The northern Ural Mountains of the former Soviet Union were a cold, unforgiving place in 1959. They remain so today, and had been for centuries prior to the first days of February in the aforementioned year, when nine hikers from the Ural Polytechnical Institute were found dead, their bodies strangely under-dressed for the bitter February cold sweeping down off the slopes of nearby Kholat Syakhl.

Known today as the Dyatlov Pass incident, the location where the group had been camping was a place of fear and superstition among the local Mansi, who called it the “Dead Mountain.” The name was tragically fitting, as a series of events which remain unexplained to this day caused the hikers to cut their way out of their tents, fleeing into the February cold and, ultimately, to their deaths.

Although a variety of theories about the ultimate cause behind the deaths of Igor Dyatlov and his companions have been offered over the years, there has yet to be one offered that can account for all of the odd factors the case presents. In equal measure, countless articles have been written on the subject over the years, and several books, documentaries, and films have also lend to the mill of rumor and speculation that surrounds the case; some of the tenuous conclusions offered by such media have done more harm than good, so far as coming to any logical determinations about what might have actually happened.

The graves of the Dyatlov party hikers, as it appears today (Public Domain).

The case, in short, continues to fascinate after the passing of many decades, and hence why I often receive emails and messages about it from others who are perplexed by it. My good friend Billy Clark, and Englishman now residing in Berlin, Germany, took time to write to me about the case, where he shared a number of frustrations with the way the incident is treated in popular writing. Namely, this involves the dismissal of the idea that some kind of aerial phenomenon might have been involved, whether it had been of a manmade, natural, or perhaps some other variety. 

“Whatever happened, it’s totally baffling!” Billy wrote. “That it would claim all nine of them and that none were able to provide any kind of clue as to what happened in their final moments is hard to accept. Perhaps the investigators were not looking for something like that? A couple of words hastily carved into some wood could be easily missed. Perhaps we don’t have all the available facts.”

“The behaviour of the Russian authorities during the case is very peculiar,” Clark noted. “The strange change of manner of the lead investigator trying to hush up talk of lights in the sky and murder during the case, to later in life insisting that the lights in the sky were directly responsible in some way.”

“Then there are those zinc lined coffins…” he added. 

Indeed, as Billy notes, there are a lot of bizarre aspects to the Dyatlov Pass case which strains the idea of there being any single, “simple” explanation. I have always been intrigued by the reports of “lights in the sky,” which are one element of the case that inevitably foments sensationalism in the sense that it would seem to insinuate that something akin to UFO phenomenon might have been involved.

“If something ‘out of this world’ were happening outside [the tent] as a result of some kind of interaction with that light, it might be one of the few things that would explain such a desperate scramble to escape,” Billy offered in our recent correspondence. “It seems the radiation on the bodies may not have actually been that strange in terms of level strength, but radiation effects are certainly consistent with some UFO encounters.”

Billy raises an important point here, in that many of the explanations that have been offered over the years (ranging from the tenuous idea of infrasound, to absurdities such as a “Yeti attack”) completely fail to account for minutiae like the radiation question. In other words, many would discount any and all implications that something akin to “lights seen in the sky” around the time of the incident could have had anything to do with the deaths of the Dyatlov group. Meanwhile, they completely discount certain pertinent facts about the case, as they churn out their own pet theories… theories which are incomplete, at very best.

I am not of a mind to think that this long-standing mystery has been “solved” in any sincere sense of things. Ideas that have been put forth in the past, like infrasound causing sudden disorientation which led to the hiker’s strange nighttime behavior is, while perhaps a little more tenable than certain other theories, simply not capable of accounting for all of the facts.

Same with the poor folks who want to believe it was a “Russian Wildman,” although it does allow for a peculiar little addendum to all of this: the Dyatlov group actually did joke about the “Abominable Snowman” in some of their private correspondence with each other. However, there is not a shred of evidence that the group ever encountered such a creature, as proposed in a Discovery Channel documentary a few years ago (unless, of course, Yetis are capable of emanating non-ionizing radiation from their bodies, hence explaining how some of the hikers appeared to have been exposed to an energetic source of some kind… figure that one out).

