Native American Genetic Source is Located

Artist rendition of crossing Bering Strait.

Northern European populations ~ British, Scandinavians, French and Eastern Europeans ~ descend from a mixture of two ancestral populations, one of which is related to Native Americans. This genetic discovery helps understanding of both Native American and Northern European ancestry, while explaining genetic similarities among the very divergent groups.

According to Science Daily, quoting Nick Patterson, first author of the report published in the November issue of Genetics magazine:

 "There is a genetic link between the paleolithic population of Europe and modern Native Americans. The evidence is that the population that crossed the Bering Strait from Siberia into the Americas more than 15,000 years ago was likely related to the ancient population of Europe."

One of these ancestral populations was the first farming population of Europe, whose DNA lives on today in relatively unmixed form in Sardinians and the people of the Basque Country, and in at least the Druze population in the Middle East.

The other ancestral population is likely to have been the initial hunter-gathering population of Europe. These two populations were very different when they met. Today the hunter-gathering ancestral population of Europe appears to have its closest affinity to people in far Northeastern Siberia and Native Americans.

Click here for the article.

Nazca Lines Still Provoke Mystery

Since their startling discovery in Peru’s coastal area during the 1920s, mystery still surrounds the so-called Nazca lines, depicting several massive images decipherable only from high altitudes.

The vast majority of the lines date from 200 BC to 500 AD, to a time when a people referred to as the Nazca inhabited the region. The earliest lines, created with piled up stones, date as far back as 500 BC.

According to LiveScience.com:

The purpose of the lines continues to elude researchers and remains a matter of conjecture. Ancient Nazca culture was prehistoric, which means they left no written records.  

One idea is that they are linked to the heavens with some of the lines representing constellations in the night sky. Another idea is that the lines play a role in pilgrimage, with one walking across them to reach a sacred place such as Cahuachi and its adobe pyramids. 

Yet another idea is that the lines are connected with water, something vital to life yet hard to get in the desert, and may have played a part in water-based rituals.

In the absence of a firm archaeological conclusion a number of fringe theories have popped up, especially several aligned with “ancient astronaut” theories. A less radical suggestion is that the Nazca people used balloons to observe the lines from high altitudes, something for which there still is no archaeological evidence.

Click here for the article.

Smashed Skulls Indicate Stone Age Fears

Several of the smashed skulls, all of young men.

Evidence that some Stone Age cultures may have considered dead young men to be threatening to living people could be the reason groups of newly discovered skulls were buried with smashed-in faces.

The 10,000-year-old skulls were found in Syria. They appear to have been dug up several years after being buried with their bodies, separated, then reburied. No one knows why Neolithic societies buried clusters of skulls - often near or underneath settlements.

Like those found in other caches, they have been cleanly separated from their spines, suggesting they were collected from dead bodies that had already begun to decompose. Patterns on the bone indicate that some had been decomposing for longer than others, making it likely that they were all gathered together for a specific purpose.

Most of the skulls belonged to adult males between 18 and 30 years old.

Click here for the article.

Confusion Still Surrounds Mary Magdalene

Christ Appearing to Mary Magdalene, Duccio di Buoninsegna, 1311.

As any reader of the New Testament knows, there are several women named Mary and scripture is not clear as to which is which. Meanwhile, readers make a number of assumptions regarding Mary Magdalene, most of which are unsubstantiated in scripture.

Smithsonian.com is exploring this situation in a detailed article by James Carroll, who writes:

In one age after another her image was reinvented, from prostitute to sibyl to mystic to celibate nun to passive helpmeet to feminist icon to the matriarch of divinity’s secret dynasty. How the past is remembered, how sexual desire is domesticated, how men and women negotiate their separate impulses; how power inevitably seeks sanctification, how tradition becomes authoritative, how revolutions are co-opted; how fallibility is reckoned with, and how sweet devotion can be made to serve violent domination—all these cultural questions helped shape the story of the woman who befriended Jesus of Nazareth.

One of the first matters Carroll addresses is the biblical presence of multiple Marys:

There are several Marys—not least, of course, Mary the mother of Jesus. But there is Mary of Bethany, sister of Martha and Lazarus. There is Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and Mary the wife of Clopas. Equally important, there are three unnamed women who are expressly identified as sexual sinners—the woman with a “bad name” who wipes Jesus’ feet with ointment as a signal of repentance, a Samaritan woman whom Jesus meets at a well and an adulteress whom Pharisees haul before Jesus to see if he will condemn her. The first thing to do in unraveling the tapestry of Mary Magdalene is to tease out the threads that properly belong to these other women. Some of these threads are themselves quite knotted.

The article also discusses a key aspect of the Magdalene confusion that carries contemporary overtones is the male need to dominate women, especially in the Catholic Church.

Click here for the complete article.

