Secret HistoryS


Better Earth

Cave murals in Spain show man may have used magic mushrooms 6,000 years ago


Daily Mail.co.uk
Wed, 09 Mar 2011 08:37 UTC
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© UnknownThe Selva Pascuala mural has a bull in the centre, but researchers from America and Mexico are focusing on a row of 13 small mushroom-like objects
For all those who thought hallucinogenic drugs took off in the 1960s, think again: scientists believe they have found evidence of magic mushroom use 6,000 years ago.

Cave murals found in Spain appear to depict them in religious rituals - which would be the oldest evidence of their use in Europe.

The Selva Pascuala cave mural near the town of Villar del Humo has a bull in the centre, but researchers from America and Mexico are focussing on a row of 13 small mushroom-like objects.

Brian Akers at Pasco-Hernando Community College in Florida, and Gaston Guzman at the Ecological Institute of Xalapa in Mexico say they believe the objects are Psilocybe hispanica, a local funghi with hallucinogenic properties.

The mushroom has a bell-shaped cap with a dome and lacks a ring around the stalk, just like the objects in the 6,000 year-old mural, they say.

It also has stalks which vary from straight to sinuous - the same as those drawn thousands of years ago, they add in the latest issue of New Scientist.

But, even though it is several millennia old, it is not thought to be the oldest painting showing hallucinogenic mushrooms.
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Sherlock

University of Hartford Researchers May Have Found the City of Atlantis


West Hartford News
Sat, 05 Mar 2011 00:00 UTC
West Hartford - University of Hartford professor Richard Freund and his team are getting national attention for their research into the legendary island city of Atlantis, according to the Associated Press.

They will be featured on the National Geographic Channel's Finding Atlantis on March 13. The university is hosting an advance screening of the documentary on Wednesday from 7 to 9 p.m. in Wilde Auditorium.

Freund is the Director of the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies. He and his team of researchers employed satellite space photography, ground penetrating radar, underwater archaeology and historical sleuthing in an effort to find Atlantis near the coast of Spain.
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Sherlock

US: Scientists Dig for Ice Age Fossils in Los Angeles

Alicia Chang
The Associated Press
Wed, 09 Mar 2011 04:16 UTC
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© The Associated Press / Damian DovarganesIn this photo taken Tuesday, March 8, 2011, Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits chief curator Dr. John Harris, left, and lead excavator Carrie Howard, look at fossil deposits at Box 14 of Project 23 at La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles.
With a dental pick in hand, Karin Rice delicately scraped off a clump of asphalt from a pelvic bone belonging to a horse that roamed Los Angeles tens of thousands of years ago.

Like many unsuspecting creatures of the last Ice Age, the horse probably stopped to take a sip of spring water only to be ensnared - and later preserved - in a pool of sticky asphalt that seeped from underground crude oil deposits.

"You're opening up this ancient world and getting to look back in time," Rice said during a recent dig at the La Brea Tar Pits in the heart of Los Angeles.

For the past three years, scientists have been sifting through a significant trove of bones and a nearly intact mammoth skeleton discovered in 2006 during the construction of an underground garage next to the tar pits.

It's been slow going. To make room for the parking structure, researchers at the George C. Page Museum built wooden crates to house the cache and trucked them to the tar pits complex where excavators use power and hand tools to break up the soil.

Careful to avoid the mistakes of early diggers who only prized large mammals bones and little else, a small army of museum employees and volunteers painstakingly chisels away seven days a week, recovering not only animal bones, but also saving the dirt for later inspection for microfossils.
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Blackbox

Buried Soldiers May Be Victims of Ancient Chemical Weapon


LiveScience
Tue, 08 Mar 2011 14:29 UTC
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© Yale University Art Gallery, Dura-Europos CollectionThe skeleton of a Persian soldier found in the siege tunnels of Dura. The man may have choked on toxic fumes from a fire he himself started. The man's armor is pulled up around his chest; archaeologists suspect he was trying to pull it off as he died.
Almost 2,000 years ago, 19 Roman soldiers rushed into a cramped underground tunnel, prepared to defend the Roman-held Syrian city of Dura-Europos from an army of Persians digging to undermine the city's mudbrick walls. But instead of Persian soldiers, the Romans met with a wall of noxious black smoke that turned to acid in their lungs. Their crystal-pommeled swords were no match for this weapon; the Romans choked and died in moments, many with their last pay of coins still slung in purses on their belts.

Nearby, a Persian soldier - perhaps the one who started the toxic underground fire - suffered his own death throes, grasping desperately at his chain mail shirt as he choked.

These 20 men, who died in A.D. 256, may be the first victims of chemical warfare to leave any archeological evidence of their passing, according to a new investigation. The case is a cold one, with little physical evidence left behind beyond drawings and archaeological excavation notes from the 1930s. But a new analysis of those materials published in January in the American Journal of Archaeology finds that the soldiers likely did not die by the sword as the original excavator believed. Instead, they were gassed.
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Sherlock

Skulls point towards mass beheading: experts


The Times Of India
Mon, 07 Mar 2011 15:45 UTC
Hubli: Archaeologists and historians, who have taken up excavation and study of skulls discovered in Annigeri near here have said that the manner in which the human skulls are neatly arranged indicates that it could be a case of mass beheading.

Director of the department of archaeology and museums R Gopal and historian M S Krisnamurthy, who paid a visit to the site along with Dharwad deputy commissioner Darpan Jain on Monday also termed it to be a rare find in the history of India's archaeology and ancient history.

