One of the world's oldest and largest wine cellars has just been unearthed in Israel, according to a presentation today at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research in Baltimore.

The cellar dates to approximately 1700 B.C., and was found at a site called Tel Kabri within the ruins of a northern Canaanite city. Its age predates both the Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls by hundreds of years.

The researchers christened a three-foot-long jar in the cellar "Bessie."

"We dug and dug, and all of a sudden, Bessie's friends started appearing - five, 10, 15, ultimately 40 jars packed in a 15-by-25-foot storage room," Eric Cline, chair of George Washington University's Department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, said in a press release.

• Stonehenge's outer ring is made up of 11 large dolerites called blue stones

• A 1923 paper claimed the stones were from Carn Menyn in Pembrokeshire

• For 90 years archaeologists have searched this location for human activity

• Yet X-rays confirm the stones came from Carn Goedog - just a mile away

• It's still not known how the stones travelled the 160 miles to Amesbury

Archaeologists trying to uncover the mystery of Stonehenge have been digging around the wrong hill for almost a century.

Teams of archaeologists have spent the past 90 years scouring the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire to find the source of the prehistoric monument's iconic 'blue stones'.

Scientists believed the 11 stones used to construct the ancient site came from a hill called Carn Menyn, but geologists have since discovered they actually came from another hill - just over a mile away - called Carn Goedog.

Now archaeologists are planning to move to the new site.

They can then start trying to discover if prehistoric man cut the 11 stone monoliths from the hill and transported them to the prehistoric site, or if they were carried there by glaciers during the last Ice Age.

Dr Richard Bevins from the National Museum of Wales is a leading authority on volcanic rocks and has been studying the Preseli Hills since he was a PhD student in the late 1970s.

The Vatican on Tuesday unveiled newly restored frescoes in the Catacombs of Priscilla, known for housing the earliest known image of the Madonna with Child - and frescoes said by some to show women priests in the early Christian church.

Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the Vatican's culture minister, presided over the opening of the "Cubicle of Lazzaro," a tiny burial chamber featuring 4th century images of biblical scenes, the Apostles Peter and Paul, and one of the early Romans buried there in bunk-bed-like stacks as was common in antiquity.

The labyrinthine cemetery complex stretching for kilometers (miles) underneath northern Rome is known as the "Queen of the catacombs" because it features burial chambers of popes and a tiny, delicate fresco of the Madonna nursing Jesus dating from around 230-240 A.D., the earliest known image of the Madonna and Child.

More controversially, the catacomb tour features two scenes said by proponents of the women's ordination movement to show women priests: One in the ochre-hued Greek Chapel features a group of women celebrating a banquet, said to be the banquet of the Eucharist. Another fresco in a richly decorated burial chamber features a woman, dressed in a dalmatic - a cassock-like robe - with her hands up in the position used by priests for public worship.
The Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests, which includes women who have been excommunicated by the Vatican for participating in purported ordination ceremonies, holds the images up as evidence that there were women priests in the early Christian church - and that therefore there should be women priests today.

The DNA gleaned from two ancient Siberian skeletons is related to that of modern-day Native Americans and western Eurasians, new research suggests.

The genetic material from the ancient Siberians provides additional evidence that the ancestors of Native Americans made the arduous trek from Siberia across the Bering Strait into the Americas.

But it also reveals there were multiple waves of migrations in Asia around this time, said Mark Hubbe, a biological anthropologist at The Ohio State University who was not involved in the study.

"This brings a new level of complexity to what we think happened in Asia," Hubbe told LiveScience.

Results from a DNA study of a young boy's skeletal remains believed to be 24,000 years old could turn the archaeological world upside down - it's been proven that nearly 30 percent of modern Native American's ancestry came from this youngster's gene pool, suggesting First Americans came directly from Siberia, according to a research team that includes a Texas A&M University professor.

Kelly Graf, assistant professor in the Center for the Study of First Americans and Department of Anthropology at Texas A&M, is part of an international team spearheaded by Eske Willerslev and Maanasa Raghaven from the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark and additional researchers from Sweden, Russia, United Kingdom, University of Chicago and University of California-Berkeley. Their work, funded by the Danish National Science Foundation, Lundbeck Foundation, and the National Science Foundation, is published in the current issue of Nature magazine.

New genome sequences from two extinct human relatives suggest that these 'archaic' groups bred with humans and with each other more extensively than was previously known.

The ancient genomes, one from a Neanderthal and one from a different archaic human group, the Denisovans, were presented on 18 November at a meeting at the Royal Society in London. They suggest that interbreeding went on between the members of several ancient human-like groups living in Europe and Asia more than 30,000 years ago, including an as-yet unknown human ancestor from Asia.

"What it begins to suggest is that we're looking at a 'Lord of the Rings'-type world - that there were many hominid populations," says Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London who was at the meeting but was not involved in the work.

