Rare Mayan Tomb Found in Guatemala

Archaeologists have penetrated a Mayan pyramid in a Guatemalan jungle and uncovered the sealed tomb of a ruler who lived 1,600 years ago. The significance is epic, says Stephen Houston, the Brown University archaeologist in charge of the operation: “It’s a great, great rarity.”

 “Once we opened an area of about 30 to 40 inches, it became clear that the surface was covered with human bone, pieces of jade, textiles,” Houston said of the Mayan site.

There was more than that. There were also the bones of six children and possibly those of an adult male who rested on a raised bier that had collapsed during the passing centuries.

“There seemed to be a vessel with an alcoholic substance that exploded and left a strange, chalky material around,” he said. The 1,600-year-old textiles still retain color. “You can see the weaving.” 

The El Diablo pyramid is one of the largest in Central America, Houston said, and was part of a religious complex in the Mayan city of El Zotz. He estimated that the site had been inhabited over a period of 2,000 years, if not longer.

Click here for the complete article.

Photo shows bust recovered from tomb.

Earliest Illustrated Christian Book is Saved

A page from the Garima Gospels.

A British charity has saved the world's earliest illustrated Christian book, which was found at a remote Ethiopian monestary.

The Garima Gospels are named after a monk named Abba Garima who arrived in Ethiopia from Constantinople in 494 AD. Legend has it that he was able to copy the gospels in a day because God delayed the sun from setting. The relic has been kept ever since in the Garima Monastery near Adwa in the north of the country.

According to the London Mail:

Experts believe it is also the earliest example of book binding still attached to the original pages. The survival of the Gospels is incredible considering the country has been under Muslim invasion, Italian invasion and a fire in the 1930s destroyed the monastery's church. 

They were written on goat skin in the early Ethiopian language of Ge'ez. There are two volumes which date from the same time, but the second is written in a different hand from the first. Both contain illustrations and the four Gospels.

Though occasional travelers have mentioned the texts since the 1950s, it was thought they dated from the 11th century at the earliest. Carbon dating, however, gives a date between 330 and 650, overlapping the date Abba Garima arrived in the country.

Click here for the complete article.

Arthur's "Round Table" Actually a Huge Structure

Artist's conception of Round Table from 13th Century.

Researchers exploring the legend of Britain’s King Arthur now believe his stronghold of Camelot was built on the site of a recently discovered Roman amphitheatre in Chester. The familiar legend describes his knights gathering at a round table where they would receive instructions from their King.

But rather than it being a piece of furniture, historians believe the meeting site would have been a vast wood and stone structure allowing more than 1,000 of his followers to gather.

According to the London Telegraph, the latest thinking is that regional noblemen would have sat in the front row of a circular meeting place, with lower ranked subjects on stone benches grouped around the outside. Rather than Camelot being a castle, it would have been housed within a structure already built and left over by the Romans.

Historian Chris Gidlow said: “The first accounts of the Round Table show that it was nothing like a dining table but was a venue for upwards of 1,000 people at a time. We know that one of Arthur’s two main battles was fought at a town referred to as the City of Legions. There were only two places with this title. One was St Albans but the location of the other has remained a mystery.”

Click here for the complete article.

Linguists Find Ancient Language Links

Section of Bering Land Bridge National Preserve where migration occurred.

Linguists are finding ancient-language connections between remote Asian tribes and native peoples in North America, providing more evidence of an ancient migration across the Bering Land Bridge.

The work of Western Washington University linguistics professor Edward Vajda with the isolated Ket people of Central Siberia is revealing more and more examples of an ancient language connection with the language family of Na-Dene, which includes Tlingit, Gwich'in, Dena'ina, Koyukon, Navajo, Carrier, Hupa, Apache and about 45 other languages.

Of the 1,200 Ket people, only about 100, all older than 55, still speak the language. The importance of studying a disappearing language goes far beyond a personal linguistic interest, Vajda explained.

According to SeattlePI.com:

"It's a new way to understand human prehistory before there were historians to write it down,” he told SeattlePI.com “Isolated languages like Ket have developed features that are very unusual and interesting, and they help us to understand the human mind and human language ability."

"We linguists should not be the focus of attention here," Vajda added. "What is important are the languages and especially the Native communities themselves."

Vajda takes no credit for coming up with the Asian language connection.

