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14,000-year-old Ice Age engravings found on British Isles

Brett Smith
RedOrbit
Mon, 02 Nov 2015 18:50 UTC
Ice Age Engravings
© Sarah Duffy
Newly-found stone artifacts found on the English Channel island of Jersey could hold some of the oldest man-made carvings ever found on the British Isles, according to a report from BBC News.

The archeologists who found the artifacts have yet to finish their analysis and publish the results, but preliminary reports have dated the stone carvings to about 14,000 year ago.

The artifacts themselves are stone pieces with criss-crossed line engravings similar to those found at other Paleolithic sites in northern Europe.

If this estimate holds up, it would make artifacts the oldest carvings in the UK since a discovery in 2003. The estimate would also put the carvings' origin at around the end of the last ice age.

The research team that discovered the artifacts has been at the same site in the southeast area of Jersey for the past five years.

"We're hoping this is a hint of what is to come, because at some other sites you get hundreds of these pieces. What we've got at the moment is only a fragment of something much larger," Chantal Conneller, a senior lecturer at the University of Manchester, told BBC News.
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British 'Wartime Domesday' book now available online - a snapshot of life in 1939

David Keys
The Independent
Mon, 02 Nov 2015 01:49 UTC
british population data
© A group of young evacuees sit on a hay cart outside Chapel Cleeve Nursery in Washford Somerset
Stored for 76 years in a government building in Lancashire, the files include metadata covering 41 million people

In a move that will transform the study of key aspects of 20th century British social history, one of the country's most important data collections is being made available to historians and the general public from 2 November. Historical researchers have for the first time digitized and placed on-line a detailed survey of English and Welsh society at the beginning of World War Two.

Stored for the past 76 years in a government building in Southport, Lancashire, it includes metadata covering 41 million individuals (with personal information publicly available on 70% of them) and fills a major 'knowledge void' about British social history in the mid-20th century. In terms of detailed digitally available metadata, it is the only major source available for the 1920s to 1940s era - while, in terms of accessible personal data on millions of named individuals, it's the only publically available source for most of the 20th century.

The only other similarly detailed 20th century sources for personal information about millions of individuals are the 1901 and 1911 census records which were only made public in 2002 and 2009. Under the UK's '100 year rule' privacy convention, post-1920 census information about individuals must remain confidential for a full century after the data was collected.
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Boat

Over 100,000 British orphans sent overseas as 'child migrants'


BBC News Magazine
Thu, 29 Oct 2015 16:36 UTC
Pamela Smedley and mother
© Pamela SmedleyPamela (right) reunited with her mother in 1990.
Up until the late 1960s the UK sent children living in care homes to new lives in Australia and other countries. It was a brutal experience for many, writes Kirstie Brewer.

In the winter of 1949, 13-year-old Pamela Smedley boarded a ship to Australia with 27 other girls. She had been told by the nuns from the Catholic home she lived in that she was going on a day-trip. In reality, she was being shipped out to an orphanage in Adelaide and wouldn't see England again for more than three decades.

"We thought it would be like going to Scarborough for the day because we were so innocent and naive," says Pamela, who is now in her 70s and still lives in Adelaide.

"The nuns said that in Australia you could pick the oranges off the trees, and I was very excited because I loved oranges."
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Sheeple

The tragic, forgotten history of zombies

​Mike Mariani
The Atlantic
Wed, 28 Oct 2015 13:48 UTC
The horror-movie trope owes its heritage to Haitian slaves, who imagined being imprisoned in their bodies forever.

Image

'The Zombies'​​ by Hector Hyppolite, which hangs in the Museum of Haitian Art of St. Peter College in Port-au-Prince

In the original script for 1968's Night of the Living Dead, the director George A. Romero refers to his flesh-eating antagonists as "ghouls." Although the film is widely credited with launching zombies into the cultural zeitgeist, it wasn't until its follow-up 10 years later, the consumerist nightmare Dawn of the Dead, that Romero would actually use the term. While making the first film, Romero understood zombies instead to be the undead Haitian slaves depicted in the 1932 Bela Lugosi horror film White Zombie.