As far as reasonable speculations go, there are at least two ideas that I would not rule out in relation to what might have happened at the Dyatlov Pass in 1959. While each of these is speculative, I offer them here because I do feel that these possibilities—unproven though they are, like the rest of the “solutions” proposed about this case over the years—nonetheless may be able to more effectively account for the variety of peculiarities about the incident. They are as follows:

1. 1) a Russian weapons test (for which there is actually a surprising amount of evidence),
2. 2) some variety of natural phenomenon (certain aspects of the case actually ARE consistent with ball lightning and similar natural luminous phenomena, as we will see shortly). 

If I had to put my money on either of these, I would say that the second possibility, involving something like ball lightning, is the most likely to have had something to do with the incident. Without any further elaboration, this may seem like an equally tenuous supposition: what, apart from alleged reports of “lights in the sky,” could the Dyatlov Pass incident have to do with ball lightning?

Investigators arrive at the scene where the hikers spent their final evening (Public Domain).

To that point, I would like to bring the reader’s attention to a very curious report I found in the British Journal of Meteorology from 1984, which tells the story of a group of Russian hikers in the Caucasses that were “attacked” by what was deemed at the time to have been “aggressive ball lightning.”

The details of that incident were related by a Mr. Victor Kavunenko, who had been one of four mountaineers that were camped in the Caucasus Mountains at an altitude of 12795 feet. The date was on or around August 17, 1978, and Kavunenko gives the following account of what transpired with his companions in their encampment one evening:

“I woke up with the strange feeling that a stranger had made his way into our tent. Thrusting my head out of the sleeping bag, I froze. A bright yellow blob was floating about one metre from the floor. It disappeared into Korovin’s sleeping bag. The man screamed in pain. The ball jumped out and proceeded to circle over the other bags now hiding in one, now in another. When it burned a hole in mine I felt an unbearable pain, as if I were being burned by a welding machine, and blacked out. Regaining consciousness after a while, I saw the same yellow ball which, methodically observing a pattern that was known to it alone, kept diving into the bags, evoking desperate, heart-rendering (sic) howls from the victims. This indescribable horror repeated itself several times. When I came back to my senses for the fifth or sixth time, the ball was gone. I could not move my arms or legs and my body was burning as if it had turned into a ball of fire itself. In the hospital, where we were flown by helicopter, seven wounds were discovered on my body. They were worse than burns. Pieces of muscle were found to be torn out to the bone. The same happened to Shigin, Kaprov and Bashkirov. Oleg Korovin had been killed by the ball — possibly because his bag had been on a rubber mattress, insulating it from the ground. The ball lightning did not touch a single metal object, injuring only people.”

This story, if true (keeping in mind that it was reported in a respected British scientific journal) bears undeniable similarities to the Dyatlov Pass incident. The primary similarities include 1) the presence of “mysterious lights” (which were not reported by the Dyatlov hikers, but which were allegedly observed in the same area around the time of the incident), 2) the presence of something inside the tent with the campers, 3) the presence of burns on the camper’s bodies, 4) damage to muscles and tissue of the survivors after their interactions with the phenomenon, 5) the death of one of the campers after his interaction with the light or object.

Note that at no time was the light observed by Kavunenko and his company referred to as anything more extraordinary than “ball lightning.”

I would argue that the “ball lightning” theory as an explanation for what the hikers encountered at Dyatlov pass in 1959 would be more no more likely than any other speculative theory, if it were not for the details provided about the separate incident above. There is little (if anything) else about this case that can be found, whether online, or in related literature, apart from its inclusion by the late William R. Corliss in his Science Frontiers publications, where he noted that “Ball lightning has often been called inquisitive, but this is one of the few reports where it deliberately (?) seemed to attack people. Some Russian English-language publications verge on the sensational, and one must always have some salt on hand.”

Salt-in-hand, therefore, the report is certainly interesting. If true, it may very well shed some light—perhaps of a natural luminous variety, and yet which remains little-understood—on this long-standing and enigmatic Cold War-era case.

