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Russia: Ancient Dog Skull from 33,000 Years Ago Discovered in Siberia


The Daily Mail, UK
Wed, 03 Aug 2011 00:54 UTC
Scientists have uncovered a 33,000-year-old dog skull that illustrates some of the earliest evidence of domestication of the animal.

The well-preserved skull was found in a cave in the Siberian Altai mountains by an international team of archaeologists.

The specimen comes from an animal that was alive shortly before the last ice age, and shows very few characteristics of modern dogs.

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© UnknownDiscovery: This 33,000-year-old dog skull illustrates some of the earliest evidence of domestication of the animal and was found in the Siberian mountains

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© UnknownDifferences: The archaeologists say the dog's snout is is similar in size to that of Greenland dogs found 1,000 years ago and it has teeth that would have resembled wild European wolves

The archaeologists have detected that while its snout is similar in size to that of Greenland dogs found 1,000 years ago, it has teeth that would have resembled wild European wolves.
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Gear

Best of the Web: Farming: A Terrible Idea? Yes, It Is!

Michaael Hanlon
The Daily Mail
Thu, 28 Jul 2011 15:40 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Progress, we tend to assume is, well, a Good Thing. Things that are new, and better, come to dominate and sweep aside old technologies. When they invented the car, the horse was rendered instantly obsolete. Ditto the firearm and the longbow, the steamship and the clipper, the turbojet and the prop. It's called the 'better mousetrap' theory of history - that change is driven by the invention of superior technologies.

Except it really isn't that simple. Sometimes a new invention, even if obviously 'better' than what came before takes a surprising amount of time to become established.

The first automobiles were clumsy, unreliable and expensive brutes that were worse in nearly all respects than the horses they were supposed to replace. The first muskets were less accurate and took longer to reload than the long- and crossbows which had reached their design zenith in medieval Europe. The last of the clippers were far faster than the first steam packets designed to replace them.

Comment: Actually, Jared Diamond is right, and agriculture is indeed the worst mistake in the history of the human race. Historical evidence also shows that it's not only temporal or that agriculture's benefits will be appreciated in the future. What's really been happening, that from the onset of farming human species have experienced a gradual degradation. We are on a fast track toward self-destruction on all levels.

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Sherlock

The ancient city that survived the Middle East crash

Owen Jarus
Live Science
Thu, 28 Jul 2011 15:02 UTC
As ancient civilizations across the Middle East collapsed, possibly in response to a global drought about 4,200 years ago, archaeologists have discovered that one settlement in Syria not only survived, but expanded.

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© Tell Qarqur ExpeditionThe site of Tell Qarqur in northwest Syria was occupied for nearly 10,000 years. The debris that people left behind accumulated into a human-made mound known as a tell. Archaeologists have determined that 4,200 years ago, at a time when cities and civilizations were collapsing in the Middle East, Tell Qarqur actually grew
Their next question is - why did Tell Qarqur, a site in northwest Syria, grow at a time when cities across the Middle East were being abandoned?
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Pharoah

Egyptian tomb mystery may be world's first protractor

Jo Marchant
New Scientist
Fri, 29 Jul 2011 14:11 UTC
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© Jane Maria HamiltonA new angle
The bizarre object to the right was found in the tomb of an ancient Egyptian architect. For over 100 years, it has languished while archaeologists debated its function.

Now, a physicist has thrown her hat into the ring, arguing that it is the world's first known protractor. The intriguing suggestion - which has drawn scepticism from archaeologists - is based on the numbers encoded within the carvings on its surface.

The architect Kha helped to build pharaohs' tombs during the 18th dynasty, around 1400 BC. His own tomb was discovered intact in 1906 by archaeologist Ernesto Schiaparelli in Deir-al-Medina, near the Valley of the Kings. Among Kha's belongings were measuring instruments including cubit rods, a levelling device that resembles a modern set square, and what appeared to be an oddly shaped empty wooden case with a hinged lid.

Schiaparelli thought this last object had held another levelling instrument. The museum in Turin, Italy, where the items are now exhibited identifies it as the case of a balancing scale.
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Hourglass

Africa: 20-Million-Year-Old Ape Skull Unearthed in Uganda


PhysOrg
Mon, 01 Aug 2011 10:00 UTC
map, uganda
© AFP/GraphicMap of Uganda showing the remote northeast Karamoja region where the ape skull was found
A team of Ugandan and French paleontologists announced Tuesday they had found a 20-million-year-old ape skull in northeastern Uganda, saying it could shed light on the region's evolutionary history.

"This is the first time that the complete skull of an ape of this age has been found ... it is a highly important fossil and it will certainly put Uganda on the map in terms of the scientific world," Martin Pickford, a paleontologist from the College de France in Paris, told journalists in Kampala.

The fossilised skull belonged to a male Ugandapitchecus Major, a remote cousin of today's great apes which roamed the region around 20 million years ago.

The team discovered the remains on July 18 while looking for fossils in the remants of an extinct volcano in Uganda's remote northeastern Karamoja region.

