Secret HistoryS


Alarm Clock

Ancient Egyptian sundial discovered at valley of the kings

Jeanna Bryner
LiveScience
Wed, 20 Mar 2013 10:50 UTC
Sundial
© University of BaselA sundial dating to the 13th century B.C. and considered one of the oldest Egyptian sundials, was discovered in Egypt's Valley of the Kings, the burial place of rulers from Egypt's New Kingdom period (around 1550 B.C. to 1070 B.C.).
A sundial discovered outside a tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings may be the world's oldest ancient Egyptian sundials, say scientists.

Dating to the 19th dynasty, or the 13th century B.C., the sundial was found on the floor of a workman's hut, in the Valley of the Kings, the burial place of rulers from Egypt's New Kingdom period (around 1550 B.C. to 1070 B.C.).

"The significance of this piece is that it is roughly one thousand years older than what was generally accepted as time when this type of time measuring device was used," said researcher Susanne Bickel, of the University of Basel in Switzerland. Past sundial discoveries date to the Greco-Roman period, which lasted from about 332 B.C. to A.D. 395.

The sundial is made of a flattened piece of limestone, called an ostracon, with a black semicircle divided into 12 sections drawn on top. Small dots in the middle of each of the 12 sections, which are about 15 degrees apart, likely served to give more precise times.

A dent in the center of the ostracon likely marks where a metal or wooden bolt was inserted to cast a shadow and reveal the time of day. [See Images of the Sundial and Egyptian Burials]

"The piece was found with other ostraca (limestone chips) on which small inscriptions, workmen's sketches, and the illustration of a deity were written or painted in black ink," Bickel told LiveScience in an email.

Bickel and her colleagues aren't sure for what purpose the workmen would've used the sundial, though they suggest it may have represented the sun god's journey through the underworld.
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Boat

Return to Antikythera: What divers discovered in the deep


Guardian
Wed, 20 Mar 2013 10:52 UTC
Antikythera
© Hellenic Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities/WHOIDivers recover an amphora from the site of the Roman Antikythera shipwreck in Greece.
Divers revisiting the wreck in Greece where an ancient computer was found have discovered an array of artefacts.

Divers returning to the site of an ancient wreck off the Greek island of Antikythera have found artefacts scattered over a wide area of the steep, rocky sea floor. These include intact pottery, the ship's anchor and some puzzling bronze objects. The team believes that hundreds more items could be buried in the sediment nearby.

The Antikythera wreck, which dates from the first century BC, yielded a glittering haul when sponge divers discovered it at the beginning of the 20th century. Among jewellery, weapons and statues were the remains of a mysterious clockwork device, dubbed the Antikythera mechanism.
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Smoking

UC Davis researchers uncover earliest tobacco use in the Pacific Northwest

Karen Nikos
Daily Democrat
Thu, 28 Feb 2013 13:29 UTC
ancient pipe tobacco
© Shannon Tushingham/courtesy UC DavisThe earliest known usage of tobacco in the Pacific Northwest was smoked using a pipe similar to this one, according to Shannon Tushingham, a UC Davis archaeology research associate.
Native American hunter-gatherers living more than a thousand years ago in what is now northwestern California ate salmon, acorns and other foods, and now we know they also smoked tobacco - the earliest known usage in the Pacific Northwest, according to a new UC Davis study.

"The study demonstrates that tobacco smoking was part of the northwestern California culture very early ... shortly after the earliest documented Pacific Northwest Coast plank house villages," said the study, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

Testing organic residues extracted from pipes, researchers from the UCD Department of Anthropology and the Fiehn Metabolomics Laboratory of the UCD Genome Center confirmed tobacco was smoked, and likely grown in the region, by at least A.D. 860.
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Info

Ancient human skulls show evidence of prevalent inbreeding

Brett Smith
RedOrbit
Tue, 19 Mar 2013 16:10 UTC
Inbreeding
© Erik Trinkaus/WUSTL This is a view of the Xujiayao site (below) and internal and external view of the Xujiayao 11 skull piece with its position indicated on the drawing of a complete skull (above).
Although it is considered completely taboo in most modern societies, an ancient human skull found in northern China suggests inbreeding could have been prevalent among ancient peoples around 100,000 years ago, according to a report in the open access journal PLoS ONE.

The skull - which was found at Xujiayao, a mountainous excavation site several hundred miles from the Mongolian border - contained an enlarged parietal foramen (EPF), or "hole in the skull," typically diagnosed as a rare genetic mutation in modern humans.

Using CT scans and 3-D imaging technology, the team was able to successfully produce a model of the highly fractured and fragmented skull. After the model was created, the team was clearly able to see the results of the congenital condition.

EPF, which appears in one out of every 25,000 modern human births, prevents the closure of the skull bones that typically occur within the first five months of fetal development. Based on the exceptionality of the genetic condition and other fossil evidence found in skulls from the same time period, the researchers theorized the genetic pools were very small in many Pleistocene communities.
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Info

Best-preserved human ancestor didn't have bone disorder

Tia Ghose
LiveScience
Tue, 19 Mar 2013 11:26 UTC
Turkana Boy
© Claire Houck | Wikimedia CommonsTurkana Boy, an ancient human ancestor who died about 1.5 million years ago, probably wasn't suffering from a congenital spine disease, new research suggests
"Turkana Boy," an exquisitely preserved 1.5-million-year-old human ancestor found in Kenya, may not have had dwarfism or scoliosis, new research suggests.

Past studies had suggested that the ancient human ancestor, a Homo erectus, had suffered from a congenital bone disorder that made him unrepresentative of his species.

