- World's oldest submerged town dates back 5,000 years (w/ Video)
- Giant impact near India -- not Mexico -- may have doomed dinosaurs
- Indus script linguistically Dravidian: expert
- Frieze dated from 5,000 years ago found in Peru (picture)
- Genetic evidence for human-Neanderthal hanky panky?
- Did India invent the nose job?
World's oldest submerged town dates back 5,000 years (w/ Video)
October 16th, 2009Archaeologists surveying the world's oldest submerged town have found ceramics dating back to the Final Neolithic. Their discovery suggests that Pavlopetri, off the southern Laconia coast of Greece, was occupied some 5,000 years ago -- at least 1,200 years earlier than originally thought.
These remarkable findings have been made public by the Greek government after the start of a five year collaborative project involving the Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and The University of Nottingham.
As a Mycenaean town the site offers potential new insights into the workings of Mycenaean society. Pavlopetri has added importance as it was a maritime settlement from which the inhabitants coordinated local and long distance trade.
This summer the team carried out a detailed digital underwater survey and study of the structural remains, which until this year were thought to belong to the Mycenaean period — around 1600 to 1000 BC. The survey surpassed all their expectations. Their investigations revealed another 150 square metres of new buildings as well as ceramics that suggest the site was occupied throughout the Bronze Age — from at least 2800 BC to 1100 BC.
Dr Jon Henderson said: "This site is unique in that we have almost the complete town plan, the main streets and domestic buildings, courtyards, rock-cut tombs and what appear to be religious buildings, clearly visible on the seabed. "Possibly one of the most important discoveries has been the identification of what could be a megaron — a large rectangular great hall — from the Early Bronze Age period. They have also found over 150 metres of new buildings including what could be the first example of a pillar crypt ever discovered on the Greek mainland. Two new stone built cist graves were also discovered alongside what appears to be a Middle Bronze Age pithos burial.
Dr Gallou said: "The new ceramic finds form a complete and exceptional corpus of pottery covering all sub-phases from the Final Neolithic period (mid 4th millennium BC) to the end of the Late Bronze Age (1100 BC). ". source
My comment:Absolutely awesome! I hope the Greek guys will manage to make the distinction between Mycenaean and Greek, because there were no Greeks at that point of space-time. Not on the Balkans at least. But the underwater city is stunning and I'm waiting for new discoveries to come. It's not very good that they work with British specialists, but let's hope that the Truth will dominate their work. I'm saying that because there is a suspicious silence on Thracians and the people who lived on the Balkans before them in main-stream science and I cannot but wonder if those scientists will be brave enough to connect their discoveries with the Pelasgian people or they will jut make up a new civillization.
Giant impact near India -- not Mexico -- may have doomed dinosaurs
A mysterious basin off the coast of India could be the largest, multi-ringed impact crater the world has ever seen. And if a new study is right, it may have been responsible for killing the dinosaurs off 65 million years ago.Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University and a team of researchers took a close look at the massive Shiva basin, a submerged depression west of India that is intensely mined for its oil and gas resources. Some complex craters are among the most productive hydrocarbon sites on the planet. Chatterjee will present his research at this month's Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Portland, Oregon.
"If we are right, this is the largest crater known on our planet," Chatterjee said. "A bolide of this size, perhaps 40 kilometers (25 miles) in diameter creates its own tectonics."
By contrast, the object that struck the Yucatan Peninsula, and is commonly thought to have killed the dinosaurs was between 8 and 10 kilometers (5 and 6.2 miles) wide.
It's hard to imagine such a cataclysm. But if the team is right, the Shiva impact vaporized Earth's crust at the point of collision, leaving nothing but ultra-hot mantle material to well up in its place. It is likely that the impact enhanced the nearby Deccan Traps volcanic eruptions that covered much of western India. What's more, the impact broke the Seychelles islands off of the Indian tectonic plate, and sent them drifting toward Africa.