By the time Dawn of the Dead was released in 1978 the cultural tide had shifted completely, and Romero had essentially reinvented the zombie for American audiences. The last 15 years have seen films and TV shows including Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later, World War Z, Zombieland, Life After Beth, iZombie, and even the upcoming Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Comment: Zombie fad: Do we love the undead because we are unhappy with the government?
A History of 'Real' Zombies

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NASA satellite images show 8000-year old patterns in Kazakhstan


RT.com
Fri, 30 Oct 2015 21:23 UTC
Kazakhstan Patterns
© DigitalGlobe, via NASA
New satellite images from NASA have revealed unusual, massive patterns on the Earth's surface. The geometric shapes are located in Kazakhstan, and are estimated to be up to 8,000 years old.

The massive earthwork patterns called the Steppe Geoglyphs were originally discovered by a Kazakh economist when he was browsing Google Earth in 2007. When browsing through an otherwise empty Central Asian landscape, Dimitriy Dey found intriguing markings in the soil.

But the study of these mysterious constructs is ramping up, and even NASA has taken an interest. Two weeks ago, the space agency released clear satellite photographs of the figures from about 430 miles in the sky.

"I've never seen anything like this; I found it remarkable," Compton J. Tucker, a senior biospheric scientist for NASA who provided the archived images, told The New York Times.
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Black Magic

Pharmakos ritual: Ancient Greeks sacrificed ugly people

Dania Rodriques
Atlas Obscura
Fri, 30 Oct 2015 18:55 UTC
acropolis
© Public domain/WikiCommonsAn 1864 painting of the Acropolis in Athens, where the pharmakos ritual became an annual event.
Is the tradition of Halloween tainted by the blood of primeval human sacrifices? The origins of Halloween lie in Samhain, the Celtic New Year festival, in which the Gaelic druids might have ritually sacrificed some human victims, according to some accounts and some recent evidence. Such hypothesis is not unreasonable, as many communities in the ancient world decided to appease their enraged chthonic deities with human flesh.

But the European neighbors of the Celts, the ancient Greeks, did something even more disturbing: they brutally sacrificed the ugliest among them in order to maintain the common good.
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Sherlock

Prehistoric "eco-house" 1,300 years older than Stonehenge discovered by archaeologists

David Keys
The Independent
Thu, 29 Oct 2015 00:00 UTC
Image
© David Jacques/Buckingham UniversityA fallen tree which forms the wall of a Stone Age ‘eco-home’ near Stonehenge
Academics fear that the 6,300-year-old settlement could be severely damaged by a new road tunnel

Archaeologists have discovered the oldest prehistoric building ever found in the Stonehenge landscape - but fear a new road tunnel could severely damage the site.

Dating from around 6,300 years ago - at least 1,300 years before Stonehenge - it was built immediately adjacent to a sacred Stone Age spring.

Academics have dubbed it an "eco" house because the base of a fallen tree was used as one of the walls.

The building is important as it appears to have been constructed by indigenous Mesolithic hunter-gatherers at the time when the very first semi-agricultural European-originating Neolithic settlers were arriving in the area.
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Sherlock

22 Shipwrecks found in single location in Greece

Rossella Lorenzi
Discovery News
Wed, 28 Oct 2015 13:30 UTC
Image
© V. MentogianisThe cargoes revealed long distance trades between the Black Sea, Aegean Sea, Cyprus, the Levant, and Egypt in all those periods. At least three ships carried amphoras, or jars, that have not been found previously on shipwrecks.
Underwater archaeologists have discovered 22 shipwrecks around a small Greek archipelago, revealing what may be the ancient shipwreck capital of the world.

Hailed as one of the top archaeological finds of 2015, the discovery was made by a joint Greek-American archaeological expedition in the small Fourni archipelago with an area of just 17 square miles. This is a collection of 13 islands and islets located between the eastern Aegean islands of Samos and Icaria.

