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Archeology and History News Articles

Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on archeology and history from reliable news media sources. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.

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Lost city 'could rewrite history'
2002-01-19, BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1768109.stm

The remains of what has been described as a huge lost city may force historians and archaeologists to radically reconsider their view of ancient human history. Marine scientists say archaeological remains discovered 36 metres (120 feet) underwater in the Gulf of Cambay off the western coast of India could be over 9,000 years old. The vast city - which is five miles long and two miles wide - is believed to predate the oldest known remains in the subcontinent by more than 5,000 years. Debris recovered from the site - including construction material, pottery, sections of walls, beads, sculpture and human bones and teeth has been carbon dated and found to be nearly 9,500 years old. The city is believed to be even older than the ancient Harappan civilisation, which dates back around 4,000 years. Author and film-maker Graham Hancock - who has written extensively on the uncovering of ancient civilisations [said,] "Cities on this scale are not known in the archaeological record until roughly 4,500 years ago when the first big cities begin to appear in Mesopotamia. Nothing else on the scale of the underwater cities of Cambay is known. There's a huge chronological problem in this discovery. It means that the whole model of the origins of civilisation with which archaeologists have been working will have to be remade from scratch," he said.

Note: Dozens of manmade complexes found under the ocean have been found, yet mainstream archeologists are largely ignoring these finds because they don't fit the academic consensus. For an excellent compilation of reliable, mainstream media news articles showing both the hidden history and suppressed archeology of our world, click here. For an interview with former Economist reporter Graham Hancock, who finds lots of solid, astounding evidence of a lost civilization, click here.


'Lost city' found beneath Cuban waters
2001-12-07, BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1697038.stm

A team of explorers working off the western coast of Cuba say they have discovered what they think are the ruins of a submerged city built thousands of years ago. Researchers from ... Canadian company [Advanced Digital Communications] used sophisticated sonar equipment to find and film stone structures more than 2,000 feet (650 metres) below the sea's surface. The explorers first spotted the underwater city last year, when scanning equipment started to produce images of symmetrically organized stone structures reminiscent of an urban development. In July, the researchers returned to the site with an explorative robot device capable of highly advanced underwater filming work. The images the robot brought back confirmed the presence of huge, smooth blocks with the appearance of cut granite. They believe these formations could have been built more than 6,000 years ago, a date which precedes the great pyramids of Egypt by 1,500 years. "It's a really wonderful structure which really looks like it could have been a large urban centre," ADC explorer Paulina Zelitsky told the Reuters news agency.

Note: For an excellent discussion by former Economist reporter Graham Hancock of this most amazing find which brings into question the accepted theories of civilization, click here. For a compilation of 10 mysteries that hint at ancient civilizations which have largely been ignored, click here.


Was Edison Adversary Father Of 'Star Wars'?
1986-08-10, Chicago Tribune
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1986-08-10/news/8602270598_1_nikola-tesla-...

Weren't we taught that radio was invented by an Italian named Guglielmo Marconi? And that the legendary Thomas Alva Edison devised today's electrical power system? "We were taught wrong," said Toby Grotz, president of the International Tesla Society. Two years before Marconi demonstrated his wireless radio transmission, [Nikola Tesla] performed an identical feat at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. On June 21, 1943, in the case of Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. vs. the United States, the Supreme Court ruled that that Tesla's radio patents had predated those of the Italian genius. To be sure, Edison invented the incandesent light bulb. But he powered it and all of his other projects with inefficient direct current (DC) electricity. It was Tesla who discovered how to use the far more powerful phased form of alternating current (AC) electricity that is virtually the universal type of electricity employed by modern civilization. There are indications that Tesla also discovered many of the devices ... for the Pentagon's controversial Star Wars antimissile defense system. "Tesla dreamed of supplying limitless amounts of power freely and equally available to all persons on Earth," said Grotz. And he was convinced he could do so by broadcasting electrical power across large distances just as radio transmits far smaller amounts of energy. [Tesla's] tests ... caused lights to burn as much as 26 miles away, according to news reports of the time.

