Researchers find historic, 19th-century wooden-hulled vessel buried in ocean floor
Ocean researchers stumbled across a historic shipwreck entombed in over 4,000 feet of water during an expedition in the Gulf of Mexico, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Scientists aboard the Okeanos Explorer reportedly discovered the approximately 200-year-old, wooden-hulled ship while on a 56-day excursion in a relatively unexplored area 200 miles off the Gulf coast that ended April 29.

A rare glimpse of the 19th-century ocean artifact wasn't all that was found, however, the shipwreck was reportedly laden with additional seafaring artifacts including anchors, navigational instruments, glass bottles, ceramic plates, cannons and boxes of muskets.

When most people think of beheadings they probably think of events far away in time and place, such as Marie Antoinette's 1793 guillotine execution during the French revolution.

But beheadings are hardly a thing of the past; in fact in some places they are becoming increasingly commonplace.

Though most Americans are unaware of it, many beheadings take place very near the United States, in Mexico. As Will Grant noted in a BBC News story,

This month has been perhaps the worst in terms of decapitations. In the past 10 days alone, there have been an unprecedented 81 beheaded bodies discovered in the country. In early May, 14 decapitated bodies were found in Nuevo Laredo, just over the border from Texas. Last week, 18 bodies and severed heads were left in two mini-vans near Lake Chapala, an area popular with tourists in western Mexico. Finally, in one of the most shocking incidents of its kind since the current drug war began, 49 headless and mutilated bodies were left in plastic bags on a road outside the industrial city of Monterrey.

The idea of execution by decapitation is bizarre and horrific, though for millennia public beheadings around the world were fairly common. It's only in modern times that cutting a person's head off has come to be considered barbaric.

In centuries past beheading was actually preferable to other common forms of execution (such as being burned alive or disemboweled). In early England beheading was considered a noble, and even honorable, death. Nigel Cawthorne, author of Public Executions (2006, Capella Press) notes that "Hanging was usually reserved for the lower classes."

More than 400 years before modern-day governments tried shutting down blogs or blocking tweets, two people tasked with censoring a sometimes-critic of the Catholic Church in Renaissance Europe took to their duties in very different ways: one with great beauty, the other with glue and, it appears, a message.

Now, two books, housed at separate libraries at the University of Toronto, illustrate two unusual approaches censors took when dealing with the same author, Erasmus.

Born in Rotterdam around 1466, Erasmus was a prolific writer who sought out wisdom in ancient Greek and Latin texts. His writings, mass produced thanks to the printing press, were at times critical of the Catholic Church.

By the time he died in 1536 the church was breaking apart, with splinter groups known as Protestants coming into conflict with the Catholics. English king Henry VIII was one of the most famous examples of a Protestant, creating a Church of England separate from church authorities in Rome.

A new book claims that the infamous Zodiac killer is still alive and living in Northern California.

The Zodiac Killer Cover Up was written by a former California Highway Patrol officer, Lyndon Lafferty, and adds another theory to the much-discussed serial killer case in Northern California.

The Zodiac killer is blamed for at least five slayings in 1968 and 1969. There was never an arrest in the case.

Three killings occurred in Vallejo. Teenagers David Farraday and Betty Lou Jensen were shot to death in December 1968. Darlene Ferrin, 22, was shot and killed seven months later at Blue Rock Springs Golf Club. Her companion, Michael Mageau, 19, survived.

In The Zodiac Killer Cover Up, Lafferty claims the killer is now a 91-year-old man living in Solano County. The book uses aliases and does not identify the alleged killer by name. Lafferty claims he and other lawmen investigated the suspect in the early 1970s but were stymied by "power brokers" in Solano County.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the book has stirred new debate among those who have followed the famous killings.

The San Francisco police formally closed the case in 2004.

The Zodiac killer got his name by taunting newspapers and the police with letters and puzzles.

The oldest rock art ever found in Europe reveals an interest in the female form - and the type of décor that the first Europeans preferred for their living spaces.

The new discovery, uncovered at a site called Abri Castanet in France, consists mainly of circular carvings most likely meant to represent the vulva. The carvings were etched into the ceiling of a now-collapsed rock shelter about 37,000 years ago, researchers reported Monday (May 14) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"It's quotidian art, it's everyday art," study researcher Randall White, an anthropologist at New York University, told LiveScience. "It's over their heads as they're doing everyday, banal sorts of things."

Earliest artists

The artists who created this ceiling décor were the first humans in Europe, a group called the Aurignicians. Arriving from Africa, they would replace the Neanderthals in Eurasia.

They were hunter-gatherers, White said, and their society was quite complex. They painted, sculpted and made carvings. Their jewelry included woolly mammoth ivory beads, pierced animal teeth and shells from both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.

The Aurignicians would have spent winters at the site in southwestern France, perhaps in groups of up to 300 people, White said. These hunter-gatherers found shelter beneath a rock overhang about 23 feet (7 meters) deep and about 6 feet (2 m) tall. On the ceiling, they pecked away rock, carving multiple depictions of notched circles likely meant to represent the female genitalia. (Anthropologists still debate if the images are meant to be vulvas or something else.) Other European rock art sites have similar carvings, White said, though there are regional differences in how the symbols are drawn.

Excavations of the bodies have been going on for many years, you can find out more from the Easter Island Statue Project. It's generally accepted that the statues were made sometime between 1250 and 1500 AD. There is controversy surrounding why the bodies are buried. Was it time and erosion, or were they buried on purpose? Aliens? The soil surrounding the bodies for so long has preserved interesting carvings (petroglyphs, or rock markings)...

My cup runneth over. Thirty three years ago I had the great good fortune to visit Easter Island, and now I have come back from an almost unimaginable (and undeserved) second visit to the loneliest world ever settled by man. Let me first present my thoughts written at that now remote time, complete with what I now know were prevailing errors and blindnesses about the future. What errors and blindnesses will I write into my account of this second journey?