With the number of UFO sightings on the increase, it’s tough to get excited about those reported by the general public with blurred and often questionable and frustratingly short videos. That’s why sightings by the military or UFOs with very distinct descriptions get more attention in the UFOlogy circles. A good example occurred last week when a UFO investigator in Chile sounded convinced that the orbs declared that UFOs seen crossing the skies and making sharp maneuvers over Concepcion were “Foo fighters.” A similar incident occurred this week when a UFO was recorded by a drone in Argentina and its speed caused some sites to refer to it as a “fastwalker.” Not only that, this UFO holds up fairy well under high magnification … enough to determine it’s not a bug or a bird.

Did you see that fastwalker?

That “whoosh” you just heard was the sound of ufologists’ ears perking up. Why? “Fastwalkers” is a term used by the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) as shorthand for unidentified aerial phenomena that appear on radar screens moving faster than known Earth aircraft and changing directions at seemingly impossible speeds and angles. In addition, Argentina is known for its frequent UFO sightings and its big UFOlogy community, so sightings are taken more seriously there. Finally, the owner of the video (uploaded on July 14) — Mariano López – is a drone operator who has seen and recorded UFOs before and believes this is his best sighting. (Watch it here.)

µ

Image left: Fastwalker near Area 51 - Image right: Fastwalker Argentina

“This is the best UFO filmed from a drone so far, in which you notice several details. It was captured with the drone Dji Phantom in Mar Chiquita, Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina. It is located 34 kilometers from the city of Mar del Plata. It was filmed with the Gopro at a resolution of 4K at 30 frames per second.”

The YouTube page also has Lopez’s previous UFO video uploaded on March 23, 2019. (See it here.) That one is less distinct and one could make a case that it’s a very fast bird or an insect close to the drone’s camera. That’s not the case with the more recent video. Lopez has spent more time on this one – adding the mandatory slow-motion and tracking circle. However, what’s most interesting is the magnification starting at about 1:20 in the video. Whatever, this is, it can’t be mistaken for a bird of bug. Could it be another drone? If it was, drone-operator Lopez would probably be trying to buy one rather than speculate on it being a UFO.

Since “Fastwalker” is merely a description, albeit a military one, it’s appropriate for UFO sights like sightings.info to use it. However, it doesn’t go beyond that in trying to identify the object. No one else seems to have seen it and Lopez doesn’t appear to have reported it to the media, the military or any Argentine UFO investigators. That leaves it wide open for speculation and skepticism.

A strange, new drone? Secret military plane? Alien space ship? Camera anomaly? Mutant bird? Something else? What would NORAD say?

Let’s hope Mariano Lopez keeps his drones flying and his keen eyes watching for more Fastwalkers.

Dan J of Barstow, San Bernardino, California, had a very disturbing encounter with two sinister entities in early 2011. Those entities have become known in paranormal research as Shadow People. But, what are they? The Official Shadow People Archives website says of these creepy things: “Sometimes it appears as the mere silhouette of a person, usually male, but generally lacking any other characteristics of gender. However, in no way does the description end there. There are ‘hatted’ shadow beings, hooded shadows, cloaked ones, and solid or wispy, smoky types. Some are seen only from the waist up. Others clearly have legs that are seen fleeing from their observers. They dart into corners, through walls, into closets, or behind television sets, bushes, and buildings. Sometimes they simply fade into the dark recesses of the night. Lacking in the description is one common denominator unifying the many different types of shadow people that enter our world, except that they are ‘intensely dark.'”

In a July 2013 interview with Psychology Today, Rosemary Ellen Guiley – an expert on paranormal phenomena – said: “I discovered that many Shadow People experiencers are also ET experiencers, especially abductees. Through a long process, I concluded that Shadow People are a shape-shifted form taken by Djinn. Therefore, there is a profound connection between Djinn and bad hauntings and ET abductions. Furthermore, the footprints of the Djinn are evident throughout our mythologies about ancient aliens and gods. The picture that emerged is of a major Djinn involvement in all of our entity contact experiences throughout history.”