Note: Tesla was written out of history texts likely because he advocated providing methods for extremely cheap electricity available to everyone. He successfully transmitted electricity through the air to lights 26 miles away. Yet the rich energy power brokers of his time could not stand for this. Only the little known Supreme Court ruling mentioned above restored his claim as original inventor of the radio. For lots more on this most fascinating genius, click on the article link above and click here and here. For revealing major media articles showing the suppression of other energy inventions which could transform our world, click here.


Here are the indigenous people Christopher Columbus and his men could not annihilate
2019-10-14, Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/10/14/here-are-indigenous-people-...

This year the District of Columbia joins at least five states and dozens of cities and counties in replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day. Its part of a decades-long reckoning with the sanitized version of the European colonization of the Americas. In Hispaniola what is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic Columbus ... and his crew searched and searched for gold to no avail, so they filled their ships with something else they could sell: people. Of the 500 Tano they took selected because they were the strongest and healthiest specimens 200 died on the voyage to Spain. Many more died once they had been sold into slavery. Columbuss men also continued to sexually abuse Tano women and girls. In 1500, Columbus wrote to an acquaintance that there are many dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to 10 are now in demand. As the population plummeted, they abducted indigenous people from other islands, like the Lucayan, to work the fields and mines of Hispaniola. Across the Caribbean ... the Spanish were responsible for the deaths of 12 to 15 million indigenous people. Historians usually attribute most of the deaths to the spread of diseases for which native people had no immunity, but recently historian Andrs Resndez has pushed back against this, arguing that populations were lower than previous estimated, and a nexus of slavery, overwork and famine killed more Indians in the Caribbean than smallpox, influenza and malaria.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on history from reliable major media sources.


Abiotic Oil: A Theory Worth Exploring
2011-09-14, US News & World Report magazine
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/energy-intelligence/2011/09/14/abiotic-oi...

[Abiotic oil theorists] hold that oil can be derived from hydrocarbons that existed eons ago in massive pools deep within the earth's core. That source of hydrocarbons seeps up through the earth's layers and slowly replenishes oil sources. In other words, it turns the fossil-fuel paradigm upside down. Thomas Gold, a respected astronomer and professor emeritus at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, has held for years that oil is actually a renewable, primordial syrup continually manufactured by the Earth under ultrahot conditions and tremendous pressures. As this substance migrates toward the surface, it is attacked by bacteria, making it appear to have an organic origin dating back to the dinosaurs, he says. That ... raises the tantalizing possibility that oil may not be the limited resource it is assumed to be. In 2008 ... a group of Russian and Ukrainian scientists [said] that oil and gas don't come from fossils; they're synthesized deep within the earth's mantle by heat, pressure, and other purely chemical means, before gradually rising to the surface. The idea that oil comes from fossils "is a myth" that needs changing according to petroleum engineer Vladimir Kutcherov, speaking at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. "All kinds of rocks could have oil and gas deposits." Alexander Kitchka of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences estimates that 60 percent of the content of all oil is abiotic in origin and not from fossil fuels.

Note: For more on the intriguing abiotic oil theory, click here. For key reports from major media sources on promising energy sources, click here.


Scholars seek to correct 'mistakes' in Bible
2011-08-12, MSNBC/Associated Press
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44117239/ns/world_news-mideast_n_africa

A dull-looking chart projected on the wall of a university office in Jerusalem displayed a revelation that would startle many readers of the Old Testament: The sacred text that people revered in the past was not the same one we study today. An ancient version of one book has an extra phrase. Another appears to have been revised to retroactively insert a prophecy after the events happened. Scholars in this out-of-the-way corner of the Hebrew University campus have been quietly at work for 53 years on one of the most ambitious projects attempted in biblical studies publishing the authoritative edition of the Old Testament, also known as the Hebrew Bible, and tracking every single evolution of the text over centuries and millennia. The ongoing work of the academic detectives of the Bible Project, as their undertaking is known, shows that this text at the root of Judaism, Christianity and Islam was somewhat fluid for long periods of its history, and that its transmission through the ages was messier and more human than most of us imagine. The sheer volume of information makes the Bible Project's version "the most comprehensive critical edition of the Hebrew Bible in existence at the present time," said David Marcus, a Bible scholar at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, who is not involved with the project.


