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1,200 year old Pictish stone discovered at early Christian church in Scottish Highlands

Tim Collins
Daily Mail
Mon, 26 Aug 2019 09:59 UTC
Pictish

A Pictish stone described as a 'once-in-a-lifetime find' has been uncovered in the Scottish Highlands
A Pictish stone described as a 'once-in-a-lifetime find' has been uncovered in the Scottish Highlands.

The stone, thought to have been carved around 12,000 years ago, is decorated with a number of Pictish symbols and is said by experts to be of national importance.


Comment: This above age appears to be a typo as the stone is thought to be 1,200 years old.


It is believed the stone, discovered at an early Christian church site in Dingwall, originally stood at more than 7.8 feet (2.4 metres) high.

It now measures around 4.9 feet (1.5 metres), having been broken over the years and been reused as a grave marker in the 1790s.

A Pictish stone described as a 'once-in-a-lifetime find' has been uncovered in the Scottish Highlands

Comment: For more recent discoveries and insights into the mysterious Picts, see: Also check out SOTT radio's: MindMatters: Everything's a Remix: Origins of the World's Mythologies

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Info

A wall discovered surrounding the ancient Mayan city of Uxmal


Yucaten Expat Life
Mon, 12 Aug 2019 22:25 UTC
Pyramid of Magician - Uxmal
© La Jornada Maya
Pyramid of Magician - Uxmal.
A nearly two-mile-long wall surrounds Uxmal, and a close look at it tells a story, said the director of the archaeological site in Yucatan.

Jose Huchim Herrera said the wall was built thousands of years ago to protect the ancient Mayan community from invaders.

Although documented in the 19th century, today it is buried in jungle thicket. But INAH has taken an interest in the structure and has begun to study and plan its restoration.

Huchim and an assistant used machetes to cut through the brush to reveal the wall to a group that included a La Jornada Maya reporter.

The archaeologist and an assistant easily sliced through the brush to reach a stretch of wall, despite the day's humidity and heat. At times they had to stop and wait for the fatigued guests who had lagged a little behind, the Jornada reporter observed.

Not even half of Uxmal's ruins have been discovered by modern-day researchers, said Huchim, and the city's ancient secrets continue to reveal themselves.
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Rocket

Looking back 25 years, did the Soviets actually build a better space shuttle?

Anatoly Zak
Popular Mechanics
Tue, 19 Nov 2019 20:13 UTC
Buran obiter
© Pinterest
Soviet Buran reusable orbiter
A quarter-century ago, it seemed like the space shuttle suddenly got a new sibling. On Nov. 15, 1988, the Buran reusable orbiter, the crowning achievement of the Soviet space program, made its first flight. It would prove to be the Buran's last. But looking back 25 years later, some space experts say the USSR might have built a better shuttle, one that would have laid the groundwork for a new generation of launch vehicles, had it been able to weather the economic storms of the 1990s and the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Copycat?

Once the Soviet winged spacecraft finally made its public debut after years of secret development, an urban myth spread that it was an exact replica of the American space shuttle. It was easy to believe. A long list of Soviet equivalents of Western technology, from vacuum cleaners and cars to aircraft and rockets, were straight-up copies. But while the resemblance between the spacecraft is striking, it turned out to be deceiving.

At the outset of the Buran project in 1976, the Soviet leadership, indeed, gave its industry the task of developing a system with similar technical capabilities to the space shuttle. However, politicians left room for engineers to choose the exact path to such a vehicle, an opening that Buran chief architect Valentin Glushko exploited. As we now know from numerous unclassified documents and eyewitness accounts, Glushko's engineers did not blindly copy the shuttle but instead went through the long and painful process of determining an original architecture for the Soviet equivalent.

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Books

The Arabian cradle of Zion: Moses, Muhammad, and Wahhabo-Zionism

Laurent Guyénot
The UNZ Review
Sat, 08 Jun 2019 12:00 UTC
moses


When Yahweh resided in an Arabian volcano

"Yahweh came from Sinai" (Deuteronomy 33:2; Psalms 68:18). It is in Sinai that Moses first encounters Yahweh; it is back to Sinai that Moses leads Yahweh's people from Egypt; and it is from Sinai that, two years later, on Yahweh's order again, Moses sets off with them to conquer a piece of the Fertile Crescent.

