Africans Came With Columbus To New World

Skeletons that may represent the remains of crew members from Columbus' second excursion to the New World in 1493-94 were exhumed in 1990. The burials were a part of La Isabela on the island of Hispaniola, now a part of the Dominican Republic and that was the first European settlement in the New World. Credit: Fernando Luna Calderon, provided courtesy of T. Douglas Price

From Live Science:

Teeth from exhumed skeletons of crew members Christopher Columbus left on the island of Hispaniola more than 500 years ago reveal the presence of at least one African in the New World as a contemporary of the explorer, it was announced.

A team of researchers is extracting the chemical details of life history from the remains found at shallow graves at the site of La Isabela, the first European town in America, said T. Douglas Price, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of anthropology and leader of the team conducting an analysis of the tooth enamel of three individuals from a larger group excavated almost 20 years ago there.

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Atlantis Revealed At Last... Or Just A Load Of Old Googles?

False hopes: Google said the grid-like markings, thought to reveal the location of mythical underwater city Atlantis, are an artifact of its map making process

From The Daily Mail:

For centuries the story of Atlantis has captured the imagination - a fabled city of great beauty, culture and wealth that was suddenly swallowed up by the ocean.

Its location - or at least the source of the legend - remained a tantalising mystery. Was it really in the Mediterranean and not in the Atlantic at all?

Some claim its ruins lie beneath the waves off the coast of Cornwall. Others say they've been found in the Black Sea.

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Danube Delta Holds Answers To 'Noah's Flood' Debate

Giosan and his colleagues estimate that the Black Sea was around 30 meters below present day levels (Black Lake is represented by dark blue water) before a breach of the Bosporus sill 9,500 years ago raised levels to a maximum of 20 meters |(the flooded area is represented by light blue water). Their estimates mean that the magnitude of the Black Sea flood was 5 or 10 meters but not 50 to 60 meters. (Credit: Jack Cook, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Jan. 27, 2009) — Did a catastrophic flood of biblical proportions drown the shores of the Black Sea 9,500 years ago, wiping out early Neolithic settlements around its perimeter? A geologist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and two Romanian colleagues report in the January issue of Quaternary Science Reviews that, if the flood occurred at all, it was much smaller than previously proposed by other researchers.

Using sediment cores from the delta of the Danube River, which empties into the Black Sea, the researchers determined sea level was approximately 30 meters below present levels—rather than the 80 meters others hypothesized.

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Heavy Rains Damage Peru's Nazca Lines

From Yahoo News/AP:

LIMA, Peru – Heavy rains have damaged part of one of Peru's top tourist destination, depositing clay and sand on mysterious figures etched in the desert sand by indigenous groups centuries ago, an archaeologist said Monday.

The rains, which are uncommon on Peru's dry coastal desert, washed off the nearby Panamerican highway and pushed sand on top of three fingers of a geoglyph in the famed Nazca lines, said Mario Olaechea of Peru's National Culture Institute. The fingers form part of a pair of hands.

Olaechea told The Associated Press that the damage is minor and the institute plans to clear the material and restore the geoglyph.

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The Shopping Mall: A 2,000-Year-Old Tradition

An archaeological team found the very first traces of an Illyrian trading post that is more than 2,000 years old, including more than 30 boats. Credit: University of Mostar

From Live Science:

At this time of the year, the pressure to shop, buy and wrap is overwhelming. And so we drag ourselves to the mall, a hopefully one-stop shopping place where any number of stores can accommodate any holiday shopping list. Checking that twice, we schlep up and down until our bags are full and our minds are empty.

And every year, it seems like the list grows longer, the schlep more tedious, and the time deciding on gifts endless. Eventually we sit down, have a holiday drink and thank our lucky stars for the mall, because without this modern market place, we'd be also be driving all over town and screaming.

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Google Earth Does Ancient Rome

2,000-Year-Old Gold Earring Found In Jerusalem

Archaeologists say they found a 2,000-year-old gold earring made around the time of Christ, between the first century B.C. and the beginning of the fourth century A.D.

From U.S.A. Today:

JERUSALEM (AP) — The Israel Antiquities Authority says archeologists have discovered a 2,000-year-old gold earring beneath a parking lot next to the walls of Jerusalem's old city.

The authority says the earring is inlaid with pearls and emeralds and was made sometime between the first century B.C. and the beginning of the fourth century A.D.

In a statement released Monday the authority said the piece is "astonishingly well-preserved." It was discovered during excavation of the ruins of a building from the Byzantine period, dating from around the fifth century, A.D.

The authority says the earring appears to have been crafted using a technique similar to that depicted in portraits from Roman-era Egypt.