Sleuths study ancient UFOs
2010-10-27, MSNBC
https://web.archive.org/web/20101106055830/https://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_n...

One of the best-known scientific sleuths of UFO sightings is focusing his search not on today's flying saucers, but on the sky wonders of antiquity. Jacques Vallee [is] the French-born computer whiz and venture capitalist who ... served as the model for Francois Truffaut's UFO-hunting character in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." He's a co-author of a newly published book, "Wonders in the Sky," that lists 500 unexplained aerial observations dating back as far as 1460 B.C. and going up to the dawn of the industrial age in 1879. About 90 percent of UFO reports turn out to have perfectly natural explanations, but Vallee says the reports that remain unexplained are provocative enough that they deserve more thoroughgoing study. Jacques Vallee: Many of the reports in our book came from professional scientists in the 18th and 19th centuries [including] two directors of the Paris Observatory. Thanks to the Internet, now we have the means to look at vast collections of records. Many of the cases, both ancient and modern, involve a number of trained people - sometimes the entire crew of an aircraft ... and official reports by pilots which in many cases involved near-collisions. There are pilots and military people willing to talk openly about what they've seen. There is a database of over 500 reports by pilots in the first person. There are radar records, visual observations, electromagnetic observations. All of us who have investigated this have spoken to pilots and radar operators who said that after a sighting, a couple of people in blue jeans showed up with some identification from somewhere and confiscated the tapes or the film, and they took it somewhere and no one ever saw it again.

Note: The list of sightings at the end of this article from highly reliable observers reporting before humans could fly is quite intriguing. For lots more reliable, verifiable information on the UFO cover-up, click here.


Underwater Exploring Is Banned In Brazil
1985-06-25, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/25/science/underwater-exploring-is-banned-in-b...

A dispute between the Brazilian Navy and an American marine archeologist has led Brazil to bar the diver from entering the country and to place a ban on all underwater exploration. The dispute involves Robert Marx, a Florida author and treasure hunter, who asserts that the Brazilian Navy dumped a thick layer of silt on the remains of a Roman vessel that he discovered inside Rio de Janeiro's bay. The reason he gave for the Navy's action was that proof of a Roman presence would require Brazil to rewrite its recorded history, which has the Portuguese navigator Pedro Alvares Cabral discovering the country in 1500. All ... permits for underwater exploration and digging, a prolific field in Brazil, have been canceled as a result of the Marx controversy ... Navy officials said. The story goes back to 1976 when lobster divers first found potsherds studded with barnacles. Then a Brazilian diver brought up two complete jars with twin handles, tapering at the bottom, the kind that ancient Mediterranean peoples widely used for storage and are known as amphoras. According to Elizabeth Will, a professor of classics and specialist in ancient Roman amphoras at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the jars are very similar to the ones produced at Kouass, a Roman Empire colony that was a center for amphora-making on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. Reached by telephone, Professor Will said of the fragments she had studied: ''They look to be ancient and because of the profile, the thin-walled fabric and the shape of the rims I suggested they belong to the third century A.D..''

Note: Many archeological finds which don't match accepted history have been suppressed and covered up. For five revealing BBC articles showing more manipulation around this, click here. For a compilation of 10 mysteries that hint at ancient civilizations which have largely been ignored, click here.


Evidence of 90-million-year-old rainforest uncovered beneath Antarctic ice
2020-04-02, NBC News/Reuters
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/evidence-90-million-year-old-rain...

Antarctica is now a harsh land of ice and snow, but has not always been that way. Earth’s southernmost continent long ago was home to temperate, swampy rainforests teeming with life, scientists said on Wednesday based on pristinely preserved forest soil they retrieved by drilling under the seafloor off Antarctica’s coast. The sediment core obtained by scientists working aboard the research icebreaker RV Polarstern in the Amundsen Sea near the Pine Island Glacier dated to about 90 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period when dinosaurs were the dominant land animals. The researchers estimated based on the soil content that this location, 560 miles (900 km) from the South Pole, experienced average annual temperatures of about 53-55 degrees Fahrenheit (12-13 Celsius) and average temperatures during the warmest summer months of about 68-77 Fahrenheit (20-25 Celsius). A modern temperature analogue may be New York City, according to marine geologist Johann Klages ... lead author of the research published in the journal Nature. The dark-brownish gray soil was composed of fine-grained silt and clay bearing remains of fossil roots in a dense network, pollen and spores spanning 65 types of plants, with individual cell structures clearly visible. “If you would go to a forest near you and drill a hole, it would probably look pretty similar,” Klages said. While they did not find any animal remains, Klages said there likely were dinosaurs.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on little-known history from reliable major media sources.