But where is Sinai, with its Mount Horeb? Exodus unequivocally places it in the land of Midian. After fleeing "into Midianite territory," Moses is hosted by "a priest of Midian with seven daughters" (2:15-16). He "agreed to stay on there with the man, who gave him his daughter Zipporah in marriage" (2:21). Moses' father-in-law is named Reuel in Exodus 2:18, but Jethro in Numbers 3:1, "Hobab son of Reuel the Midianite" in Numbers 10:29, and "Hobab the Kenite" in Judges 1:16. We'll call him Jethro, his most popular name. His daughter Zipporah gave Moses two sons: Gershom (2:22) and Eliezer (18:4). It is while grazing his father-in-law's flocks that Moses finds himself near Mount Horeb, "to the far side of the desert" (3:1), where he hears Yahweh call his name. By implication, Sinai is in Midian.

Comment: More from Lauren Guyénot: Also check out SOTT radio's:

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Info

Submerged 8000-year-old wooden structure discovered off southern Great Britain

Ryan F. Mandelbaum
Gizmodo
Sat, 24 Aug 2019 09:20 UTC
A historian examining the wooden planks.
© Maritime Archaeological Trust
A historian examining the wooden planks.
Archaeologists have spotted an 8,000-year-old wooden platform in the waters off southern Great Britain.

The mostly intact find sat in a larger archaeological site 35 feet below the water's surface. It represents a substantial increase in the amount of ancient worked wood found in the United Kingdom, and scientists hypothesize that it was a platform used to build ships.

"As a feature by itself it's quite incredible," Garry Momber, director of the Maritime Archaeological Trust in the United Kingdom, told Gizmodo. "This is the most cohesive, intact structure from the Middle Stone Age ever recovered in the United Kingdom."

Archaeologists first found the site in 2005, which included a pile of cut wood and artifacts like remnants of wheat and string. This past year, further excavation revealed the large, intact wooden platform — layers of cut wood atop a wooden foundation. Carbon dating combined with tree ring data and the depth of the site revealed its age to be around 8,000 years old.

Shortly after the end of the last ice age, sea levels were much lower, and there was no water separating the United Kingdom from France. Early humans could have migrated north into Great Britain and built sites like this. Rising sea levels eventually engulfed the site, while the dark, cold, wet conditions prevented the wood from rotting away.
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MindMatters: Everything's a Remix: Origins of the World's Mythologies

Harrison Koehli, Elan Martin, Corey Schink
Sott.net
Sat, 24 Aug 2019 00:00 UTC
jupiter jesus
© SOTT
For as long as cultures have had contact with each other, attentive observers have noticed the similarities between their respective myths. Today, scholars hypothesize that these similarities are either the result of accident, cultural sharing or diffusion, or a shared collective unconscious of symbols. But in his revolutionary book, The Origins of the World's Mythologies, E.J. Michael Witzel argues that there's a better reason for many shared features: common origin. Like linguistics or genetics, he argues that with enough data, you can trace back versions of myths to shared mythologies from the past, all the way back through human history. In the process, he has identified a common, complex storyline shared by mythologies spanning Europe, Asia, the Americas, and stretching out into Northern Africa and Southeast Asia. His work suggests that in the distant past, humanity shared a common set of myths, but prior to the spread of humanity into Eurasia and the Americas, a new storyline developed, which has been retained but modified over the past 40,000 years of history.

Today on MindMatters we discuss the basics of Witzel's theory, the two major types of mythology he has identified, and what it says about human creativity.


Running Time: 01:14:19

Download: MP3 — 68 MB

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Umbrella

'Mystery' eruption that cooled ancient world traced to El Salvador's Ilopango volcano

Katherine Kornei
Science
Fri, 16 Aug 2019 08:00 UTC
El Salvador's Ilopango volcano
© NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS; U.S./JAPAN ASTER SCIENCE TEAM
The sixth century was a rough time to be alive: Lower-than-average temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere triggered crop failure, famine, and maybe even the onset of bubonic plague. The ultimate culprit, scientists say, were two back-to-back volcanic eruptions — one in 536 C.E. and another around 540 C.E. The first likely happened in Iceland or North America. But the location of the second one has remained a mystery — until now.