With that all said, let’s now return to the case of Dan. A no-nonsense, tough biker, Dan is hardly the kind of person who it’s easy to intimidate and scare. But, the shadow-things that intruded on his sleep – as he slept in a tent on the slopes of Mt. Rainier, Washington State in the summer of 2011 – had Dan in a state of near-hysteria. An enthusiastic outdoorsman, Dan spent four days hiking around the huge, 14,000-foot-plus high mountain. He would live to regret doing that. It was around 3:00 a.m. when Dan woke with a start – and with an unsettling and intense feeling of being watched very closely. He lay still, holding his breath and clenching his fists. Something was definitely afoot; of that much he was sure. That’s an understatement. In seconds, Dan was “rushed” by two skinny, spindly shadowy monsters that were humanoid in appearance.

Dan suddenly found himself unable to move as the two figures hovered over him – at which point Dan he felt incredibly weak, short of breath and dizzy. A cold sweat enveloped him. All the time, the Shadow People had their index fingers on his stomach. It was only when they removed their silhouette-like fingers that the weakness went away, and normality suddenly returned, as the pair exited the tent at high speed. Dan didn’t even try and get back to sleep: he lept out of the tent, got all of his belongings together, jumped in his truck and hit the road. Unfortunately for Dan, this was not the end of things: the Shadow People were not about to leave Dan alone.

Three nights later, Dan had an almost identical experience – even down to the Shadow People once again touching his stomach with their fingers and causing him to feel suddenly weak and near-completely incapacitated. This time, though, the location was the living-room of his Barstow-based apartment. The creatures came back on two more occasions: one several weeks later and the final time in August 2014 – more than three years later after the encounters had begun.

Dan had a deep suspicion that the Shadow People has the ability to take away his strength, and to the point where he was so weak he could barely move. It was a sign that he had been “zapped” – to use Dan’s very own and concise description – by something that was feeding on him. Indeed, Dan was unable to shake off the idea that what he had encountered were akin to supernatural vampires, surfacing in the dead of night and on the prowl for a tasty feast – which they found in Dan himself. What particularly worried Dan, though, was that the Shadow People clearly knew where Dan lived: he remains baffled and concerned by this admittedly odd and unsettling issue.

We are far from documenting all of the great mysteries of our history and prehistory. Throughout the world there are places that have remained hidden from out gaze right up into modern times, sequestered in a realm beyond our knowledge to evade our insatiable drive for discovery. One such place sat entombed in darkness and forgotten for tens of thousands of years in a remote area of France, stuck in time even as the world above it marched on into new eras. It is a magnificent caves system of cryptic paintings of great historical importance that has managed to elude understanding and has since its discovery been sealed off yet again, off-limits to most and keeping its secrets close as it always has.

One of the greatest archeological discoveries made in modern times happened quite by accident. On September 12, 1940, an 18-year-old Marcel Ravidat was out exploring in the countryside of southwestern France, near the village of Montignac in the Dordogne region, along with his faithful dog. It was a perfectly normal day until at some point the dog tumbled down a hole in the ground at a place called the hill of Lascaux. Ravidat would call some friends to come investigate the hole with him, as it seemed to lead off into the murk into a passageway, and their minds raced with the wonders that may lie down there in the clinging dark. They went about widening the hole until they were able to fit through, and armed with a makeshift lamp they penetrated into the gloom, where they would find an ancient world lost to mankind for millennia, long a stranger to the light, and which would become a mystery that has fascinated scientists to this day.

After descending through a 49ft deep shaft and squeezing through some very narrow passageways, the corridor emptied into a larger room that seemed mundane at first until the walls were licked by the flickering illumination of their lamp. There covering the walls and dancing about in the lamplight were myriad ancient paintings depicting various animals, humans, and more, as well as abstract symbols, all mostly in red, yellow, and black. Excited by this incredible new treasure they had found, the boys returned the following day and delved deeper into the complex to find other alcoves and chambers similarly adorned with these mysterious paintings, and that is when they would finally come out with their discovery and the real research on what would come to be known as the Lascaux Caves would begin in earnest.

