– Terrestrial Archaeology and Solar System History – News Headlines Archive – April 2010 – new discoveries about ancient civilisation under ancient skies –

“One of the more interesting results from recent research into climate is that for the past million years or so, the earth’s climate has shown a distinct 100,000 cycle of long ice ages punctuated by a brief, warm intergalacials. We are in one of those brief warm periods, an interglacial period that is called the Holocene.

Then there is the comparative newcomer, solar magnetic theory, which is set to sweep orbital cycles off the board. For the evidence that the sun’s magnetic field affects climate is overwhelming.”

“New research indicates that one of the largest fresh-water floods in Earth’s history happened about 17,000 years ago and inundated a large area of Alaska that is now occupied in part by the city of Wasilla, widely known because of the 2008 presidential campaign.

That water volume drained from the lake in about a week and, at such great velocity, formed dunes higher than 110 feet, with at least a half-mile between crests. The dunes appear on topographical maps but today are covered by roads, buildings and other development.”

“Researchers in the Northwest Territories have discovered a ‘treasure trove’ of ancient weapons and other artifacts — including a spear-throwing device more than 2,000 years old — that were unlocked from melting ice patches high in the Mackenzie Mountains.

Indigenous hunters learned that the caribou ‘were, in effect, marooned on these ice islands and took advantage’ by targeting the animals as a vital source of food, clothing and bone implements.”

“Before the invention of the wheel and writing, a prehistoric civilization in northern Mesopotamia engaged in trade, processed copper and developed the first social classes based on power and wealth.

The mounds, the tallest standing some 50 feet high, cover about 31 acres and enclose the ruins of Tell Zeidan, a proto-urban community dating from between 6000 and 4000 B.C.”

“Archaeologists have uncovered bronze coins bearing the image of ancient Egyptian ruler King Ptolemy III in an oasis south of the capital, the culture ministry announced on Thursday. Also found by the Egyptian team were necklaces made of ostrich eggshell, it said.

The coins weighed 32 grams (1.12 ounces) each, with one face depicting the god Amun and the other the words “king” and “Ptolemy III” in Greek along with his effigy, the statement said.”

“Excavations began in the various archaeological sites that once housed farming communities, including Tel al-Abar 3 sites on the left bank of the Euphrates River (northern Syria) which dates back to the 10th millennium BC.

The structures contained various flint tools such as blades, knives, sickles, arrow tips and hatchets, tools used for leatherwork and crafting straw mats, stone mills and pestles, pottery fragments and animal bones and horns, Yerte added.”

“Plants grown from lentils discovered during a dig in Kütahya and believed to be thousands of years old will soon be planted, scientists have announced.

Bingöl stated that Dumlup?nar was working in cooperation with other Turkish universities on this project and that they planned to conduct DNA analyses and other scientific evaluations of the lentil plants as they grew, seeing a critical opportunity to analyze the characteristics of plants from millennia ago.”

“Archaeologists have unearthed the remains of an ancient Buddhist study centre at Telhara village in Bihar’s Nalanda district. The centre is believed to be nearly 2,000 years old.

The prayer hall is dotted with Buddha statues. Archaeologists believe this could be the same prayer hall Chinese traveller Hiuen Tsang mentions in his accounts.”

“New age estimates for Homo erectus fossils on the Indonesian island of Java have physical anthropologists scratching their crania. After convincing most of their colleagues that H. erectus may have persisted on the Indonesian island of Java as recently as 30,000 years ago — late enough to have coexisted in Asia with modern humans for more than 100,000 years — anthropologists presented new analyses April 14 suggesting the fossils in question may actually predate Homo sapiens by hundreds of thousands of years.

Antón and an Indonesian colleague lead a team that first announced in 1996 that sediment at two H. erectus sites on Java dates to between 50,000 and 30,000 years ago. Those ‘remarkably young’ dates, based on analyses of radioactive elements in fossil-bearing sediment, suggest that H. erectus survived well into the era dominated by modern humans, Antón said. Many researchers now accept those dates.”

