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Urn burial site discovered near Kancheepuram


The Hindu
Sun, 08 Apr 2012 16:14 UTC
Urn site in India
© The Hindu
Pottery and iron age megaliths identified from a structure at Aarpakkam village in Kancheepuram district of Tamil Nadu. Photo: B. Jothi Ramalingam
Dated to the pre-Megalithic/Iron Age period in T.N. - 1,800 BC-1,500 BC

A vast urn-burial site has been found at Mandapam village, near Aarpakkam intersection, about 14 km from Kancheepuram.

The importance of the site, archaeologists say, is that it belongs to a period earlier than the Megalithic Age or Iron Age in Tamil Nadu.

They estimate that the site is datable to 1,800 BCE to 1,500 BCE, that is, 3,800 to 3,500 years before the present.

The site, however, has been ravaged by quarrying for blue-metal. Earth-movers have sliced the big urns and smashed into pieces ritual pottery, bowls and terracotta plates inside the urns.

Quarrying has reduced the site to small lakes with deposits of blue metal jutting out and broken urns protruding in places. A stone-crushing machine is filling the air with dust.
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Bacon

The pagan roots of Easter

Heather McDougall
The Guardian
Sun, 08 Apr 2012 07:33 UTC
Image

Figurine of the Goddess Astarte in the Louvre, Paris.
Easter is a pagan festival. If Easter isn't really about Jesus, then what is it about? Today, we see a secular culture celebrating the spring equinox, whilst religious culture celebrates the resurrection. However, early Christianity made a pragmatic acceptance of ancient pagan practises, most of which we enjoy today at Easter. The general symbolic story of the death of the son (sun) on a cross (the constellation of the Southern Cross) and his rebirth, overcoming the powers of darkness, was a well worn story in the ancient world. There were plenty of parallel, rival resurrected saviours too.

The Sumerian goddess Inanna, or Ishtar, was hung naked on a stake, and was subsequently resurrected and ascended from the underworld. One of the oldest resurrection myths is Egyptian Horus. Born on 25 December, Horus and his damaged eye became symbols of life and rebirth. Mithras was born on what we now call Christmas day, and his followers celebrated the spring equinox. Even as late as the 4th century AD, the sol invictus, associated with Mithras, was the last great pagan cult the church had to overcome. Dionysus was a divine child, resurrected by his grandmother. Dionysus also brought his mum, Semele, back to life.
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Question

Did Shroud of Turin Inspire Spread of Christianity?

Stephanie Pappas
Live Science
Thu, 05 Apr 2012 17:01 UTC
Shroud of Turin
© Public domain
Full-length negative photograph of the Shroud of Turin.


A hoax or a miracle? The Shroud of Turin has inspired this question for centuries. Now, an art historian says this piece of cloth, said to bear the imprint of the crucified body of Jesus Christ, may be something in between.

According to Thomas de Wesselow, formerly of Cambridge University, the controversial shroud is no medieval forgery, as a 1989 attempt at radiocarbon dating suggests. Nor is the strange outline of the body on the fabric a miracle, de Wesselow writes in his new book, The Sign: The Shroud of Turin and the Secret of the Resurrection (Dutton Adult, 2012). Instead, de Wesselow suggests, the shroud was created by natural chemical processes - and then interpreted by Jesus' followers as a sign of his resurrection.

"People in the past did not view images as just the mundane things that we see them as today. They were potentially alive. They were seen as sources of power," de Wesselow told LiveScience. The image of Jesus found on the shroud would have been seen as a "living double," he said. "It seemed like they had a living double after his death and therefore it was seen as Jesus resurrected."
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Info

Hot Find! Humans Used Fire 1 Million Years Ago

Charles Choi
Live Science
Mon, 02 Apr 2012 14:01 UTC
Wonderwerk Cave
© M. Chazan
Researchers found evidence of human fire use in South Africa's Wonderwerk Cave (shown here), a massive cavern located near the edge of the Kalahari Desert.

Ash and charred bone, the earliest known evidence of controlled use of fire, reveal that human ancestors may have used fire a million years ago, a discovery that researchers say will shed light on this major turning point in human evolution.

Scientists analyzed material from Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa, a massive cavern located near the edge of the Kalahari Desert. Previous excavations there had uncovered an extensive record of human occupation.

