Ice Cores May Yield Clues To 5,000-Year-Old Mystery COLUMBUS, Ohio -- The latest expeditions to ice caps in the high, tropical Peruvian Andes Mountains by Ohio State University scientists may shed light on a mysterious global climate change they believe occurred more than 5,000 years ago. They hope that ice cores retrieved from two tropical ice caps there, as well as ancient plants retrieved from beneath the retreating glaciers, may contain clues that could link ancient events that changed daily life in South America, Europe and Asia. Something happened 5,200 years ago that was abrupt and very large-scale, explained Lonnie Thompson, professor of geological sciences at Ohio State and researcher with the Byrd Polar Research Center. As snow falls on these ice caps and is packed tightly over time, it forms stratigraphic layers indicating annual accumulations. Researchers can estimate the age of a core by counting these layers just as biologists date forests by counting tree rings. This is a soft-bodied plant, he said.
Lost ancient civilisation's ruins lie beneath Gulf, says boffin High performance access to file storage Refugees from a lost civilisation whose ruins and relics lie submerged on the seabed deep beneath the Persian Gulf may have founded ancient, advanced Middle Eastern societies thousands of years ago in the time before the Pharaohs. According to Jeffrey Rose, a Birmingham uni archaeologist, recent excavations and discoveries indicate that a large number of substantial and relatively sophisticated settlements sprang up around the shores of the Persian Gulf quite suddenly perhaps 7,500 years ago. “Where before there had been but a handful of scattered hunting camps, suddenly, over 60 new archaeological sites appear virtually overnight,” says Rose. That was all big stuff back then: even the ancient Egyptians, living along the unfeasibly fertile Nile delta and so not required to scuffle for a living as much as most prehistoric people, had yet to really get their act together back then.
'British Archaeology' home page Acupuncture 5,200 Years Ago? Acupuncture 5,200 Years Ago? The Tyrolean Iceman died in the Alps about 5,200 years ago, but his mummified body is exceptionally well-preserved -- so well-preserved that 15 groups of tattoo marks on his body stand out vividly. These punctures do not seem to be ornamental, like those on a sailor's biceps, nor are they on parts of the body usually displayed. What is most interesting are their locations; some groups are placed at traditional Chinese acupuncture points. Bolstering this suspicion is the determination from computer tomography (noninvasive imaging) that the Iceman suffered from arthrosis of the lumbar spine. The Iceman's body is punctured at the points usually used by acupuncturists to treat this condition!
Top 10 Civilizations That Mysteriously Disappeared Throughout our history, most civilizations have either met a slow demise or were wiped out by natural disasters or invasion. But there are a few societies whose disappearance has scholars truly stumped: 10. The Olmec One of the first Mesoamerican societies, the Olmec inhabited the tropical lowlands of south-central Mexico. Where did they go? Around 400 BC the eastern half of the Olmec’s lands was depopulated- possibly due to environmental changes. 9. The Nabateans were a Semitic culture that inhabited parts of Jordan, Canaan and Arabia from around the sixth century BC. During the fourth century AD, the Nabateans abandoned Petra and no one really knows why. 8. The Aksumite Empire began in the first century AD in what is now Ethiopia and is believed to be the home of the Queen of Sheba. According to local legend, a Jewish Queen named Yodit defeated the Aksumite Empire and burned its churches and literature. 7.The Mycenaeans 6. 5.The Cucuteni-Trypillian Culture 4. 3.The Minoans 2.The Anasazi 1.
The Archaeology Channel - Welcome Signs of Atlantis found in southern Spain: scientists - Health Scientists say they may have discovered the lost city of Atlantis buried deep under the marshlands of southern Spain. The legendary city is believed to have been "swallowed up by the sea," as the Greek philosopher Plato so famously put it 2,400 years ago. He wrote of a great city destroyed by floodwaters following an earthquake deep under the sea — an image that resonates at a time when Japan is struggling to recover from a devastating earthquake and tsunami off its northeast coast. A National Geographic television special that aired on Sunday details the work of American, Canadian and Spanish scientists as they attempt to prove Atlantis existed by following up on space satellite images showing unusual features in an area just north of Cadiz. The area is near the Straits of Gibraltar — widely thought to be the "Pillars of Hercules" Plato mentioned in his description of the location of Atlantis. The team is led by archaeologist Richard Freund of the University of Hartford in Connecticut.