Piltdown Man: Scientists finally get to the bottom of notorious scientific forgery
2016-08-11, Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0811/Piltdown-Man-Scientists-finally-ge...

Piltdown Man was heralded as the missing link, connecting humans to their ape ancestors. Discovered in England in 1912, the fossils were exactly what British paleontologists were hoping to find. Newspapers proclaimed: "Missing Link Found - Darwin's Theory Proved." In 1953, scientists concluded that Piltdown Man was an elaborate fraud, compiled of pieces of a human skull and orangutan jaw and teeth. Now ... scientists have definitively narrowed the blame down to just one person: Charles Dawson, an amateur archaeologist and fossil collector. The shocking thing was how many people accepted it because it fell right into their belief system, [said] David Begun, a paleoanthropologist professor at the University of Toronto. Dawson put together this fraudulent fossil to fit the preconceptions of the time." Anthropologists hadn't pinned down where humans first arose, so it was still possible to link them back to Europe. More recent discoveries of human ancestors have immediately raised red flags because they upended people's expectations, including the enigmatic "hobbit" from Indonesia, and strange, small human ancestors in the Rising Star cave in South Africa. But those excavations were carefully documented and the specimens were verified as real. In contrast, the greatest scientific fraud in history fit exactly what scientists were looking for. Because it confirmed the biases of the time, the Piltdown Man closed people's eyes to the new things there were to discover.

Note: Scientists all too often herald discoveries which confirm their theories without carefully checking the facts. The carefully researched book "Forbidden Archeology" raises serious questions about the origins of the human race. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing archeology and history news articles from reliable major media sources.


Gobekli Tepe: The Birth of Religion
2011-06-01, National Geographic
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/06/gobekli-tepe/mann-text

Every now and then the dawn of civilization is reenacted on a remote hilltop in southern Turkey. Dozens of massive stone pillars [at this site are] arranged into a set of rings, one mashed up against the next. Known as Gobekli Tepe ... the site is [made] from cleanly carved limestone pillars splashed with bas-reliefs of animals—a cavalcade of gazelles, snakes, foxes, scorpions, and ferocious wild boars. The assemblage was built some 11,600 years ago, seven millennia before the Great Pyramid of Giza. It contains the oldest known temple. Indeed, Gobekli Tepe is the oldest known example of monumental architecture. Archaeologists are still excavating Gobekli Tepe and debating its meaning. What they do know is that the site is the most significant in a volley of unexpected findings that have overturned earlier ideas about our species' deep past. Just 20 years ago most researchers believed they knew the time, place, and rough sequence of the Neolithic Revolution—the critical transition that resulted in the birth of agriculture, taking Homo sapiens from scattered groups of hunter-gatherers to farming villages and from there to technologically sophisticated societies with great temples and towers and kings and priests who directed the labor of their subjects and recorded their feats in written form. But in recent years multiple new discoveries, Gobekli Tepe preeminent among them, have begun forcing archaeologists to reconsider.

Note: Other discoveries reported in BBC and elsewhere suggest civilizations on Earth much earlier than most archeologists believe. For more on this, click here. As this fascinating article indicates, the early site uncovered at Gobekli Tepe may be related to a number of newly-excavated sites in the Levant from the "Natufian" period, yet archeologists are still puzzling over this one.


