The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
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Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld Ontdek de Fascinerende Wereld van UFO's en UAP's: Jouw Bron voor Onthullende Informatie!
Ben jij ook gefascineerd door het onbekende? Wil je meer weten over UFO's en UAP's, niet alleen in België, maar over de hele wereld? Dan ben je op de juiste plek!
België: Het Kloppend Hart van UFO-onderzoek
In België is BUFON (Belgisch UFO-Netwerk) dé autoriteit op het gebied van UFO-onderzoek. Voor betrouwbare en objectieve informatie over deze intrigerende fenomenen, bezoek je zeker onze Facebook-pagina en deze blog. Maar dat is nog niet alles! Ontdek ook het Belgisch UFO-meldpunt en Caelestia, twee organisaties die diepgaand onderzoek verrichten, al zijn ze soms kritisch of sceptisch.
Nederland: Een Schat aan Informatie
Voor onze Nederlandse buren is er de schitterende website www.ufowijzer.nl, beheerd door Paul Harmans. Deze site biedt een schat aan informatie en artikelen die je niet wilt missen!
Internationaal: MUFON - De Wereldwijde Autoriteit
Neem ook een kijkje bij MUFON (Mutual UFO Network Inc.), een gerenommeerde Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in de VS en wereldwijd. MUFON is toegewijd aan de wetenschappelijke en analytische studie van het UFO-fenomeen, en hun maandelijkse tijdschrift, The MUFON UFO-Journal, is een must-read voor elke UFO-enthousiasteling. Bezoek hun website op www.mufon.com voor meer informatie.
Samenwerking en Toekomstvisie
Sinds 1 februari 2020 is Pieter niet alleen ex-president van BUFON, maar ook de voormalige nationale directeur van MUFON in Vlaanderen en Nederland. Dit creëert een sterke samenwerking met de Franse MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP, wat ons in staat stelt om nog meer waardevolle inzichten te delen.
Let op: Nepprofielen en Nieuwe Groeperingen
Pas op voor een nieuwe groepering die zich ook BUFON noemt, maar geen enkele connectie heeft met onze gevestigde organisatie. Hoewel zij de naam geregistreerd hebben, kunnen ze het rijke verleden en de expertise van onze groep niet evenaren. We wensen hen veel succes, maar we blijven de autoriteit in UFO-onderzoek!
Blijf Op De Hoogte!
Wil jij de laatste nieuwtjes over UFO's, ruimtevaart, archeologie, en meer? Volg ons dan en duik samen met ons in de fascinerende wereld van het onbekende! Sluit je aan bij de gemeenschap van nieuwsgierige geesten die net als jij verlangen naar antwoorden en avonturen in de sterren!
Heb je vragen of wil je meer weten? Aarzel dan niet om contact met ons op te nemen! Samen ontrafelen we het mysterie van de lucht en daarbuiten.
26-05-2022
A Lost Primeval World Has Been Found in a Giant South China Sinkhole!
A Lost Primeval World Has Been Found in a Giant South China Sinkhole!
Chinese explorers have discovered a lost world in an exceptionally deep and large sinkhole in south China. And in this ancient subterranean space they expect to find flora and fauna unknown to science.
A cenote is a natural pit, or sinkhole, caused by bedrock collapsing in karst terrain that exposes groundwater channels. When we read the word cenote it's normally followed up with a story about Aztec or Maya bodies and artifacts. This is because Mexico and Central America virtually float on underground rivers with thousands of cenotes peppering the landscape. However, this sinkhole story is from China, where an enormous karst sinkhole has recently been discovered containing its own untouched primeval ecosystem.
The 630-foot-deep sinkhole in China with primeval forest in its depths.
Karst terrain describes a landscape where the surface can be dissolved by groundwater circulating through soluble salt beds and carbonate rocks like gypsum and limestone. In China, cenotes are called tiankeng (heavenly pit), and a lost world has been found in a hitherto unknown sink hole near Ping'e village in the county of Leye, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Central China, according to LiveScience.
The Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region borders Vietnam and is a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site . The area is known for its stalactites and stalagmite riddled caves, charging rivers, and towering tooth-like karst formations, and countless sinkholes. According to the Xinhua news agency the latest south China sinkhole is 630 feet (192 meters) deep and the interior measures 1,004 feet (306 meters) long and 492 feet (150 meters) wide. This is about half the depth of the deepest water-filled sinkhole on the planet, the El Zacatón sinkhole in northeast Mexico , which is 335 meters (1099 feet) deep.
Exploring Worlds Lost In Time
According to Newsweek this is the 30th sinkhole discovered in this area of China. George Veni, the US executive director of the National Cave and Karst Research Institute (NCKRI), told Live Science the discovery “is no surprise.” Southern China is “karst topography,” said the cave specialist, and he added that the entire region is a “landscape prone to dramatic sinkholes and otherworldly caves.”
Veni explained that rainwater is slightly acidic and that it picks up carbon dioxide as it runs through the soil, becoming even more acidic. It permeates cracks in the bedrock and wears away tunnels which over time create chambers. When these spaces get big enough they collapse and create sinkholes, like the one recently discovered in China. However, where most of the Mexican sinkholes are full of water, the Chinese speleologists and spelunkers discovered ancient trees measuring 131 feet (40 meters) tall in the latest China sinkhole.
People walk across a bridge in the man-made woods in Kashgar, China, which are said to increase drought when non-indigenous trees are used.