“The coastal savannas of French Guiana dotted with thousands of small mounds have given up some of their secrets, thanks to an interdisciplinary European collaborative research project, financed by two CNRS programs.

This study confirms first of all that pre-Columbian farmers built the vast complexes of raised fields found in Guianan savannas. This coastal fringe, considered inhospitable, is subjected to seasonal flooding (an alternation of periods of rain and drought). The Amerindians constructed mounds to make well-drained soil, permitting intensive sedentary agriculture.”

“The great Khmer capital of Angkor, in what is now Cambodia, was for a time the largest preindustrial city in the world. Modern-day visitors to the ruins at Angkor Wat can see, in addition to the ornately carved Buddhist temple, remnants of a massive and intricate system of waterways, dikes and holding ponds.

‘The Angkor droughts were of a duration and severity that would have impacted the sprawling city’s water supply and agricultural productivity, while high-magnitude monsoon years damaged its water control infrastructure’, the researchers wrote in a recent Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.”

“A Colorado State University archaeologist and his team have discovered the ruins of an ancient urban center in the heart of the Purépecha Empire in Lake Pátzcuaro Basin, located in the central Mexican state of Michoacán.

The settlement may be as large as 5 square kilometers and dates to A.D. 1000-1520. Initial results suggest the peak occupation of the newly discovered urban center occurred just prior to the formation of the Purépecha Empire, further indicating that results from the study may yield new clues regarding the empire’s formation.”

“The entrance to Egypt’s cave underworld has been sealed shut just two years after its modern day discovery. Access to the tomb leading to these natural caverns, located beneath the famous Pyramids of Giza, is now blocked by a metal gate set in concrete. This came in the wake of revelations in the press last summer that British explorer and writer Andrew Collins had in March 2008 located a previously unknown opening into a natural cave system long thought to exist at Giza, but never before explored in modern times.

‘We have dozens of clear photos, along with film footage, that make it clear that extending from the Tomb of the Birds is an extensive series of cave passages that almost certainly reach beneath the main pyramid field’, Collins said.”

“The Gabon Republic in Africa is rich in uranium. In 1972, A French factory imported uranium ore from Oklo, Gabon, and found to its surprise that the uranium had already been extracted.

Studies indicate that the uranium mine’s nuclear reactor was several miles in length. However, for such a huge nuclear reactor, the thermal impact to its environment was limited to 40 meters (about 131 feet) on all sides. Even more astonishing, the radioactive waste materials have still not migrated outside the mine site. They are held in place by the surrounding geology.”

“New findings from an excavation site in Spain are generating heated debate among palaeontologists and archaeologists about precisely when the Neanderthals disappeared and were replaced by the first anatomically modern human beings. The research, carried out by a team from the Centre for Prehistoric Archaeological Heritage Studies at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, and published in the Journal of Human Evolution, pinpoints the transition to between 34,000 and 32,000 years ago, and supports the hypothesis that the two species did not interact or coexist.

The archaeologists carried out their research at a site called Cova Gran in the south eastern Pyrenees in Catalonia, Spain, that was inhabited by Neanderthals and modern humans at different times in the past. Covering a total surface area of 2 500 square metres, Cova Gran is a rarity for archaeologists; sites of this ‘transitionary’ type are crucial to palaeontologists and archaeologists as they offer them a chance to trace the development of the human species.”

“A study of hundreds of ancient Indus Valley civilisation sites has revealed previously unsuspected patterns of growth and decline that challenge a long-standing idea of a solely eastward-moving wave of Indus urbanisation. Researchers at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMS), Chennai, combined data from archaeology, radiocarbon dating, and river flows to study how settlements around the Indus Valley region had evolved from around 7000 BC till 1000 BC.

Their analysis of 1,874 Indus region settlements has shown that the Indus urbanisation had three epicentres — Mehrgarh in present-day Baluchistan, Gujarat, and sites along an ancient river called the Ghaggar-Hakra in Haryana and Punjab. The findings, published in Current Science, a journal of the Indian Academy of Sciences, dispute suggestions by international researchers that farming and urbanisation in the region was driven by a “wave of advance” moving eastward.”

