Bear Down Wildcats

Stunning glass beads found in Danish Bronze Age burials dating to 3400 years ago turn out to have come from ancient Egypt – in fact, from the workshop that made the blue beads buried with the famous boy-king Tutankhamun. The discovery proves that there were established trade routes between the far north and Levant as early as the 13th century BCE.
Twenty-three of the glass beads found in Danish Bronze Age burials by the team of Danish and French archaeologists were blue, a rare color in ancient times.

Possible Viking Find Could Rewrite North American History

04/01/2016

A team of archaeologists say they’ve made a potentially “seismic” discovery in Canada that could “rewrite the history of Vikings in the New World” — and they did it with the help of medieval sagas and the latest satellite technology.

Medieval sagas, considered to be masterpieces of literature from the Middle Ages, capture the stories of the intrepid Vikings — the master seafarers and warriors who, starting around the 8th century, ventured beyond their Scandinavian homelands to raid and trade in foreign lands.

According to these stories, many of them featuring “larger-than-life heroes,” the Vikings had made the first European voyage to North America — at least 500 years before Christopher Columbus.

But the question has long remained: Just how much fact was interwoven into these sagas, which Icelandic monks wrote in the 13th and 14th centuries? And if laced with truth, just how much of the New World did the Norse really explore?

In the 1960s, archaeologists determined that a site on the northernmost tip of Newfoundland in Canada — L’Anse aux Meadows — had been a Viking settlement, established about a millennium before. The discovery changed the history of European exploration in the New World and proved the sagas were not simply works of fiction.

L’Anse aux Meadows, however, had merely been a temporary settlement, which the Norse abandoned after a few short years. Archaeologists have since been searching for clues of other Viking expeditions in North America; but in the past half-century, nothing concrete has been found.

Until now.

Thanks largely to the work of Sarah Parcak, a leading space archaeologist, evidence has been unearthed of a possible second Viking site in North America — and it’s located about 300 miles further south than L’Anse aux Meadows.

The site at Point Rosee, which Parcak pinpointed after analyzing satellite imagery, is located on the southwest coast of Newfoundland, The New York Times reports.

“I am absolutely thrilled,” she told the BBC of the new find. “Typically in archaeology, you only ever get to write a footnote in the history books, but what we seem to have at Point Rosee may be the beginning of an entirely new chapter.”

“This new site could unravel more secrets about the Vikings, whether they were the first Europeans to ‘occupy’ briefly in North America, and reveal that the Vikings dared to explore much further into the New World than we ever thought,” added Parcak, who won the $1 million TED prize last year for her pioneering work using satellite data for archaeological purposes.

Last summer, Parcak and a team of archaeologists conducted a test excavation at Point Rosee, and uncovered an “iron-working hearth [and some cooked bog iron] partially surrounded by the remains of what appears to have been a turf wall,” The National Geographic reports.

The team said they can’t yet say for certain that the Vikings built the hearth, but the signs are encouraging.

The turf wall is “nothing like the shelters built by indigenous peoples who lived in Newfoundland at the time, nor by Basque fishermen and whalers who arrived in the 16th century,” according to Nat Geo. And Douglas Bolender, an archaeologist who specializes in Viking settlements, said there “aren’t any known cultures — prehistoric or modern — that would have been mining and roasting bog iron ore in Newfoundland other than the Norse.”

Bolender told the BBC that the Point Rosee discovery “has the potential to change history.”

“The sagas suggest a short period of activity and a very brief and failed colonization attempt. L’Anse aux Meadows fits well with that story but is only one site. Point Rosee could reinforce that story or completely change it if the dating is different from L’Anse aux Meadows. We could end up with a much longer period of Norse activity in the New World,” he told Nat Geo.

One of the reasons why the Vikings have been so hard to track down is because of the way they moved around.

“They travelled light and left nothing behind, No massive stone theatres for them. They voyaged in longships with a strong oak keel ... [and] sails spun from wool,” historian Dan Snow writes for the BBC. “Food was pickled herring, lamb smoked using reindeer droppings, fermented salmon. Almost everything on a Viking ship would get recycled or rot away.”

But, thanks to satellite imagery, Parcak believes that even the elusive Vikings can be found.

In the case of Point Rosee, for instance, it had been irregularities in the soil — “a dark stain,” according to the Times — that initially piqued her interest.

“For a long time, serious North Atlantic archaeologists have largely ignored the idea of looking for Norse sites in coastal Canada because there was no real method for doing so,” Bolender told Nat Geo. “If Sarah Parcak can find one Norse site using satellites, then there’s a reasonable chance that you can use the same method to find more, if they exist. If Point Rosee is Norse, it may open up coastal Canada to a whole new era of research.”