The geological evidence is dramatic. Shiva's outer rim forms a rough, faulted ring some 500 kilometers in diameter, encircling the central peak, known as the Bombay High, which would be 3 miles tall from the ocean floor (about the height of Mount McKinley). Most of the crater lies submerged on India's continental shelf, but where it does come ashore it is marked by tall cliffs, active faults and hot springs. The impact appears to have sheared or destroyed much of the 30-mile-thick granite layer in the western coast of India. source
My comment: Nice, now compete for the site of the impact. What would be really interesting, if all of those craters are with the same age. Which wouldn't very unexpected if they were parts of a body that passed near Earth. But it has to be checked.
Indus script linguistically Dravidian: expert
The Indus script is Dravidian linguistically and culturally closer to the old Tamil polity than what has been recognised so far, eminent epigraphist Iravatham Mahadevan has said.
He shared some of his recent and still-not-fully-published findings relating to the interpretation of the Indus script, in an endowment lecture on ‘Vestiges of Indus Civilisation in Old Tamil’ at the 16th annual session of the Tamil Nadu History Congress, which opened here on Friday.
Mr. Mahadevan said that though the claim could be met with incredulity, the evidence he had gathered over four decades of intensive study of the sources — the Indus texts and old Tamil anthologies — had led him to the conclusion.
Mr. Mahadevan, who specialises in the Indus script and Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions, said there was also substantial archaeological evidence to support the view that Indus Civilisation was pre-Aryan. The Indus Civilisation was urban, while the Vedic culture was rural and pastoral.
The Indus seals, he said, do not depict the horse and the chariot with ‘spooked wheels,’ which were the defining pieces of the Aryan-speaking societies. “The Indus religion as revealed by the pictorial depiction on seals included worship of a buffalo-horned male god, mother-goddesses, the pipal tree and the serpent, and possibly the phallic symbol. Such modes of worship present in Hinduism are known to have been derived from the aboriginal population and are totally alien to the religion of the Rig Veda.”
There was also substantial linguistic evidence “favouring Dravidian authorship of the Indus Civilisation,” he said, citing Brahui, a Dravidian language still spoken in the Indus region, Dravidian loan words in the Rig Veda, the substratum influence of Dravidian on Indo-Aryan as shown by the presence of retroflex consonants in the Rig Veda and major modifications in the Prakrit dialects moving them closer to the Dravidian than the Indo-European family of languages. Computer analysis of Indus texts has also revealed that the language had suffixes only as in Dravidian and no prefixes as in Indo-Aryan or infixes as in Munda.
Clarifying that he was employing the terms, ‘Aryan’ and ‘Dravidian,’ only in linguistic sense, he said speakers of the Aryan languages indistinguishably merged with Dravidian and Munda-speaking people millennia ago, creating a composite Indian society.
Referring to the ‘BEARER’ ideograms in the Indus script, he said the frequent Harappan title, ‘Bearer,’ originally meant a priestly functionary ceremonially carrying, on a yoke, food offerings to the deity. The corresponding Dravidian expression, ‘poray’ (bearer) was translated in the Rig Veda as Bharata (bearer).
The symbols inscribed on a Neolithic axe found at Sembiyan Kandiyur near Mayiladuthurai in 2006, a most significant discovery connecting Indus Civilisation with Tamil Nadu, corresponded to the signs of the Indus script. Symbols found on megalithic pottery and potsherds from Sanur and Mangudi in Tamil Nadu also resembled the signs of the Indus script. source
My comment: Ok, that is certainly interesting. Though I find it hard to understand, why, if Harappa and Mohenjo-daro are so old, they try to connect them with the Aryans. Maybe it has something to do with the Indo-european languages, but still, I get very annoyed when people try to stick Aryans everywhere. So what if that civilisation has nothing to do with them, do this make it worst? It's ridiculous! And I hope that guy did the research right, because we know what kind of attacks the previous similar research had to take. It's a war out there!
Frieze dated from 5,000 years ago found in Peru
Isabel Guerra, 8 October, 2009 [ 12:42 ]
A frieze that would have been sculpted 5,000 years ago, was found at Vichama archaeological complex, some 120km to the north of Lima, according to archaeologists of the Caral-Supe project.According to a press release, the most notable part of the frieze is one that represents a human hand holding an object like a knife or a spindle.
