The remains of two Jewish ritual baths and two public buildings were uncovered in a salvage dig ahead of the paving of a new section of Israel's Highway 6, a north-south toll road eventually slated to run much of the length of the country.
Secret History
Israeli archaeologists digging on the route of a planned highway have found new ruins from a 1,500-year-old Jewish town, the Israel Antiquities Authority said Sunday.
The remains of two Jewish ritual baths and two public buildings were uncovered in a salvage dig ahead of the paving of a new section of Israel's Highway 6, a north-south toll road eventually slated to run much of the length of the country.
The remains of two Jewish ritual baths and two public buildings were uncovered in a salvage dig ahead of the paving of a new section of Israel's Highway 6, a north-south toll road eventually slated to run much of the length of the country.
© University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Each section of the mosaic features its own geometric design.
Each section of the mosaic features its own geometric design.
The mosaic, which once decorated the floor of a bath complex, abuts a 25-foot (7-meter)-long pool, which would have been open to the air, said Michael Hoff, a University of Nebraska, Lincoln art historian and director of the mosaic excavation. The find likely dates to the third or fourth century, Hoff said. The mosaic itself is an astonishing 1,600 square feet (149 square meters) - the size of a modest family home.
"To be honest, I was completely bowled over that the mosaic is that big," Hoff told LiveScience. [See Photos of the Roman Mosaic]
The first hint that something stunning lay underground in southern Turkey came in 2002, when Purdue University classics professor Nick Rauh walked through a freshly-plowed farmer's field near the ancient city of Antiochia ad Cragum. The plow had churned up bits of mosaic tile, Hoff said. Rauh consulted other archaeologists, including experts at the local museum in Alanya, Turkey. The museum did not have funds to excavate more than a sliver of the mosaic, so archaeologists left the site alone.
Last year, with a new archaeological permit for the site in hand, museum archaeologists invited Hoff and his team to complete the dig.
Ice Age Art - Trove of early ceramics shows the mindset of ancient humans: More metaphor, less blood
We know them best for their stone tools and intrepid mammoth hunting. But new discoveries in Croatia suggest that ice age humans made evocative ceramic art far more regularly than once believed. Thirty-six fragments of fired clay, excavated in the Vela Spila cave on an island off the Adriatic coast, make up the second-largest collection found so far of the earliest human experiments with ceramic art. They are 15,000 to 17,500 years old -- the first European evidence of ceramic art after the ice sheets stopped spreading.
© Rebecca Farbstein
An archaeologist at the University of Cambridge worked in a trench at a cave where ancient ceramics were found in Croatia. The find reinforced the idea that ceramic work was invented for art rather than utility.
An archaeologist at the University of Cambridge worked in a trench at a cave where ancient ceramics were found in Croatia. The find reinforced the idea that ceramic work was invented for art rather than utility.
© LiveScience
A 1669 map by Athanasius Kircher put Atlantis in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The map is oriented with south at the top.
A 1669 map by Athanasius Kircher put Atlantis in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The map is oriented with south at the top.
In the 1800s, mystic Madame Blavatsky claimed that she learned about Atlantis from Tibetan gurus; a century later, psychic Edgar Cayce claimed that Atlantis (which he described as an ancient, highly evolved civilization powered by crystals) would be discovered by 1969.
In the 1980s, New Age mystic J.Z. Knight claimed that she learned about Atlantis from Ramtha, a 35,000-year-old warrior spirit who speaks through her. Thousands of books, magazines and websites are devoted to Atlantis, and it remains a popular topic.
© Corbis
According to one news story, the show asks,"Did extraterrestrials visit Earth, as... the TV series Wild Pacific speculates? Who built the giant stone Moai of Easter Island that's been called 'a solemn reminder of a fallen alien civilization?' These and other questions... can never be fully answered, states Wild Pacific narrator Mike Rowe."
The idea that extraterrestrials visited ancient civilizations has been around for decades, a theory most prominently promoted by Erich von Daniken, author of the best-selling classic work of pseudoscience Chariots of the Gods?: Unsolved Mysteries of the Past.
Von Daniken believes, for example, that ancient Egyptians had neither the intelligence nor the tools to create the pyramids at Giza -- thus they must have been made by aliens. Similar claims have been made about the Mayan pyramids in Central America and the giant drawings in the Nazca desert of Peru; archaeologists and other scientists have long since discredited Von Daniken's theories.
