Tag Archives | Ancient History

Bizarre Death Rituals In Newly Discovered Oldest European Town

By on November 1, 2012 in News 2

The first known European settlement contains a 7,000-year-old tomb complex where corpses were chopped in two before being positioned upright…as if to prevent the dead from rising again and running amok, but allowing them to face each other and converse. The Daily Mail reports:

Residents of what is thought to be Europe’s oldest town cut their dead in half and buried them from the pelvis up, according to archaeologists. The newly discovered ancient settlement, thought to date back to 4700 BC, is near the Bulgarian town of Provadia, about 25 miles from the Black Sea coast.

Archaeology professor Vassil Nikolov led the dig which focused on the town itself and its necropolis, where the strange and complex burial rituals were discovered.

Nikolov [said] the town’s 300 to 350 residents lived in two-storey homes and earned their living mining the surrounding area for salt, which was as important to the ancient world as oil is today.

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This Is What Neanderthals Really Looked Like

By on October 23, 2012 in News 11

BBC

Have you seen this man? Last spotted 70,000 years ago in France. From BBC News:

A team of international experts has been rebuilding our most iconic ancient ancestors from the bones up – starting with a Neanderthal

A team of scientists has created what it believes is the first really accurate reconstruction of Neanderthal man, from a skeleton that was discovered in France over a century ago.

In 1909, excavations at La Ferrassie cave in the Dordogne unearthed the remains of a group of Neanderthals. One of the skeletons in that group was that of an adult male, given the name La Ferrassie 1.

These remains have helped scientists create a detailed reconstruction of our closest prehistoric relative for a new BBC series, Prehistoric Autopsy.

La Ferrassie 1 is one of the most important discoveries made in the field of Neanderthal research.

His skull is the largest and most complete ever found.

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5,500-Year-Old Tomb Found Beneath Swedish Stonehenge

By on October 22, 2012 in News 3

Would you dare to tamper with the burial chamber of the mythic King Ale the Strong? Via Live Science:

A 5,500-year-old tomb possibly belonging to a Stone Age chieftain has been unearthed at a megalithic monument in the shape of a ship called the Ale’s Stenar (Ale’s Stones). The tomb, in Sweden, was likely robbed of stones to build the Viking-era ship monument.

Perched on a seaside cliff in the village of Kåseberga stands the Ales Stenar, also called Ale’s Stones, 59 massive boulders arranged in the 220-foot (67-meter)-long outline of a ship. Most researchers believe the 1,400-year-old ship structure is a burial monument built toward the end of Sweden’s Iron Age. Local legend has it that the mythic King Ale lies beneath the site.

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5,000-Year-Old, Giant Elk-Shaped Structure Discovered In Russia

By on October 15, 2012 in News 4

Ancient stone strangeness via NBC News:

A huge geoglyph in the shape of an elk or deer discovered in Russia may predate Peru’s famous Nazca Lines by thousands of years. The style of stone-working called lithic chipping used on one artifact dates it to the Neolithic and Eneolithic (sixth to third millennia B.C.).

The animal-shaped stone structure, located near Lake Zjuratkul in the Ural Mountains, north of Kazakhstan, has an elongated muzzle, four legs and two antlers. The animal stretches for about 900 feet at its farthest points (northwest to southeast), the researchers estimate, equivalent to two American football fields.

Fieldwork carried out this past summer has shed more light on the glyph’s composition and date, suggesting it may be the product of a “megalithic culture,” researchers say. A man named Alexander Shestakov first discovered the glyphs using satellite images. He alerted researchers, who sent out a hydroplane and paraglider to survey the giant structure.

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Divers Return to Antikythera

By on October 8, 2012 in News 6

Picture: Marsyas (CC)

Almost every student of anomalous history will know the story of the Antikythera Mechanism, a mysterious, ancient “computer” of unknown origin discovered on the ocean floor off the island of Antikytherain in 1900. The machine has puzzled scientists since its discovery, but a new mission to the site where it was recovered may provide more information. Via The Guardian:

This week, the team begins a three-week survey using rebreather technology, which recycles unused oxygen from each breath and allows divers to stay deeper for longer. The aim is to survey the wreck site properly for the first time, to find out once and for all what has been left down there – and to check down the slope, to 70 metres depth or more, to see if those stories of runaway statues are true.

Any items found on the wreck site could provide further clues to the origin or ownership of the ship.