Expedition leader, Chen Lixin, told Xinhua that the dense undergrowth on the sinkhole floor was as high as a person's shoulders. And so bizarre was this lost space that Lixin added that he wouldn't be surprised to learn “there are species found in these caves that have never been reported or described by science.” Zhang Yuanhai, a senior engineer with the Institute of Karst Geology, said the bottom of the sinkhole “seemed like another world.”
Botanists around the world will be waiting with bated breath for news of new tree species, and any such discoveries will perhaps shift focus from China's current íssues with trees. The Gobi Desert and other arid regions in China are expanding because of overgrazing that has depleted border vegetation allowing wind and gravity to erode soils. In response, China has planted 66 billion trees in the past four decades as part of its fight against expanding deserts. Covering an area the size of Ireland every year, these new trees have successfully slowed down China′s deserts.
Notwithstanding, Troy Sternberg, a geographer at the University of Oxford, UK, says “it’s kind of foolish to plant trees in a desert” and that this will worsen water scarcity . A 2019 Nature article explains that most of the billions of trees planted in China “are not native to the regions where they have been planted and they use a lot of water.” This in effect compounds the negative effects of global warming by reducing the available water for human consumption.
Top image: An aerial photo of the giant China sinkhole or tiankeng at Leye-Fengshan Global Geopark, in south China's Guangxi Province, which was huge and is home to an amazing primeval forest. Source: Zhou Hua / Xinhua
Ancient Alien City Found! 2,000 Year Old City At Center Of Ocean! Video, UFO Sighting News.
Ancient Alien City Found! 2,000 Year Old City At Center Of Ocean! Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of discovery: May 10, 2022
Location of discovery: 16°37'27.65"S 143°35'47.39"W
Guys, I was looking over the islands and found an ancient alien city from about 2,000-3,000 years ago. This city is under the ocean and covers a distance of .5 miles by .25 wide.
Someone asked me on my video comments, what makes you think this is alien? Humans had compares back then. True, the compass was invited about 2,000 years ago, but this has nothing to do with compasses. It has everything to do with structure design, and stone block transportation to the center of the ocean. Look closely at the nearest house...its very conservative and simple. Now look at the stone structure under the ocean near it. They are 1-2 meters thick stone blocks! How many ships 2,000-3,000 years ago could carry even one half ton block of stone to the center of the ocean? How many ships could carry the tens of thousands of stone blocks to the center of the ocean? I rest my case. A UFO clearly could do such things with ease. The stone structures are so elaborate, thick, huge and complex that there is no way this was a human city. 100% proof that ancient alien cities exist. This...could be part of Atlantis, the legendary city of Mu.
New X-Ray Technique May Have Proven Shroud of Turin is 2,000 Years Old
New X-Ray Technique May Have Proven Shroud of Turin is 2,000 Years Old
A shroud is a long piece of cloth, usually made of cotton or linen, that is wrapped around a corpse before it is buried or placed in a tomb – most often without a casket. The most famous shroud is the Shroud of Turin, which appears to be stained with the image of a man that many believe was Jesus, who, according to the biblical story, was only it for three days before he came back to life. The Shroud of Turin seems to come back to life as well – rising up in the news every few years as the debate over its authenticity rages on. Just a few weeks ago, a million-dollar prize was offered to anyone who can prove the shroud is not a forgery or show how it was forged. This week, an Italian scientist unveiled in a studya new X-ray technique he claims has proven the Shroud of Turin is 2,000 years old. Does he win the prize?
Secondo Pia's 1898 negative of the image on the Shroud of Turin
“We have therefore developed a method to measure the natural aging of flax cellulose using X-rays and then convert it into time elapsed since fabrication. The new dating method, based on a technique called Wide Angle X-ray Scattering, was first tested on linen samples already dated using other techniques, on samples that had nothing to do with the Shroud, and then applied to a sample taken from the Shroud of Turin.”
In an interview with National Catholic Register, Italian scientist Liberato De Caro explains how to the polymer chains of cellulose which make up cloth fibers gradually break over centuries due to the combined effect of temperature, humidity, light and chemical agents in the environment. He has spent 30 years studying this aging process using X-rays and developed a method of modeling it for various fibers of various ages. The end result is the Wide Angle X-ray Scattering (WAXS) technique which he proved to be reliable using fabrics ranging in age from 3000 BCE to 2000 CE. He then applied the technique to a sample of the Shroud of Turin and graphed the results.
“These curves show that the sample of the Shroud of Turin (orange curve in the picture) should be much older than the approximately seven centuries indicated by the radio-dating carried out in 1988.”
In 1988, carbon-14 dating (radiocarbon dating) was used on Shroud samples by three separate laboratories which all concluded it was about seven centuries old and not authentic. De Caro claims carbon-14 dating is affected by contamination and fabric is filled with air spaces that can trap and hold contaminants no matter how thoroughly it is cleaned – the reason the 1988 carbon-14 dating gave different results on samples from the edge of the shroud compared to those from the middle. WAXS is non-destructive, can be performed on smaller samples and can be repeated for comparisons. In fact, De Caro’s tests were made on fibers from the same section as the 1988 tests … and delivered different results.
So … which test is right?
“However, the earlier study of pollen trapped in its fibers had already shown a consistent presence of pollen from the Middle East, in particular from the ancient region of Palestine, as if the Shroud had been in that geographical area and not in Europe for a significant period of its history.”