In Hunt for Nazis, an Incomplete History
2010-11-14, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/14/us/14documents.html

A secret internal history of the Justice Departments Nazi-hunting unit, the Office of Special Investigations, chronicles numerous hidden chapters in the offices 31-year-existence. But a heavily redacted version of the report turned over by the Justice Department in response to a lawsuit deletes more than 1,000 passages in the report, including many of the most intriguing references. Here is a sampling of the original passages in the unredacted report, obtained by the New York Times, as compared with the deleted versions. The full report details how the United States became a safe haven for some Nazis, with some American officials actively working to help persecutors gain entry to the United States and conceal their identities and crimes. But the redacted version prepared by the Justice Department omits many of the central elements of these cases. The redacted report omits the debate within the CIA in 1953 over what Otto von Bolschwing, a Nazi associate of Adolph Eichmann who became a CIA asset, should tell immigration officials or others in the United States if confronted about his Nazi past. It also deletes references to what American officials knew about his atrocities, including the assertion from a Justice Department officials that he might be guilty of acts more heinous than anyone else currently under investigation. [many additional examples follow]

Note: This suppressed report contains clear evidence that top Nazi war criminals were given aliases and allowed to escape prosecution by elements both outside and inside of government. For even more powerful evidence from released US government documents that top government leaders felt the need for mind control techniques developed by the Nazi's warranted secretly protecting and eventually working with some of the most heartless of the Nazis, click here.


Archaeologists probe legendary city
2000-10-19, BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/978885.stm

Archaeologists have uncovered what they believe to be the remains of a long-lost ancient Greek city, Helike. Classical texts suggest that all its inhabitants perished when the city sank beneath the waves after suffering a disastrous combination of earthquake and tidal wave. Some scholars have speculated that the catastrophe may well have been the source of Plato's story of Atlantis, a land that supposedly suffered a similar fate. During the summer, Greek and American researchers ... began digging 3m deep trenches within an area of modern orchards and vineyards of about one square mile. These revealed archaic walls, classical ceramic fragments and, perhaps most significantly, evidence that the ruins had been submerged beneath the sea. "We uncovered archaic walls buried in clay containing sea shells," said one of the researchers, Dr Steven Soter from the American Museum of Natural History.

Note: Here is solid evidence of ancient manmade structures that were submerged for a period under sea water, yet now are above sea level. The evidence suggests an ancient civilization from many thousands of years ago, yet most archeologists will not entertain this idea. For a powerful interview that questions the consensus of archeologists, click here. For a compilation of 10 mysteries that hint at ancient civilizations which have largely been ignored, click here.


History in black and white
1997-01-26, The Telegraph (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/history-in-black-and-white-12...

[Review of] RHODES: The Race for Africa by Antony Thomas, BBC Books. The book is ... intelligent, detailed, well-researched and credibly nuanced. The book's aim is to kill off once and for all the public-schoolboy perception of [Cecil] Rhodes as the model Englishman who selflessly deployed his vast diamond wealth to the task of civilising Southern Africa while adding, virtually single-handedly, a chunk of territory the size of Europe to Her Majesty's imperial possessions. The picture that persuasively emerges in the book [is] of a man of immense charm and demonic single-mindedness. Rhodes ... tailored his rhetoric to suit an age when lust for acquisition had to be dressed in the garb of moral rectitude. Thus the famous lines from his precocious personal credo, drafted at the age of 23: "I contend that we are the finest race in the world, and the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for the human race." Business ... was the medium he employed to pursue personal power. He beat his rivals not by fighting them but by seducing them. By bribery (Rhodes coined the expression "every man has his price") or sheer force of personality, or more often both, he submitted members of the British cabinet, Kruger's Boers and proud African chieftains to his colossal will. Such were his powers of persuasion that after a smallpox epidemic struck Kimberley in 1883, he prevailed upon local doctors to sign false documents declaring the outbreak to be a rare skin disease. Thus did he prevent the temporary closure of his diamond mines and thus did at least 751 people needlessly, hideously die. By the end of the book Thomas leaves us in no doubt as to Rhodes' greatness, but he concludes that it was a misdirected greatness, a story of talents squandered and opportunities lost.

Note: Often portrayed in history books as one of the most influential men of the 19th century, Rhodes not only believed his was the superior race, in his will he advocated "for the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be for the extension of British rule throughout the world." For major media reports revealing other secret societies with similar aims, click here. For more information on Rhodes and secret societies from Caroll Quigley's epic Tragedy and Hope, click here.


