Posts Tagged: Archeology
It's Science!
12

Did They Find Atlantis?

| March 14th, 2011

In a strange coincidence of timing, considering the horrible news and footage coming out of Japan over the past three days, an international team of scientists working in south Spain believe they have pinpointed the location of the city of Atlantis. This is a major big deal in archeology. Plato wrote about Atlantis in 360 B.C. It was said to have been an engineering marvel located near the "Pillars of Hercules" (as the Straits of Gibralter were called back then), that it was built around an island temple to Poseidon which was surrounded by concentric rings of water and land, like a bulls-eye, and that it was "swallowed up [...]

What a World
7

Pssst, Wanna Buy A Raptorex Skull?

| April 29th, 2010

"Sereno, who has conducted extensive fieldwork in the region, says he has visited villages where the fossil trade is the livelihood for the majority of residents… He recalls entering one tunnel in China, guided by candlelight, that was dug by hand about 900 feet into the side of the mountain. 'There were no wood supports or anything. It was so deep in the side of the mountain, it actually went through an entire valley,' he says. 'There is an untold number of people-probably not thousands, but hundreds-that have been buried alive in the course of trying to find these dinosaurs.'" -Interesting Indiana-Jonesy story in Popular Mechanics about University of [...]

Knifecrime Island
8

Britons Drank From Human Skulls

| February 17th, 2011

"I think the production of the skull-cups is ritualistic. If the purpose was simply to break the skulls to extract the brain to eat it, there are much easier ways to do that. If food was the objective, the skull would be highly fragmented. But here you can really see they tried to preserve most of the skull bone; the cut marks tell us they tried to clean the skull, taking off every piece of soft tissue so that they could then modify it very precisely. They were manufacturing something." —Paleontologist Silvio Bello, on research that indicates that 14,700-year-old human skulls found in Gough's Cave in Somerset, England were [...]

13

Long Before They Were Nazis, Germans Were Cannibals

| December 7th, 2009

"We see patterns on the bones of animals indicating that they have been spit-roasted," said archeologist Bruno Boulestin, of a 7,000-year-old mass burial site discovered near the southern German town of Herxheim. "We have seen some of these same patterns on the human bones."

This Just In
20

Scientist Mars Important Discovery By Using Terrible Cliche

| August 13th, 2010

"This discovery dramatically shifts the known timeframe of a game-changing behavior for our ancestors. Tool use fundamentally altered the way our early ancestors interacted with nature, allowing them to eat new types of food and exploit new territories. It also led to tool making-a critical step in our evolutionary path that eventually enabled such advanced technologies as airplanes, MRI machines, and iPhones." -Dr. Zeresenay Alemseged, from the California Academy of Sciences, on the cut marks he and his team found in 3.4-million-year-old animal bones in Ethiopia. The discovery, reported in Nature magazine, is amazing; it pushes back the scientifically established estimate of earliest tool-usage by 900,000 years. [...]