Key Myths Have Behavioral Links to Real World

Beowulf slaying his foe.

Ancient myths including Beowulf, Homer’s Illiad and the traditional Irish poem Táin Bó Cuailnge likely are based on real communities and people, according to researchers who compared the complex web of the characters’ relationships with the type of social networks occurring in real life.

Scientists at Coventry University calculated characters’ popularity based on how many relationships they had with other characters and whether they were friends or enemies. Then they examined the overall dynamic between the cast as a whole.

According to the The Telegraph:

Their results, published in the journal Europhysics Letters, showed that the societies depicted in the stories strongly mirrored real social networks of company directors, film actors and scientists which had been mapped out by other academics.

In contrast they found that four works known to be entirely fictional ~ Shakespeare's Richard III, Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring, the first installment of Rowling's Harry Potter series and Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo ~ contained telltale signs of being fictional.

"In the myths but also in real social networks, you tend to have sub-communities who do not know anybody else," says Pádraig Mac Carron, co-author of the report. "In fiction, everyone tends to be completely connected with each other."

"In reality you also have popular people with hundreds of friends, then a few people with maybe 70, and a lot of people with a lot less friends," he adds. "But [in fiction] you get a lot of characters who have the same number of friends. Almost everyone that Harry Potter knows and interacts with also meets and interacts with Ron and Hermione, for example."

Click here for the article.
Small photo shows Page 1 of Beowulf.

Stamp May Be Evidence of Biblical Samson

Samson and the Lion by Hayez

Archaeologists digging near Beit Shemesh near Jerusalem have uncovered a tiny seal that could possibly be the first evidence of Samson, the Biblical slayer of Philistines.

The seal appears to depict the Old Testament story of Samson, whose might was undone by his lust for the temptress Delilah, and his fight with a lion. It measures less than an inch in diameter, shows a large animal with a feline tail attacking a human figure.

According to the Daily Mail:

The seal was discovered at a level of excavation that dates it to roughly the 11th century BC, when Israelite tribes had moved into the area after Joshua's conquest of Canaan. It was a time when the Jews were led by ad hoc leaders known as judges, one of whom was Samson. 

 The location also indicates that the figure on the seal could represent Samson, according to Israeli archaeologists Professor Shlomo Bunimovitz and Dr Zvi Lederman. 

Beit Shemesh is regularly mentioned in the Old Testament, most notably in chapter 6 of the book of Samuel I - the ruler of Israel immediately after Samson - as being the first city encountered by the ark of the covenant on its way back from Philistia after having been captured by the Philistines in battle.

 A popular character in the Old Testament, Samson was said to have been given supernatural strength by God to allow him to overcome his enemies. He discovered his strength when he was accosted by a lion on his way to propose to a Philistine woman, killing it with his bare hands.

Click here for the article.

Smaller photo shows the small stamp archaeologists have unearthed. 

Vikings Valued Personal Cleanliness

Historians have studied the 11th century Bayeux Tapestry for details.

Vikings are often thought to be filthy, roughhewn warriors, but the contrary seems to be closer to the truth ~ some were borderline fastidious. 

“Several archaeological finds have revealed tweezers, combs, nail cleaners, ear cleaners and toothpicks from the Viking Age," says Louise Kæmpe Henriksen, a curator at the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde.

According to ScienceNordic.com:

The finds suggest that cleanliness meant a lot to the Vikings. Written sources from medieval England also back up this view. In his chronicle from 1220 – a couple of centuries after the Vikings had ravaged England – John of Wallingford described the Vikings as well-groomed heartbreakers: 

”They had also conquered, or planned to conquer, all the country’s best cities and caused many hardships for the country’s original citizens, for they were – according to their country’s customs – in the habit of combing their hair every day, to bathe every Saturday, to change their clothes frequently and to draw attention to themselves by means of many such frivolous whims. In this way, they sieged the married women’s virtue and persuaded the daughters of even noble men to become their mistresses,” wrote Wallingford.

Cleanliness was one of five discussions ScienceNordic.com has presented to refute the top five popular myths regarding Vikings. Others include that Vikings wore horned helmets, looked like we do today, wore clothing admired throughout the world, and were scarred by battle wounds.

Click here for the complete article.

Artifacts Point to Earlier African Stone Age

Archaeologists at Border Cave where the artifacts were found.

 New findings indicate that the late Stone Age in Africa began about 20,000 years earlier than previously thought. Artifacts found in a cave reveal residents were carving bone tools, using pigments, making beads and even using poison 44,000 years ago.

Such artifacts had previously been linked to the San culture, which was thought to have emerged around 20,000 years ago. The Later Stone Age in Africa occurred at the same time as Europe's Upper Paleolithic Period, when modern humans moved into Europe from Africa and met the Neanderthals about 45,000 years ago.