The archaeologists think that the frieze might be associated with ceremonial activities, and could probably represent a particular scene or ritual slaughter. source
My comment: Note the hand on the picture. Does it look normal? Not to me!
October 27, 2009 6:32 PM
The scientist behind the Neanderthal genome project said he's certain that Neanderthals and our ancestors had sex.
The claim is making its way around the internet today, based largely off of a story in The Sunday Times.
"I'm sure in a way that they had sex, but what I'm interested in was it productive in the sense of giving offspring that contributed to us, and that I think we'll be able to answer quite rigorously with the genome sequence we'll have," said Svante Pääbo, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, during a recent conference.
Pääbo's team is expected to publish a draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome by year's end, but it's unclear whether or not there is any indication of admixture.
His public comments give no indication that the genome sequence offers this proof, and one member of Paabo's team involved in this analysis that I contacted declined to comment until the genome sequence is published. Fair enough. The data analysis is extremely complex and it ought to be vetted by peer reviewers.
Beyond genetics, though, some researchers have interpreted well-known paleontological finds as evidence for human-Neanderthal hanky panky.
For one, the two species seem to have lived close together in parts of Europe and the Middle East, so it is not impossible to imagine that Neanderthals and humans met on occasion.
More direct proof for admixture comes in the skeleton of a child that seemed to possess both human and Neanderthal features, discovered in Portugal in 1999. However, not all paleoanthropologists believe this is a hybrid, and it presupposes what a Neanderthal-human hybrid should look like.
An increasingly popular view is that Neanderthal-human sex could have produced either sterile offspring, like a mule or a liger, or no offspring at all due to chromosomal incompatibility.
"It's possible that Neanderthals and humans were genetically incompatible, so they could have interbred but their children would have been less fertile," the London National History Museum's Chris Stringer told the Sunday Times. source
My comment: I don't see why wouldn't they have sex. I mean, what's to stop them. And the most important question is how different we are genetically, so are fertile babies a no-go, or not. Lol, women even back then liked big and strong males
Did India invent the nose job?
October 29th, 2009 by Pratap ChakravartyAn Indian doctor working in 600 B.C. might have been the world's first plastic surgeon, according to a new exhibition that challenges Western domination of the history of science and technology.
The plastic surgery claim relates to Susruta, who lived 150 years before Greece's "father of medicine," Hippocrates, and who lends his name to a number of modern Indian clinics.
Iyer, citing official records, said the surgeon pioneered nose reconstruction in northern India, which entailed removing skin from the forehead of a person to re-build the facial feature.
Criminals were often punished by having their noses cut off during his time.
He is credited with authoring the Susruta Samhita, a medical text which details 650 types of drugs, 300 operations, 42 surgical procedures and 121 types of instruments, according to available records.
The earliest documentation of Indian medicine is found in holy Hindu scripts of the Vedas compiled between 3,000 and 1,000 BC.
Physicist Manas Bagchi, who helped set up the science heritage exhibition, said India's achievements in pre-Iron Age sectors such as alchemy, astronomy, cultivation, metrology and metallurgy have been especially highlighted.
He also highlighted India's claim to have invented the mathematical zero.
Three civilisations had a notion of the zero, but Indians were the first to use it as the base numeral, giving it the shape '0' which is now used across the world.
The event also showcased advances in zinc smelting in 800 AD, breakthroughs in astronomy between 400 and 1,000 AD, as well as multiple cropping technology practised by Indian farmers as far back as in 2,500 BC.
sourceMy comment: Amazing! I mean, how many things Indians came up with. Now, I cannot judge if everything they say is true, but there are not too many reasons to doubt it. We all know that Greek philosopher took their knowledge from somewhere - India is a sensible choice for storage of the ancient wisdom. The main question is did they only store the information, or they invented it? Without being a racist, I don't think they invented it. There is a missing period and a missing civilisation. And I get more and more convinced that this civilisation was very wide-spread across the Earth, if we account for all the precious bits of knowledge different culture kept.
Be warned!
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