Secret HistoryS


Sherlock

The mysterious sunken 'pyramid' of Japan

Alexander Light
Humans Are Free
Thu, 23 Apr 2015 13:44 UTC
Image
A mysterious underwater structure off the coast of Japan causes historical controversy. This megalithic structure is commonly referred to as the "Yonaguni Pyramid."

Though it is not an actual pyramid, this massive structure looks like a small mountain, which was carved to suit the needs of an unknown ancient civilization.

In 1986, a diver near the island of Yonaguni Jima, off the southern tip of Japan (around Okinawa) came across some strange structures about 25 metres (82 feet) below the sea level.
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Info

How ancient peoples populated the Pacific islands

Eric Hopton
RedOrbit
Wed, 22 Apr 2015 19:47 UTC
Atoll
© Thinkstock
Between 3,500 and 900 years ago, people first settled the islands of the vast Pacific Ocean in double-hulled and outrigger canoes. Many scientists have tried to explain just what made these epic journeys possible. University of Utah anthropologist Adrian Bell tackled the problem from a completely new perspective. He used statistics that describe how an infectious disease spreads and applied them to computer simulations of the colonization of 24 major island groups.

"We model ocean migrants as 'infecting' uninhabited islands," he said in a statement.

If the results of the analysis are correct, the colonizers didn't just hop to the nearest islands or drift around hopefully. The study, published in this month's issue of the journal American Antiquity , suggests that those early Pacific seafarers "had a strategy for the best way to discover new places: movement across the ocean in a less risky fashion - often meaning into the wind - and moving to places that were more easily visible."
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Document

Oldest DNA extracted from Neanderthal who fell down sinkhole 150,000 years ago, starved to death, fused with walls

Richard Gray
Daily Mail, UK
Mon, 20 Apr 2015 07:22 UTC
Scientists have found that the Neanderthal fell down into the cave thousands of years ago - believing the person starved to death
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© Redazione Research ItalyCaveman: The body became fused with the walls
It was a gruesome death that is the stuff of most people's nightmares. Now scientists have identified the unfortunate individual whose bones were found fused to the walls of a cave in Lamalunga, near Altamura, in southern Italy.

Using analysis of DNA extracted from the bones sticking out from the limestone rock, researchers have found he was a Neanderthal who fell down a sinkhole around 150,000 years ago. Genetic analysis of the bones (above) of 'Altamura Man', found entombed in limestone in a cave in Altamura, Italy, has revealed that they belong to a Neanderthal who fell into the cave 128,000 to 187,000 years ago

Wedged in the narrow space and probably badly injured, he is thought to have starved to death.
Over the thousands of years that followed, the body decayed and the remaining bones gradually became incorporated into the stalactites left behind by water dribbling down the cave walls.

The DNA is the oldest to ever be extracted from a Neanderthal and the researchers now hope to further analyse the genetic information from the skeleton.
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Book 2

Helen Keller: Radical activist

Peter Dreier
yes! magazine
Thu, 12 Jul 2012 23:39 UTC
Here's what they don't teach: When the blind-deaf visionary learned that poor people were more likely to be blind than others, she set off down a pacifist, socialist path that broke the boundaries of her time—and continues to challenge ours today.
Helen Keller
© Los Angeles TimesHelen Keller sitting holding a magnolia flower, circa 1920.
"So long as I confine my activities to social service and the blind, they compliment me extravagantly, calling me 'arch priestess of the sightless,' 'wonder woman,' and a 'modern miracle.' But when it comes to a discussion of poverty, and I maintain that it is the result of wrong economics—that the industrial system under which we live is at the root of much of the physical deafness and blindness in the world—that is a different matter! It is laudable to give aid to the handicapped. Superficial charities make smooth the way of the prosperous; but to advocate that all human beings should have leisure and comfort, the decencies and refinements of life, is a Utopian dream, and one who seriously contemplates its realization indeed must be deaf, dumb, and blind." —Helen Keller (letter to Senator Robert La Follette, 1924)
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Clock

Clock based on a 300 year old design keeps accurate to a second for 100 days

Lydia Willgress
Daily Mail
Sun, 19 Apr 2015 16:52 UTC
martin burgess clock B
The Martin Burgess Clock B, which is based on a design by carpenter John Harrison from 300 years ago, has stunned experts by keeping accurate to a second for 100 days
A clock based on a design from 300 years ago has stunned experts by keeping accurate to a second for 100 days.

The modern-day Martin Burgess Clock B is based on John Harrison's 18th century clock, which he thought up to solve the problem of determining longitude at sea.

It has been part of a 100-day trial at the Royal Observatory, in Greenwich, to see if the claim - that the clock would neither lose nor gain more than a second in 100 days - was true.

The clock, which was built using modern materials, was initially set ticking a year ago after being strapped to one of the Observatory's supporting pillars.

