It's tempting to dismiss the mid-16th-century depictions of Biblical miracles, flaming comets, multi-headed beasts, and apocalyptic chaos that fill the pages of the "Augsburg Book of Miraculous Signs" as the superstitious vestiges of the post-Medieval mind. But according to the co-authors of Taschen's new, 568-page boxed volume called "Book of Miracles," the Protestant citizens of Augsburg, Germany, were enthusiastic and active collectors of portrayals of portentous signs, as well as written descriptions of ancient and astrological prophecies. Gathering the myriad broadsheets and pamphlets about the imminent apocalypse into so-called Books of Wonders, of which the privately commissioned "Augsburg Book of Miraculous Signs" is probably the most important surviving example, was a way for people to connect the dots between ancient prophecies, their contemporary fears, and unexplainable phenomena, especially in the skies.

In part, their passion stemmed from a collector's fascination with such topics, but Germany's 16th-century Protestants were also motivated by religious antipathy toward the Catholic Church, whose Pope they derided as the Antichrist. Some took the epithet for fact: For them, since the end was nigh, it behooved one to pay attention to the signs.

The history of our planet is far more complex than most people would dare to imagine. According to the commonly accepted version of history that is taught in high schools and colleges all over the United States, ancient man was a very simple creature with extremely limited knowledge. Unfortunately for those that promote this flawed version of history, archaeologists keep digging up stuff that directly contradicts it. The truth is that there is a tremendous amount of evidence of great intellectual achievement in the ancient world.

For example, just consider the Great Pyramid of Giza. It is a true technological marvel. It is such a massive structure built with such extraordinary precision that modern technology is only just now starting to catch up with it. We think that we could possibly build a similar structure today if we wanted to, but modern man has never actually constructed anything like it. And as you will see below, the Great Pyramid of Giza is far from the only example of advanced technology in the ancient world that we find in Egypt.

Posted above is a photograph of a wall in an ancient Egyptian temple at Abydos. Look at the hieroglyphics very carefully.

Do you see anything strange?

A treasure trove of fossils chiseled out of a canyon in Canada's Kootenay National Park rivals the famous Burgess Shale, the best record of early life on Earth, scientists say.

"Once we started to break fresh rock, we realized we had discovered something incredibly special," said Robert Gaines, a geologist at Pomona College in Pomona, Calif., and co-author of a new study announcing the find. "It was an extraordinary moment."

The Burgess Shale refers to both a fossil find and a 505-million-year-old rock formation made of mud and clay. The renowned Burgess Shale fossil quarry, a UNESCO World Heritage site located in Yoho National Park, is in a glacier-carved cliff in the Canadian Rockies. The fossils were discovered in 1909. Since then, several other fossil sites have been found in the Burgess Shale, but none as rich as the original.

Fire in the sky, torrential rains, droughts and Biblical floods - all supposedly brought on by the sins and wickedness of man. Is it really a surprise we are hearing it all once again today?

The online Spiegel today has a report on a new book titled The Book of Miracles which presents and examines a collection of 16th century depictions of celestial phenomena and portentous signs. They were recently discovered as part of a collection of 169 illustrations created in Augsburg, Germany around 1552. End-of-world visions, it turns out, are a human mental disorder that has been around for as long as civilization itself.


The images were created as Europe was in the grips of the Little ice Age, a time of bad weather, bitter cold, storms and crop failures, starvation and human misery. The 16th century depictions reveal images of a civilization obsessed with the end-of-the-world. Priests and elitists of the time conducted terrifying witch hunts to find those allegedly responsible for the black magic that cooked up the extreme weather.

Sound familiar?

The change by our ancestors from hunter-gathers to farmers is one of the most intensively researched aspects of archaeology. Now a large-scale investigation of British archaeological sites dating from around 4,600 BC to 1,400 AD has examined millions of fragments of bone and analyzed over 1,000 cooking pots.

The team, led by Professor Richard Evershed of the University of Bristol's School of Chemistry, developed new techniques in an effort to identify fish oils in the pots. Remarkably, they showed that more than 99 per cent of the earliest farmer's cooking pots lacked sea food residues.

Other clues to ancient diets lie within human bones themselves, explored by the Cardiff group led by Dr Jacqui Mulville. The sea passes on a unique chemical signature to the skeletons of those eating seafood; while the early fisher folk possessed this signature it was lacking in the later farmers.

Lead author of the study, Dr Lucy Cramp said: "The absence of lipid residues of marine foods in hundreds of cooking pots is really significant. It certainly stacks up with the skeletal isotope evidence to provide a clear picture that seafood was of little importance in the diets of the Neolithic farmers of the region."

Returning to the pots, the Bristol team used a compound-specific carbon isotope technique they have developed to identify the actual fats preserved in the cooking pots, showing that dairy products dominated the menu right across Britain and Ireland as soon as cattle and sheep arrived.

