one is surrounded by a ring of huge, T-shaped stone pillars, some of which are decorated with carvings of fierce animals. Two more megaliths stand parallel to each other at the centre of each ring (see illustration).
Göbekli Tepe put a dent in the idea of the Neolithic revolution, which said that the invention of agriculture spurred humans to build settlements and develop civilisation, art and religion. There is no evidence of agriculture near the temple, hinting that religion came first in this instance.
“We have a lot of contemporaneous sites which are settlements of hunter-gatherers. Göbekli Tepe was a sanctuary site for people living in these settlements,” says Klaus Schmidt, chief archaeologist for the project at the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) in Berlin.
Drones are most often associated with assassinations in remote regions of Pakistan and Yemen but in Peru, unmanned aircraft are being used to monitor crops and study ancient ruins.
Forget Reapers and Predators — the drones used here are hand-held contraptions that look like they were assembled in a garage with gear from a hardware store.
They are equipped with a microcomputer, a GPS tracker, a compass, cameras and an altimeter, and can be easily programmed by using Google Maps to fly autonomously and return to base with vital data.
“These aircraft are small in size, are equipped with high-precision video or photo cameras and go virtually unnoticed in the sky,” said Andres Flores, an electrical engineer in charge of the UAV program at Peru’s Catholic University.
Here is a collection of interesting quotes from scientists, authors, researchers, NASA insiders and star-gazers relating to the enigmatic and often inexplicable nature of the moon:
“We cannot help but come to the conclusion that the Moon by rights ought not to be there. The fact that it is, is one of the strokes of luck almost too good to accept… Small planets, such as Earth, with weak gravitational fields, might well lack satellites… … In general then, when a planet does have satellites, those satellites are much smaller than the planet itself. Therefore, even if the Earth has a satellite, there would be every reason to suspect… that at best it would be a tiny world, perhaps 30 miles in diameter. But that is not so. Earth not only has a satellite, but it is a giant satellite, 2160 miles in diameter. How is it then, that tiny Earth has one? Amazing.”
“The Moon, which has no atmosphere and no magnetic field, is basically a freak of nature”
Isaac Asimov, American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University and Science Fiction writer. Asimov was one of the most prolific writers of all time.
“The best possible explanation for the Moon is observational error – the Moon doesn’t exist.’
“The Moon is bigger than it should be, apparently older than it should be and much lighter in mass than it should be. It occupies an unlikely orbit and is so extraordinary that all existing explanations for its presence are fraught with difficulties are none of them could be considered remotely watertight.”
Irwin Shapiro, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
A new high-tech analysis led by a University of Colorado Boulder researcher shows the oldest known petroglyphs in North America, which are cut into several boulders in western Nevada, date to at least 10,500 years ago and perhaps even as far back as 14,800 years ago.
The petroglyphs located at the Winnemucca Lake petroglyph site 35 miles northeast of Reno consist of large, deeply carved grooves and dots forming complex designs on several large limestone boulders that have been known about for decades, said CU-Boulder researcher Larry Benson, who led the new effort. Although there are no people, animals or handprint symbols depicted, the petroglyph designs include a series of vertical, chain-like symbols and a number of smaller pits deeply incised with a type of hard rock scraper.Benson and his colleagues used several methods to date the petroglyphs, including determining when the water level the Winnemucca Lake subbasin—which back then was a single body of water connecting the now-dry Winnemucca Lake and the existing Pyramid Lake—reached the specific elevation of 3,960 feet.
The elevation was key to the study because it marked the maximum height the ancient lake system could have reached before it began spilling excess water over Emerson Pass to the north. When the lake level was at this height, the petroglyph-peppered boulders were submerged and therefore not accessible for carving, said Benson, an adjunct curator of anthropology at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History.