Coral Castle: Mysterious Monument to Lost Love
2008-02-01, ABC News
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=4225517

Like the ancient wonders of Stonehenge or the Great Pyramids of Egypt, there is an incredible and mysterious creation right here in the United States. Coral Castle, in Homestead, Fla., just south of Miami, is an intricate rock garden made of enormous pieces of coral, many of them weighing several tons. But more amazingly, Coral Castle was built entirely by one man -- Latvian immigrant Ed Leedskalnin, who stood just 5 feet tall and weighed 100 pounds. To this day, no one knows how he did it. The castle is an extraordinary feat of engineering, and experts have puzzled over how Leedskalnin, who only had a fourth-grade education, constructed Coral Castle by himself. For example, how did this little man build a 9-ton coral gate constructed so precisely that you can push it open using one finger? There are many theories on how Leedskalnin accomplished this amazing feat. Some say he had help from extraterrestrials, others believe he discovered the secrets behind anti-gravity and levitation. Leedskalnin was a self-taught expert on magnetic currents, and one theory holds that he positioned the site to be perfectly aligned with Earth's poles to eliminate the forces of gravity, allowing him to move stones weighing several tons each. Even Albert Einstein couldn't figure it out.

Note: For a good video of this wonder, click here. For more information on this most intriguing phenomenon, click here. The unusual builder of this site claimed to know the secrets of the pyramids and even Einstein could not imagine how he did it.


'Sistine Chapel of the ancients' rock art discovered in remote Amazon forest
2020-11-29, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/nov/29/sistine-chapel-of-the-ancient...

One of the world’s largest collections of prehistoric rock art has been discovered in the Amazonian rainforest. Hailed as “the Sistine Chapel of the ancients”, archaeologists have found tens of thousands of paintings of animals and humans created up to 12,500 years ago across cliff faces that stretch across nearly eight miles in Colombia. Their date is based partly on their depictions of now-extinct ice age animals, such as the mastodon, a prehistoric relative of the elephant that hasn’t roamed South America for at least 12,000 years. There are also images of the palaeolama, an extinct camelid, as well as giant sloths and ice age horses. These animals were all seen and painted by some of the very first humans ever to reach the Amazon. Their pictures give a glimpse into a lost, ancient civilisation. Such is the sheer scale of paintings that they will take generations to study. The discovery was made by a British-Colombian team, funded by the European Research Council. Its leader is José Iriarte, professor of archaeology at Exeter University and a leading expert on the Amazon and pre-Columbian history. He said: “When you’re there, your emotions flow … We’re talking about several tens of thousands of paintings. It’s going to take generations to record them … Every turn you do, it’s a new wall of paintings. “We started seeing animals that are now extinct. The pictures are so natural and so well made that we have few doubts that you’re looking at a horse, for example. It’s fascinating.”

Note: Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.


Sprawling Maya network discovered under Guatemala jungle
2018-02-02, BBC News
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-42916261

Researchers have found more than 60,000 hidden Maya ruins in Guatemala in a major archaeological breakthrough. Laser technology was used to survey digitally beneath the forest canopy, revealing houses, palaces, elevated highways, and defensive fortifications. The landscape, near already-known Maya cities, is thought to have been home to millions more people than other research had previously suggested. "I think this is one of the greatest advances in over 150 years of Maya archaeology," said Stephen Houston, [a] Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology. Results from the research using Lidar technology, which is short for "light detection and ranging", suggest that Central America supported an advanced civilisation more akin to sophisticated cultures like ancient Greece or China. Maya civilisation, at its peak some 1,500 years ago, covered an area about twice the size of medieval England, with an estimated population of around five million. With this new data it's no longer unreasonable to think that there were 10 to 15 million people there. One of the hidden finds is a ... complex network of causeways linking all the Maya cities in the area. The raised highways, allowing easy passage even during rainy seasons, were wide enough to suggest they were heavily trafficked and used for trade. "Understanding everything is connected across many square miles is amazing," said Mr Houston.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing archeology news articles from reliable major media sources.