It was found that the mysterious cave system was divided into several main areas that between them held hundreds upon hundreds of ancient cave paintings depicting animals, including deer, aurochs, ibex, bison, deer, equines, birds, and feline species, as well as human figures, bears, lions, a rhinoceros, and abstract signs, yet none of trees, vegetation, or the landscape itself, and none of reindeer, odd because that is believed to have been the main source of food for the people who painted it all. Most of the animals seen were of species long extinct, belonging to the Upper Paleolithic era, and most can be identified, yet there are also some anomalies among them, such as a monstrous creature with panther skin, the tail of a deer, a bison’s hump, two horns, and a prominent male member. What was this thing? No one knows.

All of these figures are meticulously rendered in a variety of mineral pigments, with some amount of engraving directly into the stone also seen, all of it often incorporating the angles and curves of the walls themselves into the designs. The paintings in general show great skill and care in their creation, often exhibiting artistic skills and techniques far ahead of their time. Among the different sections of the caves are the so-called Hall of the Bulls, which shows various horses, stags, and bulls, including an immense, 17-foot-long image of a bull, as well as another section called the Nave, which holds painting referred to as “The Crossed Bison,” which uses tricks of perspective that were very advanced for their era, and the Abside (Apse), a smallish chamber in which practically every inch is covered in thousands of entwined, overlapping, engraved drawings, and other sections with names like the Shaft of the Dead Man, the Chamber of Engravings, the Painted Gallery, the Chamber of Felines, and others.

It is all rather breathtaking in its ambitious majesty, but it is also permeated with a great deal of mystery, and there is much we don’t know about this place. One thing that has never been agreed on is just how old the paintings actually are. From the species depicted and the various tools found scattered about it is believed that they date to between 17,300 to 20,000 years ago, but it is still debated as to exactly how old they really are. It is also not fully understood why the paintings were made in the first place. While there are other cave paintings to be found in the region, there is nothing approaching the grand scale of what can be seen in the Lascaux Caves, suggesting this place had some special significance among the people that made it, but just what this might be is unclear, with theories ranging from that this was a place for rituals to that it held some spiritual capacity. Making it all more impressive is that a main component in the pigments used are certain manganese oxides that do not exist in the immediate area, with the nearest source lying 250 kilometres away, meaning these artists went through great lengths to import these materials and then lock themselves deep underground with animal fat lamps to complete their work over the course of generations.

Another mystery still is that no one really knows what all of these paintings actually mean, and although some seem to tell a story and even continue on into other rooms, no one is quite sure what that story is or why it was recorded here in this manner. One idea is that these paintings tell spiritual stories or even creation myths, while another is that they are rituals to bring success in hunting, or another still that they are just hunting records or records of the wildlife of the area. No one really knows, and there are fewer and fewer opportunities to study these wonders because in modern times the caves are almost completely off limits to even scientists and researchers.

This wasn’t always the case. The caves were opened to the public in 1948, where they began to attract droves and droves of people coming to peer into this window to the past, but this unfortunately led to a change in the cool, dark atmosphere within the cave that began to seriously threaten the paintings. Factors such as carbon dioxide, heat, humidity, artificial lighting, changes in air circulation and temperature, and various contaminants conspired to lead to visible deterioration of the paintings that began to progress at an alarming rate. By the 1960s there were crystals, algae, and lichens appearing within the caves, and they were finally closed down to the public in 1963. This severely limited access to the caves, but things would get even worse still, when in 2000 a destructive white mold was found running amok here, and in 2007 a mysterious black fungus of an entirely new species never seen before began doing irreparable damage to the paintings, and in 2008 the caves were closed altogether for three months, with only a single person allowed in for 20 minutes at a time once a week to monitor the site and take readings.

Since then the fungus problem has been ongoing, and access is still extremely limited, meaning very few people have had the privilege of seeing these paintings up close. Even researchers and experts are only allowed very limited access to the caves at present, making study of the ancient treasures inside an agonizingly slow process. Tourists are able to see the paintings only through a replica cave called Lascaux II, created in 1983 only about 200 meters from the actual site, which holds recreations of certain sections of the real caves, and this is about as close as most people will ever get to seeing the real thing. It is somewhat sad to think that this piece of our past might forever be hidden away down in the earth like it did for millennia before its discovery, to keep its secrets that only the long dead know of. One can only hope that we find the answers we seek, but until then this remains a window to another era which was open to us for a time, but which has had the curtains pulled over it once again.

