VERO BEACH – Treasure Coast amateur fossil collector James Kennedy appears to have made an unprecedented archaeological discovery that might help confirm a human presence here up to 13,000 years ago.
A 15-inch-long prehistoric bone fragment found near Vero Beach contains a crude engraving of a mammoth or mastodon on it, said Dr. Barbara Purdy, emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Florida.
"It is humbling to realize that we are seeing what the hunter saw more than 13,000 years ago," Purdy said.
Tests so far have shown it to be genuine.
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Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who discovered the hallucinogenic drug LSD, has died of a heart attack at his home in Basel at the age of 102.
Mr Hofmann first produced LSD in 1938 while researching the medicinal uses of a crop fungus.
He accidentally ingested some of the drug and said later: “Everything I saw was distorted as in a warped mirror.”
He argued for decades that LSD could help treat mental illness, but in the 1960s it became a popular street drug.
‘Turn on, tune in, drop out’
BBC news
One day last month, I paid a visit to Michael Wright, in his book-and-clock-cluttered home, in West London. Wright was reading Xenophon, the Greek historian, in ancient Greek. He put the book down and brought out his model of the Mechanism from a cabinet underneath the stairs. In size, it is startlingly similar to a laptop computer, though a bit thicker. On the front dial, in addition to the pointers for the sun and the moon that Price posited, Wright added pointers for the planets and a separate pointer for the day of the year. On the back dial were two hundred and twenty-three divisions, marking months in the saros cycle; a similar dial above that showed months in the Metonic cycle. The gears were hidden inside a wooden casing, which had a large wooden knob on one side.
Wright took his model apart to showed me how all the gears fitted together. Then Wright put the machine back together and turned the hand knob that drives the solar gear. It engaged with the smaller gears, through the various gear trains, and the pointers began to spin around the dials. The day-of-the-year pointer moved forward at a regular pace, but the lunar and planetary pointers traced eccentric orbits, sometimes reversing course and going backward, just as the planets occasionally appear to do in the night sky. Meanwhile, the pointers on the back dials crept through the months in the saros and Metonic cycles; eclipses came and went. I noticed that as long as he kept turning the knob Wright himself seemed, for once, perfectly unmuddled.
Until this moment, I had, like many others, continued to puzzle over why, if the Greeks were capable of building such a technically sophisticated device, they used that capacity to construct what is essentially a toy—an intellectual amusement. But as I beheld this whirring, whirling symphony of metal, a perfect simulation of a mechanistic and logical universe, I realized that my notions of practicality were foolish and shortsighted. This machine was much more than a toy; it embodied a whole world view, and it must have been, for the ancients, wonderfully reassuring to behold.
The government has created an online database of 1.8 million ancient texts to promote them as treasures of the country and to preserve millions of neglected manuscripts. Out of the five million manuscripts, 1.8 million have been documented.
As the manuscripts were lying neglected, the ministry had set up a National Mission for Manuscripts with the aim to locate them through a nation-wide surveys and then to document and catalogue them.
Think carbon nanotubes are new-fangled? Think again. The Crusaders felt the might of the tube when they fought against the Muslims and their distinctive, patterned Damascus blades.
Sabres from Damascus, now in Syria, date back as far as 900 AD. Strong and sharp, they are made from a type of steel called wootz.
Their blades bear a banded pattern thought to have been created as the sword was annealed and forged. But the secret of the swords’ manufacture was lost in the eighteenth century.
Materials researcher Peter Paufler and his colleagues at Dresden University, Germany, have taken electron-microscope pictures of the swords and found that wootz has a microstructure of nano-metre-sized tubes, just like carbon nanotubes used in modern technologies for their lightweight strength.
The tubes were only revealed after a piece of sword was dissolved in hydrochloric acid to remove another microstructure in the swords: nanowires of the mineral cementite.
Elaborate ritual objects and carved masks have been uncovered in the ancient ruins of a city in Guatemala.
Exploration of the 2,000-year-old site has caused archaeologists to question the established chronology of the enigmatic Maya civilisation. The city, Cival, thrived in what is generally considered the “pre-classic” period – but it bore the hallmarks of the more advanced “classic” period.
