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Butterfly

Ice-age flute found in Germany one of oldest instruments discovered

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Bone flute from Hohle Fels with an enlarged image of the finger holes.
With its jaw-dropping sculptures and carvings of bulbous women and half-human animals, the British Museum's Ice Age Art exhibition is a sublime reminder of the fact that the creativity of homo sapiens predates what we tend to think of as the dawn of civilisation. But for me, the most moving object in the show is one of the least obviously beautiful: a long, thin flute made from the wing-bone of a griffon vulture. Found in the Hohle Fels cave in south-west Germany, it could be 40,000 years old, making it one of the oldest instruments ever discovered. What's so striking about this ancient wind instrument is how familiar it looks. It's basically an ice age penny whistle: anyone can see it's a tool for making music, with its five finger-holes and a V-shaped notch at one end, through which a prehistoric musician would have blown.

The sounds it makes are strikingly familiar, too. We know this thanks to Wulf Hein, an "experimental archeologist" who made a replica of the instrument - and can be seen on YouTube, dressed in animal skins, using it to play The Star-Spangled Banner. (You will already be familiar with this fascinating figure if you've seen Werner Herzog's 2010 movie Cave of Forgotten Dreams, about the shockingly contemporary-seeming art found in the Chauvet cave in southern France.) Hein shows that the notes the flute can play form the "pentatonic scale", the same scale that's the basis of so many tunes we know and love today. Hein will be on hand at the British Museum next month, to give a carving talk and demonstration, hopefully wearing his animal skins.

Question

Shoe-dunnit? Archaeologists determined to solve the mystery

Ancient Shoes
© 2005 Franco M. Giani - Milano - ItalyThe unwrapped shoe bundle showing the two pairs of children's shoes and the adult isolate.
The discovery of shoes deliberately hidden in an ancient Egyptian temple has left archaeologists baffled, not least because they include design features thought to have been invented in Medieval Europe.

Two pairs of tiny children's shoes were among the seven found concealed in a jar placed into a cavity between two mudbrick walls in a temple in Luxor, site of the ancient city of Thebes.

Oddly, they were tied together using palm fibre string and placed within a single adult shoe. A third pair that had been worn by an adult was found alongside them.

But there is no clue as to why the shoes, which would have been costly and unusual footwear for the era, were never retrieved after they were left in the temple just over 2,000 years ago when Egypt was ruled by a dynasty of Greek descent.

Research has shown that at least one of them includes structural elements that historians had previously believed were not invented until the Medieval era, which began in Europe some 500 years later.

At the time the shoes were concealed, most Egyptians would normally have worn sandals.

The shoes were discovered by an Italian archaeological team in 2004, but a new study has now offered fresh insights into them.

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God is not the Creator, claims academic

God Not Creator
© PAThe Earth was already there when God created humans and animals, says academic.
Professor Ellen van Wolde, a respected Old Testament scholar and author, claims the first sentence of Genesis "in the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth" is not a true translation of the Hebrew.

She claims she has carried out fresh textual analysis that suggests the writers of the great book never intended to suggest that God created the world -- and in fact the Earth was already there when he created humans and animals.

Prof Van Wolde, 54, who will present a thesis on the subject at Radboud University in The Netherlands where she studies, said she had re-analysed the original Hebrew text and placed it in the context of the Bible as a whole, and in the context of other creation stories from ancient Mesopotamia.

She said she eventually concluded the Hebrew verb "bara", which is used in the first sentence of the book of Genesis, does not mean "to create" but to "spatially separate".

The first sentence should now read "in the beginning God separated the Heaven and the Earth"

According to Judeo-Christian tradition, God created the Earth out of nothing.

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Seeking meaning in the earliest female nudes

Prehistoric female figurines
© Bildersturm/Creative CommonsChanging styles. Prehistoric female figurines started off voluptuous like the Venus of Willendorf (left) but then became schematic like these "Gönnersdorf" style statuettes (right), possibly signaling a shift in their meaning.
London - About 35,000 years ago, prehistoric artists across Europe suddenly discovered the female form - and the art world has never been the same. The explosion of voluptuous female figurines sculpted out of limestone, ivory, and clay directly inspired Picasso and Matisse. Researchers have debated the figurines' meaning for decades. Now, two scientists think they have the answer. Presenting their work here last week at the European Palaeolithic Conference, they claimed that the objects started off as celebrations of the female form, then later became symbols that tied together a growing human society.

The talk, part of a special exhibition on Ice Age art at London's British Museum, surveyed the more than 20,000 year-history of female figurines, which are found at dozens of archaeological sites from Russia to France. The earliest such objects, which include the famous Venus of Willendorf from Austria (see photo) and a statuette recently found in Germany that some have called the "earliest pornography," date from as early as 35,000 years ago and are generally called the "Willendorf style" of prehistoric art.

It's an overtly sexual, earthy style: Many of the intricately carved figurines share features such as large, pendulous breasts, huge buttocks, and chubby legs with no feet. They display "female nakedness in all its splendor," said presenter Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser, who co-authored the work with archaeologist Olaf Jöris, both of the MONREPOS Archaeological Research Centre in Neuwied, Germany. Nevertheless, she pointed out, individual figurines differ in many aspects. They vary greatly in size; some are slim rather than fat; and some are hairless while others bear what appear to be elaborate headdresses, possibly reflecting clothing that prehistoric women actually wore. Moreover, during the Willendorf period, male figurines, many anatomically correct with penises and detailed facial features, also appear frequently, and occasional sculptures depict men and women side by side.

