Spanish archaeologists may have uncovered the final resting place of an Irish nobleman whose bloody 16th-century rebellion almost toppled Ireland's English rulers.

With some Spanish support, Red Hugh O'Donnell waged war against the English for nine years before his rebels suffered a defeat at the 1602 Battle of Kinsale.

He escaped to Spain, hoping to secure King Philip III's backing for a renewed assault. But Philip was uninterested and O'Donnell died shortly before his 30th birthday near Valladolid, the site of the Spanish court at the time.

Before Orwell's masterpiece novel, 1984, about a dystopian society and what politically motivated and propaganda-induced groupthink looked and sounded like, another Englishman by the name of Edwin Abbott Abbott wrote a semi-satirical, allegorical sci-fi novella called Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, in 1884. In his story, Abbott ingeniously uses flat geometric shapes to represent different strata of society in his contemporary experience of Victorian England. Taking aim at his era's biases, prejudices and social mores, Abbott satirizes the thought processes and modes of oppression towards those who would begin to consider other, higher, levels of reality, and allegorizes the reception of divine inspiration using a mathematical conceit that may have more reality to it than perhaps even Abbott supposed.

On this week's MindMatters we discuss Flatland in all its cosmological glory. Like a dimensionally flattened, but fleshed-out, Plato's cave, we delve into the book's significance as a profound allegory, its many intricately bound insights, and what Edwin Abbott was entertainingly imploring us to think about and consider. In a world where ever greater numbers of people actually believe that the world is flat, we'll be thinking on a story which suggests that higher dimensions are not only possible - but probable - if only one can open one's mind enough to 'see' it.


Running Time: 01:01:04

Download: MP3 — 55.9 MB

Tel Megiddo was an important Canaanite city state during the Bronze Age, approximately 3500 B.C. to 1200 B.C. DNA analysis reveals that the city's population included migrants from the distant Caucasus Mountains.

A new study of ancient DNA traces the surprising heritage of these mysterious Bronze Age people.

They are best known as the people who lived "in a land flowing with milk and honey" until they were vanquished by the ancient Israelites and disappeared from history. But a scientific report published today reveals that the genetic heritage of the Canaanites survives in many modern-day Jews and Arabs.

The study in Cell also shows that migrants from the distant Caucasus Mountains combined with the indigenous population to forge the unique Canaanite culture that dominated the area between Egypt and Mesopotamia during the Bronze Age, lasting from approximately 3500 B.C. until 1200 B.C.

When we stargaze, we bask in photons that have traveled for many millennia before reaching our eyes. To us, the stars appear fixed on a so-called celestial sphere that encapsulates our entire earthly existence.

The truth, of course, is that no such sphere exists. Instead, stars and galaxies are scattered through the cosmos at distances so great they're incomprehensible to us.

But not all celestial phenomena exist so far away. Every day, shooting stars fail to recognize a boundary between space and Earth, dropping rocks from above — and often with dramatic results.

Our planet is vast, so meteorites typically don't concern us. But every once in a while, these objects actually strike humans and our property. Based purely on statistics, researchers estimate that a space rock should strike a human roughly once every nine years. And with those odds, you'd expect people to get killed by meteorites fairly often.

"I do strongly suspect that stats on 'death by asteroid' have been severely undercounted through human history," NASA Planetary Defense Officer Lindley Johnson told Astronomy via email. "It's only been in the last half century or so that we've even realized that such a thing could happen."

However, researchers still have not found a single confirmed case of death by space rock. But that's not to say we haven't come close. Modern history is full of near misses. On many occasions, space rocks have exploded over populated areas and sent thousands of meteorites raining down.

One of the most recent and well-known examples occurred in Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013, when a house-sized asteroid exploded over the city and injured some 1,200 people. Further back, on Jan. 30, 1868, a meteor exploded outside a town called Pultusk, near Warsaw, Poland, creating a literal meteor shower: More than 100,000 stones fell from the sky. The biggest recovered meteorite (a fragment of a space rock that makes it to the ground) weighed 20 pounds. It's the largest meteorite fall on record.

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), happily amplified by the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) in the United States which carries its World News, continues to pump out its regular dreck about the alleged economic chaos in Russia and the imagined miserable state of the Russian people.

It is all lies of course. Patrick Armstrong's authoritative regular updates including his reports on this website are a necessary corrective to such crude propaganda.

But amid all their countless fiascoes and failures in every other field (including the highest per capita death rate from COVID-19 in Europe, and one of the highest in the world) the British remain world leaders at managing global Fake News. As long as the tone remains restrained and dignified, literally any slander will be swallowed by the credulous and every foul scandal and shame can be confidently covered up.

A perfectly preserved ancient Roman mosaic floor has been discovered near the northern Italian city of Verona.

Archaeologists were astonished by the find as it came almost a century after the remains of a villa, believed to date to the 3rd century AD, were unearthed in a hilly area above the town of Negrar di Valpolicella.

After the discovery in 1922, the site was mostly left abandoned until a team from the Superintendent of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape of Verona resumed digging last summer. The team returned to the site in October and again in February before the excavation was suspended because of the coronavirus pandemic.

"Wash your hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds." That's what the CDC has advised all Americans to do to prevent the spread of COVID-19 during this pandemic.

It's common-sense advice. The surfactants found in soap lift germs from the skin, and water then washes them away. Soap is inexpensive and ubiquitous; it's a consumer product found in every household across the country.

Yet few people know the long and dirty history of making soap, the product we all rely on to clean our skin. I'm a historian who focuses on material culture in much of my research. As I started digging into what's known about soap's use in the past, I was surprised to discover its messy origins.

According to new genomic analysis, France was populated by a pair of ancient migrations: the first during the Neolithic period, roughly 6,300 years ago, and the second during the Bronze Age, some 4,200 years ago.

"There were almost no data from ancient populations on the territory of present-day France and our study begins to fill a gap that leads to a clearer picture of the evolution of populations throughout Europe," Eva-Maria Geigl, a researcher with the Jacques Monod Institute in Paris, told UPI in an email.

For the new study, researchers in France generated and analyzed the mitochondrial genomes, Y-chromosome markers and genotypes of 243 individuals, whose remains were recovered from dig sites across present-day France. The dates of the individuals comprised a period spanning 7,000 years.

An aerial search in the Peruvian desert has revealed intriguing figures of humans and animals that predate the nearby Unesco world heritage site

A faded decades-old black-and-white photograph was the only lead Johny Isla had when he set out on the trail of a sea monster.

The Peruvian archaeologist spotted the image at a 2014 exhibition in Germany about the Nazca Lines, the vast and intricate desert images which attract tens of thousands of tourists every year.

The photograph taken in the early 1970s showed a mysterious killer whale deity carved in an arid hillside. The figure bore some resemblance to others he knew but he had never seen this one before.

Archaeologists have found the bones of about 60 mammoths at an airport under construction just north of Mexico City, near human-built "traps" where more than a dozen mammoths were found last year.

Both discoveries reveal how appealing the area - once a shallow lake - was for the mammoths, and how erroneous was the classic vision of groups of fur-clad hunters with spears chasing mammoths across a plain.

For the moment, however, Mexican archaeologists are facing a surfeit of mammoths, almost too many to ever excavate.

"There are too many, there are hundreds," said archaeologist Pedro Sánchez Nava, of the National Institute of Anthropology and History.