Hints of Trigonometry on a 3,700-Year-Old Babylonian Tablet
2017-08-29, New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/29/science/trigonometry-babylonian-tablet.html

Two Australian mathematicians assert that an ancient clay tablet was a tool for working out trigonometry problems, possibly adding to the many techniques that Babylonian mathematicians had mastered. Its a trigonometric table, which is 3,000 years ahead of its time, said Daniel F. Mansfield of the University of New South Wales. Dr. Mansfield and his colleague Norman J. Wildberger reported their findings last week in the journal Historia Mathematica. The tablet, known as Plimpton 322, was discovered in the early 1900s in southern Iraq and ... contains 60 numbers organized into 15 rows and four columns. With all the publicity, the tablet has been put on display at [Columbia] Universitys Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Plimpton 322 has been dated to between 1822 and 1762 B.C. One of the columns on Plimpton 322 is just a numbering of the rows from 1 to 15. The other three columns are ... Pythagorean triples - sets of integers, or whole numbers, that satisfy the equation a2 + b2 = c2. That by itself was remarkable given that the Greek mathematician Pythagoras, for whom the triples were named, would not be born for another thousand years. You dont make a trigonometric table by accident, Dr. Mansfield said. Just having a list of Pythagorean triples doesnt help you much. Thats just a list of numbers. But when you arrange it in such a way so that you can use any known ratio of a triangle to find the other sides of a triangle, then it becomes trigonometry. Thats what we can use this fragment for.

Note: Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.


Ancient humans had sex with non humans
2017-07-25, New Zealand Herald
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/science/news/article.cfm?c_id=&objectid=11894688

New research shows that ancient humans had sex with non human species. According to a study conducted by Omer Gokcumen, an assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of Buffalo, ancient humans had intercourse with a "ghost species" of "proto human". Gokcumen explains that humans are only one member of a broader species named "hominins". The research found that humans had sex with other members of the hominins group. Gokcumen found "wildly different" genes in DNA of humans living in Sub-Saharan Africa. He believes these genes can be traced back to about 150,000 years ago when ancient humans were breeding with this mysterious "ghost species". This other species is referred to by the scientific community as a "ghost species" as there are no known fossils that can be analysed. "It seems that interbreeding between different early hominin species is not the exception - it's the norm," Gokcumen said. "Based on our analysis, the most plausible explanation for this extreme variation is archaic introgression - the introduction of genetic material from a 'ghost' species of ancient hominins."

Note: What was this "ghost species"? Could there have been intervention from species outside of planet Earth? Read an essay by WantToKnow.info founder Fred Burks for intriguing ideas along these lines.


Just how Earth-shattering are those 300,000-year-old Homo sapiens fossils?
2017-06-08, Christian Science Monitor
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2017/0608/Just-how-Earth-shattering-are-tho...

Some old bones made big headlines this week, as paleoanthropologists reported that they had identified the oldest Homo sapiens fossils yet. Freshly dated to be about 300,000 years old, a collection of fossils and stone artifacts unearthed in Morocco could push the origin of our species back 100,000 years, scientists say in two papers published ... in the journal Nature. Paleoanthropology is kind of like a connect-the-dot puzzle, says Shara Bailey, a coauthor of one of the Nature papers But you don't have any numbers on it and only a quarter of the dots are there. Will you be able to recreate what that puzzle is? Not necessarily. But as you get more dots and you can put numbers on it, you can get a clearer picture of what that puzzle is actually supposed to be. Each new fossil and date is a boon for scientists, she explains, because it adds another dot and number to that sparse picture. Before this North African site claimed the title of oldest Homo sapiens site, a 195,000-year-old site thousands of miles away in Ethiopia wore that crown. And with other similarly aged Homo sapiens sites nearby, some scientists pointed to East Africa as the birthplace of our species. Now researchers say the Moroccan site, called Jebel Irhoud, adds a new wrinkle. We're sort of incrementally inching in upon a better description of nature, says Ian Tattersall, a paleoanthropologist. The new fossils could be members of a population of early Homo sapiens relatives that ultimately died out.

Note: The very well researched book Forbidden Archeology makes crystal clear that the history of humankind with which we are presented is in actuality riddled with holes, deception, and unexplained anomalies, including numerous man-made artifacts found in rocks and sediments millions of years old. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing archeology and history news articles from reliable major media sources.


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