De Caro claims that another study on the pollen trapped in the shroud’s fibers shows the pollen came from the Middle East, not from Europe where the known history of the shroud began in the 1300s. In other words, the pollen proves the shroud was in the Middle East before the 1300s and WAXS shows it’s about 2,000 years old.
Bingo … drop the mic … pay Liberato De Caro the money. Right?
“It would be enough to take 1-mm-long samples from these threads, combine them with other linen samples taken from other ancient fabrics of known date, and involve several laboratories in a dating experiment using the technique we have developed that uses X-rays. It could also be carried out as a blind experiment, that is, without laboratories knowing which samples are taken from the Shroud compared with those taken from other linen fabrics, to avoid any possible bias in the data analysis by the authors of the research.”
To his credit, De Caro admits that even though his study was peer-reviewed, conducting the WAXS tests again in different labs with blind samples should be conducted to confirm the 2000-year age of the shroud. It should be noted that the majority of the reports on De Caro’s study have been made by religious media sites, not scientific ones.
It remains to be seen if this research is enough to prove the Shroud of Turin is not a 700-year-old fake and win the million-dollar prize.
Are the study results enough to prove it’s the burial shroud of Jesus? They’re going to need a bigger X-ray machine for that.
The mayor of the Turkish city wherein Gobekli Tepe is located recently offered a fantastic theory for the ancient archaeological site's origins: aliens. The eyebrow-raising assessmentreportedly occurred earlier this week as Zeynel Abidin Beyazgül, who presides over the community of Urfa, was speaking to Turkish media outlet Milliyet. In discussing the 12,000-year-old complex, the mayor mused that "every person who sees Gobekli Tepe, scientist or normal person, states that there is a mystery and secrets here. But they can't find it." Beyazgül then boldly declared that "I will tell you about these mysteries and secrets," which he apparently believes center around an extraterrestrial hypothesis.
To that end, the mayor surprisingly argued that "the statues in Gobekli Tepe depict something other than humans. They seem to be coming from somewhere else. They remind me of aliens." Lest one think that Beyazgül was merely waxing poetic, he pointed out a number of elements about the site which informed that thinking. Specifically, the mayor noted that the aforementioned sculptures show people who are wearing attire that appears to be out of place for the era in which the complex was built. "People of the time wore pelts, but here, we see V-shaped motives," he noted, wondering "if the first humans wore pelts, who are these people?"
Additionally, Beyazgül pointed out the peculiar depiction of handbags in some of the artwork at Gobekli Tepe and observed that "those purses are akin to the modern purses of today. If we think that those purses were made by the men of the time, we would be wrong. The probability of another living creature making that purse is more likely." Beyond the artwork at the site, the mayor also expressed skepticism that the massive stones used to construct the complex could have been moved by humans and, instead, asked "did beings from outer space come and do this?"
While the theory that extraterrestrials may have had a hand in Gobekli Tepe is not a particularly new idea to ancient alien enthusiasts, the fact that Beyazgül seemingly endorsed the concept is rather remarkable. That said, unless some Earth-shattering artifact is unearthed at the site someday, the possibility that extraterrestrials had a hand in building the complex is likely to remain a matter of conjecture, despite the mayor's tantalizing assertions. With that in mind, what's your take on the Beyazgül's musings? Do you think aliens built Gobekli Tepe or was it the work of human hands? Share your theory with us at the Coast to Coast AM Facebook page.
A palaeontologist examines a dinosaur fossil from the Triassic period (around 250 million to 200 million years ago) in Brazil.
Credit: Carl de Souza/AFP via Getty
In December 2020, a paper in the journal Cretaceous Research sent shock waves through the palaeontology community1. It described a dinosaur species that the authors named Ubirajara jubatus — the first dinosaur found in the Southern Hemisphere to display what were probably precursors to modern feathers. The 110-million-year-old fossil had been collected in Brazil decades earlier — but no Brazilian palaeontologist had ever heard of it. The authors of the paper were from Germany, Mexico and the United Kingdom.
It was the latest instance of what some researchers now call palaeontological colonialism, in which scientists from wealthy nations obtain specimens from low- and middle-income countries without involving local researchers, and then store the fossils abroad. The practice can sometimes be illegal. For instance, according to Brazilian law, the country’s fossils belong to the state, although the authors of the Ubirajara paper say that they had a permit signed by a Brazilian mining official allowing them to export the specimen. “As far as the authors are aware, the specimen of Ubirajara was obtained legally,” says David Martill, a co-author and palaeontologist at the University of Portsmouth, UK.
The practice can also deprive nations of knowledge and heritage, say researchers. “Fossils are special to us,” says Allysson Pinheiro, director of the Plácido Cidade Nuvens Palaeontological Museum in Santana do Cariri, Brazil, near where U. jubatus was found. “We have literature, arts and crafts, and music based on them.”
Unlike previous incidents, however, the publication of Ubirajara sparked a revolution.
Through the Twitter campaign #UbirajaraBelongstoBR, Brazilian researchers protested against the paper, which was eventually withdrawn, and called for the fossil’s return. The Ubirajara specimen is currently located at the State Museum of Natural History Karlsruhe in Germany, but officials say that the museum is involved in negotiations to send it back to Brazil.
The Ubirajara jubatus fossil sparked outrage among Brazilian palaeontologists and citizens.
Credit: Felipe L. Pinheiro
Even more significantly, the incident prompted paleontologists and paleontology associations across Latin America to join forces to end the practice. The growing movement is even attracting interest from scientists in Mongolia and other countries beyond Latin America that are affected by colonial palaeontology.