The Wild Pacific program makes statements such as that "the great stone origins on Easter Island [have] vexed experts for decades: Who built these giant stone statues and how did they get there on this remote Pacific Island?"
© Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images
Dr. Hutan Ashrafian, a lecturer and surgeon at the Imperial College London, says the key to the mystery lies in the art of the time, which depicted King Tut with highly feminine features, including enlarged breasts.
The enlarged breasts, he argues, are indicative of a condition known as gynecomastia, which, when added to a host of historical and familial evidence, indicates that Tutankhamun might have suffered and eventually died from temporal lobe epilepsy.
Ashrafian says the first clue is in the relatively early deaths of other rulers who were directly related to Tutankhamun.
"For all of them to die sequentially at younger ages is a sign of a genetic inheritance of some sort," Ashrafian said, adding "you could argue one of them died in battle, one of them was poisoned but none of them did die in battle. They could have been poisoned, of course, but it's very odd for sequential pharaohs who were aware that they could have been killed to be killed at such a young age."
© Sabine Hornung, Arno Braun
Researchers report finding the oldest Roman military fortification known in Germany to date, with the camp's exposed gateway and remains of the stone pavement shown. In gaps between these paving stones, they found numerous shoe nails from the sandals of Roman soldiers (red dots mark sites where nails were found).
Researchers report finding the oldest Roman military fortification known in Germany to date, with the camp's exposed gateway and remains of the stone pavement shown. In gaps between these paving stones, they found numerous shoe nails from the sandals of Roman soldiers (red dots mark sites where nails were found).
Researchers knew about the large site - close to the German town of Hermeskeil, near the French border - since the 19th century but lacked solid evidence about what it was. Parts of the fort also had been covered up or destroyed by agricultural development.
"Some remains of the wall are still preserved in the forest, but it hadn't been possible to prove that this was indeed a Roman military camp as archaeologists and local historians had long suspected," researcher Sabine Hornung, of Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz (JGU), said in a statement.
Hornung and her team began work on the site in March 2010, first mapping the fort's dimensions. They found that the military base was made up of a rectangular earthwork enclosure with rounded corners, covering about 45 acres (182,000 square meters). They also found an 18-acre (76,000-square-meter) annex that incorporated a spring, which may have supplied water to the troops.
© Corbis
Da Vinci's The Mona Lisa.
Da Vinci's The Mona Lisa.
The announcement, at a news conference in Florence, follows the discovery of another skeleton, the fourth since the bone hunt began last year -- beneath an altar in the church of the now-derelict Convent of St. Orsola.
"The skeleton doesn't belong to the Mona Lisa, but it's hinting to her burial. Indeed, she might be just underneath," Silvano Vinceti, president of a private organization known as the National Committee for the Promotion of Historic and Cultural Heritage, told a news conference on Wednesday.
Vinceti's ambitious project aims to possibly reconstruct Lisa's face in order to see if her features match that of the iconic painting hanging at the Louvre Museum in Paris.
Indeed, most scholars believe that the Mona Lisa, known as La Gioconda in Italian or La Joconde in French, is the portrait of Lisa Gherardini, a member of a minor noble family of rural origins who married the wealthy merchant Francesco del Giocondo.
Known for controversial claims, like that letters and numbers are hidden inside the Mona Lisa painting, Vinceti has based his search in the convent on documents found by historian Giuseppe Pallanti some years ago.
- Rock was 'used by Druids in a burial mound' before being excavated by an archaeologist 200 years ago, researchers believe
- The 200lb space rock is four times larger than the next biggest discovered
© Steve Roberts/SWNS.com
Prof Colin Pillinger with the rock, now on display for the first time in 30,000 years
Prof Colin Pillinger with the rock, now on display for the first time in 30,000 years
The rock lay undiscovered on the doorstep of a house for at least 80 years before being revealed as a 200lb space rock, measuring 1.6ft long.
After sitting on the step of Lake House near Wilsford-cum-Lake, Wiltshire, since the 1900s, it is on display for the first time at the Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum from today.
© University of Leicester
A 14th-century inlaid floor tile belonging to the church of the Greyfriars.
A 14th-century inlaid floor tile belonging to the church of the Greyfriars.
The researchers note they are not saying they have found King Richard III's remains, but that they are moving into the next phase of their search, from the field to the laboratory.
"[W]e are clearly very excited, but the University now must subject the findings to rigorous analysis. DNA analysis will take up to 12 weeks," Richard Taylor, the director of corporate affairs at the University of Leicester, told reporters this morning, as recorded in a tweet.
