Secret HistoryS


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.

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© 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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Info

Leonardo da Vinci was right all along, new medical scans show

Hannah Furness
The Telegraph, UK
Tue, 12 Mar 2013 22:33 UTC
Leonardo da Vinci's anatomical drawings were "startling" in their accuracy, new medical scans have shown, putting him hundreds of years ahead of his peers.
Leonardo_1
© Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013 /© Mark Mobley, West Midlands Surgical Training Centre The bones, muscles and tendons of the hand c.1510-11 and 3D image of a dissected hand.
He has long been praised as one of the finest artists of the Renaissance, working far ahead of his time and producing some of the world's most recognisable works.

But Leonardo da Vinci has finally received the credit he deserves for his "startling" medical accuracy hundreds of years in advance of his peers, as scientists match his anatomical drawings with modern day MRI scans.

The project, which will be unveiled at the Edinburgh International Festival in August, compares the work directly for the very first time, unveiling the minute details recorded by the artist.
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Info

World's oldest murder mystery: Tracking down iceman Otzi's killer

Hannah Osborne
International Business Times, UK
Wed, 13 Mar 2013 22:18 UTC
Iceman Murder Mystery_1
© Channel 4Scientists perform autopsy on 5,000-year-old mummy.
The mystery surrounding the violent murder of a Stone Age man in the Swiss Alps 5,000 years ago is to be uncovered by scientists.

The Iceman Murder Mystery documentary examines Otzi, whose body was found preserved in an Alpine glacier in 1991.

For 20 years, researchers have tried to ascertain how Otzi died. X-rays of his body gave little indication of his death so scientists took the decision to defrost his corpse.

The team has nine hours to perform an autopsy on the mummified body, providing them with DNA evidence of his last meal and indications of how he died.
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Frog

Neanderthals extinction may have been caused by incapacity to form larger social networks

Jennifer Viegas
Discovery News
Tue, 12 Mar 2013 18:00 UTC
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Homo neanderthalensis
For ages, anthropologists have puzzled over Neanderthal and human brains, since they were the same size. If each species had comparable brainpower, why did humans dominate?

A comparison of Neanderthal and human brains has revealed it was a matter of allocation: Neanderthal brains focused more on vision and movement, leaving less room for cognition related to social networking.

According to the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, bigger eyed and larger bodied Neanderthals required more brain space devoted to the visual system and basic body functions, leaving less area for what co-author Robin Dunbar called "the smart part."

He explained to Discovery News that this is "the part that is doing the creative thinking."

Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford, and colleagues Eiluned Pearce and Chris Stringer compared the skulls of 32 anatomically modern humans and 13 Neanderthals. The skulls date to 27,000 to 75,000 years ago. The researchers noticed that Neanderthals had significantly larger eye sockets.
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Question

Wright brothers flew 2 years after Gustav Whitehead, researcher claims

Jeremy A. Kaplan
FoxNews
Wed, 13 Mar 2013 16:08 UTC
Whitehead
© FoxNews
Were we wrong about the Wright Brothers?

That's the shocking claim by Australian aviation historian John Brown, who told FoxNews.com he has photographic proof that German immigrant Gustav Whitehead flew over Connecticut in 1901 -- Orville and Wilbur were second.

"Two years, four months, and three days before the Wright brothers, somebody else flew first," Brown said via phone from Germany. "It's really a radical revision of the history of aviation."

Even Jane's: All the World's Aircraft -- widely considered the essential bible of flight -- has acknowledged Whitehead's achievement and Brown's research. With the headline "justice delayed is justice denied," editor-in-chief Paul Jackson wrote about the early aviator's story for the overview to the newly released 100th edition of the reference guide, published online on Saturday.

"Today, it seems impossible that a vast cache of documentary evidence ... can be overlooked by the world at large," he wrote.