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Ancient Cave Yields Clues to Chinese History

From Live Science:

WASHINGTON (AP) — A stalagmite rising from the floor of a cave in China is providing clues to the end of several dynasties in Chinese history.

Slowly built from the minerals in dripping water over 1,810 years, chemicals in the stone tell a tale of strong and weak cycles of the monsoon, the life-giving rains that water crops to feed millions of people.

Dry periods coincided with the demise of the Tang, Yuan and Ming dynasties, researchers report in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

In addition, the team led by Pingzhong Zhang of Lanzhou University in China noted a change in the cycles around 1960 which they said may indicate that greenhouse gases released by human activities have become the dominant influence on the monsoon.

The Wanxiang Cave is in Gansu Province, a region where 80 percent of the rainfall occurs between May and September.

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DNA Legacy Of Ancient Seafarers

(Click To Enlarge)

From BBC:

Scientists have used DNA to re-trace the migrations of a sea-faring civilisation which dominated the Mediterranean thousands of years ago.

The Phoenicians were an enterprising maritime people from the territory of modern-day Lebanon.

They established a trading empire throughout the Mediterranean Sea in the first millennium BC.

A new study by an international team has now revealed the genetic legacy they imparted to modern populations.

The researchers estimate that as many as one in 17 men from the Mediterranean may have Phoenician ancestry.

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Lost Biblical Copper Mine Found?

The excavation at Khirbat en-Nahas where scientists believe they may have uncovered King Solomon's Mine (Photo from The Telegraph)

From Christian Science Monitor:

King Solomon was big on brass accessories. He ordered two enormous brass pillars, plus other brass items, for the temple the monarch commissioned for Jerusalem.

And where might all of this copper – a key ingredient in brass – have come from? Archaeologists from the US, Jordan, Britain, and Switzerland report that they have excavated an industrial-scale copper center in southern Jordan and dated it to the 9th and 10th centuries BC. If the dating stands up to further scrutiny, the peak of its smelting activity would coincide with the reigns of David and Solomon. It also would resurrect a currently discredited time frame for existence of the kingdom of Edom. The smelting center occupies a spot that lies within Edom’s boundaries. In the Old Testament, Edom was one of ancient Israel’s troublesome neighbors.

The results are likely to be controversial. In the 1980s, Bible scholars began to challenge the historical accuracy of accounts of people and events earlier than the 5th century BC, the research team says. In addition, some ceramic and radiocarbon evidence suggested that Edom didn’t emerge until the 7th century.

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Spiders and Scorpions Among World's Oldest Creatures

Ancient Creepy Crawly
A fossil spider can be seen embedded in amber. The fossil, provided by the Florida Museum of Natural History, was discovered in the Dominican Republic and dates from the Miocene epoch, some five to 23 million years ago.

From Discovery:

Oct. 31, 2008 -- If it seems like spiders, scorpions, ticks and mites have been around forever, it's because they nearly have, according to new genetic research that found these arachnids first emerged at least 400 to 450 million years ago.

The study, published in the latest issue of Experimental and Applied Acarology, extends the known world presence of these creepy crawlies by over 200 million years. The oldest fossil spider is 125 to 135 million years old, while the oldest fossil scorpion is around 200 million years old.

These invertebrates could even have emerged much earlier than this latest study determined.

"A horseshoe crab dating to 475 million years ago provided one of our anchor dates, and this crab actually looked quite modern, as did a Devonian period (416 to 359 million years ago) mite that was one very modern-looking mite," co-author Marjorie Hoy told Discovery News.

Hoy, a University of Florida entomologist, added, "I don't think the individuals just suddenly appeared on Earth, so it's likely these invertebrates are even older than we estimated."

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VIDEO: Ancient Temples Found In Peru -- National Geographic

The link to the video is HERE.

Death, A Cultural And Historical Look

Death Rituals Reveal Much About Ancient Life -- Live Science

Cultures around the world and through time have had wildly varying ways of dealing with the dead. And since death weighs so heavy on a culture and is ultimately so mysterious, records of these practices, or "deathways," are often more abundant than other ancient cultural accounts and provide illuminating windows into other cultures.

"Deathways illuminate religious meaning and the social life of cultures about which we may know little else," says Erik Seeman, Ph.D., associate professor of history at the University at Buffalo and author of the forthcoming "Death in the New World."

Cremation, grave cairns, funeral mounds, mummification, air burial, and belief in life after death are just some of the practices which, though sacred to one culture, often seem odd or even terrifying to another, Seeman says. The Greeks, for example, were fascinated with the historian Herodotus' description of the ancient Issedonians chopping up their dead into a mixed grill and devouring them in a communal barbeque, something entirely contrary to the Greeks' treatment of their own dead.

"Much of my research looks at how deathways marked cultural self-definition and the definition of 'other' in the New World," Seeman said.

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