“I do not like the idea of being a domestic cat, but what’s the solution? I think one of the solutions that seems to be the best option is to add an AI layer. This is something that I think will really be important on a civilization level scale.”

Who said anything about being a domestic cat? And why is it so bad? Garfield seems to be doing well and most house cats seem to rule the homes they live in while doing nothing to earn it other than the occasional purr. And yet, that’s what seems to be worrying billionaire and man-you-don’t-want-licking-your-face Elon Musk, whose solution to not being a house cat (you would think he has enough money to get plastic surgery) is to implant wires into brains and download all of their data into massive computers. Not HIS brain, mind you – but probably his computers and his wires. Do you trust him with your mind? Do you trust him with your milk or tuna?

“Even in a benign AI scenario we will be left behind,” he said. “With a high-bandwidth brain-machine interface, we can actually go along for the ride. We can have the option of merging with AI.”

At a presentation at the California Academy of Sciences this week, Musk explained that artificial intelligence is leaving our puny human brains behind, but his company Neuralink has a way for us to at least keep pace with it. Neuralink’s product is a computer chip attached to ultrafine, electrode-studded wires that will be inserted into a brain (yours?) by a surgical robot, which first drilled the hole. The robot will then connect the chip to a computer that will read brain “spikes,” interpret them and then store them faster than you can say “this sounds a lot scarier than that Russian face-aging app.” That’s because it is, although Neuralink’s president Max Hodak assured The New York Times that they’re not trying to hide anything – well, not anymore … this is the first announcement since Musk founded and financed the company two years ago.

“We want this burden of stealth mode off of us so that we can keep building and do things like normal people, such as publish papers.”

Publish papers? Does Elon I-can’t-get-to-Mars-soon-enough Musk know that this guy just wants to write papers about his brain-data-sucking device?

“All this will occur I think quite slowly. It’s not as if Neuralink will suddenly have this incredible neural lace and take over people’s brains. It will take a long time.”

That comment sounds like Musk is smoking pot again. In reality, Neuralink has made considerable progress. It showed the Times a lab rat with 1,500 electrodes in its brain connected to a computer that is reading and interpreting them – a system they say is already advanced enough for scientific research or medical applications. They’re also upgrading the robot to use a laser drill because the mechanical ones cause too much brain vibrations. Could that be why Musk feels like he’s becoming a cat?

Neuralink says it plans to conduct testing on humans by 2020. It already has a jump on its competition because it uses ultra-thin wires and the robot can insert them at different depths inside a brain. It still needs to find a better material for the wires, since the salt in brains causes them to deteriorate and Musk wants them to stay in your head permanently so he knows when you change your mind about buying a Tesla. Musk may be anxious to get some return on his $100 million investment, especially since Neuralink is hiring more people without a product to sell. Then again, isn’t that the Muskian way?

Someone who didn’t go with Neuralink

“[If two people both had Neuralinks, they’d] effectively have a really high-bandwidth telepathy … potentially a new kind of communication, a conceptual telepathy. It would also be consensual.”

Consensual? Did Musk throw that last word in about brain-to-brain communications because he was worried about privacy … or does he know the first thoughts most people would send across the wires?

A lot of people have already trusted Elon Musk with their money. How many will trust him with their thoughts?

Will you?

What else will this cat man do?

A massive and mysterious underground structure has been detected beneath the ancient Naryn-Kala fortress in Derbent, Russia. Scientists still aren’t sure what the void may be, but the current thinking is that the structure may be evidence of the oldest church in Russia, dating all the way back to 300 CE.

Karyn-Nala

Derbent is in what is today known as the republic of Dagestan which lies on the Caspian Sea just north of Azerbaijan. Derbent is recognized as the oldest occupied city in what is now Russia and evidence exists suggesting Derbent has been inhabited since at least the 8th century. Because of its location perfectly situated between Asia and Europe, Derbent has changed hands many times throughout the centuries between Persian, Arab, Mongol, Timurid, Shirvan and Iranian kingdoms. In 1813 the city became part of Russia as a result of the Russo-Persian War. 

