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Basque Origins Predate Arrival of Farmers in Iberian Peninsula, DNA Analysis Finds

David Braun
National Geographic
Tue, 06 Mar 2012 21:39 UTC
Basque Region
© Jonathan Blair/National GeographicHundreds of sheep walk up cloud-veiled mountain with herder following in the Basque region.
Comprehensive analysis of Basque genetic patterns has found that Basque genetic uniqueness predates the arrival of agriculture in the Iberian Peninsula some 7,000 years ago, the Genographic Project announced today.

"Through detailed DNA analysis of samples from the French and Spanish Basque regions, the Genographic team found that Basques share unique genetic patterns that distinguish them from the surrounding non-Basque populations," Genographic said in a news statement. The Genographic Project seeks to chart new knowledge about the migratory history of the human species and answer age-old questions surrounding the genetic diversity of humanity.

The project is a nonprofit, multi-year, global research partnership of National Geographic and IBM with field support by the Waitt Family Foundation. At the core of the project is a global consortium of 11 regional scientific teams following an ethical and scientific framework and who are responsible for sample collection and analysis in their respective regions.

Published in the American Journal of Human Genetics, the Basque study was led by Lluis Quintana-Murci, principal investigator of Genographic's Western European regional center. "Our study mirrors European history and could certainly extend to other European peoples. We found that Basques share common genetic features with other European populations, but at the same time present some autochthonous (local) lineages that make them unique," said Quintana-Murci. "This is reflected in their language, Euskara, a non-Indo-European language, which altogether contributes to the cultural richness of this European population."
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Magic Wand

Five hundred new fairytales discovered in Germany

Victoria Sussens-Messerer
Guardian.co.uk
Tue, 06 Mar 2012 13:25 UTC
Image
© Barbara StefanSpinning a yarn … King Golden Hair, one of the newly-discovered fairytales.
Collection of fairytales gathered by historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth had been locked away in an archive in Regensburg for over 150 years

A whole new world of magic animals, brave young princes and evil witches has come to light with the discovery of 500 new fairytales, which were locked away in an archive in Regensburg, Germany for over 150 years. The tales are part of a collection of myths, legends and fairytales, gathered by the local historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth (1810 - 1886) in the Bavarian region of Oberpfalz at about the same time as the Grimm brothers were collecting the fairytales that have since charmed adults and children around the world.

Last year, the Oberpfalz cultural curator Erika Eichenseer published a selection of fairytales from Von Schönwerth's collection, calling the book Prinz Roßzwifl. This is local dialect for "scarab beetle". The scarab, also known as the "dung beetle", buries its most valuable possession, its eggs, in dung, which it then rolls into a ball using its back legs. Eichenseer sees this as symbolic for fairytales, which she says hold the most valuable treasure known to man: ancient knowledge and wisdom to do with human development, testing our limits and salvation.
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Butterfly

Mozart Piece Previously Unknown Discovered in 18th Century Music Book

Leigh Goessl
Digital Journal
Sun, 04 Mar 2012 00:00 UTC
Image
© wbsgallery.org
A previously unknown work of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has been uncovered in the state of Tyrol in Austria. The Mozart Foundation in Salzburg reported the music was discovered in the western Austrian state tucked inside a late 1700s music music book.

The Austrian Independent reported a professional music copyist in Tyrol identified the work was Mozart's and the Mozart Foundation said the find "is clearly written by the young Wolfgang Mozart." The previously unknown piece, which also dates back to the 18th century, is said to be an authentic Mozart creation. The exciting find was stumbled upon by a university lecturer as he was gathering pieces of music.

Hildegard Herrmann-Schneider, from the institute for Tyrolean music research at Innsbruck University, was reported to have been compiling handwritten pages for the Répertoire International des Sources Musicales, an international organization that catalogues preserved music, when he came across the centuries-old piano composition inside a music book that is estimated to originate around 1780.
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Blackbox

Could the first humans to reach the Americas have come from Europe - across Atlantic ice?


io9.com
Mon, 05 Mar 2012 16:09 UTC
Image
© John Winkelman on Flickr.
It's one of the most controversial ideas in archaeology. Humans from Europe supposedly could have crossed the frozen Atlantic and reached America first. It's a fringe idea...but now two archaeologists have released a book explaining how it could have happened.