Solid evidence in the form of ancient dung microbes, has led Microbiologists to believe that the crossing occurred in the Col de la Traversette pass between France and Italy. The findings, published this week in the journal Archaeometry, may have finally settled this long standing puzzle of history.

One of the astonishing things about Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps was that he was able to successfully move such a tremendous number of men and animals over such treacherous, unforgiving terrain. Conditions were likely terrible, and Inadequate clothing coupled with severe weather probably made it a harrowing experience for the average soldier. His army consisted of some 30,000 soldiers, 15,000 horses and at least 37 elephants.

That's right: He guided war elephants from the sunbaked continent of Africa through the snow covered mountains of France and Italy. Imagine the Romans’ terror and disbelief at seeing elephants coming down from the mountains, let alone a full army.

Moving that many living things is like moving a city. And it most certainly didn’t happen in a day. So like all living things, the soldiers and beasts of war all had to bed down at night, forage for food, and relieve themselves. Now 45,000 mammals—and big ones at that—all loosening their bowels in the same area is going to create a substantial amount of feces. And in this case, it was substantial enough for scientists to find signs of it over 2,000 years later.

azgreg wrote:How can something like that go unseen for so long?

Chicat wrote:

azgreg wrote:How can something like that go unseen for so long?

That picture is not what they discovered. Nice and misleading, huh?

(CNN)Turf cutter Jack Conaway was cutting peat for fuel in the Emlagh bog when he made a surprising and smelly discovery.

Buried 12 feet under, Conaway found a massive 22 pound (10 kilogram) chunk of butter estimated to be 2,000 years old.
Oddly enough, such encounters are not unusual.
Hundreds of lumps of bog butter have been found in Ireland and Scotland, dating back over thousands of years, according a study published in The Journal of Irish Archaeology.

Chicat wrote:Wasn't the Tigris river water safe to drink 5,000 years ago?

ASUCatFan wrote:

Chicat wrote:Wasn't the Tigris river water safe to drink 5,000 years ago?

I imagine that depended on which part of the river you did. Seems like it would have been a natural place to dump the raw sewage before people understood pathology. Wouldn't want to live in a settlement too far downstream.

Merkin wrote:Saw some show on the History Channel years ago about beer. Seems in Victorian England it was quite normal to drink beer at lunch due to drinking water being so unsafe.

It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution and people started losing body parts in industrial accidents that they decided beer at lunch wasn't a very good idea.

ASUHATER! wrote:http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37452287


2 skeletons found in London from the Roman Era that are likely Chinese in ancestry...

Longhorned wrote:

ASUHATER! wrote:http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37452287


2 skeletons found in London from the Roman Era that are likely Chinese in ancestry...

My guess is Severan (193-235) or more likely Tetrarchic (284-324) soldiers.

ASUHATER! wrote:

Longhorned wrote:

ASUHATER! wrote:http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37452287


2 skeletons found in London from the Roman Era that are likely Chinese in ancestry...

My guess is Severan (193-235) or more likely Tetrarchic (284-324) soldiers.

Well those are Roman periods, but in your professional opinion, what's the explanation of the possible asian/Chinese ancestry.

Longhorned wrote:

ASUHATER! wrote:

Longhorned wrote:

ASUHATER! wrote:http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37452287


2 skeletons found in London from the Roman Era that are likely Chinese in ancestry...

My guess is Severan (193-235) or more likely Tetrarchic (284-324) soldiers.

Well those are Roman periods, but in your professional opinion, what's the explanation of the possible asian/Chinese ancestry.

It's plausible that descendants of earlier Han merchants taken as slaves would be freed and then either them or their descendants fight under a Roman commander or emperor/junior emperor. It's less plausible that they'd reach London as independent merchants or as slaves. What's really hard about this is that the archaeology won't correspond to textual evidence, since it will be hard to know whether any writer in Latin or Greek referred to peoples whom we call Han or Chinese.

• World's first (proved) sea migration (90 kilometer ocean crossing - sophisticated sea going craft required)
• World's oldest (known) ground edge axe (beating Europe by 30,000+ years)

In a lava flow in south-western Victoria, the ancestors of the fighting Gunditjmara built the world's oldest known aquaculture system - 6500 years ago.

A feat of engineering, Budj Bim is an extensive system of eel traps, including dams, holding ponds and stone houses.

Chicat wrote:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/vik ... f53aef5a26

Possible Viking Find Could Rewrite North American History

04/01/2016

A team of archaeologists say they’ve made a potentially “seismic” discovery in Canada that could “rewrite the history of Vikings in the New World” — and they did it with the help of medieval sagas and the latest satellite technology.