The first Neanderthal¹ and the Denisovan² genome sequences revolutionized the study of ancient human history, not least because they showed that these groups interbred with anatomically modern humans, contributing to the genetic diversity of many people alive today.

Shortly after dark on Sunday night November 24, 1963, after Ruby had killed Lee Harvey Oswald, a meeting took place in Jack Ruby's apartment in Oak Cliff, a suburb of Dallas, Texas. Five persons were present. George Senator and Attorney Tom Howard were present and having a drink in the apartment when two newsmen arrived. The newsmen were Bill Hunter of the Long Beach California Press Telegram, and Jim Koethe of the Dallas Times Herald. Attorney C.A. Droby of Dallas arranged the meeting for the two newsmen. Jim Martin, a close friend of George Senator's, was also present at the apartment meeting.

This writer asked Martin if he thought it was unusual for Senator to forget the meeting while testifying in Washington on April 22, 1964, since Bill Hunter, who was a newsman present at the meeting, was shot to death that very night. Martin grinned and said: "Oh, you're looking for a conspiracy."

I nodded yes and he grinned and said, "You will never find it."

I asked soberly, "Never find it, or not there?"

He added soberly, "Not there."

Bill Hunter, a native of Dallas and an award winning newsman in Long Beach, was on duty and reading a book in the police station called "Public Safety Building." Two policemen going off duty came into the press room, and one policeman shot Hunter through the heart at a range officially ruled to be "no more than three feet." The policeman said he dropped his gun, and it fired as he picked it up, but the angle of the bullet caused him to change his story. He finally said he was playing a game of quick draw with his fellow officer. The other officer testified he had his back turned when the shooting took place.

Off the shores of a tiny island in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean are the ruins of an ancient civilization. The remains of Nan Madol are the only standing monument of a civilization built entirely over open water, on a coral reef.

The eerie abandoned stone structures are said to have inspired science-fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft to create a similar sunken city that was home to the monster Cthulhu, says Atlas Obscura.

In reality, Nan Madol was once home to the Saudeleur, who ruled the island of Pohnpei for more than a millennium, reported Smithsonian Magazine. The 92 artificial islands of Nan Madol are thought to have been constructed over the course of several centuries, and then eventually abandoned after 1,000 years of habitation.

Rufino Mauricio, Pohnpei's only archaeologist, has dedicated his life to studying and preserving the ruins, which are built of 750,000 tons of black basaltic rock.

Classical scholars from the Cluster of Excellence "Religion and Politics" made an unusually large find of seals in an ancient sanctuary in Turkey. They discovered more than 600 stamp seals and cylinder seals at the sacred site of the storm and weather god Jupiter Dolichenus, 100 of which in the current year alone. "Such large amounts of seal consecrations are unheard-of in any comparable sanctuary", said excavation director Prof. Dr. Engelbert Winter and archaeologist Dr. Michael Blömer at the end of the excavation season. In this respect, the finding of numerous pieces from the 7th to the 4th centuries B.C. close to the ancient city of Doliche is unparalleled.

"The amazingly large number proves how important seals and amulets were for the worshipping of the god to whom they were consecrated as votive offerings", according to Classical scholar Prof. Winter. Many pieces show scenes of adoration. "Thus, they provide a surprisingly vivid and detailed insight into the faith of the time." The stamp seals and cylinder seals as well as scarabs, made of glass, stone and quartz ceramics, were mostly crafted in a high-quality manner. Following the restoration work, the finds were handed over to the relevant museum in Gaziantep in Turkey.

Different themes can be found on the seals and amulets: the spectrum ranges from geometric ornaments and astral symbols to elaborate depictions of animals and people. This includes, for example, praying men in front of divine symbols. Another popular theme was a royal hero fighting animals and hybrid creatures. "Even those images that do not depict a deity express strong personal piety: with their seals, people consecrated an object to their god which was closely associated with their own identity", said Blömer. People wore the amulets found with the seals in everyday life. "Strung on chains, they were supposed to fend off bad luck", explained the archaeologist.

The bones of a holy figure, still wearing shoes and initially wrapped in a finely-woven textile, have been found buried within a wall beneath Lincoln Castle in a discovery pointing to the remains of a church dating to "at least" 1,000 years ago, according to experts.
Archaeologists believe the remains of several skeletons found during the dig at the castle, which was built by William the Conqueror more than 900 years ago, date to a stone church created between the departure of the Romans and the arrival of the conquering Normans.

At least one of the remnants, found in a tiny space three metres below ground level, is a stone coffin, with the sacred bones found in a niche embedded in the foundations of an early stone wall on the opposite side of the site.

"Our knowledge of the site between the end of Roman period and when the castle was built is very scant," admits Beryl Lott, the historic environment manager for Lincolnshire County Council, calling the excavation "very exciting".

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