Secret HistoryS


Sherlock

Earliest example of human with cancer discovered in northern Sudan

cancer in ancient skeleton
© Press AssociationThe sternum of the skeleton, believed to have belonged to a man aged between 25 and 35, pictured, shows evidence of cancer, highlighted by the arrows
British archaeologists have found what they say is the world's oldest complete example of a human being with metastatic cancer and hope it will offer new clues about the now common and often fatal disease.

Researchers from Durham University and the British Museum discovered the evidence of tumors that had developed and spread throughout the body in a 3,000-year-old skeleton found in a tomb in modern Sudan in 2013.

Analyzing the skeleton using radiography and a scanning electron microscope, they managed to get clear imaging of lesions on the bones which showed the cancer had spread to cause tumors on the collar bones, shoulder blades, upper arms, vertebrae, ribs, pelvis and thigh bones.

"Insights gained from archaeological human remains like these can really help us to understand the evolution and history of modern diseases," said Michaela Binder, a Durham PhD student who led the research and excavated and examined the skeleton.

"Our analysis showed that the shape of the small lesions on the bones can only have been caused by a soft tissue cancer ... though the exact origin is impossible to determine through the bones alone."

Despite being one of the world's leading causes of death today, cancer is virtually absent in archaeological records compared to other diseases - and that has given rise to the idea that cancers are mainly attributable to modern lifestyles and to people living for longer.

Info

Ancient city of Petra was a 'celestial calendar', says new study

Petra
© The Independent, UKA new study into the ancient Jordanian city of Petra has found that was built to cast the sun’s rays onto sacred sites “like celestial spotlights.”
The Nabateans (Petra's inhabitants) rose and fell in relative obscurity between the 3rd century BC and the 1st century AD.

Exploiting the trade between its two neighbours', Rome and Assyria, the Nabateans built the buildings popularised in the film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.'

Yet despite their iconic dwellings, gouged out of mountains in the south of Jordan, not much is known of their culture and habits.

Now, a new study in the 'Nexus Network Journal' is beginning to reveal a little more about the Nabateans and how they lived.

The study shows that Petra's buildings were hewn for more than aesthetics - they double as a celestial calendar, marking the seasons and days of religious significance.

"The facades of Petra are not only beautiful in themselves, but they also show something additional," the study leader Juan Antonio Belmonte, an archaeo-astronomer at the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands told National Geographic.

Star of David

Flashback Oliver Stone: Jewish control of the media is preventing free Holocaust debate

Outspoken Hollywood director says new film aims to put Adolf Hitler, who he has called an 'easy scapegoat' in the past, in his due historical context.
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© AP"We're going to educate our minds and liberalize them and broaden them. We want to move beyond opinions ... Go into the funding of the Nazi party. How many American corporations were involved, from GM through IBM. Hitler is just a man who could have easily been assassinated," Stone said.
Jewish control of the media is preventing an open discussion of the Holocaust, prominent Hollywood director Oliver Stone told the Sunday Times, adding that the U.S. Jewish lobby was controlling Washington's foreign policy for years.

In the Sunday interview, Stone reportedly said U.S. public opinion was focused on the Holocaust as a result of the "Jewish domination of the media," adding that an upcoming film of him aims to put Adolf Hitler and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin "in context."

Comment: See also Solzhenitsyn - Banned all over again


Pyramid

Pyramid in Croatia? Secret Dalmatia follows a 1570 map in Zagora

After the Bosnian pyramid, is there a Croatian equivalent? Secret Dalmatia investigates a map dating back to 1570 in Zagora.

While the traditional association with pyramids is Egypt, the alleged discovery of pyramids in Bosnia and Hercegovina a few years ago brought the possibility of their existence in Europe, and a field trip by boutique agency Secret Dalmatia in Croatia on March 10, 2014 has offered up one more intriguing angle to the mystery.

Croation Pyramid
© Alan MandicThe pyramid.
Specialists in discovering and promoting the many secrets of Croatia and the Dalmatian hinterland, Digital Journal recently reported on how owner Alan Mandic and local adventure specialists Dalmatia Explorer discovered the lost village of Karanovac, and a similar field trip at the weekend investigated a curious feature on a map of the region produced in 1570.

Question

Mystery of Blarney Stone's heritage finally solved

Blarney Stone
© Associated PressA tourist kisses the Blarney Stone – which researchers now say is Irish in origin.
As millions of Irish people at home and abroad celebrate Saint Patrick's Day by pinning shamrocks to their clothes and downing the odd pint or two, their Celtic cousins across the sea in Scotland have shattered a couple of myths about one of Ireland's most iconic tourist attractions.

The Blarney Stone - famous for giving you the "gift of the gab" if you kiss it - is 100% Irish, according to researchers at Glasgow University.

For centuries, legends have abounded about the origins of the stone, which some have claimed was hewn from Stonehenge or sent over as a gift from the Scots by Robert the Bruce after victory at the battle of Bannockburn in 1314. But the secret of the stone has been unravelled after the discovery of a unique 19th-century microscopic slide taken from the rock at Blarney Castle, near Cork.

Geologists at the University of Glasgow's Hunterian Museum can reveal the true nature of the Stone after studying the historic microscope slide, containing a slice of the stone ground so thin that it is transparent to light. Their analysis indicates the Blarney is a limestone, made of the mineral calcite, and containing recrystallised and slightly deformed fragments of fossil brachiopod shells and bryozoans - all of which are unique to the region where it is based.

Dr John Faithfull, curator at the Hunterian museum, said: "This strongly supports views that the stone is made of local carboniferous limestone, about 330m years old, and indicates that it has nothing to do with the Stonehenge bluestones, or the sandstone of the current 'Stone of Destiny', now in Edinburgh Castle."