Microscopic analysis revealed clear evidence of burning, such as plant ash and charred bone fragments. These materials were apparently burned in the cave, as opposed to being carried in there by wind or water, and were found alongside stone tools in a layer dating back about 1 million years. Surface fracturing of ironstone, the kind expected from fires, was also seen.

Although modern humans are the only human species alive today, originating about 200,000 years ago, other human species once roamed the Earth, such as Homo erectus, which arose about 1.9 million years ago.

"The analysis pushes the timing for the human use of fire back by 300,000 years, suggesting that human ancestors as early as Homo erectus may have begun using fire as part of their way of life," said researcher Michael Chazan, a paleolithic archaeologist at the University of Toronto and director of the university's archaeology center.
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Cards

"Lucy" had prehuman company, fossil shows


CBS News
Sun, 01 Apr 2012 18:50 UTC
Lucy and friends
© Yohannes Haile-Selassie/The Cleveland Museum of Natural History
The first element of the Burtele partial foot, fourth metatarsal, as it was found on the ground in the Woranso-Mille area of the Afar region of Ethiopia.

Lucy, it turns out, had company - another prehuman that also walked but spent more of its time in trees.

Until now, there was no proof of another human relative living around the same time as the species made famous by the Lucy skeleton. But a fossil discovery reveals there was another creature around 3 million years ago and it gives new insight into the evolution of a key human trait - walking on two legs.

The creature came to light when an international team of researchers unearthed a partial foot in eastern Africa. Like Lucy, it walked upright, but had a grasping foot that it used to climb tree branches. Scientists said it's now clear that various human relatives experimented with upright walking.

"This is just another window into solving the problem of how we got from a primitive foot to the modern human foot," said Bruce Latimer of Cleveland's Case Western Reserve University, who helped discover the fossil remains.

Various hominin species have co-existed throughout human evolutionary history, but this is the first sign of another during Lucy's time.

So what was this tree-climbing and ground-dwelling creature?
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Star of David

Were Jews Ever Slaves in Egypt, or is Passover a Myth?

Josh Mintz / Jewish World blogger
Haaretz.com
Mon, 26 Mar 2012 20:11 UTC
Where is the real proof - archeological evidence, state records and primary sources?

Image
© Associated Press
Here's a question for you: what do actor Charlton Heston, DreamWorks animation studios and Former Prime Minister Menachem Begin all have in common? Well, they've all, at one time or another, perpetuated the myth that the Jews built the pyramids. And it is a myth, make no mistake. Even if we take the earliest possible date for Jewish slavery that the Bible suggests, the Jews were enslaved in Egypt a good three hundred years after the 1750 B.C. completion date of the pyramids. That is, of course, if they were ever slaves in Egypt at all.

We are so quick to point out the obvious lies about Jews and Israel that come out in Egypt - the Sinai Governors claims that the Mossad released a shark into the Red Sea to kill Egyptians, or, as I once read in a newspaper whilst on holiday in Cairo, the tale of the magnetic belt buckles that Jews were selling cheap in Egypt that would sterilize men on contact - yet we so rarely examine our own misconceptions about the nature of our history with the Egyptian nation.
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Info

Another Nazca: Rare Animal-Shaped Mounds Discovered in Peru

Enrico de Lazaro
Sci-News
Thu, 29 Mar 2012 13:08 UTC
Dr. Robert Benfer of the University of Missouri has discovered numerous earthen animals rising above the coastal plains of Peru, including a giant condor, an orca, a duck, and a caiman or puma monster.

Ancient Mounds
© Google Earth Pro
The orca-shaped mound dated to about 5000 years ago.
The study, published in the journal Antiquity, describes the mounds, measuring from 5 to 400 m long in each of the six valleys Dr. Benfer surveyed in coastal Peru, a region already renowned for the Nazca lines. The mounds pre-date ceramics and were probably built using woven baskets to carry and pile up rock and soil.

"The mounds will draw tourists, one day," Dr. Benfer said. "Some of them are more than 4,000 years old. Compare that to the effigy mounds of North America, which date to between 400 and 1200 AD. The oldest Peruvian mounds were being built at the same time as the pyramids in Egypt."