"Surpassing all expectations, over only 13 days we added 12 percent to the total of known ancient shipwrecks in Greek territorial waters," Peter Campbell, of the University of Southampton and co-director from US based RPM Nautical Foundation, told Discovery News.

Fourni lies right in the middle of the major east-west crossing route, as well as the north-south route that connected the Aegean to the Levant. Ships traveling from the Greek mainland to Asia Minor, or ships leaving the Aegean for the Levant had to pass by Fourni.

"Ikaria and the west coast of Samos have no harbors or anchorages, so Fourni is the safest place that ships could stop in the area," Campbell said.
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Sherlock

Beyond the temples, ancient bones reveal the lives of the Mayan working class


ScienceDaily
Thu, 29 Oct 2015 00:00 UTC
Maya
© Ashley SharpeSharpe and co-author Kitty Emery, Florida Museum associate curator of environmental archaeology, examined the animal remains recovered from the ruins of three Maya city-states in Guatemala, including the famous site of Aguateca that was burned after a surprise enemy attack which resulted in a level of preservation similar to the Roman ruins of Pompeii.
Most of what we know about Mayan civilization relates to kings, queens and their elaborate temples. To understand what life was like for the 99 percent, one researcher turned to ancient animal bones stored at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

Ashley Sharpe, a doctoral student at the museum on the UF campus, says the picture researchers have painted of the Maya people isn't broad enough.

"When you think about the Romans and the Greeks, we know a lot about all of the different social classes -- from the Caesars down to the commoners -- but although there were tens of thousands of middle-class and lower-income Maya in big cities, we still don't know much about the everyday lives of most people."

For the first time in Maya archaeology research, 22,000 animal remains at the museum, one of the largest collections of its kind outside of Central America, were used as clues about life in the Maya lower classes. The bones revealed that the civilization known for its art and astronomy also had political and economic systems that were more complex than previously thought -- systems similar to modern societies. The details are described in a new study appearing online this month in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.
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Book 2

Handwritten draft of King James Bible discovered: Reveals no 'divine powers'

Antiphon Freeman
AddictingInfo
Wed, 28 Oct 2015 08:51 UTC
bible draft
© New York Times
The earliest known version of The King James Bible, perhaps one of the most influential and widely read books in history, has been discovered mislabeled inside an archive at the University of Cambridge. The find is being called one of the most significant revelations in decades. It shows that writing is a process of revising, cutting, and then more rewriting. The Bible is no different in this regard, even though some conservative Christians claim it is the divine word of God himself. Perhaps God, then, is a revisionist. This find certainly seems to suggest that.

The notebook containing the draft was found by American scholar, Jeffrey Alan Miller, an assistant professor of English at Montclair State University in New Jersey, who announced his research in an article in The Times Literary Supplement. The New York Times didn't take long to pick up the story. They ran an article about it, HERE. Mr. Miller was researching an essay about Samuel Ward, one of the King James translators, and was hoping to find an unknown letter at the archives. While you can say he certainly accomplished that end, he definitely wasn't expecting to find the earliest draft of the King James Bible — which is now giving new insights into how the Bible was constructed.

He first came across the plain notebook not knowing what it was — it was incorrectly labeled. That's why no one has found it until now. It had been cataloged in the 1980s as a "verse-by-verse" Biblical commentary with "Greek word studies, and some Hebrew notes." When he tried in vain to figure out which passages of the Bible the commentary was referring to, he realized that it was no commentary at all — it was an early draft of part of the King James Version of the Bible.

Professor Miller described what it felt like when he first knew what he had in his hands:
"There was a kind of thunderstruck, leap-out-of-bathtub moment. But then comes the more laborious process of making sure you are 100 percent correct."

Comment: Read Laura Knight-Jadczyk's book,The Secret History of the World and How to Get Out Alive , where a chapter is devoted to "Who Wrote the Bible".

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