The excavations were supported by the National Geographic Society.
The ancient city of Cival, in Guatemala’s Peten region, was first mapped by the explorer Ian Graham in 1984. Since 2001, it has been the focus of an exhaustive excavation, led by Francisco Estrada-Belli, of Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, US.
His team’s discoveries have included two monumental carved masks, 120 pieces of polished jade, a ceremonial centre that spanned 800m (2,600ft) and an inscribed stone slab dating to 300 BC.
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Maya culture ‘ahead of its time’
SAO PAULO, Brazil—A grouping of granite blocks along a grassy Amazon hilltop may be the vestiges of a centuries-old astronomical observatory _ a find archaeologists say indicates early rainforest inhabitants were more sophisticated than previously believed.
The 127 blocks, some as high as 9 feet tall, are spaced at regular intervals around the hill, like a crown 100 feet in diameter.
On the shortest day of the year _ Dec. 21 _ the shadow of one of the blocks, which is set at an angle, disappears.
“It is this block’s alignment with the winter solstice that leads us to believe the site was once an astronomical observatory,” said Mariana Petry Cabral, an archaeologist at the Amapa State Scientific and Technical Research Institute. “We may be also looking at the remnants of a sophisticated culture.”
Anthropologists have long known that local indigenous populations were acute observers of the stars and sun. But the discovery of a physical structure that appears to incorporate this knowledge suggests pre-Columbian Indians in the Amazon rainforest may have been more sophisticated than previously suspected.
LONDON (Reuters) – An international team of scientists have discovered 4.1 million year old fossils in eastern Ethiopia that fill a missing gap in human evolution.
The teeth and bones belong to a primitive species of Australopithecus known as Au. anamensis, an ape-man creature that walked on two legs.
The Australopithecus genus is thought to be an ancestor of modern humans. Seven separate species have been named. Au. anamensis is the most primitive.
“This new discovery closes the gap between the fully blown Australopithecines and earlier forms we call Ardipithecus,” said Tim White, a leader of the team from the University of California, Berkeley.
“We now know where Australopithecus came from before 4 million years ago.”
Found and analyzed by scientists from the United States, Ethiopia, Japan and France, the fossils were unearthed in the Middle Awash area in the Afar desert of eastern Ethiopia.
Paleontologists have discovered fossils of a species that provides the missing evolutionary link between fish and the first animals that walked out of water onto land about 375 million years ago. The newly found species, Tiktaalik roseae, has a skull, a neck, ribs and parts of the limbs that are similar to four-legged animals known as tetrapods, as well as fish-like features such as a primitive jaw, fins and scales.
These fossils, found on Ellesmere Island in Arctic Canada, are the most compelling examples yet of an animal that was at the cusp of the fish-tetrapod transition. The new find is described in two related research articles highlighted on the cover of the April 6, 2006, issue of Nature.
“Tiktaalik blurs the boundary between fish and land-living animal both in terms of its anatomy and its way of life,” said Neil Shubin, professor and chairman of organismal biology at the University of Chicago and co-leader of the project.
On the walls of dozens of caves in southern France and northern Spain lie some of the most majestic works of art ever painted. Drawn 25,000 to 40,000 years ago, the paintings have puzzled anthropologists since they were discovered more than four decades ago.
Where did this astonishing display of talent come from? Why did these prehistoric societies decide to paint these scenes in such remote locations? And what inspired them to paint the strange array of bisons, horses and therianthropes (part animal, part man)?
A scientific consensus of sorts has finally emerged on one of those questions: Although there are still dissenters, a majority of anthropologists now champion the theory that the paintings in Europe were the work of shamans, and in part the product of trance states, likely induced by psilocybin (the psychoactive ingredient in some species of mushrooms).
Similarly, South African anthropologist David Lewis-Williams maintains that the remarkable rock art of the San people of southern Africa, also painted at least 25,000 years ago, is the result of shamanic trances created by drumming and ritual ecstatic dancing.
In his new book, Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind, published by Random House, British writer Graham Hancock has taken Prof. Lewis-Williams’s research as a point of departure to posit a theory as fascinating as it is provocative: If it’s true that cave art derives from altered states of consciousness, then it constitutes a watershed moment in human history, marking the first visible encounter with the supernatural, the first expression of spiritual myth.