Juliana Sterli, president of the Argentinian Paleontological Association in Buenos Aires, describes the Ubirajara episode as the “last drop”. “In previous situations, we didn’t express ourselves,” she says.
Global awareness
One of the fruits of the movement has been the publication of journal articles surveying the extent of palaeontological colonialism in Latin America and elsewhere. In March, for instance, a report2 reviewed decades of papers describing fossils from Mexico and Brazil. The authors analysed almost 200 studies published between 1990 and 2021, and found that more than half did not include local researchers. Of the Brazilian fossils described, 88% were stored outside Brazil.
Some in the community, however, have disputed the paper’s findings. Martill says that the paper “is a pseudo-scientific study with a highly cherry-picked data set”, and adds that it ignores practices by US palaeontologists and focuses on European researchers. Martill was a co-author on papers highlighted by the survey.
Juan Carlos Cisneros, a palaeontologist at the Federal University of Piauí in Teresina, Brazil, and a co-author of the survey, says that it omitted some US collections of Brazilian fossils dating from before 1990. That is because the survey focused on vertebrate holotypes (specimens used as benchmarks for describing a species) studied after 1990, he explains. That is when Brazil passed a decree that requires international institutions studying fossils from the country to partner with Brazilian institutions. Cisneros adds: “It seems a clumsy attitude for researchers involved in such questionable practices to defend themselves by expressing that, in other countries, similarly questionable things are done.”
In the past, when issues of scientific colonialism were brought up with colleagues in wealthy countries, incidents were chalked up to anecdotal occurrences, he says. “Now that this is published in a scientific journal, there’s no way to ignore it anymore.”
Jeff Liston, president of the European Association of Vertebrate Palaeontologists, who is based in Edinburgh, UK, and has studied the illegal fossil trade in China, says that the scientific community has been aware of issues related to colonial palaeontology for some time — but the debate in the past few years has brought the discussion to a broader audience.
There are plans for more publications on the issue in Latin America — including papers discussing how journals can help to solve the problem. The palaeontological associations of Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico plan to submit a letter describing how colonial practices are affecting palaeontology in the region to a scientific journal. “One of our goals is to raise global awareness about the responsibility of peer-reviewed journals in fighting colonial practices,” says Hermínio de Araújo Júnior, president of the Brazilian Paleontological Society, who is based in Rio de Janeiro.
In the March paper2, for example, the researchers found that none of the studies they reviewed reported having permits for taking the fossils abroad. “A big step would be to request the proper permits to study the material that they are putting into the journal,” says Karen Moreno Fuentealba, president of the Chilean Association of Paleontology, which is based in Santiago. “It would certainly be a way to enforce proper scientific behaviour.”
Some journals, such as Palaeontology, have already adopted policies that require authors to respect local laws when collecting and exporting samples. “PLoS ONE was one of the first journals to have a very tight set of ethical guidelines in terms of having to show collecting and export permits,” Liston says. (Naturealso has this type of policy; Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its journal team.)
A Latin American alliance
Latin American researchers have also raised global awareness of colonial palaeontology at international conferences. Last December, Cisneros presented research at the third annual Palaeontological Virtual Congress, in which he and his team analysed the impact of the #UbirajaraBelongstoBR campaign. The hashtag became a trending topic on Twitter in Brazil between December 2020 and January 2021, after the Cretaceous Research paper was published.
“Not only science communicators engaged in the conversation, but also influencers from the gaming world, artists and the news media gave it wide attention,” says Aline Ghilardi, a palaeontologist at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Natal, Brazil, who created the hashtag.
Liston notes these positive outcomes, but says that there were negative ones, too. Members of the public threatened the scientists and institutions involved in the Ubirajara research. The Karlsruhe museum’s Instagram account drew more than 10,000 comments — many of them negative — and was deleted in 2021.
In July, a panel will discuss scientific colonialism at the virtual Latin American Congress of Vertebrate Paleontology. The goal, according to Cisneros, is to promote true cooperation between palaeontologists. “We don’t want researchers from other countries to stop working here. What we hope for is that partnerships are more equitable and reciprocal. And that our laws are respected, as we respect the laws of other countries.”
Palaeontologists in Mexico work to preserve mammoth skeletons found during an excavation in 2020.
Credit: Rodrigo Arangua/AFP via Getty
Martill says he has no problem cooperating with local researchers, but he has questions about how far the movement will go to revise the field. “Should we be expected to [collaborate with local partners] when, say, a Brazilian fossil is in a German collection and has been for many years?” he asks, additionally wondering whether seeking out experts simply to add local collaborators could lead to tokenism. “I think this should be up to authors who do the science to decide who is an author.”
It’s important to acknowledge that ethical standards today are different from those of the past, even in Latin America, says Elizabeth Chacón Baca, president of the Mexican Society of Paleontology, headquartered in San Nicolás de los Garza. In Mexico, for example, fossils used to be offered as gifts by political leaders or academics to their international counterparts. “Scientific interest must prevail,” she says. “We must protect and defend [our heritage], but always with a tone of open dialogue.”
Ripple effects
Latin American palaeontologists hope that their efforts will have an impact beyond their countries. According to a study published last December by Ghilardi and others3, the countries most affected by ‘parachute science’ — publications that make no mention of local collaboration — are the Dominican Republic, Myanmar and Namibia. In the first two, in particular, foreign researchers have become interested in fossil inclusions in amber deposits.
