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Martin Wolff's List: Archaeology
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It is hard to picture a wee monkey-like adult creature weighing no more than an ounce. But fossils of the 55.8 million-year-old animal, the earliest known primate to inhabit North America, have emerged from coastal sediments in Mississippi. It is even harder to imagine that tiny primates of this primitive kind were able to migrate to this continent all the way from their Asian homeland.
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The ancient peoples of Mexico and Central America loved to drink chocolate. But their beverage was nothing like the modern one — it was a frothy, bitter brew of fermented, roasted and ground cacao seeds, often spiced with chile peppers, more like mole poblano than Swiss Miss.
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Before Zeus hurled his first thunderbolt from Olympus, the pre-Greek people occupying the land presumably paid homage and offered sacrifices to their own gods and goddesses, whose nature and identities are unknown to scholars today. But archaeologists say they have now found the ashes, bones and other evidence of animal sacrifices to some pre-Zeus deity on the summit of Mount Lykaion, in the region of Greece known as Arcadia.
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Long before the rule of pharaohs, Egyptians grew wheat and barley and raised pigs, goats, sheep and cattle. Spotty evidence had suggested that agriculture was practiced there more than 7,000 years ago, two millenniums earlier than the first royal dynasties. American and Dutch archaeologists reported the discovery at a desert oasis of what they say is the earliest known farming settlement in ancient Egypt. They said the animal bones, carbonized grains, hearths and pottery were roughly dated at 5200 B.C.
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When archaeologists excavated brick tombs outside a ceremonial site for an early king of Egypt, they expected to find the remains of high officials who had been sacrificed to accompany the king in his posthumous travels. Instead, they found donkeys. No other animals have ever been found at such sites. Even at the tombs of the kings themselves, the only animals buried alongside were ones full of symbolism like lions.
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At least part of the mystery of Stonehenge may have now been solved: It was from the beginning a monument to the dead. New radiocarbon dates from human cremation burials among and around the brooding stones on Salisbury Plain in England indicate that the site was used as a cemetery from 3000 B.C. until after the monuments were erected around 2500 B.C., British archaeologists reported. What appeared to be the head of a stone mace, a symbol of authority, was found in one grave, the archaeologists said, indicating that this was probably a cemetery for the ruling dynasty responsible for erecting Stonehenge.
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Jun 14, 08
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Professor Thomas said: “The Stonehenge Cursus is a 100 metre wide, mile-long area which runs about 500 metres north of Stonehenge. “We don’t know what it was used for – but we do know it encloses a pathway which has been made inaccessible. “And that suggests it was either a sanctified area or for some reason was cursed.†Professor Thomas believes that the Cursus was part of a complex of monuments, within which Stonehenge was later constructed.
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Startling fossil discoveries in the Chilean Andes reveal an unexpected menagerie of unique mammals that once roamed South America. The finds also overturn long-held wisdom about the continent's geologic history
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In 1010 King Ly Thai To picked Thang Long (“Ascending Dragonâ€), situated within present-day Hanoi, as the capital for a country that had defeated the Tang Dynasty less than a century before, ending a millennium of Chinese rule.
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In the Treaty of Tordesillas, Spain and Portugal divided the world outside Europe between them. That was not the first time that two rival groups carved up the globe. More than 50,000 years ago, all the world outside Africa was divided between two archaic human species.
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