Medieval sagas, considered to be masterpieces of literature from the Middle Ages, capture the stories of the intrepid Vikings — the master seafarers and warriors who, starting around the 8th century, ventured beyond their Scandinavian homelands to raid and trade in foreign lands.

According to these stories, many of them featuring “larger-than-life heroes,” the Vikings had made the first European voyage to North America — at least 500 years before Christopher Columbus.

But the question has long remained: Just how much fact was interwoven into these sagas, which Icelandic monks wrote in the 13th and 14th centuries? And if laced with truth, just how much of the New World did the Norse really explore?

In the 1960s, archaeologists determined that a site on the northernmost tip of Newfoundland in Canada — L’Anse aux Meadows — had been a Viking settlement, established about a millennium before. The discovery changed the history of European exploration in the New World and proved the sagas were not simply works of fiction.

L’Anse aux Meadows, however, had merely been a temporary settlement, which the Norse abandoned after a few short years. Archaeologists have since been searching for clues of other Viking expeditions in North America; but in the past half-century, nothing concrete has been found.

Until now.

Thanks largely to the work of Sarah Parcak, a leading space archaeologist, evidence has been unearthed of a possible second Viking site in North America — and it’s located about 300 miles further south than L’Anse aux Meadows.

The site at Point Rosee, which Parcak pinpointed after analyzing satellite imagery, is located on the southwest coast of Newfoundland, The New York Times reports.

“I am absolutely thrilled,” she told the BBC of the new find. “Typically in archaeology, you only ever get to write a footnote in the history books, but what we seem to have at Point Rosee may be the beginning of an entirely new chapter.”

“This new site could unravel more secrets about the Vikings, whether they were the first Europeans to ‘occupy’ briefly in North America, and reveal that the Vikings dared to explore much further into the New World than we ever thought,” added Parcak, who won the $1 million TED prize last year for her pioneering work using satellite data for archaeological purposes.

Last summer, Parcak and a team of archaeologists conducted a test excavation at Point Rosee, and uncovered an “iron-working hearth [and some cooked bog iron] partially surrounded by the remains of what appears to have been a turf wall,” The National Geographic reports.

The team said they can’t yet say for certain that the Vikings built the hearth, but the signs are encouraging.

The turf wall is “nothing like the shelters built by indigenous peoples who lived in Newfoundland at the time, nor by Basque fishermen and whalers who arrived in the 16th century,” according to Nat Geo. And Douglas Bolender, an archaeologist who specializes in Viking settlements, said there “aren’t any known cultures — prehistoric or modern — that would have been mining and roasting bog iron ore in Newfoundland other than the Norse.”

Bolender told the BBC that the Point Rosee discovery “has the potential to change history.”

“The sagas suggest a short period of activity and a very brief and failed colonization attempt. L’Anse aux Meadows fits well with that story but is only one site. Point Rosee could reinforce that story or completely change it if the dating is different from L’Anse aux Meadows. We could end up with a much longer period of Norse activity in the New World,” he told Nat Geo.

One of the reasons why the Vikings have been so hard to track down is because of the way they moved around.

“They travelled light and left nothing behind, No massive stone theatres for them. They voyaged in longships with a strong oak keel ... [and] sails spun from wool,” historian Dan Snow writes for the BBC. “Food was pickled herring, lamb smoked using reindeer droppings, fermented salmon. Almost everything on a Viking ship would get recycled or rot away.”

But, thanks to satellite imagery, Parcak believes that even the elusive Vikings can be found.

In the case of Point Rosee, for instance, it had been irregularities in the soil — “a dark stain,” according to the Times — that initially piqued her interest.

“For a long time, serious North Atlantic archaeologists have largely ignored the idea of looking for Norse sites in coastal Canada because there was no real method for doing so,” Bolender told Nat Geo. “If Sarah Parcak can find one Norse site using satellites, then there’s a reasonable chance that you can use the same method to find more, if they exist. If Point Rosee is Norse, it may open up coastal Canada to a whole new era of research.”

At an archaeological site in northeastern Jordan, researchers have discovered the charred remains of a flatbread baked by hunter-gatherers 14,400 years ago. It is the oldest direct evidence of bread found to date, predating the advent of agriculture by at least 4,000 years. The findings suggest that bread production based on wild cereals may have encouraged hunter-gatherers to cultivate cereals, and thus contributed to the agricultural revolution in the Neolithic period.

scumdevils86 wrote:Hah, one of the Wichita State students in the picture in that article is wearing an Arizona shirt.