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Tomb of Mayan Prince Discovered in Jungle Ruins

Wynne Parry
LiveScience
Mon, 30 Jul 2012 14:16 UTC
Mayan Tomb Artifact
© Uxul Archaeological Project/University of Bonn
In the ruins of a royal complex in the Mayan city of Uxul, archaeologists found a tomb they believe belonged to a prince, who died 1,300 years ago. Here's one of the ceramic vessels they found buried with him.
Excavators have uncovered what they believe to be the 1,300-year-old remains of a Mayan prince entombed within a royal complex of the ancient city of Uxul, located in Mexico near the Guatemalan border.

The fossilized man, who researchers estimate was between 20 and 25 when he died, was found lying on his back, with his arms folded inside a tomb 4.9 feet (1.5 meters) below the floor in a building within the city's royal complex.

When the researchers first slipped a camera into the tomb to peek at what was inside they saw ceramics at the feet of the skeleton, said Kai Delvendahl, field director for the project with the University of Bonn.

They found a total of nine pieces of ceramics, including a plate painted in the distinctively black-lined Mayan Codex-Style covering the man's skull. At Mayan sites, it is not uncommon to find plates placed over the skulls of the deceased, Delvendahl, said. [See Photos of Mayan Prince's Tomb]

The other ceramics offered additional clues. One bore hieroglyphics reading: "[This is] the drinking vessel of the young man/prince." A second vessel also bore a mention of a young man or prince.

However, if this young man had been a prince, he did not appear to be in line for the throne, the researchers believe, since certain status markers, such as jade jewelry, were not found.
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Archeologists Unearth Extraordinary Human Sculpture in Turkey


ScienceDaily
Mon, 30 Jul 2012 12:27 UTC
Image
© Jennifer Jackson
Front view of the Suppiluliuma statue.
A beautiful and colossal human sculpture is one of the latest cultural treasures unearthed by an international team at the Tayinat Archaeological Project (TAP) excavation site in southeastern Turkey. A large semi-circular column base, ornately decorated on one side, was also discovered. Both pieces are from a monumental gate complex that provided access to the upper citadel of Kunulua, capital of the Neo-Hittite Kingdom of Patina (ca. 1000-738 BC).

"These newly discovered Tayinat sculptures are the product of a vibrant local Neo-Hittite sculptural tradition," said Professor Tim Harrison, the Tayinat Project director and professor of Near Eastern Archaeology in the University of Toronto's Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations. "They provide a vivid glimpse into the innovative character and sophistication of the Iron Age cultures that emerged in the eastern Mediterranean following the collapse of the great imperial powers of the Bronze Age at the end of the second millennium BC."
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Arrow Down

Remains Recovered from WWII Seaplane in Quebec


CBC News
Sun, 29 Jul 2012 10:59 UTC
Image
© Parks Canada
Marc-André Bernier, Chief of the Underwater Archaeological Service at Parks Canada, studies the wreck of a Catalina American World War II Plane which went down in November 1942 off the coast of Longue-Pointe-de-Mingan.
Canada - A special U.S. military team has almost finished its month-long mission off Quebec's north shore to recover the bodies of five crew who drowned 70 years ago when their U.S. Army seaplane slid into the waters.

The wind was fierce and the waves were surging on that day 70 years ago in Longue-Pointe-de-Mingan, a small fishing village.

In 1942, the village became the site of an emergency airstrip on the U.S. military's so-called "Crimson Route," a strategic air corridor to Europe through Maine and Newfoundland.

Late in the afternoon on Nov. 2, 1942, most of the village stopped to watch a U.S. Army seaplane taxi from the harbour.

But the plane - a PBY Catalina - struggled to clear the water. Vibert recalls the towering waves of the Gulf lashing at the cockpit during its second take-off attempt.

"I counted five waves, but there may have been more," recalls Josephine Vibert, who was getting married that very day and still lives in Longue-Pointe-de-Mingan. "After the last one, water started entering their plane."

The town's fishermen braved the frothing waters to find four crew members clinging to the fuselage.

Just moments after the survivors were hauled aboard the local fishing boats, the plane, along with the five remaining crew members, slipped beneath waves, never to be seen again.
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Chess

Archaeologists discover Paleolithic Ice Age culture that flourished in Balkans 17,500 years ago


Horsetalk.co.nz
Sun, 29 Jul 2012 05:12 UTC
Image
© Rebecca Farbstein
The leg and torso from the model of a four-legged animal, possibly a deer or horse. It is one of 36 ceramic items recovered from Vela Spila, Croatia.
Ceramics found on the coast of the Adriatic attest to a previously unknown artistic culture which flourished during the last Ice Age, thousands of years before pottery was commonly used.