Take, for example, the emergence of Judaism as we know it today. Archaeological evidence—and even “reading between the lines” of the Tanakh—reveals that the original form of Judaism was, aside from its progressive social program, a very typical Bronze Age religion. It was a state religion that provided a foundation myth for the state, and relied on a “spirit of the place” form of monolatry. The God of Israel is presented not as the only god, but either as the best or highest god or, more commonly, our god—the only god we pay attention to.
Monolatry is typically quite tolerant of other religions, so it should come as no surprise that another local god, Baal, became competition for early Judaism. The prophets’ message was primarily a social one centered around caring for the poor and other radical, progressive goals. Such goals were rather unique to the Jewish religion, and obviously such priorities were not shared by Baal. In order to more effectively advance their social agenda, the prophets introduced a new memetic variation: monotheism. The prophets no longer referred to the God of Israel as the best or highest god, but as the only God.
Most scientists have long assumed that life on Earth is a homegrown phenomenon. According to the conventional hypothesis, the earliest living cells emerged as a result of chemical evolution on our planet billions of years ago in a process called abiogenesis. The alternative possibility—that living cells or their precursors arrived from space—strikes many people as science fiction. Developments over the past decade, however, have given new credibility to the idea that Earth’s biosphere could have arisen from an extraterrestrial seed.
Planetary scientists have learned that early in its history our solar system could have included many worlds with liquid water, the essential ingredient for life as we know it. Recent data from NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers corroborate previous suspicions that water has at least intermittently flowed on the Red Planet in the past. It is not unreasonable to hypothesize that life existed on Mars long ago and perhaps continues there. Life may have also evolved on Europa, Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon, which appears to possess liquid water under its icy surface. Saturn’s biggest satellite, Titan, is rich in organic compounds; given the moon’s frigid temperatures, it would be highly surprising to find living forms there, but they cannot be ruled out. Life may have even gained a toehold on torrid Venus. The Venusian surface is probably too hot and under too much atmospheric pressure to be habitable, but the planet could conceivably support microbial life high in its atmosphere. And, most likely, the surface conditions on Venus were not always so harsh. Venus may have once been similar to early Earth.
Moreover, the expanses of interplanetary space are not the forbidding barrier they once seemed. Over the past 20 years scientists have determined that more than 30 meteorites found on Earth originally came from the Martian crust, based on the composition of gases trapped within some of the rocks. Meanwhile biologists have discovered organisms durable enough to survive at least a short journey inside such meteorites. Although no one is suggesting that these particular organisms actually made the trip, they serve as a proof of principle. It is not implausible that life could have arisen on Mars and then come to Earth, or the reverse. Researchers are now intently studying the transport of biological materials between planets to get a better sense of whether it ever occurred. This effort may shed light on some of modern science’s most compelling questions: Where and how did life originate? Are radically different forms of life possible? And how common is life in the universe?
The Psychedelic Salon has posted a new podcast, this one being a dialogue between Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham.
From the site: It isn’t often that we have the opportunity to see how accurate predictions about the future are, but this fascinating conversation between two of the great thinkers of our times has already proven to be right on target. The reason this may be of interest to you is that if they correctly predicted some things that have now happened, then we are really in for some big time excitement if some of their more far-out predictions come true.
Also, last night on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory, the author Graham Hancock was interviewed. Although it’s mostly new-age nonsense, he echoes Terence Mckenna’s claim that our cognitive and linguistic capabilities were enhanced through the use of entheogens.
GUATEMALA CITY (Reuters) – A Mayan city whose fabulous art has beguiled collectors for decades but whose true location was until now a mystery has been pinpointed in the jungles of northern Guatemala, scientists said on Tuesday.
A sculpted and polished phallus found in a German cave is among the earliest representations of male sexuality ever uncovered, researchers say.
The 20cm-long, 3cm-wide stone object, which is dated to be about 28,000 years old, was buried in the famous Hohle Fels Cave near Ulm in the Swabian Jura.
The prehistoric “tool” was reassembled from 14 fragments of siltstone.
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