Easter Island, August, 1971

I have just returned from Easter Island! It was not easy to get there, for seats in the weekly airplane from Santiago, Chile, to Easter Island and Tahiti, with connections to Australia, were jammed for weeks with Chilean Germans fleeing from Salvador Allende's Marxist-Leninist "Revolution." The revolutionaries and most of the news-following world think of Allende's Chile as the scene of a class struggle and of a rebellion against North American imperialism. But these Germans felt it as ethnic revenge, as Hispanic Chilean reassertion against these Chilean Germans and an appropriation of the wealth the latter had created and amassed. They had seen their businesses struck, harassed and seized, their homes broken into and looted with impunity by leftist Hispanic thugs and leftist Hispanic police. They all had tales of friends and relatives who'd been murdered. They were terrified and they were fleeing while they had the chance.

This was my unexpectedly political introduction to Easter Island, for I was getting off the plane there, not fleeing from Allende to Australia. We don't think of Easter Island in connection with politics, but it is now overwhelmed by the political storm. The Easter Islanders had been carried off into slavery and almost exterminated by Peruvian slavers in 1862. Their missionary priest and presently the Chilean and French Catholic hierarchies had effected their return later in the 1860s, a shattered remnant dying of smallpox. A succession of priests of the island, at first French but culminating in the great, scholarly and saintly Bavarian Capuchin, Father Sebastian Englert, who had served his flock from 1935 till his death less than two years ago, backed by the Catholic Church as a whole, had restored the Easter Island population from about 200 to 1600 today (over 4,000 before 1862), enjoying a Spartan but decent life. Grateful, the Easter Islanders always voted overwhelmingly Christian Democratic. To the various Marxist-Leninist groups in Allende's chaotic coalition (in which the actual Communist Party, on Moscow's orders, is paradoxically the most moderate element!) the Easter Islanders are therefore counterrevolutionary traitors in league with the North American C.I.A. To the resurgent Hispanic Chilean majority, they're Injuns, alien savages.

An archaeologist from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem says he has discovered cultic shrines dating back to the time of the biblical King David, which may provide clarity to some obscure building references in the Bible.

Professor Yosef Garfinkel says his discoveries at Khirbet Qeiyafa, an ancient fortified city that is 30 kilometers southwest of Jerusalem and is adjacent to the Valley of Elah, have confirmed the biblical view of the region prior to the construction of Solomon's Temple.

"This is the first time that archaeologists uncovered a fortified city in Judah from the time of King David," Garfinkel said in a press release. "Even in Jerusalem we do not have a clear fortified city from his period. Thus, various suggestions that completely deny the biblical tradition regarding King David and argue that he was a mythological figure, or just a leader of a small tribe, are now shown to be wrong."

The riddle of why scores of the statues on Easter Island are wearing red hats may have been solved by a team of British researchers.

The presence of the large disks of red stone has been one of the great mysteries of the island, situated 2,500 miles off the coast of Chile, since European archeologists began studying it a century ago.

Dr Colin Richards from the University of Manchester and Dr Sue Hamilton from University College London managed to reconstruct the journey taken by the sculptured rocks after following an ancient road which leads to a "sacred" quarry where the material was mined.

Dr Richards told The Independent: "It is clear that the quarry had a sacred context as well as an industrial one. The Polynesians saw the landscape as a living thing and after they carved the rock the spirits entered the statues."

The more we learn about the remote island from archaeologists and researchers, the more intriguing it becomes

"There exists in the midst of the great ocean, in a region where nobody goes, a mysterious and isolated island," wrote the 19th-century French seafarer and artist Pierre Loti. "The island is planted with monstrous great statues, the work of I don't know what race, today degenerate or vanished; its great remains an enigma." Named Easter Island by the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, who first spied it on Easter Day 1722, this tiny spit of volcanic rock in the vast South Seas is, even today, the most remote inhabited place on earth. Its nearly 1,000 statues, some almost 30 feet tall and weighing as much as 80 tons, are still an enigma, but the statue builders are far from vanished. In fact, their descendants are making art and renewing their cultural traditions in an island renaissance.

To early travelers, the spectacle of immense stone figures, at once serenely godlike and savagely human, was almost beyond imagining. The island's population was too small, too primitive and too isolated to be credited with such feats of artistry, engineering and labor. "We could hardly conceive how these islanders, wholly unacquainted with any mechanical power, could raise such stupendous figures," the British mariner Capt. James Cook wrote in 1774. He freely speculated on how the statues might have been raised, a little at a time, using piles of stones and scaffolding; and there has been no end of speculation, and no lack of scientific investigation, in the centuries that followed. By Cook's time, the islanders had toppled many of their statues and were neglecting those left standing. But the art of Easter Island still looms on the horizon of the human imagination.

Just 14 miles long and 7 miles wide, the island is more than 2,000 miles off the coast of South America and 1,100 miles from its nearest Polynesian neighbor, Pitcairn Island, where mutineers from the HMS Bounty hid in the 19th century. Too far south for a tropical climate, lacking coral reefs and perfect beaches, and whipped by perennial winds and seasonal downpours, Easter Island nonetheless possesses a rugged beauty - a mixture of geology and art, of volcanic cones and lava flows, steep cliffs and rocky coves. Its megalithic statues are even more imposing than the landscape, but there is a rich tradition of island arts in forms less solid than stone - in wood and bark cloth, strings and feathers, songs and dances, and in a lost form of pictorial writing called rongorongo, which has eluded every attempt to decipher it. A society of hereditary chiefs, priests, clans and guilds of specialized craftsmen lived in isolation for 1,000 years.