The Naryn-Kala fortress is believed to have been built in the 6th century by the last kingdom of the Persian Empire shortly before the rise of Islam throughout the region. Today, the fortress is a UNESCO World Heritage site and is still being actively excavated by archaeologists.

In one such excavation, scientists with the Russian Academy of Sciences and two Russian universities discovered a massive underground structure by using muon radiography, a revolutionary new form of imaging which leverages cosmic rays as a non-invasive source of radiation. Already, muon radiography has enabled scientists to detect previously unknown structures in the Great Pyramid of Giza and other archaeological sites.

The underground structure is roughly cross-shaped with a dome in the center and measures around 11 metres (36 feet) high, 15 metres (50 feet) from north to south, and 13 metres (43 feet) from east to west. It was originally believed that the structure was a water tank, but the latest muon radiography offers a previously unknown level of detail that suggests it may have been something more.

A cemetery just outside the walls of Karyn-Nala.

Natalia Polukhina, the senior author on the published study of the mysterious void in Naryn-Kala, says the shape of the structure and its location indicates that it likely played an important role in the fortress at the time:

The unusual building, in which we have put our detectors, has the shape of a cross, oriented strictly to the sides of the world, one side is two meters longer than the others. As the archaeologists who began excavations say, during construction, the building was entirely on the surface and it stands on the highest point of the Naryn-Kala. What is the sense to put the tank on the surface, and even on the highest mountain? It is strange. Currently, there are more questions than answers.

It’s still impossible to determine the structure’s purpose until actual physical excavations are conducted – if they ever can be without harming the ancient fortress.

The club of weird, giant, prehistoric bird-lizards we call dinosaurs just got a new member, and this one has a face like a shovel. Aquilarhinus palimentus was discovered at Big Bend National Park in the Chihuahuan Desert and belongs to a group of other strange-faced dinosaurs called Hadrosaurids, known for their distinctive “duck-bill” jaws. This newly identified hadrosaurid genus roamed the Earth roughly 80 million years ago when the Chihuahuan desert was a lush river delta, and represents the most primitive species of hadrosaurid yet discovered.

The discovery was published in the Journal of Systematic Paleontology earlier this week. According to the paper, the name Aquilarhinus palimentus refers to the shape of the dinosaurs face and is Latin for eagle-nosed shovel-chin, which sounds like an insult from a schoolyard bully. If dinosaurs have ghosts, that’s one angry shovel-faced dino-ghost. You can see an artist’s rendition of the unfortunate beast here.

Part of the dinosaur’s remains were actually discovered in the 1980’s by paleontologist Tom Lehman, one of the co-authors of the new study and professor of paleontology at Texas Tech University. The fossils were originally misidentified as belonging to a member of the Gryposaurus genus of duck-billed dinos. Revisiting the fossilized bones, however, showed that this was an example of an entirely new subspecies of Hadrosaurid.

Art of two Hadrosaurids feeding in a river bed.

Old shovel-face represents the most primitive example of the Hadrosaurid family of dinosaurs ever discovered. According to professor Tom Lehman:

“This new species is particularly interesting because it is among the earlier representatives of the duck-billed dinosaurs, and it shows us what the narial crest, or nose, of these animals looked like before the wide variety of distinctive noses evolved in later species of duck-billed dinosaurs.

In addition, instead of a duck bill, this animal had a shovel-shaped beak that suggests it had a unique way of feeding. Most of what we know about duck-billed dinosaurs is based on the wide variety of species found in Alberta, Canada, Montana and Utah. So, this new species also is interesting because it shows us that duck-billed dinosaurs that lived in Texas were different from those that lived farther north.”

The Hadrosaur evolutionary tree, of which the recently discovered dinosaur is the earliest known member.

Credit: Debivort (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The area of big Bend National Park where the discovery was made looked very different 80 million years ago when Aquilarhinus palimentus was alive. It was a wet and silty river delta and researchers believe Aquilarhinus palimentus used its unique jaw to scoop silt out of the river bed, eating the loosely rooted plants of the tidal river delta. The researchers believe that when the dinosaur died, its remains were washed downstream and covered with silt over the course of millions of years.