Ancient Symbols, meanings of symbols from Ancient Egyptian, Celtic, Greek, etc. Mysterious Pyramid Baffles Chinese Scientists No one seems to know the origin or the meaning behind a mysterious pyramid that sits atop Mount Baigong in western China that local legends claim is an alien UFO launch tower. Nine scientists form the team that will travel to the western province of Qinghai and the mouth of this 165-198 foot tall structure known as the “ET Relics.” “The pyramid has three caves with openings shaped like triangles on its façade and is filled with red-hued pipes leading into the mountain and a nearby salt water lake,” says China’s state-run Xinhua agency. To add to the mystery, iron debris and unusually shaped stones are scattered about the desolate area. “The theory that the pyramid was created by extra terrestrials is “understandable and worth looking into…but scientific means must be employed to prove whether or not it is true,” says Yang Ji, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. On the beach at nearby Toson Lake, many strangely-shaped iron pipes lay amid the sands and rocks. (Link)
"Lost" Language Found on Back of 400-Year-Old Letter Notes on the back of a 400-year-old letter have revealed a previously unknown language once spoken by indigenous peoples of northern Peru , an archaeologist says. Penned by an unknown Spanish author and lost for four centuries, the battered piece of paper was pulled from the ruins of an ancient Spanish colonial church in 2008. But a team of scientists and linguists has only recently revealed the importance of the words written on the flip side of the letter. The early 17th-century author had translated Spanish numbers—uno, dos, tres—and Arabic numerals into a mysterious language never seen by modern scholars. (Related: " 'Lost' Languages to Be Resurrected by Computers"? "Even though [the letter] doesn't tell us a whole lot, it does tell us about a language that is very different from anything we've ever known—and it suggests that there may be a lot more out there," said project leader Jeffrey Quilter , an archaeologist at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.
Robot finds 3 rooms under Feathered Serpent temple A robot named Tláloc II-TC, equipped with an infrared camera and laser scanner, has discovered three new chambers underneath the Temple of the Feathered Serpent pyramid in the Mesoamerican metropolis of Teotihuacan. He was sent down a tunnel 390 feet long that was discovered 50 feet below the surface of the temple in 2003. The tunnel had been filled with debris by the ancient Teotihuacans to block access, an effective technique since despite centuries of looting and archaeological excavations nobody had managed to breach it. It’s been a decade since the subterranean conduit was discovered and five years since excavations began, and archaeologists have only able to get a glimpse of what’s on the other side in the past few months. They first discovered two side rooms dubbed the North Chamber and the South Chamber 236 and 242 feet respectively from the entrance. The human archaeologists couldn’t get any further than that, so they deployed Tláloc II-TC to travel another 65 feet.
The Ajanta Caves – Ancient Temples Carved from Rock Two thousand two hundred years ago work began on an extensive series of cave monuments in Maharashtra, India. Over a period of hundreds of years, thirty one monuments were hewn piece by piece from the rock face. Then, some speculate around the year 1000AD, they fell in to disuse. Dense jungle grew around, hiding the caves away from human eyes. They Ajanta caves lay undisturbed for hundreds of years. One can only imagine what went through Smith's head when he made his find. The nearest human habitation is Ajinṭhā, a tiny village a few miles away from the caves. The first caves were hewn from the bare rock at the time of The Sātavāhana Empire which started around 230BC. Although there is widespread debate about the time at which the second period of building took place most now agree that it was probably during the reign of Harishena, from 460AD and over a period of around twenty years. There are paintings everywhere – literally. They were created using an ancient method.
5 Shockingly Advanced Ancient Buildings That Shouldn't Exist Back in the 1960s, surveyors in Turkey found an ancient buried complex composed of huge stone pillars arranged in a circle like Stonehenge, some of them 30 feet tall. What really knocked the monocles out of their eyes, however, was that this was much older than Stonehenge ... 6,000 years older. TeomancimitThe hieroglyphics translate to "First!" So those massive, ornate limestone pillars were carefully carved from a nearby quarry using hunks of flint rock and their bare hands. Having been dated to around 9000 B.C., Gobekli Tepe is thought to be the oldest human construction. TeomancimitIt was truly the golden age for Big Bad Wolves. In fact, the site even predates agriculture, which means that the people who built it were still chasing mammoths rather than planting crops. WikipediaWhile riding a unicycle. And this doesn't make much sense, because conventional knowledge has always been that humans didn't start building things until after we learned how to farm.