In their new book Across Atlantic Ice, University of Exeter archaeologist Bruce Bradley and Smithsonian Institution colleague Dennis Stanford outline how they think early humans could have made it from Europe to the Americas between 18,000 and 25,000 years ago. The pair first proposed their controversial hypothesis thirteen years ago, but their new book attempts to solve one of the hypothesis's biggest problems: just how could humans have crossed the Atlantic?

Earlier versions of this hypothesis had required Bradley and Stanford to suggest the presence of advanced seafaring technology among these ancient humans that was on par with what the Polynesians used to colonize the Pacific. Their new idea is rather less far-fetched, suggesting that climate conditions during the time period created a sort of icy highway between France and North America. The authors say these ancient humans, known as the Solutrean culture, could have made it across the Atlantic use technology known to be in their possession.
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Info

Gate Found in Karnak Temple Adds New Name to Ancient Kings' List

Nevine El-Aref
Ahram Online
Sun, 04 Mar 2012 20:42 UTC
Ancient Engraving
© Ahram Online

During routine excavations on the northern side of the Amun-Re Temple in Luxor's famous Karnak temple complex, a team from the French-Egyptian Centre for the Study of the Karnak Temples this week unearthed a gate that they say has led to a significant breakthrough in archaeologists' understanding of Egypt's enigmatic 17th Dynasty. It was this dynasty that launched the military campaign that eventually succeeded in ridding Egypt of the tribe of invaders known as the "Hyksos."

The gate, carved out of limestone, is engraved with the name of a king called "Sen-Nakht-En-Re." Mansour Boreik, general supervisor of monuments in Luxor, told Ahram Online that this king's name was previously mentioned twice - during the Rameside period and during the reign of King Ahmose, the latter of whom is traditionally given credit for expelling the Hyksos from Egypt.

Boreik went on to note that, despite these earlier references to Sen-Nakht-En-Re, archaeologists had believed him to be an imaginary king, since no monuments had ever been found bearing his name. The recent discovery of the pharaoh's name on the gate in Karnak, however, strongly suggests that the king was, in fact, once a ruler of ancient Egypt.
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Boat

New archaeological site discovered at the coast of Brazil


brazilweirdnews.blogspot.com
Sun, 04 Mar 2012 12:42 UTC
Archaeological discovery coast Brazil

Brazil, Sao Paulo's state. At "Ilhabela", (Beautiful Island) - an archipelago and city situated 4 miles off the coast of São Paulo state in Brazil, the coodinator of the Projeto de Gestão e Diagnóstico do Patrimônio Arqueológico de Ilhabela (Project Management and Diagnosis of the Archaeological Heritage of Ilhabela - GEDAI), maintained by the Instituto Histórico, Geográfico e Arqueológico da the Secretaria Municipal de Cultura (History, Geography and Archaeology Institute of the Municipal Culture), the archaeologist Mrs. Cintia Bendazzoli discovered an impotant mortuary archaeological site. The excavation was done on an emergency basis because of the imminent destruction of the material.

The place that was named "Toca da Caveira" (something like Hole of Skull or "Skull Burrow") had human skeletal remains, and funerary accompaniments like clay pot and stone tool, revealing a complex Indigenous funerary ritual. At the same time another two more sites were identified how belonging to the pré-colonizations epoch, but these - still have not been subjected to more detailed research.
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2 + 2 = 4

Radical Theory of First Americans Places Stone Age Europeans in Delmarva 20,000 Years Ago

Brian Vastag
Washingtonpost.com
Wed, 29 Feb 2012 07:06 UTC
Image
© Bonnie Jo Mount/PostSmithsonian Institute anthropologist Dennis Stanford, left, and University of Exeter archeologist Bruce Bradley examine knives from the last Ice Age.
When the crew of the Virginia scallop trawler Cinmar hauled a mastodon tusk onto the deck in 1970, another oddity dropped out of the net: a dark, tapered stone blade, nearly eight inches long and still sharp.