Cow Skull

A creepy collection of 9,000-year-old stone faces is on display in Israel

Billed as "the oldest masks in the world," a creepy collection of 9,000-year-old stone faces is now display in Israel.
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© Elie Posner/Israel MuseumHoles at the edges of the stone artifact may have been threaded with hair or strung with cords to attach the mask to the face or hang it up on a building.
With stilted smiles and large eyeholes, the artifacts are thought to have represented the spirits of dead ancestors and may have been worn during Stone Age ceremonies and rituals, researchers say.

Before putting the rare artifacts inside glass cases at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the curators say they brought the masks together for a comparative study. Three-dimensional modeling showed that most of the masks could have been placed comfortably on the face, curator Debby Hershman said. [See Pictures of the Stone Age Masks]

"The eye holes allow for a wide field of vision, and the comfortable apportioning of the mass is suited to human facial contours," Hershman told Live Science in an email.

Sherlock

1930s homicide detectives trained in forensics with an unusual tool: Dollhouses

Frances Glessner Lee's miniature murder scenes are dioramas to die for

Frances Glessner Lee (1878-1962) was a millionaire heiress and Chicago society dame with a very unusual hobby for a woman raised according to the strictest standards of nineteenth century domestic life: investigating murder. And she did this through a most unexpected medium: dollhouse-like dioramas. Glessner Lee grew up home-schooled and well-protected in the fortress-like Glessner House, designed by renown American architect H.H. Richardson, but she was introduced to the fields of homicide investigation and forensic science by her brother's friend, George Magrath, who later became a medical examiner and professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School. Instantly captivated by the nascent pursuit, she became one of its most influential advocates. In 1936, she endowed the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard and made subsequent gifts to establish chaired professorships and seminars in homicide investigation. But that's not all.
Frances Glessner Lee
© Glessner House Museum, Chicago, IllinoisFrances Glessner Lee hard at work on her one of her deadly dioramas, The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.
As architect and educator Laura J. Miller notes in the excellent essay "Denatured Domesticity: An account of femininity and physiognomy in the interiors of Frances Glessner Lee," Glessner Lee, rather than using her well cultivated domestic skills to throw lavish parties for debutantes, tycoons, and other society types, subverted the notions typically enforced upon a woman of her standing by hosting elaborate dinners for investigators who would share with her, in sometimes gory detail, the intricacies of their profession. Glessner Lee oversaw every detail of these dinners herself, down to the menu and floral arrangements. She could probably tell you which wine goes best with discussion about a strangled corpse found in a bathroom. But the matronly Glessner Lee -- who may have been the inspiration for Angela Lansbury's character in "Murder She Wrote" - wanted to do more to help train investigators. She wanted to create a new tool for them.

Info

Ancient Greek tombstones served as therapy

Tombstone
© University of GothenburgTombstone from Smyrna. The small boy to the left is sitting on a grave monument and holding a rattle in his right hand, while another curly haired boy is holding a bunch of grapes above a small dog. On the right, in front of a pillar, is a mourning a servant boy with his right hand on his chin.
Greek tombstones were not just commemorative markers, but served as therapy for the bereaved, says a study on images and epitaphs found on 2,300-year-old gravestones.

The research examined 245 grave reliefs from the Greek city-states of Smyrna and Kyzikos in present-day Turkey.

Dating to the Hellenistic period (323-31 B.C.), when production of funerary reliefs was at its height in western Asia Minor, the rather expensive tombstones probably belonged to the equivalent of middle class individuals.

According to Sandra Karlsson, a doctoral student at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, the rarely investigated sepulchral imagery can offer precious insights about funerary rituals, demographics, and family structures. Most of all, the reliefs reflect people's way of relating to death.

"In classical antiquity there were strict conventions for grieving for the dead, based on the belief that death is not an evil and hence not a reason for sorrow," Karlsson wrote in her doctoral thesis in classical archaeology and ancient history.

Pyramid

Arkaim: Russia's Stonehenge and a puzzle of the ancient world

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Everyone's heard of Stonehenge. You could probably venture into the Amazonian jungle and seek out an untouched tribe of hunter-gatherers, spend months gaining their trust and learning their language, fighting off dysentery while you're at it, and when their chief finally makes you an honorary member of their society, against the emphatic advice of his shaman, you could ask them if they've heard of Stonehenge, and the answer would probably be: yes.

Some might say that's overstating the matter a touch, but the point stands. The sarsen stones of Wiltshire are famous; they've made their way into popular culture the world over. Though, would it surprise you to know that Stonehenge isn't the only megalithic stone circle in the world? Probably not, but most don't realise that there are somewhere on the order of 5000 stone circles around the world. Some exist as collections of circles, like the Senegambian circles in Gambia, Senegal, which are counted as one circle in the global list, but which actually consists of more than 1000 individual monuments covering an area of 15,000 square miles.

Great Britain boasts a large number of these Neolithic sites, but they don't have a monopoly on henges, as they're called over there. One of their neighbours actually has quite a few as well.

Magic Wand

Ancient 'ritual wand' etched with human faces discovered in Syria

Ritual Wand
© Ibanez et al, Antiquity, 2014A 9,000-year-old wand with a face carved into it was discovered in Syria.
Archaeologists have unearthed an ancient staff carved with two realistic human faces in southern Syria.

The roughly 9,000-year-old artifact was discovered near a graveyard where about 30 people were buried without their heads - which were found in a nearby living space.

"The find is very unusual. It's unique," said study co-author Frank Braemer, an archaeologist at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France.

The wand, which was likely used in a long-lost funeral ritual, is one of the only naturalistic depictions of human faces from this time and place, Braemer said.