Palaeontological colonialism “used to be a discussion among friends and peers in between two sessions at a conference”, says Devapriya Chattopadhyay, a palaeontologist at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Pune and a co-author of the study. Now, “it is getting quite a bit of deserved attention”.
“I’m really excited about this whole movement, especially in Brazil,” says Bolortsetseg Minjin, founder and director of the Institute for the Study of Mongolian Dinosaurs in New York City. She has helped to repatriate dinosaur fossils taken illegally from Mongolia, and sees parallels between her efforts and the campaign to repatriate the Ubirajara dinosaur.
Minjin strongly advocates that fossils remain in their places of origin. “In Mongolia, fossils have been out of the country for the last 100 years,” she says. “Now we are facing an issue: how to find the next generation of scientists?” When children don’t grow up seeing fossils as part of their heritage and aren’t exposed to knowledge that excites them, she says, there is little motivation to become scientists.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-01093-4
References
Smyth, R. S. H., Martill, D. M., Frey, E., Rivera-Sylva, H. E. & Lenz, N. Cretaceous Res. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cretres.2020.104686 (2020).
Hundreds of prehistoric paintings have been found in subterranean chambers with barely enough oxygen to breathe.
Low oxygen causes hypoxia that can induce exalted mental states.
A new study says the artists chose these hard-to-reach caverns in search of an oxygen-starved high.
Artists of all types have been known to ingest a — shall we say — creative lubricant or two. One of the paradoxical things about art, even for people who love making it — maybe especially for those people — is that it’s sometimes hard to get started, despite the fact that it’s even harder to stop.
A new paper suggests this problem and solution go way back.
As archaeologist Yafit Kedar from Tel-Aviv University in Israel was in France enjoying some cave art deep within the ground, she started to wonder why their creators would choose to create images so far away from natural light sources. These places are also airless, where what little oxygen there could have been would have been consumed by the burning torches the painters needed in order to see what they were painting.
Maybe, she thought, the reason these long-ago artists chose to create in such remote chambers was because of their lack of fresh oxygen. Perhaps the painters would have been down there creating in a hypoxic, trancelike state. In that pre-agricultural, pre-chemistry time, cave painting might have been a way to get inspirationally baked.
There are some 400 known prehistoric cave paintings found in Western Europe dating back to the Upper Paleolithic period from 40,000 to 11,00 years ago.
This might not be the only historical example of people inducing an oxygen-starved state to achieve transcendence or something like it. A 2006 study from scientists at the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Rome hypothesized that hypoxia might have been the source of the trances out of which Delphic oracles extracted their visions.
Plutarch had written that trances began when the oracle—really generations of female oracles, all of them ceremonially named “Pythia” — inhaled sweet noxious fumes from cracks in the ground beneath the temple. Lead author of the 2006 study Giuseppe Etiope suggested that these gasses may well have been nothing more miraculous than carbon dioxide and methane filling a poorly ventilated space, thus casting Pythia off into a netherworld of semi-consciousness.
On the surface, the air we breathe is 21 percent oxygen. Kedar and her colleagues created computer models that revealed the likely levels of oxygen in the painted caves. They found that in some such caverns, oxygen levels can drop to 18 percent in just 15 minutes. Some models fell to 11 percent. Hypoxia is likely at oxygen levels below 14.5% percent.
Fire torches exacerbate the problem. Up near the surface in a cave open to outside air, a burning fire’s exhaust flows up and out while fresh air comes in beneath it. In a narrow passageway, however, the carbon dioxide and oxygen mix, and the lighter oxygen floats upward and on out of the cavern toward the surface.
The deeper a painter went with their torch, the more extreme was the loss of oxygen. Some of Kedar’s models of deep caverns found just 9 percent oxygen, the lower limit of survivability.
Kedar hopes to validate the modeled outcomes by measuring oxygen levels in existing painted caves. For now though, the models point to the “transformative nature of an underground, oxygen-depleted space.”
The Lascaux Cave in south-western France, thought to have been painted around 20,000 years ago.
Hypoxia releases dopamine and can produce euphoria, visions, and out-of-body sensations. Modern visitors have reported experiencing some of these same sorts of mental phenomena when viewing the artwork.
The paper suggests that, “The cave environment was conceived as both a liminal space and an ontological arena, allowing early humans to maintain their connectedness with the cosmos.” The hypoxic mind may well have found it easy to imagine that they were seeing beyond the rock, and indeed, beyond their world.
Prehistoric hand paintings at the Cave of Hands in Argentina, thought to be over 10,000 years old R.M. Nunes/Shutterstock" src="https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/silDPBn1lkuiqBjXdQtGJw--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTk2MDtoPTYzMztjZj13ZWJw/https://s.yimg.com/uu/api/res/1.2/sv.Vue755cVqzeESKZCEGg--~B/aD0zMjc7dz00OTY7YXBwaWQ9eXRhY2h5b24-/https://media.zenfs.com/en/the_conversation_464/c57fbdcfa426c1c1f31d98c3da94cd52" data-src="https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/silDPBn1lkuiqBjXdQtGJw--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTk2MDtoPTYzMztjZj13ZWJw/https://s.yimg.com/uu/api/res/1.2/sv.Vue755cVqzeESKZCEGg--~B/aD0zMjc7dz00OTY7YXBwaWQ9eXRhY2h5b24-/https://media.zenfs.com/en/the_conversation_464/c57fbdcfa426c1c1f31d98c3da94cd52" width="651" height="429" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" />
Prehistoric hand paintings at the Cave of Hands in Argentina, thought to be over 10,000 years old
“The images envisioned in such a hallucinatory state appear to float on the cave surfaces (walls, floors, and ceilings) as if these constituted a membrane connecting the upper and lower worlds,” write the authors.