Preliminary studies of the fossil showed that the tree-climbing herbivore, roughly 10 years old when it died, had a head the size of a chimpanzees but a brain the size of a baboons, Pickford said.
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Info

"Spectacular" Three-Cat Monolith Unearthed in Mexico

Ker Than
National Geographic
Mon, 01 Aug 2011 21:44 UTC
3 Cat Monolith
© INAH via APThe "Triad of Felines" carved rock found in Chalcatzingo, Mexico.

With a little help from archaeologists, three giant cats have slunk into view after spending thousands of years underground in central Mexico.

Carved in a vaguely Olmec style into a stone monolith, the seated jaguars - or possibly mountain lions - may have been part of a decorative hillside wall that was crawling with big-cat carvings, experts suggest.

The circa 700 B.C. carving, dubbed the "Triad of Felines" by archaeologists, was found about 60 miles (a hundred kilometers) south of Mexico City at Chalcatzingo, an archaeological site known to have had ties to the Olmec civilization.

Measuring about 5 feet (1.5 meters) tall and 3.6 feet (1.1 meters) wide, the carving was originally set within a hillside and was designed to be clearly visible from a village below, experts say.

The discovery is only the latest of about 40 large stone carvings found at Chalcatzingo since 1935 - many of them depicting cats, said David Grove, an anthropologist at the University of Florida who conducted research at Chalcatzingo for 30 years beginning in the 1970s.

As an example of Olmec-style art, Grove added, "Triad of Felines" is "spectacular."
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Beaker

Half of European men share King Tut's DNA

Alice Baghdjian
Reuters
Mon, 01 Aug 2011 14:36 UTC
Image
© Unknown
London - Up to 70 percent of British men and half of all Western European men are related to the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun, geneticists in Switzerland said.

Scientists at Zurich-based DNA genealogy centre, iGENEA, reconstructed the DNA profile of the boy Pharaoh, who ascended the throne at the age of nine, his father Akhenaten and grandfather Amenhotep III, based on a film that was made for the Discovery Channel.

The results showed that King Tut belonged to a genetic profile group, known as haplogroup R1b1a2, to which more than 50 percent of all men in Western Europe belong, indicating that they share a common ancestor.

Among modern-day Egyptians this haplogroup contingent is below 1 percent, according to iGENEA.

"It was very interesting to discover that he belonged to a genetic group in Europe -- there were many possible groups in Egypt that the DNA could have belonged to," said Roman Scholz, director of the iGENEA Centre.

Around 70 percent of Spanish and 60 percent of French men also belong to the genetic group of the Pharaoh who ruled Egypt more than 3,000 years ago.
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Sherlock

Rome, Italy: Archaeologists unearth 2,000-year-old mosaic depicting the Greek god Apollo surrounded by muses


The Daily Mail
Sat, 30 Jul 2011 15:00 UTC
A 2,000-year-old mosaic in Rome depicting the Greek god Apollo has been unearthed by archaeologists near the Colosseum.

Excavations in the bowels of an ancient Roman hill have turned up the well-preserved, late 1st century wall mosaic with a figure of Apollo, nude except for a colourful mantle over a shoulder and surrounded by muses.

The mosaic-covered wall is 16 meters (53 feet) wide and at least 2 meters (6.6 feet) high. Officials think the wall continues down some 8 meters (26.5 feet) more.

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© EPAAncient: A worker restores part of a mosaic mural depicting Apollo and the Muses found at an archaeological site under the Terme di Traiano in Rome
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© Associated PressWork of art: Excavations in the bowels of the ancient Roman hill have turned up the well-preserved, late 1st Century wall mosaic with a figure of Apollo, naked except for a colourful mantle over a shoulder
Archaeologists say the wall appears to be in a tunnel built to help support Trajan's Baths, named for the emperor who ruled from 98 till 117. The mosaic apparently embellished a room where wealthy Romans gathered to hear music and discuss art.
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Sherlock

The 12,000 years old unexplained structure at Göbekli Tepe, Turkey

jalalHB
Jaho Jahal
Sun, 17 Jul 2011 14:50 UTC
Göbekli Tepe, is a hilltop sanctuary erected on the highest point of an elongated mountain ridge some 15 km northeast of the town of Şanlıurfa, in southeastern Turkey and 500 miles away from Istanbul, Turkey. It is the most astonishing archaeological discovery in modern times and also thought to be the oldest advanced civilization on Earth.

Watch the video below to see details as reported by the History Channel:

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Family

New York, US: Traces of a 19th-Century Village Have Been Excavated in Central Park

Jen Doll
Village Voice Blog
Sat, 30 Jul 2011 13:45 UTC
Think about this when you're relaxing in Central Park over the weekend: An entire community once lived there, with homes and several churches and at least one school, right in the park (before it was the park). We're talking about Seneca Village, a largely African-American community of some 260 people that existed from the 1820s until 1857, when they were evicted so that Central Park could be created. They lived in the area between 81st and 89th Streets and 7th and 8th Avenues, in what is now part of Central Park, east of Central Park West.


For many years, three professors from City College, Columbia, and NYU had sought to gain permission to dig in the park, seeking artifacts from this community. They had documentary records of Seneca Village, including maps of houses, newspaper accounts, affidavits, and church records. They had radar that showed where homes existed. But the city wouldn't let them excavate -- until 8 weeks ago. Today marks the last day of their dig. We spoke to archaeologist Nan Rothschild of Columbia, who told us about what they found...and what it means.
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