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UFOs And Alien Encounters In The Ancient World

By on October 8, 2012 in News 30

Documented sightings spanning thousands of years, across cultures, match reported UFO encounters today. The scholarly article “Unidentified Flying Objects In Classical Antiquity” (download here: .2007_Stothers_2) tries to decode the patterns:

The UFO phenomenon, whatever it may be due to, has not changed much over two millennia. Throughout recorded history, reports of what we today might call unidentified flying objects have been made and preserved. Embedded in the mass of relatively explicable ancient reports, is a small set of unexplained (or at least not wholly explained) reports from presumably credible witnesses.

At Rome in the winter of 218 BC “a spectacle of ships (navium) gleamed in the sky”. In 217 BC “at Arpi round shields (parmas) were seen in the sky”. In 212 BC “at Reate a huge stone (saxum) was seen flying about” In 173 BC “at Lanuvium a spectacle of a great fleet was said to have been seen in the sky” In 154 BC “at Compsa weapons (arma) appeared flying in the sky”.

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Did Ancient Hairy Hobbits Once Inhabit A Japanese Island?

By on October 4, 2012 in News 11

Cryptomundo discusses evidence, including tiny tools and bizarre pit dwellings, that supports legends of tiny elfin people living on the island of Hokkaido:

A commonly occurring phenomenon seen in the folklore and myth of a wide range of cultures throughout the world is the existence of miniature humanoid creatures [Faeries, dwarves, leprechauns, or by whatever other names they are known].

On the island of Hokkaido, in the cold northern reaches of the Japanese archipelago, the indigenous Ainu people too have their long traditions of an ancient race of dwarf-like people thought to have inhabited the land long before humans arrived. The Ainu knew these creatures as the Koropokkuru…most commonly translated as “the people who live under the burdock leaves.” Most commonly Koropokkuru are described as being rather hairy and odiferous.

Was there any truth to any of these stories of small, humanoid creatures living in the wilds of Hokkaido, and if so what were they?

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“Jesus said to them, ‘My wife…’”

By on September 19, 2012 in News 24

Papyrus fragment: front. Karen L. King 2012

Remember all the fuss about Jesus having married surrounding the publication of The Da Vinci Code nearly a decade ago? Well now Harvard University Divinity professor Karen L. King has found an ancient papyrus fragment that actually refers to his having a wife. Professor King has published a paper in which she explains,

This is the only extant ancient text which explicitly portrays Jesus as referring to a wife. It does not, however, provide evidence that the historical Jesus was married, given the late date of the fragment and the probable date of original composition only in the second half of the second century. Nevertheless, if the second century date of composition is correct, the fragment does provide direct evidence that claims about Jesus’s marital status first arose over a century after the death of Jesus in the context of intra-Christian controversies over sexuality, marriage, and discipleship.

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Did Temporal Lobe Epilepsy Cause The Birth Of Monotheism?

By on September 14, 2012 in News 13

Via New Scientist, a new theory claims that a specific form of genetically-inherited epilepsy among several generations of Egyptian pharaohs is responsible for the sun-inspired visions that led to humanity’s belief in a single supreme god:

Tutankhamun’s mysterious death as a teenager may finally have been explained. And the condition that cut short his life may also have triggered the earliest monotheistic religion, suggests a new review of his family history.

Tuthmosis IV had a religious experience in the middle of a sunny day, recorded in the Dream Stele – an inscription near the Great Sphinx in Giza. But his visions were nothing compared with those experienced by Akhenaten. They encouraged Akhenaten to raise the status of a minor deity called the “sun-disk”, or Aten, into a supreme god – abandoning the ancient Egyptian polytheistic traditions to start what is thought to be the earliest recorded monotheistic religion. If Hutan Ashrafian’s theory is correct, Akhenaten’s religious experiment and Tutankhamun’s premature death may both have been a consequence of a medical condition.

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Archaeology Being Undermined By Fake Fossils Of Imaginary Animals

By on September 7, 2012 in News 15

Could your favorite ancient animal species not be real? Via the Archaeology News Network:

Fake fossils are duping scientists and museums, a senior paleontologist has warned, after a scholar was forced to retract a controversial essay that stated the cheetah originated in China.

According to Li Chun, associate researcher at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, counterfeits are now widespread and have become a serious risk to genuine study projects. “I believe many scholars are victims of fake fossils,” he said, before estimating that more than 80 percent of marine reptile specimens on display in Chinese museums “have been altered or artificially combined to varying degrees”.

Li’s alert follows the debunking last month of an essay co-authored by Huang Ji, a Chinese scientist, and Danish researcher Per Christiansen in 2008 about an alleged new species of cheetah.

“Probably to make it appear more complete, thus enhancing its commercial value, Chinese fossil dealers makes numerous fake fossils.

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