The Wright brothers soared into history books on Dec. 17, 1903, following their historic, 852-foot, 59-second flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina -- an achievement for which the duo are widely described as being "first in flight." But historians have long known that others were working on a variety of flying machines, including a fellow U.S. resident, German immigrant Gustav Whitehead (born Weisskopf).
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Document

Shape-Shifting Jesus described in ancient Egyptian text

Owen Jarus
LiveScience
Tue, 12 Mar 2013 12:36 UTC
Last Supper
© Renata Sedmakova | ShutterstockIn a newly deciphered 1,200-year-old telling of the Passion story, Jesus has supper with Pontius Pilate before his crucifixion. His supper with the apostles (and subsequent arrest) happen on Tuesday instead of Thursday.
A newly deciphered Egyptian text, dating back almost 1,200 years, tells part of the crucifixion story of Jesus with apocryphal plot twists, some of which have never been seen before.

Written in the Coptic language, the ancient text tells of Pontius Pilate, the judge who authorized Jesus' crucifixion, having dinner with Jesus before his crucifixion and offering to sacrifice his own son in the place of Jesus. It also explains why Judas used a kiss, specifically, to betray Jesus - because Jesus had the ability to change shape, according to the text - and it puts the day of the arrest of Jesus on Tuesday evening rather than Thursday evening, something that contravenes the Easter timeline.

The discovery of the text doesn't mean these events happened, but rather that some people living at the time appear to have believed in them, said Roelof van den Broek, of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, who published the translation in the book Pseudo-Cyril of Jerusalem on the Life and the Passion of Christ (Brill, 2013).

Copies of the text are found in two manuscripts, one in the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City and the other at the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania. Most of the translation comes from the New York text, because the relevant text in the Pennsylvania manuscript is mostly illegible.
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Info

Early human ancestor surprisingly smart

Tia Ghose
LiveScience
Tue, 12 Mar 2013 15:11 UTC
Early Humans
© Steveoc, Wikimedia CommonsTo routinely use fire, early human ancestor Homo erectus would have needed long-term planning, group cooperation, and inhibition.
Early human ancestors needed high-level intelligence to use fire, new research suggests.

The study, published in February in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, argues that fire use requires long-term planning, group cooperation and inhibition. In combination with evidence for early fire use, the study suggests that the early human ancestor Homo erectus may have been smarter than previously thought.

"Early humans would have had to have been fairly clever to keep a fire going by cooperating, not stealing food or not stealing fire from other people," said study author Terrence Twomey, an anthropologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia.

Fire found

Traces of ash found in Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa suggest that at least some Homo erectus used fire as far back as 1 million years ago. Another site in Israel, Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, shows evidence of fire from around 800,000 years ago.

While it's possible these ancient ancestors made fire from scratch, it's more likely they learned to harness flames from a lightning strike or other natural source, Twomey told LiveScience.

Some anthropologists have suggested that cooked food allowed early human ancestors to eat meat, derive more nutrition from food and neutralize bacteria in their food. As a result, early humans could divert energy from digestion to brain growth.

But the evidence for that hypothesis is mostly circumstantial.
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Info

Five strange theories about Stonehenge

Stephanie Pappas
LiveScience
Tue, 12 Mar 2013 13:11 UTC
Sunset over Stonehenge
© MPanchenko, ShutterstockSunset over Stonehenge.
Thousands of years ago, an ancient civilization raised a circle of huge, roughly rectangular stones in a field in what is now Wiltshire, England. Stonehenge, as it would come to be called, has been a mystery ever since.

Building began on the site around 3100 B.C. and continued in phases up until about 1600 B.C. The people who constructed the site left no written records and few clues as to why they bothered to schlep the stones to this spot.

Wild theories about Stonehenge have persisted since the Middle Ages, with 12th-century myths crediting the wizard Merlin with constructing the site. More recently, UFO believers have spun theories about ancient aliens and spacecraft landing pads.

But Stonehenge has inspired a fair number of scientifically reasonable theories as well. Here are five major (and not necessarily mutually exclusive) reasons Stonehenge might exist.

Comment: ...and then there's a variation on number 4:

Stonehenge as a cometary catastrophe predictor

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