One of the better-preserved items among the 36 recovered fragments seems to be the torso and foreleg of a horse or deer. Its creator deliberately minimised the number of joins in the model, perhaps to give it structural strength.

The evidence unearthed in modern-day Croatia points to the existence of a community of prehistoric artists and craftspeople who made ceramics during the last Ice Age - thousands of years before pottery became commonplace.

The finds consist of 36 fragments, most of them apparently the broken-off remnants of modelled animals. They come from a site called Vela Spila on the Adriatic coast.

Comment: Again we see that history is far from being a straight upward trend of 'progress'. What if the reason why artistic traditions can spring up, become lost, then re-emerge is because cyclical cataclysms periodically intervene?

The Golden Age, Psychopathy and the Sixth Extinction

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Genetic Data and Fossil Evidence Tell Differing Tales of Human Origins

Nicholas Wade
New York Times
Thu, 26 Jul 2012 00:24 UTC
Hadza Men
© Sarah Tishkoff
A group of Hadza men.

After decades of digging, paleoanthropologists looking for fossilized human bones have established a reasonably clear picture: Modern humans arose in Africa some 200,000 years ago and all archaic species of humans then disappeared, surviving only outside Africa, as did the Neanderthals in Europe.

Geneticists studying DNA now say that, to the contrary, a previously unknown archaic species of human, a cousin of the Neanderthals, may have lingered in Africa until perhaps 25,000 years ago, coexisting with the modern humans and on occasion interbreeding with them.

The geneticists reached this conclusion, reported on Thursday in the journal Cell, after decoding the entire genome of three isolated hunter-gatherer peoples in Africa, hoping to cast light on the origins of modern human evolution. But the finding is regarded skeptically by some paleoanthropologists because of the absence in the fossil record of anything that would support the geneticists' statistical calculations.

Two of the hunter-gatherers in the study, the Hadza and Sandawe of Tanzania, speak click languages and carry ancient DNA lineages that trace to the earliest branchings of the human family tree. The third group is that of the forest-dwelling pygmies of Cameroon, who also have ancient lineages and unusual blood types.

The geneticists, led by Joseph Lachance and Sarah A. Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania, decoded the entire genomes of five men from each of these groups. The costs of whole-genome sequencing have fallen so much that the technique can now be applied to populations for the first time, said Dr. Tishkoff, who paid the company Complete Genomics around $10,000 for each of the 15 genomes.
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Question

Mysterious disappearances of 10 civilizations

Annalee Newitz
io9
Mon, 23 Jul 2012 12:02 UTC
For almost as long as we've had civilization, we've lost it. There are records going back hundreds of years of explorers discovering huge temples encrusted with jungle, or giant pits full of treasure that were once grand palaces. Why did people abandon these once-thriving cities, agricultural centers, and trade routes? Often, the answer is unknown. Here are ten great civilizations whose demise remains a mystery.

Mayan temple
© Unknown
1. The Maya
The Maya are perhaps the classic example of a civilization that was completely lost, its great monuments, cities and roads swallowed up by the central American jungles, and its peoples scattered to small villages. Though the languages and traditions of the Maya still survive up to the present day, the civilization's peak was during the first millennium AD, when their greatest architectural feats and massive agricultural projects covered a vast region in the Yucatán - today, an area stretching from Mexico to Guatemala and Belize. One of the largest Mesoamerican civilizations, the Maya made extensive use of writing, math, an elaborate calendar, and sophisticated engineering to build their pyramids and terraced farms. Though it's often said that the Maya civilization began a mysterious decline in roughly the year 900, a great deal of evidence points to climate change in the Yucatán combined with internecine warfare, which resulted in famine and abandonment of the city centers.
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New Research Suggests Modern Humans, not Volcanoes, killed off Neanderthals


Huffington Post, US
Thu, 26 Jul 2012 04:59 UTC

About 40,000 years ago, a huge volcanic eruption west of what is now Naples, Italy, showered ash over much of central and Eastern Europe. Some researchers have suggested that this super-eruption, combined with a sharp cold spell that hit the Northern Hemisphere at the same time, created a "volcanic winter" that did in the Neandertals. But a new study of microscopic particles of volcanic glass left behind by the explosion concludes that the eruption happened after the Neandertals were already mostly gone, putting the blame for their extinction on competition with modern humans.