Gopal said that Annigeri had a history of more than 1,000 years and there was a mention of a massacre at Annigeri in an inscription dating back to the 12th century. However, he said it is only after the carbon dating report that they can arrive at a conclusion.
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Black Cat

17th Century Witch Chronicles Put Online

Michelle Martin
Reuters
Fri, 04 Mar 2011 11:52 UTC
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© chiccmanchester.wordpress.comThe English Civil War diary of Nehemiah Wallington
A 350-year-old notebook which documents the trials of women convicted of witchcraft in England during the 17th century has been published online.

The notebook written by Nehemiah Wallington, an English Puritan, recounts the fate of women accused of having relationships with the devil at a time when England was embroiled in a bitter civil war.

The document reveals the details of a witchcraft trial held in Chelmsford in July 1645, when more than a hundred suspected witches were serving time in Essex and Suffolk according to his account.

"Divers (many) of them voluntarily and without any forcing or compulsion freely declare that they have made a covenant with the Devill," he wrote.

"Som Christians have been killed by their meanes," he added.

Of the 30 women on trial in Chelmsford, 14 were hanged.
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Sherlock

California Islands Give Up Evidence of Early Seafaring: Numerous Artifacts Found at Late Pleistocene Sites on the Channel Islands


Science Daily
Fri, 04 Mar 2011 22:21 UTC
chert
© Courtesy of Jon ErlandsonA three-view look at a chert crescent dating to ancient seafarers on San Miguel Island.
Evidence for a diversified sea-based economy among North American inhabitants dating from 12,200 to 11,400 years ago is emerging from three sites on California's Channel Islands.

Reporting in the March 4 issue of Science, a 15-member team led by University of Oregon and Smithsonian Institution scholars describes the discovery of scores of stemmed projectile points and crescents dating to that time period. The artifacts are associated with the remains of shellfish, seals, geese, cormorants and fish.

Funded primarily by grants from the National Science Foundation, the team also found thousands of artifacts made from chert, a flint-like rock used to make projectile points and other stone tools.

Some of the intact projectiles are so delicate that their only practical use would have been for hunting on the water, said Jon Erlandson, professor of anthropology and director of the Museum of Natural and Cultural History at the University of Oregon. He has been conducting research on the islands for more than 30 years.
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Wall Street

Is the Amelia Earhart mystery finally about to be solved? Diving team to explore plane wreckage at bottom of ocean

Richard Shears
Daily Mail.co.uk
Fri, 04 Mar 2011 10:37 UTC
  • Body of the downed plane was discovered in 2002 by fishermen
  • Divers claims there is gold bullion on board coral-covered wreck
  • But they have been unable to get it because of 20ft poisonous sea snake
  • Tests on bones believed to be Earhart's found on island 'inconclusive'
A diving team is being put together in Papua New Guinea to swim down to the wreckage of a rust-and-coral-covered plane in the hope of solving one of the world's greatest aviation mysteries - the 74-year-old disappearance of Amelia Earhart.

The 40-year-old American and her navigator Fred Noonan disappeared while attempting to fly around the world in 1937 in a Lockheed Model 10 Electra plane and most theories say they crashed near Howland Island in the central Pacific.

She and her navigator had completed 22,000 miles of the journey when they arrived at Lae in New Guinea, as the country was then known, and just 7,000 miles across the Pacific remained before they were due to land back in the U.S.
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© CorbisEarhart posing by her plane in Long Beach California in 1930
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Pharoah

Mysterious objects from Mexico's past

Janos Gereben
San Francisco Examiner
Thu, 03 Mar 2011 11:00 UTC
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© UnknownOld days: “Olmec: Colossal Masterworks of Ancient Mexico” at the de Young Museum showcases a range of objects, such as this group of standing figures and celts dated from 900–400 BC.
The headline items in the de Young Museum's new special exhibit, "Olmec: Colossal Masterworks of Ancient Mexico" are indeed colossal, similar to the iconic - if much more contemporary - Easter Island heads.

The unique show, organized by many and led by the de Young's Kathleen Berrin and Virginia M. Fields of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, represents the only chance for visitors to see 140 ancient objects outside their homes in 25 Mexican and U.S. museums. In addition to the huge heads, the exhibition also features many small, fascinating works of art.

The Olmec ("people of the rubber country") created a pre-Columbian civilization in south-central Mexico, now the states of Veracruz and Tabasco. Thriving some 3,500 years ago, the Olmec pre-dated other Mesoamerican civilizations, such as the Zapotecs, Teotihuacans, Aztecs and Mayans.

Unlike many other ancient civilizations, the Olmec disappeared without a trace, leaving uncertainty behind them. Their contemporaries were the golden age of Greece and the Zhou dynasty of China, both known in great detail today, unlike the Olmec.
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UFO

Vapour trails, bright lights and a mysterious balloon


South Devon
Thu, 03 Mar 2011 10:53 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Details of a mystery cylinder floating in the sky over Torquay, star-shaped lights with vapour trails over Torbay and a silver ship hovering over Brixham are revealed for the first time today.

All three UFO incidents are included in the largest-ever release of official files on unexplained phenomena.

But the Herald Express had already solved one of the 'mysteries' seven years ago thanks to a group of local teenagers and a £13 balloon.

Files released today by The National Archives reveal how UFOs were discussed at the highest level worldwide.

Among the files is a sighting reported by an un-named man from Torquay.

He wrote: "On April 28 1967 I, along with 100 others including schoolteachers, witnessed a silver UFO pass over Torquay at approximately 11.30am.

"The UFO traveled towards Brixham, where it remained stationary for approximately one hour.

"The object was observed by Brixham Coastguards, which was reported to the RAF in Plymouth.

"The object, after remaining stationary over the town, proceeded to fly off."
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