"Until now, the Turkana Boy was always thought to be pathological," said study co-author Martin Häusler, a physician and physical anthropologist at the University of Zurich. "The spine was somewhat weird, and so he couldn't be used as a comparative model for Homo erectus biology because he was so pathological."

But the new analysis, published in the March issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, suggests that apart from a herniated disc in his back, Turkana Boy was a fairly healthy person with no genetic bone problems.
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Info

3,300-year-old Egyptian cemetery reveals commoners' plight

Tia Ghose
LiveScience
Mon, 18 Mar 2013 08:12 UTC
Commoners Cemetry
© The Amarna ProjectArchaeologists have unearthed an ancient cemetery at the Egyptian city of Amarna. The cemetery held the commoners, rather than the elites, of the city.
While an Egyptian pharaoh built majestic temples filled with sparkling treasures, the lower classes performed backbreaking work on meager diets, new evidence suggests.

An analysis of more than 150 skeletons from a 3,300-year-old cemetery at the ancient Egyptian city of Amarna reveals fractures, wear and tear from heavy lifting, and rampant malnutrition amongst the city's commoners.

The discovery, detailed in the March issue of the journal Antiquity, could shed light on how the non-elites of ancient Egyptian society lived.

Overnight city

For a brief, 17-year period, the center of Egypt was Amarna, a small city on the banks of the Nile, about 218 miles (350 kilometers) south of Cairo.

The pharaoh Akhenaten relocated his capital city to Amarna to build a pure, uncontaminated cult of worship dedicated to the sun god Aten.

In a few years, temples, court buildings and housing complexes sprung up. At one time, 20,000 to 30,000 court officials, soldiers, builders and servants lived in the city.

But after Akhenaten's death, the next pharaoh, Tutankhamun , promptly rolled up the experiment. The city, which lacked good agricultural land, was soon abandoned.

Because the Egyptians occupied Amarna for such a short time, the city provides archaeologists with an unprecedented insight into what people's lives looked like at a specific moment in history, said study co-author Anna Stevens, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge.
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Syringe

When false memories prove true: Dr. Colin Ross MD on CIA mind programming


Brasscheck TV
Mon, 18 Mar 2013 08:37 UTC
Dr. Colin Ross MD speaks in 2009 in Los Angeles with Roseanne Barr, Cathy O'Brien and Mark Phillips about CIA mind control, MK-Ultra and the documented history of Project Blue Bird and Project Artichoke.

There's a myth that these mind control/psychiatric torture programs stopped in the 1970s.

No they did not

They were outed in the 1970s - and the all future work has been classified.

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Colosseum

Seven centuries later: Thirteen skeletons of Black Death plague victims unearthed during London Crossrail tunnelling

Rob Williams
The Independent, UK
Sat, 16 Mar 2013 16:55 UTC
Image
© Crossrail/PAPlague victims' skeletons are unearthed during the constructions of the Crossrail train link in London.
Thirteen skeletons, lying in two neat rows 2.4m beneath a road in Farringdon have been unearthed by excavations for London's Crossrail project

For seven centuries they have lain beneath the feet of commuters in one of the busiest parts of central London.

Thirteen skeletons, lying in two neat rows, 2.4m beneath a road in Farringdon, have been unearthed by excavations for London's Crossrail project.

The remains, which were found in a 5.5m-wide shaft at the edge of Charterhouse Square in Farringdon, are thought to be victims of The Black Death.

Builders working on the £15bn Crossrail project uncovered the bodies alongside pottery dating from the mid-14th Century.

Experts believe that the skeletons' arrangement in two neat rows suggests they date from the earlier period of the plague, before it became a pandemic and before bodies were thrown randomly into mass graves.

Comment: To find out more about the real cause of 'the Black Death', the following article and books Comets and the Horns of Moses are must-reads:

New Light on the Black Death: The Viral and Cosmic Connection

Celestial Intentions: Comets and the Horns of Moses

The Apocalypse: Comets, Asteroids and Cyclical Catastrophes

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Cardboard Box

Rail dig may reveal Black Death graves


Daily News
Sat, 16 Mar 2013 14:08 UTC
Black death grave
© AFPConstruction workers building a new railway in London have unearthed 13 skeletons believed to be victims of the Black Death plague 650 yars ago.

Archaeologists said on March 15 they had found a graveyard during excavations for a rail project in London which might hold the remains of some 50,000 people killed by the "Black Death" plague more than 650 years ago.

Thirteen skeletons laid out in two neat rows were discovered 2.5 meters below the road in the Farringdon area of central London by researchers working on the 16 billion pound ($24 billion) Crossrail project.
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Magnify

Medieval knight's tomb found beneath parking lot

Megan Gannon
LiveScience
Fri, 15 Mar 2013 16:07 UTC
A medieval headstone and skeleton have been found underneath a parking lot in Scotland, and researchers believe they might belong to a knight.

Archaeologists who were on hand during the construction of a new building in Edinburgh uncovered a carved sandstone slab, decorated with markers of nobility - a Calvary cross and a sword. Nearby, the team found an adult skeleton, which is thought to have once occupied the grave. Scientists plan to analyze the bones and teeth to learn more about this possible knight or nobleman.

"We hope to find out more about the person buried in the tomb once we remove the headstone and get to the remains underneath, but our archaeologists have already dated the gravestone to the thirteenth century," Richard Lewis, a member of the City of Edinburgh Council, said in a statement.

Image
© Headland Archaeology/ Edinburgh Centre for Carbon InnovationThis carved slab, thought to be the headstone of a medieval knight, was found under a parking lot in Edinburgh.
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