 According to LiveScience.com:

"Our research proves that the Later Stone Age emerged in South Africa far earlier than has been believed and occurred at about the same time as the arrival of modern humans in Europe,” says researcher Paola Villa of the Colorado Museum of Natural History. "The differences in technology and culture between the two areas are very strong, showing the people of the two regions chose very different paths to the evolution of technology and society."

Traces of civilization have been found going back nearly 80,000 years in Africa, but these fragments — bone tools, carved beads — vanish from the archaeological record by about 60,000 years ago.

Click here for the article.

End of Human Nomadic Lifestyle is Explored

Neolithic huts are evident at Turkish site.

Archaeologists in Turkey are studying one of the major transformations in human history ~ the end of the nomadic lifestyle. A team headed by Dr Andrew Fairbairn from the University of Queensland is joining with a British team to continue excavating the 10,000-year-old village known as Boncuklu Höyük. The site is one of the earliest villages from the period when hunter-gatherers ceased their nomadic lifestyle to begin farming.

According to ABC News:

"It's come to be one of the key transformations in human history because, basically, the development of our civilisations is routed in a lot of these social and economic transformations that happened around about this time," Dr Fairbairn told ABC News Online. 

He says the site is one of the earliest found just outside the key Fertile Crescent area of eastern Turkey, Syria and Jordan where it is thought farming first originated. The site is expected to help archaeologists understand how humans adapted to a sedentary lifestyle and how it spread across Europe. 

"This farming lifestyle then spreads around the world - it goes across Europe and it goes across Asia," he said. "And so where Boncuklu is is that sort of first area where you have this spread of this new lifestyle. 

"We've been very interested to find out whether it was, as it's always been suspected, due to farming people moving from this area of origin, the Fertile Crescent ... or whether it was due to the people who already lived there, lay hunter-gatherer societies, actually starting to develop and take up new crops and new ways of life. So Boncuklu is one of those very rare sites that allows us to investigate that time period."

Boncuklu Höyük means "beady mound." It was discovered about a decade ago by the head of the British excavation team, Dr Douglas Baird, who was trying to place the excavation of Çatalhöyük in its regional context and then found Boncuklu, which is 1,000 years older, on the last day of a field survey.

Click here for the complete article, plus a video.

Lush Farms Once Surrounded Palmyra

Ruins stand as testimony to Palmyra's ancient grandeur. 

Historical evidence points to ancient Palmyra ~ sitting today in the middle of the infertile Syrian desert ~ as having been a major trading metropolis during the Roman Empire. Once a caravan stop that brought Asian goods west to eager Romans, the site has "always been conceived as an oasis in the middle of the desert, but it's never been quite clear what it was living from," says Michal Gawlikowski of the University of Warsaw.

According to National Geographic:

Among the ruins are grand avenues lined with columns, triumphal arches, and the remains of an ancient market where traders once haggled over silk, silver, spices, and dyes from India and China. 

To find out what made it all possible, archaeologist Jørgen Christian Meyer began a four-year survey of the 40 square miles just north of Palmyra in 2008. The area was targeted for its mountainous terrain, which channels precious rainwater to otherwise dry streambeds—making the region marginally less hostile to agriculture. 

Through ground inspections and satellite images, the archaeologists eventually found outlines of more than 20 farming villages within a few days' walk of the city—adding to about 15 smaller settlements previously uncovered by other researchers to the west of Palmyra.

The surrounding landscape now appears to have been intensively farmed and most likely included olive, fig, and pistachio groves—crops known in the region from Roman accounts and still common in Syria.

Click here for the complete article.

More Research on Possible Solomon Mine

Aerial view of KEN, with fortress and slag mounds.

Archaeologists will return to a site southeast of the Dead Sea in September to continue investigating one of the largest copper mines of the ancient Middle East. Among other things, they hope to identify the ethnicity of the people who controlled the mines during the 10th century BC.

That’s the period when, based on the Biblical accounts, scholars have traditionally dated the kingdom of Edom, as well as that of David and Solomon of ancient Israel. Khirbat en-Nahas ~ usually shortened to KEN ~ is substantiated as the largest Iron Age (1200 - 500 BC) copper mining and smelting center in the southern Levant.

According to Popular Archaeology:

Recent radiocarbon dating has placed its age indisputably two centuries earlier than scholars had previously thought, pushing back the clock from the long-accepted dates assigned by archaeologists for the center and the kingdom of Edom in which it was located. 

It also places its heyday squarely during the time when ancient Edom and the United Monarchy of Israel under kings David and  Solomon, according to traditional interpretations of the Biblical account, dominated the region.

The significance of the discoveries at KEN fall within the context of a larger debate about chronology and the credibility of traditional interpretations about the existence of the kingdoms of David and Solomon as depicted in the Hebrew Bible.

Click here for the complete article.