[After an Ice Age lasting almost 100,000 years, the Earth was starting to warm again about 13,000 years ago. But suddenly the global temperature took a sharp dive, and another severe cold spell endured for the next 1,300 years.

‘Earth collided with debris from a vast comet, measuring 50 to 100 km across, that had wandered into the inner Solar System some 30,000 years ago before breaking up. The impact unleashed a firestorm that blanketed the atmosphere with ash and dust, reducing heat and light from the Sun, Napier suggests in Monthly Notices, a journal of the Royal Astronomical Society.’ Reported also in the recent issue of Cosmos Magazine, Napier has suggested that the phenomenon known to astronomers as the Taurid Complex consists of the remnants of the giant comet, and said that Earth’s orbital path still crosses that of the remaining debris field, which ‘includes at least 19 of the brightest near-Earth objects’. He’s usually right… : – Ed]

[There seems to be a lot of new discoveries in the area of supposed human evolution recently. Last week we heard that a new species of hominid that is different from both modern humans and Neanderthals has been found in a cave in Siberia. Now we have the long-sought-after “missing link” between humans and apes announced in South Africa – also discovered in a cave.

If you place these alongside the discovery in recent years of the so-called Hobbit”, a 3ft high new species of ancient human found on the island of Flores, Indonesia, and the many credible sightings of “wild men” in remote parts of the world over thre last 150 years or so, it’s beginning to look like there were many different types of human-like creatures existing alongside each other in ancient times. And, oddly, with many remote forrested and mountainous areas still remaining unexplored to this day in many parts of the world, some of these creatures may still be surviving alongside us, albeit in the many and varied remote pockets of wilderness that modern humans have not trodden in historical times… : – Ed]

[Since the discovery in 1987 of a 600-year-old sunken ship off the coast of mainland China, archaeologists there have been pursuing the underwater cultural heritages around their coasts. One of their main marine archaeology projects involves the excavation of the Ming Dynasty ship, the “Nan’ao No.1”, and a related general study of the legendary “Silk Road on the Sea”. They are now seeking cooperation from the marine archaeologists of other countries in that area: – Ed]

“A paradox about the climate of the early Earth that has been plaguing scientists for nearly 50 years may have a new solution. The so-called ‘young’ sun paradox — first proposed by Carl Sagan and his colleague George Mullen in 1972 — refers to the fact that the Earth had liquid oceans for the first half of its more than 4-billion-year existence despite the fact that the sun was likely only 70 percent as bright in its youth as it is now. A lower solar luminosity should have left Earth’s oceans frozen over, but there is ample evidence in the Earth’s geological record that there was liquid water — and life — on the planet at the time.”

[The Picts, who inhabited the northernmost areas of the British Isles, were the only peoples to have fully stopped the march of the Roman legions as they sought to subjugate the whole of the islands of Britain. They were remarkable for not having a written language, much like the Druids, who also left no written record of themselves. But a recent study focussing on the symbols they did leave carved on stones and jewellry looks set to reveal something of that elusive record.

A paper published by The Royal Society at the end of last month entitled “Pictish symbols revealed as a written language through application of Shannon entropy”, concludes that the Pictish symbols, far from being random sequences, do in fact “exhibit the characteristics of written languages”. Last year a different study applied a similar technique to the previously-undecipherable script of the ancient Indus Valley civilisation, coming to the conclusion that it was also a written language: – Ed]

[In October 1900, Captain Dimitrious Kondos was leading a team of sponge divers near the the island of Antikythera off the coast of Greece. They noticed a shipwreck about 180 feet below the surface and began to investigate. Amongst the artifacts that they brought up was a coral-encrusted piece of metal that later archaeologists found was some sort of gear wheel.

In 2006 the journal “Nature” published a letter, and another paper about the mechanism was published in 2008, detailing the findings of Prof. Mike G. Edmunds of Cardiff University. Using high-resolution X-ray tomography to study the fragments of the anomalous Antikythera Mechanism, they found that it was in fact a bronze mechanical analog computer that could be uased to calculate the astronomical positions of the Moon as seen from the Earth: – Ed]