Researchers studying ancient deposits from El Salvador's Ilopango volcano knew that a massive eruption had taken place there sometime between the third and sixth centuries. That event, dubbed Tierra Blanca Joven (TBJ), or "white young earth," sent a volcanic plume towering nearly 50 kilometers into the atmosphere.

To better pin down the date of this eruption, the scientists collected slices from three tree trunks embedded in TBJ volcanic ash 25 to 30 kilometers from the present-day lake that covers the caldera (above). The tropical hardwood trees likely died after being engulfed by the searing hot, gale-force winds containing the volcanic gases, ash, and pumice that would have swept outward after the eruption.

Comment: See also: 536 AD: Plague, famine, drought, cold, and a mysterious fog that lasted 18 months

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Dig

Tombs of Iberian prince and 24 aristocrats unearthed in Spain

Vicente G. Olaya
Archeology News Network
Thu, 15 Aug 2019 19:00 UTC
Tomb Iberian
© [Credit: UCLM]
Tomb of an Iberian prince found in Alarcos
The general landscape of the Iberian Peninsula in 300 BC consisted of a variety of communities that included the Celts, the Iberians, the Celtiberians and the Lusitanians, while the two main powers of Rome and Carthage fought each other to the death on their turf.

The Carthaginian general Hamilcar Barca invaded Iberia in 235 BC, laying waste to the various communities that he came across. Finally, these groups banded together and waged war on him in what became known as the battle of Heliké - possibly Elche in Alicante or Elche de la Sierra in Albacete - where Hamilcar met his death in 228BC.

Last year, the archeologists and historians María del Rosario García Huerta, Francisco Javier Morales Hervás and David Rodríguez González came to the end of their research after three years excavating and two years analyzing the remains of the Iberian necropolis of Alarcos, in the Spanish province of Ciudad Real, where they unearthed 25 tombs belonging to Iberian aristocrats, including one the experts believe could have belonged to a prince, from the period when Hamilcar was killed in battle.

Comment: See also:

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Dig

Ancient skeletons with cranial deformation unearthed in Croatia

Yasemin Saplakoglu
Live Science
Thu, 22 Aug 2019 12:00 UTC
cranial deformation
© M Kavka/CC By 4.0
CT scans of the skull that had a "circular-erect"deformation
Archaeologists have unearthed three ancient skeletons in Croatia — and two of them had pointy, artificially deformed skulls.

Each of those skulls had been melded into a different shape, possibly as a way to show they belonged to a specific cultural group.

Artificial cranial deformation has been practiced in various parts of the world, from Eurasia and Africa to South America. It is the practice of shaping a person's skull — such as through using tight headdresses, bandages or rigid tools — while the skull bones are still malleable in infancy.

Ancient cultures had different reasons for the practice, from indicating social status to creating what they thought was a more beautiful skull. The earliest known instance of this practice occurred 12,000 years ago in ancient China, but it's unclear if the practice spread from there or if it emerged independently in different parts of the world, according to a previous Live Science report.

Comment: See also:

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Archaeology

Armenian find shows innovation in Stone Age tools more than 300,000 years was local, not imported


Science Daily
Thu, 25 Sep 2014 17:33 UTC
ancient stone tools armenia
© Dan Adler
This image shows stone tools found at the site of Nor Geghi, Armenia: top – biface tool; bottom – a Levallois core.
The analysis of artifacts from a 325,000-year-old site in Armenia shows that human technological innovation occurred intermittently throughout the Old World, rather than spreading from a single point of origin, as previously thought.

The study, published today in the journal Science, examines thousands of stone artifacts retrieved from Nor Geghi 1, a unique site preserved between two lava flows dated to 200,000-400,000 years ago. Layers of floodplain sediments and an ancient soil found between these lava flows contain the archaeological material. The dating of volcanic ash found within the sediments and detailed study of the sediments themselves allowed researchers to correlate the stone tools with a period between 325,000 and 335,000 years ago when Earth's climate was similar to today's.

The stone tools provide early evidence for the simultaneous use of two distinct technologies: biface technology, commonly associated with hand axe production during the Lower Paleolithic, and Levallois technology, a stone tool production method typically attributed to the Middle Stone Age in Africa and the Middle Paleolithic in Eurasia. Traditionally, Archaeologists use the development of Levallois technology and the disappearance of biface technology to mark the transition from the Lower to the Middle Paleolithic roughly 300,000 years ago.
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