But it quickly became apparent the trial would be a success and wax seals were placed on its case so its accuracy could be verified, the Independent on Sunday reported.

The time was measured using a radio-controlled clock, which received the national time signal, and the BT speaking clock.
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Info

Tools found near Lake Turkana in Kenya are world's oldest

Ian Johnston
The Independent, UK
Thu, 16 Apr 2015 03:18 UTC
Lake Turkana
© The Independent, UKThey are about 700,000 years older than the previous record holder and are likely to have been made by Australopithecus, an ape-like ancestor of Homo sapiens.
The world's oldest tools - made by ancestors of modern humans some 3.3 million years ago - have been found in Kenya.

Stones had been deliberately "knapped" or flaked to make a sharp cutting edge, researchers said, according to Science magazine.

They are about 700,000 years older than the previous record holder and are likely to have been made by Australopithecus, an ape-like ancestor of Homo sapiens, or another species, Kenyanthropus.

Archaeologist Sonia Harmand, of New York's Stony Brook University, told the annual meeting of the US Paleoanthropology Society: "The artefacts were clearly knapped and not the result of accidental fracture of rocks."
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Info

Evidence of pre-Columbus trade found in Alaska house

Owen Jarus
Live Science
Thu, 16 Apr 2015 06:39 UTC
Rising Whale Site
© University of ColoradoArchaeologists working at the Rising Whale site at Cape Espenberg, Alaska, have discovered several artifacts that were imported from East Asia.
Bronze artifacts discovered in a 1,000-year-old house in Alaska suggest trade was occurring between East Asia and the New World centuries before the voyages of Columbus.

Archaeologists found the artifacts at the "Rising Whale" site at Cape Espenberg.

"When you're looking at the site from a little ways away, it looks like a bowhead [whale] coming to the surface," said Owen Mason, a research associate at the University of Colorado, who is part of a team excavating the site.

The new discoveries, combined with other finds made over the past 100 years, suggest trade items and ideas were reaching Alaska from East Asian civilizations well before Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean Sea in 1492 archaeologists said. [See Images of the New Discoveries at the Rising Whale Site]

"We're seeing the interactions, indirect as they are, with these so-called 'high civilizations' of China, Korea or Yakutia," a region in Russia, Mason said.
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Colosseum

Julius Caesar suffered from mini-strokes, not epilepsy says new study


Yahoo News
Wed, 15 Apr 2015 17:30 UTC
caesar
Roman emperor Julius Caesar may have suffered a series of mini-strokes, explaining his dark mood in later life, according to doctors at London's Imperial College.

Caesar, who lived from 100 to 44 BC, has long been the focus of medical debate, with the common assumption being that he suffered from epilepsy.

But medical experts from the London university have reexamined his symptoms, which included vertigo, dizziness and limb weakness, and concluded that he may have in fact suffered from a cardiovascular complaint.

"To date, possible cardiovascular explanations have always been ruled out on the grounds that until his death he was supposedly otherwise physically well during both private and stately affairs," said an excerpt of the study written by Francesco Galassi and Hutan Ashrafian.
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Info

Found in UK cathedral, pummeled remains of medieval knight

Laura Geggel
livescience.com
Mon, 13 Apr 2015 17:43 UTC
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© Headland ArchaeologyThe skeleton of the medieval man, a possible knight, in his stone grave.
The battered remains of a medieval man uncovered at a famous cathedral hint that he may have been a Norman knight with a proclivity for jousting.

The man may have participated in a form of jousting called tourney, in which men rode atop their horses and attacked one another, in large groups, with blunted weapons.

Archaeologists uncovered the man's skeleton, along with about 2,500 others — including a person who had leprosy and a woman with a severed hand — buried at Hereford Cathedral in the United Kingdom. The cathedral was built in the 12th century and served as a place of worship and a burial ground in the following centuries, said Andy Boucher, a regional manager at Headland Archaeology, a commercial archaeology company that works with construction companies in the United Kingdom.

Comment: Interesting information brought to light by examination of skeletal remains.

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Question

Experts perplexed by ancient structure built in the middle of a Siberian Lake: 'Russia's most mysterious archaeological site'

Erica Ritz
The Blaze
Thu, 09 Apr 2015 13:52 UTC
Por-Bajin
© Siberian TimesPor-Bajin
Described as "Russia's most mysterious archaeological site," the Archaeological Institute of America says Por-Bajin is located roughly 20 miles from the Mongolian border and boasts outer walls that are 40 feet high.

The structure was reportedly excavated in the 1950s and 1960s, but archaeologists were unable to determine what the purpose of the intricate structure was. Irina Arzhantseva of the Russian Academy of Sciences has begun her own expedition, and is determined to get to the bottom of the ancient mystery.
Por-Bajin_2
© gdehorosho.ru1,300-year-old structure could be a fortress, summer palace, monastery, or even an astronomical observatory.
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