"People developed the beginnings of these ideas even 300 years ago, and in 1923 someone made the specific claim I am arguing for," he said. "My work builds on vocabulary comparisons made by other linguists in the late 1990s as well."

Click here for the complete SeattlePI.com article.

Photo shows re-created Na-Dene woman.

Thanks to Christopher Hileman for forwarding the article.

Was Cleopatra's Suicide by Lethal Drug?

Death of Cleopatra by Jean Andre Rixens, 1874

A new study contends Cleopatra died of swallowing a lethal drug cocktail and not from the bite of an Egyptian cobra snake called an asp. According to Christoph Schäfer, historian and professor at the University of Trier in Germany: “There was no cobra in Cleopatra's death.”

Author of a best-selling book in Germany, Cleopatra, Schäfer searched historic writings for evidence to disprove the 2,000-year-old asp legend. 

"The Roman historian Cassius Dio, writing about 200 years after Cleopatra's demise, stated that she died a quiet and pain-free death, which is not compatible with a cobra bite,” he told Discovery News. “Indeed, the snake's venom would have caused a painful and disfiguring death.”

According to German toxicologist Dietrich Mebs, a poison specialist taking part in the study, symptoms occurring after an asp bite are very unpleasant, and include vomiting, diarrhea and respiratory failure. "Death may occur within 45 minutes, but it may also be longer with painful edema at the bite site," he said. "At the end, the dead body does not look very nice with vomit, diarrhea, a swollen bite site."

Ancient texts also record that Cleopatra's two handmaidens died with her -- something very unlikely if she had died of a snake bite, said Schäfer.

The Queen of the Nile committed suicide in August 30 B.C. at the age of 39, following the example of her lover, the Roman leader Marc Antony, who killed himself after losing the Battle of Actium.

Click here for the complete Discovery News article.

Cave Etchings May Help Date Rise of Egypt

A section of dancing figures etched into the stone.

Archaeologists say prehistoric rock drawings discovered in a remote Egyptian cave ~ depicting dancing figures and strange headless beasts ~ may provide clues about the rise of Egyptian civilization. According to Reuters:

Rudolph Kuper, a German archaeologist, said the detail depicted in the "Cave of the Beasts" indicate the site is at least 8,000 years old, likely the work of hunter-gatherers whose descendants may have been among the early settlers of the then-swampy and inhospitable Nile Valley.

Some 5,000 images are painted or engraved into the cave’s stone.

“It is the most amazing cave in North Africa and Egypt,” Karin Kindermann, a member of a team that recently made a trip to the site 560 miles southwest of Cairo, told Reuters. “You take a piece of the puzzle and see where it could fit. This is an important piece.”

Click here for the Reuters article.

Early Apostle Portraits Found in Catacombs

Archaeologists and art restorers are analyzing recently discovered paintings believed to be the earliest ever found depicting apostles of Jesus. The images ~ likely painted at the end of the 4th century ~ are in a branch of the catacombs of St. Tecla near St Paul's Basilica, just outside the walls of ancient Rome.

“These are the first images that we know of the faces of these four apostles,” Fabrizio Bisconti, head of archaeology for Rome's numerous catacombs, told Reuters.

The full-face icons include visages of St. Peter, St. Andrew, and St. John, who were among Jesus' original 12 apostles, and St. Paul, who became an apostle after Christ's death.

The paintings have the same characteristics as later images, such as St Paul's rugged, wrinkled and elongated forehead and balding head and pointy beard, indicating they may have been the ones which set the standard.

Click here for the Reuters article.

Ancient Spores May Disprove Comet Cataclysm

The presence of tiny balls of fungus and feces in materials dating over several millennia may disprove the theory that an exploding comet 12,900 years ago ignited a dramatic drop in earth temperature called the Younger Dryas.

The Younger Dryas has been associated with the extinction of mammoths and other Ice Age mammals in North America. But the theory that a comet or asteroid explosion is behind the cooling event is wrong, according to study leader Andrew C. Scott, a paleobotanist at Royal Holloway University in London.

According to National Geographic:

For years proponents of the impact theory have cited tiny spherules of carbon found in a layer of charred sediment throughout North America that dates to the Younger Dryas period. According to the theory, these spherules are organic matter subjected to intense heat after debris from an exploded meteor rained down on Earth, sparking massive wildfires. 