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Mysterious origins of Malta

In the National Museum of archaeology in Malta there is the 'sleeping lady' an object found in the painted rooms of sort of vaulted cave temple complex from the Saflieni phase. This was a time between 3000-2500 BC.
Astarte
© Wikimedia Commons
The statue is believed to be that of the Goddess Astarte and is the finest artifact of its type from Malta.

The temple complex, or Hypogeum (Greek for underground), called the Hal-Saflieni is one of many underground temple complexes that make Maltese archaeology one of the most fascinating. The concentration of important pre historical and historical sites of significance makes Malta a real treasure trove for mapping cultural movements throughout the Mediterranean. Its origins remain a mystery. No one knows who built the temples on Malta.

However there are clues or hints at what might be Malta's ancient history, Herotodus points a period in Levantine history where the king of Anatolia splits his kingdom as a result of a great famine. He sends one half West to find new land. The theory is that these early settlers colonised islands in the med. The greatest correlation, in culture is between the ancient sites of Catal Hoyuk and Gobekli Tepe in southern Turkey and the temple complexes on the Islands around Malta. However these somewhat similar cultures seem to be at a significant distance from each other, with the whole of Greece and its Islands standing closer to the proposed point of exodus. There does seem to be a sequence of Ancient sites dedicated to the Goddess leading from southern Turkey through Knossos and to Malta, however as a pattern it leaves many facts to be desired.

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Geneticists estimate publication date of the 'Iliad'

Illad
© Iliad VIII 245-253 in codex F205/http://bit.ly/Yyof3THomer's Iliad codex from approximately the late 5th-early 6th century A.D.
Scientists who decode the genetic history of humans by tracking how genes mutate have applied the same technique to one of the Western world's most ancient and celebrated texts to uncover the date it was first written.

The text is Homer's Iliad, and Homer -- if there was such a person -- probably wrote it in 762 B.C., give or take 50 years, the researchers found. The Iliad tells the story of the Trojan War -- if there was such a war -- with Greeks battling Trojans.

The researchers accept the received orthodoxy that a war happened and someone named Homer wrote about it, said Mark Pagel, an evolutionary theorist at the University of Reading in England. His collaborators include Eric Altschuler, a geneticist at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, in Newark, and Andreea S. Calude, a linguist also at Reading and the Sante Fe Institute in New Mexico. They worked from the standard text of the epic poem.

The date they came up with fits the time most scholars think the Iliad was compiled, so the paper, published in the journal Bioessays, won't have classicists in a snit. The study mostly affirms what they have been saying, that it was written around the eighth century B.C.

That geneticists got into such a project should be no surprise, Pagel said.

Magnify

Found: Prehistoric Indian Ocean mini-continent

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Scientists said today that they had found traces of a micro-continent hidden underneath the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius
Scientists said Sunday they had found traces of a micro-continent hidden underneath the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius.

The slab, dubbed Mauritia, was probably formed around 61-83 million years ago after Madagascar split from India, but eventually broke up and became smothered by thick lava deposits, they said.

In a study published in the journal Nature Geoscience, scientists analysed beach sand on Mauritius that contained ancient zircons between 660 million and about two billion years old.

Sherlock

Mysterious Arizona canals believed to come from ancient civilization

Two things you might not expect to find if you visit the foothills of Mount Graham in eastern Arizona:

1) An elaborate network of "hanging canals" likely built nearly a thousand years ago on steep mesas by long-forgotten ancients.

2) An endearingly eccentric electrical engineer and author who, long before he started trying to solve the archaeological mystery, helped pioneer the world of personal computers.

Nevertheless, on a sunny morning, Don Lancaster wrestles his four-wheel-drive SUV over ruts and boulders into the bajada above the Gila River Valley.


His voice rising with excitement, the bearded 73-year-old urges passengers to hold tight and keep their eyes on the slope of a nearby butte.

"Right around this corner," he promises. "You won't miss it. One of the most spectacular of the hanging canals.... As far as I know, what we have here is unique in the Southwest - and could be in the world."

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British academic discovers a 500-year-old arrest warrant for Machiavelli

Machiavelli
© Wikimedia CommonsPortrait of Niccolò Machiavelli by Santi di Tito.
A British academic stumbled across a rare find while combing through historical archives in Florence: an arrest warrant for the famous Italian writer and strategist Niccolò Machiavelli, dated to 1513 and subsequently forgotten.

"When I saw it I knew exactly what it was and it was pretty exciting," said Manchester University professor Stephen Milner in a university press release.

"When you realize this document marked the fall from grace of one the world's most influential political writers, it's quite a feeling."

The academic had been looking through town criers proclamations when he stumbled upon the document, says The Independent, as well as documents securing the pay of the horsemen who hunted for the political writer in Florence.

Florence celebrates the 500th anniversary of The Prince this year, a legendary (and infamous) document intimately linked with Machiavelli's political downfall.

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One million 'Romans' in Britain

Around one million men in the UK can claim to be direct descendants of the Romans, scientists have revealed.

The Roman army invaded Britain in 43 AD and left around 400 years later, in the early 5th century. But historians and scientists claim that the legions left behind their legacy in the genes of many Britons.

A study by BritainsDNA, a commercial DNA testing company, compared Y chromosome markers found in men in Britain with those found in modern Italy. The results found five major types of DNA which were likely to have come from the Roman legions.

The first, known as Alpine, was found in 13% of Italian men, 6.5% of men in England and Wales, 4.3% in Scotland and 1.8% in Ireland.

As Ireland was never conquered and Scotland was only occupied for a short time, the researchers said these figures suggested this DNA was a "probable candidate" to be linked to the Romans.