Considering the likelihood of hypoxic conditions inside caves, it may be that it was the promise of a transcendent experience that drove the painters deep into the ground rather than any inherent meaning attached to the caves. As the paper concludes:
“It was not the decoration that rendered the caves significant; rather, the significance of the chosen caves was the reason for their decoration.”
Paleontologists Find Perfectly Preserved Dinosaur Fossils From the Day of the Asteroid Impact
Paleontologists Find Perfectly Preserved Dinosaur Fossils From the Day of the Asteroid Impact
Behind the scenes. Ian Kellett on location in Tanis filming the Triceratops skin whilst still in the ground.
BBC
Scientists believe they have been given an extraordinary view of the last day of the dinosaurs after they discovered the fossil of an animal they believe died that day.
An upcoming BBC documentary looks at a slew of fossils found at the Tanis site in North Dakota. It includes the Thescelosaurus leg, seen in a video here, and the skin of a triceratops, pictured above.
The site is rich in well-preserved fossils, including fish, a turtle, and even the embryo of a flying pterosaur encased in an egg.
Scientists believe that tiny glass-like particles of molten rock lodged in the gills of fish fossils found at the site were kicked up by the asteroid's explosive impact, the BBC said.
"We've got so many details with this site that tells us what happened moment by moment. It's almost like watching it play out in the movies," Robert DePalma, a graduate student from the University of Manchester, UK, who leads the Tanis dig, told the BBC.
Prof Phil Manning, DePalma's PhD supervisor at Manchester, told BBC Radio 4's Today program that the discovery was "absolutely bonkers" and something he "never dreamt in all my career."
"The time resolution we can achieve at this site is beyond our wildest dreams. This really should not exist, and it's absolutely gobsmackingly beautiful," Manning said.
A discovery so 'fabulous' it has attracted skepticism
In the BBC documentary, Robert DePalma, a relative of film director Brian De Palma, can be seen sporting an Indiana Jones-style fedora and tan shirt.
He christened the paleontological site "Tanis," the last resting place of the Ark of the Covenant in the 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark, per The New Yorker.
The findings from Tanis, and the work of DePalma, have attracted controversy over the years.
The New Yorker first wrote about the Tanis site in 2019 before presenting the findings in an academic journal.
While paleontologists usually cede their rights and curation of the fossils to institutions, DePalma, who had collected few academic laurels until the discovery of the site, insists on contractual clauses that give him oversight over the specimens. He has controlled how the fossils are presented, per The New Yorker.
In response to the article, Kate Wong, science editor of Scientific American, said in a 2019 tweet that the findings from the site "have met with a good deal of skepticism from the paleontology community."
A few peer-reviewed papers have since been published, and the BBC said that the dig team promises more.
The BBC also said that it has called outside consultants to verify the specimens.
Prof Paul Barrett from London's Natural History Museum looked at the leg and said it was a Thescelosaurus that likely died "more or less instantaneously."
"It's from a group that we didn't have any previous record of what its skin looked like, and it shows very conclusively that these animals were very scaly like lizards. They weren't feathered like their meat-eating contemporaries," Barrett told the BBC.
However, Prof Steve Brusatte, an outside consultant on the documentary from the University of Edinburgh, told the BBC he was skeptical about the dinosaurs' findings for now and would like to see the hypotheses being subjected to the scrutiny of peer review.
"Those fish with the spherules in their gills, they're an absolute calling card for the asteroid. But for some of the other claims – I'd say they have a lot of circumstantial evidence that hasn't yet been presented to the jury," he said.
Prof Brusatte said that it is possible that some of the animals died before the asteroid strike but could have been exhumed and then buried again by the impact.
But ultimately, Brussate said the quality of the fossils trumps the controversy about the event's timing.
"For some of these discoveries, though, does it even matter if they died on the day or years before? The pterosaur egg with a pterosaur baby inside is super-rare; there's nothing else like it from North America. It doesn't all have to be about the asteroid."
Erich von Daniken: Hopi Star Lore, and the Origins of Human Civilization, Off-Worldly Technologies
Erich von Daniken: Hopi Star Lore, and the Origins of Human Civilization, Off-Worldly Technologies
Erich von Daniken, Gary A. David, and Michael Cremo present compelling evidence of a no-human influence of evolution of our civilization. From the Cargo Cult to Megalithic Structures, indigenous tribes and ancient texts, all pointing toward some unknown advanced form of intelligence which guided humanity’s evolutionary path .
What do you think? Let us know in the comments. Hope everyone has a great weekend.
The Maykop: Lost Bronze Age Culture of the Exotic Caucasus Region
The Maykop: Lost Bronze Age Culture of the Exotic Caucasus Region
In 1897, Professor Nikolay Veselovsky, a Russian archaeologist and orientalist, specializing in the history and archaeology of Central Asia, uncovered one of the greatest archaeological finds of recent history in a small North-Western Caucuses town called Maykop. The Maykop Mound, or Chieftain’s Grave, contained countless ancient riches and spoils from a previously unheard-of Bronze Age civilization.
Comparison with similar artefacts from other cultures roughly contemporary with the 4th-3rd-century Maykop culture of the Caucasus region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.