Forty years later, this rediscovered prehistoric slasher has reopened debate on a radical theory about who the first Americans were and when they got here.

Archaeologists have long held that North America remained unpopulated until about 15,000 years ago, when Siberian people walked or boated into Alaska and then moved down the West Coast.

But the mastodon relic found near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay turned out to be 22,000 years old, suggesting that the blade was just as ancient.

Whoever fashioned that blade was not supposed to be here.
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Boat

Neanderthals were Ancient Mariners


Science Daily
Thu, 01 Mar 2012 11:01 UTC
Neanderthals ancient mariners

It looks like Neanderthals may have beaten modern humans to the seas. Growing evidence suggests our extinct cousins criss-crossed the Mediterranean in boats from 100,000 years ago - though not everyone is convinced they weren't just good swimmers.

Neanderthals lived around the Mediterranean from 300,000 years ago. Their distinctive "Mousterian" stone tools are found on the Greek mainland and, intriguingly, have also been found on the Greek islands of Lefkada, Kefalonia and Zakynthos. That could be explained in two ways: either the islands weren't islands at the time, or our distant cousins crossed the water somehow.

Now, George Ferentinos of the University of Patras in Greece says we can rule out the former. The islands, he says, have been cut off from the mainland for as long as the tools have been on them.

Ferentinos compiled data that showed sea levels were 120 metres lower 100,000 years ago, because water was locked up in Earth's larger ice caps. But the seabed off Greece today drops down to around 300 metres, meaning that when Neanderthals were in the region, the sea would have been at least 180 metres deep (Journal of Archaeological Science, DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2012.01.032).
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Sherlock

Paleo Adapted: The 5,000-year-old iceman cometh with brown eyes and lactose intolerance

Jason Palmer
BBC
Tue, 28 Feb 2012 08:38 UTC
Image
© Samadeli Marco/Eurac"The Iceman" has been the subject of constant study for more than 20 years
New clues have emerged in what could be described as the world's oldest murder case: that of Oetzi the "Iceman", whose 5,300-year-old body was discovered frozen in the Italian Alps in 1991.

Oetzi's full genome has now been reported in Nature Communications.

It reveals that he had brown eyes, "O" blood type, was lactose intolerant, and was predisposed to heart disease.

They also show him to be the first documented case of infection by a Lyme disease bacterium.
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Sherlock

New Evidence Suggests Stone Age Hunters from Europe Discovered America

David Keys
The Independent
Tue, 28 Feb 2012 21:21 UTC
eskimo painting
© n/a
New archaeological evidence suggests that America was first discovered by Stone Age people from Europe - 10,000 years before the Siberian-originating ancestors of the American Indians set foot in the New World.

A remarkable series of several dozen European-style stone tools, dating back between 19,000 and 26,000 years, have been discovered at six locations along the US east coast. Three of the sites are on the Delmarva Peninsular in Maryland, discovered by archaeologist Dr Darrin Lowery of the University of Delaware. One is in Pennsylvania and another in Virginia. A sixth was discovered by scallop-dredging fishermen on the seabed 60 miles from the Virginian coast on what, in prehistoric times, would have been dry land.

The new discoveries are among the most important archaeological breakthroughs for several decades - and are set to add substantially to our understanding of humanity's spread around the globe.

The similarity between other later east coast US and European Stone Age stone tool technologies has been noted before. But all the US European-style tools, unearthed before the discovery or dating of the recently found or dated US east coast sites, were from around 15,000 years ago - long after Stone Age Europeans (the Solutrean cultures of France and Iberia) had ceased making such artefacts. Most archaeologists had therefore rejected any possibility of a connection. But the newly-discovered and recently-dated early Maryland and other US east coast Stone Age tools are from between 26,000 and 19,000 years ago - and are therefore contemporary with the virtually identical western European material.
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