The new research, however, detected carbon spherules in soil layers from before, during, and after the Younger Dryas, making it hard to argue that the particles are products of a sudden impact.

"All these particles are of natural biological origin and are not related to either intense wildfires or cosmic impacts," Scott said in an email. "The press and public are very interested in catastrophic explanations. But it is important that when evidence stacks up to show the theory does not work, then it should be abandoned."

Scott said fungal spores have similar microscopic features to nanodiamonds, which some researchers have cited as evidence of a massive comet explosion above the earth’s surface nearly 13,000 years ago.

Click here for the complete National Geographic article.
Click here for earlier post on nanodiamond theory.

Serbian Site Reveals Copper Heritage

Microscopic image of copper slag from Belovode site.

An ancient settlement in southeastern Europe claims the oldest evidence of copper making, from 7,000 years ago. The recent archaeological finding suggests copper smelting was invented in separate parts of Asia and Europe rather than spreading from a single source.

The find extends the known record of copper smelting by about 500 years.

Chemical and microscopic analyses of previously unearthed material from Serbia’s Belovode site have identified pieces of copper slag, the residue of an intense heating process used to separate copper from other ore elements. The raw material came from nearby copper-ore deposits in Serbia or Bulgaria, they add.

“Our finds provide the earliest secure dates for copper smelting and indicate the existence of different, possibly independent centers of invention of metallurgy,” says Thilo Rehren of University College London.

Large numbers of copper artifacts have been found at southeastern European sites dating to more than 6,000 years ago, Rehren notes.

Click here for the complete ScienceNews article.

Canadian Burial Site Dates Back 4,600 Years

Site of the newly discovered burial along the Bug River.

A 4,600-year-old burial has been discovered in a remote corner of northern Canada. Native American fishermen recently spotted the burial site as water levels fell along the mouth of the Bug River, near Big Trout Lake, Ontario.

The skeleton discovered is that of a man aged in his late 30s or 40s. Around five-and-a-half feet tall, the man had a “very, very robust muscular build,” according to Prof Scott Hamilton, leader of an archaeological team from Lakehead University working the site.

The man may have held high status, based on the seemingly formal burial. “There's a flat slab of granite that's associated directly with the bones,” Hamilton adds. “It looks very much like a purposeful grave. We'll be taking a closer look at the stone as part of our analysis to see if we can find any evidence of function.”

Isotope testing has so far shown that the man ate a fish-based diet, with some hunted land mammals such as reindeer, indicating a nomadic lifestyle.

Click here for the complete article from Britain’s Independent.

India's Stone Age Megaliths Still a Mystery

How the massive tombs were built remains unknown.

Considerable mystery still surrounds an enormous and isolated megalithic site in southern India, called Hire Benakal, where scores of supposed tombs are constructed of upright slabs topped by capstones weighing 10 tons or more. Current conjecture is that the granite structures once contained graves, though no trace of human remains have been found there.

According to Archaeology.com:

The monuments were built over more than 1,000 years spanning the southern Indian Iron Age (1200-500 B.C.) and Early Historic (500 B.C.-A.D. 500) periods, and there are more than 1,000 of them across nearly 50 acres, from modest rock enclosures to mausoleum-like tombs.

Click here to see several photos of Hire Benakal and a brief description of it.

World's Oldest Leather Shoe Unearthed in Cave

A perfectly preserved shoe ~1,000 years older than the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt and 400 years older than Stonehenge ~ has been found in a cave in Armenia by a team of international archaeologists.

The 5,500 year old shoe, the oldest leather shoe in the world, has cowhide dating back to 3500 BC. It was made of a single piece of leather and was shaped to fit the wearer's foot. It contained grass, although the archaeologists were uncertain as to whether this was to keep the foot warm or to maintain the shape of the shoe.

“It is not known whether the shoe belonged to a man or woman,” said lead author of the research, Dr Ron Pinhasi, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland, “as while small (European size 37; US size 7 women), the shoe could well have fitted a man from that era.” The cave is situated in the Vayotz Dzor province of Armenia, on the Armenian, Iranian, Nakhichevanian and Turkish borders, and was known to regional archaeologists due to its visibility from the highway below.

The stable, cool and dry conditions in the cave resulted in exceptional preservation of the various objects that were found, which included large containers, many of which held well-preserved wheat and barley, apricots and other edible plants.

Click here for the complete ScienceDaily article.