By the late-fourth century the later Roman Empire experienced an invasion by nomadic peoples from Asia - the Huns. This invasion would intensify in the years 447 to 453 under the Hun leader Attila. This would be the start of several invasions into Europe from the East during the Middle Ages, ending with the Mongol Empire.

While the arrival of the Mongols in Eastern Europe is better known, historians have few clues to why the Huns and Avars migrated from Central Asia. A recent article by Edward R. Cook, a climate research specialist at Columbia University, offers some new insights.

In his article, 'Megadroughts, ENSO, and the Invasion of Late-Roman Europe by the Huns and Avars', Cook analyzes records related to the El-Nino Southern Oscillation - a periodic episode when warmer waters off the west coast of South America cause significant climate change across the Pacific region. Researchers have been able to track the effects of the El-Nino Southern Oscillation system going back over two thousand years by examining tree ring patterns from both New Mexico and New Zealand.

The name deriving from the Greek "eugenes," meaning "well-born," it should be no surprise that "eugenics" seeks to engineer a better human race by purposefully selecting good traits, and eliminating bad ones, as is common when breeding animals.

Over the years, eugenics has had a number of proponents, from some of the greatest and most admires thinkers in western civilization to the worst human monsters to ever walk the earth.

Ancient Eugenics

Eugenics is as old as Plato (although he didn't call it that) and in The Republic, Plato (428-347 BC) argued that the state should control the reproduction of its ruling classes:

The good must be paired with the good, and the bad with the bad, and the offspring of the one must be reared and of the other destroyed; in this way the flock will be preserved in prime condition.

Although his views tempered with age, even at the end he thought ruling class marriages should be conducted "under the supervision of a board of matrons, appointed by the magistrates."

This thinking was in line with, although more humane than, the common practice of infanticide in Sparta, which was used to keep that population in fighting shape.

For the past several years researchers have been trying to crack a Viking rune alphabet known as Jötunvillur, a perplexing code dating back to the 11th or 12th century that's been found in some 80 inscriptions including the scratched piece of wood found above. Recently runologist (!) Jonas Nordby from the University of Oslo managed to crack the code and discovered the secret message etched into this particular 900-year-old object reads "Kiss me." Via Medievalists.net:

For the jötunvillur code, one would replace the original runic character with the last sound of the rune name. For example, the rune for 'f', pronounced fe, would be turned into an 'e', while the rune for 'k', pronounced kaun, became 'n'.

"It's like solving a puzzle," said Nordby to the Norwegian website forskning.no. "Gradually I began to see a pattern in what was apparently meaningless combinations of runes."

However, those thinking that the coded runes will reveal deep secrets of the Norse will be disappointed. The messages found so far seem to be either used in learning or have a playful tone. In one case the message was 'Kiss me'. Nordby explains "We have little reason to believe that rune codes should hide sensitive messages, people often wrote short everyday messages."

The act of coding secret messages appears to have been a leisure activity amongst the Vikings, as some of the other translated inscriptions turned out to be playful taunts at the person doing the decoding. The story was originally reported on forskning.no. (via Erik Kwakkel, Neatorama)

A building site near the Uffizi museum has uncovered what archeologists believe could be a mass grave dating back to the sixth or seventh century AD, possibly during a plague.

The dig found 60 bodies laid out head-to-toe in a manner that could indicate hasty burial and need to optimize space in view of many more deaths, possibly because of a fatal epidemic.

''The remains have been unearthed over five months, and bear no evidence of trauma'', said Tuscany Archeology Superintendent Andrea Pessina. ''We will conduct DNA and carbon-14 tests to determine the cause and time of death, as well as information on diet, pathologies, and work-related stresses at the time''.

The entire operation is being filmed in 3D for future museum exhibitions.

New York - The DNA of a baby boy who was buried in Montana 12,600 years ago has been recovered, and it provides new indications of the ancient roots of today's American Indians and other native peoples of the Americas.

It's the oldest genome ever recovered from the New World. Artifacts found with the body show the boy was part of the Clovis culture, which existed in North America from about 13,000 years ago to about 12,600 years ago and is named for an archaeological site near Clovis, N.M.

The boy's genome showed his people were direct ancestors of many of today's native peoples in the Americas, researchers said. He was more closely related to those in Central and South America than to those in Canada. The reason for that difference isn't clear, scientists said.

The researchers said they had no Native American DNA from the United States available for comparison, but that they assume the results would be same, with some Native Americans being direct descendants and others also closely related.

The DNA also indicates the boy's ancestors came from Asia, supporting the standard idea of ancient migration to the Americas by way of a land bridge that disappeared long ago.

The burial site, northeast of Livingston, Mont., is the only burial known from the Clovis culture. The boy was between 1 year and 18 months old when he died of an unknown cause.

He was buried with 125 artifacts, including spear points and elk antler tools. Some were evidently ritual objects or heirlooms. The artifacts and the skeleton were covered with powdered red ochre, a natural pigment, indicating a burial ceremony.

The skeleton was discovered in 1968 next to a rock cliff, but it's only in recent years that scientists have been able to recover and analyze complete genomes from such ancient samples.