The Maykop catacomb had a large central chamber split into three differently sized rooms which each held a body lying in the crouched position. The largest of these tombs was reserved for the principal occupant, who was adorned with a richly decorated garment, hundreds of semi-precious stones, a weapons set, a bronze cauldron, and a number of polished clay pots .
One of the most exquisite items was a black fur coat , the earliest fur garment found in Eastern Europe. The unusual tunic was made out of souslik fur, a type of squirrel endemic to the region, and it’s estimated 25 to 30 skins were needed to craft it. The silver pins found on the attire, and sheer amount of silver and gold, indicated the wearers highborn status.
The treasure trove was so great that by 1898 the entire collection had been transferred to the Hermitage in St Petersburg and prepared for display for the Tsar and his family at the Imperial Archaeological Commission, where it became the star exhibit. In the following century, much would be brought to light about the mysterious Maykop.
Early Maykop objects from the chieftain’s grave at Maikop, Russia. The lion, bull, necklace, and diadem are gold; the cup with engraved design is silver; the two pots are ceramic; and the other objects are arsenical bronze. The bronze blade with silver rivets is 47 cm (18.5 inches) long and had sharp edges.
From its initial discovery in 1897, the age of the Maykop civilization quickly became a heated topic of debate. Archaeologists were mainly torn between a 3rd millennium BC or 4th millennium BC date.
In 1911, Tallgren proposed a 2000 BC dating by comparing the silver vessels found at Maykop to Priam’s Treasure, a horde of gold coins that had been excavated in 1873. But by the 1920s, an even earlier date was being suggested.
Rostovstev, finding similarities between the art of Ancient Egypt, refuted Tallgren’s argument, describing the Maykop objects as “more primitive” and “much older.” In addition, Schmidt, by analyzing the newly discovered artifacts unearthed at the Early Dynastic Royal Cemetery of Ur, joined Rostovstev in proclaiming a third millennium BC date.
During the 1930s to the 1950s, a plethora of archeological digs in the Caucasus region would contribute to a developing understanding of the Maykop culture and in particular their relationships with other primitive societies. They revealed that the Maykop were not bound solely to the Kuban area but occupied the entire northern Caucasus region.
In 1956, Alexsandr Iessen reviewed the available material and agreed with earlier claims that Maykop art had a likeness to the Priam Treasure and the art of Ancient Egypt. As a result, he proposed the early Maykop period to be between 2300-1900 BC, and the late phase to be between 2100-1700 BC. His framework, despite only resting on the evidence of less than 20 graves and only one settlement, was widely accepted in the academia for several decades.
The Maykop culture existed between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, with the Yamna culture to the north and the Kura-Araxes culture to the south.
Alongside this, extensive research In the 1950s and 1960s by Munchaev firmly established the co-existence of the Maykop and the Kura-Araxes people , an early South Caucasian kingdom, who were usually dated to 2800-2100 BC. Adding to this, Safranov in the 1970s placed the Maykop within the archaeological time period of Tripolie 2, which was conventionally dated to 2600-1700 BC.
However, Andreeva, using the same methods as Safranov, came to a strikingly different verdict. She argued that Maykop art resembled pottery of the period Gawra XII-VIII in Northern Mesopotamia, which strongly indicated a 4th millennium BC date. Over the next few years, the 3rd millennium and 4th millennium schools would play out their debate in academic papers, journals, and lectures.
But with the emergence of radio-carbon dating in the early 1980s, new and valuable insights surrounding the Maykop culture would emerge. In 1983, Kavtaradze, in the inaugural radio-carbon survey of the Caucuses area, offered a 4th millennium date for the Kura-Araxes who had earlier been established as contemporaneous with the Maykop, countering Munchaev’s 3rd millennium thesis.
Closer to home, in 1991, the first radio-carbon datings of Maykop sites were undertaken from animal bones found at Galjugal, in the valley of Terek. Korenevskij’s data recommended a 4th century millennium date, further reinforcing the link between the Kura-Araxes and the existence of the Maykop culture in the late Tripoli period of the area, with several studies in the 1990s further corroborating his hypothesis.
So, radio-carbon dating had finally settled the dating of the Maykop to the 4th millennium BC, a point of contention that had been blazing for nearly 100 years.
The 3rd millennium school was left severely weakened, especially since their conclusions were only based on the comparison of art objects, which ignored the archaeological context. Despite this, the resemblance of objects from the Great Cemetery at Ur to Maykop pieces by Schmidt, remained a persuasive claim. Yet, if the 4th and 3rd millennium dates were both correct, it would suggest that the Maykop survived for a staggering 1500 years. The uniformity of Maykop materials proved this was impossible and implied a shorter timeline of existence, for a longer chronology would inevitably contain objects of greater variation and divergence.
The busiest part of early human civilization in the Caucasus region, specifically between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea in the upper left of this map, included the pre-Maykop peoples, the PIE speaking peoples and the Proto-Uralic tribes.
Throughout the years, two distinct periods of the Maykop were acknowledged, namely the pre-Maykop period and the Maykop period.
In 1929, the first evidence for the Pre-Maykops appeared at an archaeological excavation at Agubekovo. Additional discoveries in the 1950s and 1960s led academics Formozov and Stoljar to contend that Maykop-like settlements existed in the 5th millennium BC.
Following on from this, a multitude of Pre-Maykop communities were discovered in the South of Kuban, the steppe of the Lower Kuban, and the Kislovodsk and Terek valley regions. The archaic objects uncovered in these areas were visibly distinct, and were commonly characterized with ovoid bodies without handles, pointed and rounded bottoms, grey, red, and brown colors, pearl ornaments, and rim incisions.