According to the researchers this discovery suggests that there may be many more lineages of Hadrosaurid yet to be discovered, and if the previous findings are to be any indication they’ll likely also be ridiculous.

The story of human origins is a mysterious and complex tale, and one full of shadows. These aren’t just the shadows of a past that we can’t fully recall, either through the study of the historical record or earlier anthropological evidence; modern science continues to discover the literal “shadow” of our past relatives in our modern DNA.

Human ancestry was far more diverse and complex than was once believed, and every year we are adding new members to our ancient family tree. But unlike in the past when such discoveries were made in the dusty floors of caves or in ancient burial sites, today we can learn almost as much about our complex origins from studying the genetics of modern human groups around the world.

And, rather strikingly, we continue to find traces of unknown hominid ancestors when doing so.

Reconstruction of Homo neanderthalensis skull.

Science Alert recently reported on a study led by João Teixeira of the University of Adelaide, and his colleague, biologist Alan Cooper, who discovered evidence of what they believe to be “ghost” ancestors in modern DNA.

One such discovery, made in 2018 but which had not been widely reported at that time, indicated an unusual genetic trait that is discernible in the population of Flores, Indonesia, which the researchers believe to be “as divergent from modern human DNA as Neanderthal or Denisovan.”

Neanderthal fossils were first discovered at the Feldhofer Cave of the Neander Valley, near Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1856. Although different in appearance from modern humans, there is still some debate as to whether they should be categorized as an entirely different species from us, or as a subspecies of modern humans. The Denisovans weren’t discovered until fairly recently, and going off of little more than a fingertip fragment and teeth recovered from Denisova cave in Siberia. Since then, other fragmentary remains have been discovered, including one mysterious hominid jawbone found off the Taiwanese coast which some believe could have Denisovan origins.

The Penghu jaw fragment, recovered by fishermen off the coast of Taiwan sometime prior to 2008.

In all of the aforementioned cases, the discovery of these archaic human groups involved physical remains recovered from what a type site (the location after which the species or group is named) or other location. There is now also genetic evidence of encounters between modern humans and these known, but now-extinct relatives; shortly after our exit from Africa, Homo sapiens encountered Neanderthals, and the results of these interactions can still be found in the DNA of as much as 2% of modern populations. Similar genetic traces of our interactions with the Denisovans can be found (albeit to a lesser degree than that of Neanderthals).

However, there are also traces of interactions between humans and species that cannot be identified. According to Science Alert:

The first unknown extinct hominid – named EH1 – was roughly genetically equidistant from Denisovans and Neanderthals. The ancestor of all Asian and Australo-Papuan populations bred with EH1, resulting in 2.6 to 3.4 percent shared EH1 ancestry.

The other “unknown” in this equation, as discussed earlier in relation to genetic traces found among the modern populations of Indonesia (dubbed EH2) “only appears in short-statured people that live near Liang Bua Cave,” which, not surprisingly, is where evidence of Homo floriensis, a diminutive species that have been likened to real-life “Hobbits” of the ancient world, was discovered in 2004 (we should note that the unidentified EH2 is not taken to be one and the same as Homo floriensis, but rather some other extinct hominid type that remains undocumented).

As Teixeira and Cooper summarize, “At least 3 different hominin groups appear to have been involved in Asia, of which only the Denisovans are currently known. Several interbreeding events are inferred to have taken place east of Wallace’s Line, consistent with archaeological evidence of widespread and early hominin presence in the area.”

Teixeira and Cooper’s paper appeared in the journal PNAS. 

Current archaeological evidence, as with that of fossil remains, provides no evidence that these archaic human groups made it as far south as Australia and Tasmania (both being parts of the ancient continent of Sahul, as it would have existed prior to 18,000 years ago). However, as the authors of the PNAS study have noted, genetic evidence in this region of the world “remains enigmatic,” hinting at further possibilities with relation to the many mysteries in our ancient family tree… and the “ghosts” of others whom our ancestors occasionally encountered.