Why the Neandertals disappeared is one of archaeology's longest-running debates. Over the years, opinions have shifted back and forth between climate change, competition with modern humans, and combinations of the two. Earlier this year, the climate change contingent got a boost when a European team determined that the Italian eruption, known as the Campanian Ignimbrite (CI), was two to three times larger than previous estimates. The researchers calculated that ash and chemical aerosols released into the atmosphere by the eruption cooled the Northern Hemisphere by as much as 2°C for up to 3 years.
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Question

Ancient Life-Size Lion Statues Baffle Scientists

Owen Jarus
LiveScience
Wed, 25 Jul 2012 11:18 UTC
Lion Sculpture_1
© American Journal of Archaeology
A life-size granite lion sculpture discovered in the town of Karakiz in Turkey. Dating back more than 3,200 years, to the time of the Hittite Empire, the lion is shown "prowling forward" with rippling muscles and a curved tail. In antiquity there would have been a second lion connected to it, bringing the total weight of the sculpture to about 5 tons (10,000 pounds).
Two sculptures of life-size lions, each weighing about 5 tons in antiquity, have been discovered in what is now Turkey, with archaeologists perplexed over what the granite cats were used for.

One idea is that the statues, created between 1400 and 1200 B.C., were meant to be part of a monument for a sacred water spring, the researchers said.

The lifelike lions were created by the Hittites who controlled a vast empire in the region at a time when the Asiatic lion roamed the foothills of Turkey.

"The lions are prowling forward, their heads slightly lowered; the tops of their heads are barely higher than the napes," write Geoffrey Summers, of the Middle East Technical University, and researcher Erol Özen in an article published in the most recent edition of the American Journal of Archaeology.

The two lion sculptures have stylistic differences and were made by different sculptors. The lion sculpture found in the village of Karakiz is particularly lifelike, with rippling muscles and a tail that curves around the back of the granite boulder.

"The sculptors certainly knew what lions looked like," Summers told LiveScience in an interview. He said that both archaeological and ancient written records indicate that the Asiatic lion, now extinct in Turkey, was still very much around, some even being kept by the Hittites in pits.

Curiously the sculpture at Karakiz has an orange color caused by the oxidization of minerals in the stone. Summers said that he doesn't believe it had this color when it was first carved.
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Historians Discover Medieval Banking Records Hidden Under Coats of Arms


ScienceDaily
Tue, 24 Jul 2012 16:48 UTC
Image
© College of Arms
A rare accounting document, half-concealed beneath a coat of arms design, has revealed the activities of Italian bankers working in early 15th century London, decades before the capital became a financial powerhouse.
A rare accounting document, half-concealed beneath a coat of arms design, has revealed the activities of Italian bankers working in early 15th century London, decades before the capital became a financial powerhouse. The discovery was made by economic historians at Queen Mary, University of London.

Among the pages of a bound collection of traditional English crests held at the London College of Arms -- the headquarters of British heraldry -- are several papers belonging to a book of debtors and creditors for Florentine merchant-banking company, Domenicio Villani & Partners.

The coats of arms are estimated to have been painted in 1480, during a time when good quality paper was scarce and anything that was available was re-used.
The banking records, only half-covered by the design, date from 1422-24 and hint at the extensive trade in wool and other commodities produced in Britain during the era.
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Pharoah

Pharaoh Snefru's Playground In the Desert

Rossella Lorenzi
Discovery News
Tue, 24 Jul 2012 15:25 UTC
Pyramid at Dahshur
© Daniel Csörföly/Wikimedia Commons
Snefru's Red Pyramid at Dahshur. This was Egypt's first true pyramid. Credit:
Pharaoh Snefru, the "King of the Pyramids," developed his building skills over a 2.3 square mile playground in the desert, according to a new study into the geology of the Dahshur royal necropolis in Egypt.

The first king of the 4th dynasty, Snefru (reigned 2575-2551 BC) built Egypt's first true pyramid at Dashur, after a couple of failures. The task was overshadowed by his son Khufu, or Cheops, when he built the Great Pyramid at Giza.

More than 3.5 million cubic meters (123 million cubic feet) of building material were mined and transported at Dashur, some 20 miles from Cairo, yet very little evidence remains of what went on at the pyramid practice site some 4500 years ago. Nature wiped virtually any trace of human activity.

To expose the ancient pyramid playground, a team of Earth scientists from Germany turned to fractals.

Fractals are natural or artificially created geometric patterns that form designs. These appear to repeat themselves over and over when magnified.

Deltas created where rivers meet the ocean often display fractal properties. Dissected by river channels which drain into the floodplain of the Nile, the area around Dahshur was indeed supposed to show an abundance of natural fractals. The new study showed that was't really the case.
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