Like the Nazca lines, which include a series of giant animal outlines drawn on the ground to the south, the animal mounds were best observed from a higher vantage point. Google Earth images of the mounds revealed the shapes of birds, including a giant condor, a 5000-year-old orca, a duck, and a caiman/puma monster seen in bone and rock carvings from the area.
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Info

Neanderthals Were Dying Out Before Humans Arrived

Jennifer Viegas
Discovery News
Thu, 29 Mar 2012 09:16 UTC
Neanderthal
© Corbis
A lifelike model of a Neanderthal at the Neanderthal Museum in Mettmann, Germany.

Neanderthals in Western Europe started disappearing long before Homo sapiens showed up, suggesting that cold weather, and not cold-hearted humans, might have been responsible for the species' ultimate demise.

The findings, published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, suggest that at least one population of Neanderthals was vulnerable to climate change.

Love Dalén, lead author of the paper, told Discovery News that "even if the Neanderthals were capable of surviving periods of extreme cold, the game species they relied on likely could not, so their resource base would have been severely depleted."

Neanderthals appear to have favored hunting wooly mammoths and other big game. Neanderthals were also big-brained, with the ability to make stone tools, construct garments, control fire and find shelter.

For the study, Dalén of the Swedish Museum of Natural History and his colleagues analyzed mitochondrial DNA sequences from 13 Neanderthal individuals, including a new sequence from the site of Valdegoba cave in northern Spain.
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Info

Celeb Martial Artist Recruited for Ancient Roman Army

Owen Jarus
Live Science
Thu, 29 Mar 2012 09:54 UTC
Ancient Sports
© Timothy R. Nichols | Shutterstock
Flavillianus excelled at two sports, wrestling and pankration, winning victories in Athens, Argos and Neapolis. Both of these sports have roots in ancient Greece.
Millennia before modern-day military recruiters talked up potential soldiers in shopping malls or put up posters, one Roman city took a rather different approach to recruiting soldiers for the emperor's army.

A newly translated inscription, dating back about 1,800 years, reveals that Oinoanda, a Roman city in southwest Turkey, turned to a mixed martial art champion to recruit for the Roman army and bring the new soldiers to a city named Hierapolis, located hundreds of miles to the east, in Syria.

His name was Lucius Septimius Flavianus Flavillianus and he was a champion at wrestling and pankration, the latter a bloody, and at times lethal, mixed martial art where contestants would try to pound each other unconscious or into submission.

Flavillianus proved to be so successful as a military recruiter that it was decreed that he be made a "cult figure in the band of heroes" after he died, with each tribe of the city erecting statues in his honor. The inscription, written in Greek, was engraved on the base of a statue found in Oinoanda's agora (a central public space) and would have been erected by the people of the city. Discovered by a team in 2002, it wasn't until now that researchers translated and published it.

"This is a very unusual piece of evidence that has come to light," said Nicholas Milner, a researcher with the British Institute at Ankara, who published the translation in the most recent edition of the journal Anatolian Studies.

Milner explained that in the Roman Empire, this sort of "heroisation" is very rare.
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Sherlock

Archaeologists astounded by musical instrument find in Skye cave

Laurence Ford
HighlandNews.co.uk
Thu, 29 Mar 2012 08:33 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Cabinet Secretary for Culture and External Affairs Fiona Hyslop holds a replica of the 2,300-year-old lyre bridge with, from left, High Pasture Cave project director Steve Birch, cultural historian Dr John Purser and Dr Graeme Lawson of Cambridge Music-archaeological research.
One of the earliest stringed instrument ever found in Western Europe - dating to more than 2,300 years ago - has been discovered at an excavation on the Isle of Skye. Scottish Government Cabinet Secretary for Culture Fiona Hyslop has revealed the small wooden fragment that it is believed comes from a lyre. It has been burnt and broken, but the notches where strings would have been placed are easy to distinguish on the artefact.

Music archaeologists Graeme Lawson and John Purser studied the fragment which was discovered at High Pasture Cave, near the village of Torrin. Mr Lawson, of Cambridge Music-archaeological Research, said: "For Scotland - and indeed all of us in these islands - this is very much a step change. It pushes the history of complex music back more than a thousand years, into our darkest pre-history. And not only the history of music but more specifically of song and poetry, because that's what such instruments were very often used for.
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