Further investigations revealed a unique set of Pre-Maykop treasures that had no comparison to other Maykop articles. Obsidian tools, stone bracelets, polished stone axes , human and animal clay figurines, and cross-shaped mace heads were all soundly dated to the 5th millennium BC. Supplementary radio-carbon testing of animal bones from Svobodnoe, Jasenovaja, and Mesoko again pointed to a date in the second half of the 5th millennium BC.
Silver vessel with animal frieze and landscape depiction, found in Large Kurgan of Maikop, Russia.
In addition, an assemblage of graves from the Lower Kuban and Stavropol plateau, which included flint tools, rare pottery, small items of personal decorations made of stone, bone, copper, and shell clearly illustrated a society predating the Maykop. Signs of a typical Early Bronze age burial at Verkhniy Akbash, where the cadaver was crouched on the side with hands in front of feet, likewise confirmed a 5th millennium date.
Following the pre-civilization, it’s generally believed that the Maykop culture inhabited the foothills of the West and North Caucuses and the steppe lowlands of Lower Kuban, Manych, Terek, and Stavropol.
A unique type of grave sets the Maykop apart from their other Bronze Age neighbors. The body was usually placed on its side with hands in front of the face and with a layer of earth shoveled on top. Personal mementos and items of value were conventionally positioned next to the deceased.
In 2004, Korenevskij, using ceramic evidence, divided the Maykop into 2 types. The Galjugaj-Sereginskoe were distinguished by the prevalence of simple spherical and pearl shaped vessels with rounded bottoms, jars with short necks, cups with thin necks, cone-shaped clay objects, and vessels of precious metals.
The second kind were the Psekupskoe and Dolinskoe, who could be determined by more complex forms of pottery and decoration such as squat round forms which were decorated, patterned, and polished, and a noticeable absence of the spherical forms crafted by their Galjugaj-Sereginskoe compatriots.
Korenevskij intimated that the Galjugaj-Sereginskoe belonged to an earlier phase, with the Psekupskoe and Dolinskoe an Eastern and Western branch of the Maykop that split up at a later stage.
A gold diadem, massive gold and silver figures of bulls and gold lion plaques sewn on cloth, from the Maykop, or Maikop archaeological site in southern Russia.
Most commentators believe that the Maykop were influenced by the Near East, an idea first proposed by Alexsandr Iessen in the 1950s because of the pervasiveness of foreign imports at Maykop burial mounds.
Fortifying this new strand of thought was Safranov, who, in the 1970s advanced the viewpoint that Maykop culture may have come from the Arameans of Harran, a semi-mythical people said to have inhabited Ciscausasia in modern-day northern Syria. She argued material from the Chuera collection, from as far back as 24000 BC, shared startlingly similar details to Maykop crafts.
A more recent examination linking the Maykop to the Sumerians, the earliest known civilization in Southern Mesopotamia, comes from Trifonov, Petrov, and Savelieva, who reanalyzed the scepters found in the Chieftain’s Grave, presenting them alternatively as tubes for communal beer drinking.
They compared the tubes to ancient Sumerian drinking vessels, which were often made of a long, hollow reed, and through residue analysis they found traces of barley starch granules. Furthermore, in an arrangement similar to the practices of early royal funerals of the Near East, the tubes were positioned closest to the body to emphasize the importance of feast in the funerary processions.
Some have gone further, stating that not only were the Maykop intertwined with the Near East, but that they had a sizable sway in the ancient world. In 2008, Ivanova-Bieg remarked on the numerous Maykop artifacts that reflected the developed stage of Near Eastern societies. She called for a “change in chronological perspective allowing for Maykop as a centre of innovation in its own right” .
Gold Bull artefact and silver vessel from the Maykop Culture of the Northwest Caucasus (c. 4th-3rd millenniums BC).
Her call was answered in 2019 by Hansen, who, in his attempt to dismantle the grand narrative that all pre-historical technological advancements originated in Egypt and Mesopotamia, pointed to the Maykop as an important intermediary site for the formulation and spread of new ideas.
His new approach argued that Egyptian and Mesopotamian success was down to their adaptation of techniques produced in peripheral areas, like the North Caucuses where the Maykop resided.
Before, early theorists had recognized a strong Mesopotamian bent to Maykop objects, but usually attributed it to direct Mesopotamian influence on the Maykop.
Using later radio-carbon dating of the Chieftain’s Grave, Hansen showed that the crypt was built around 3700-3500 BC, a thousand years older than previous estimates, implying that it was the Maykops that influenced the Mesopotamians.
It revealed that the Chieftain’s Grave represented the oldest evidence for metal vessels and the earliest use of lion iconography in the heraldry of a ruler, showing that tentative steps towards state formation were already being made by the Maykop in the first half of the 4th millennium.
To add to this, similar copper tools found in the Chieftain’s Grave have also been found in Mesopotamia and as far as the island of Crete. The relatedness of the knives, swords, and axes in Maykop, Mesopotamia, and Crete, advocated the Maykop as an important middle-man in the spread of technology during the 4th millennium BC.
Maykop influence has been found even further afield than Crete. In an astounding discovery, Maykop weapons, bows, and quivers were found in Göhlitzsch, Germany, identical to similar armaments from a site in Novosvobodnaya near Maykop.
Thus, the Maykops had an impact on the development and distribution of technologies during the 4th millennium BC, being a major player in a system of innovation that incorporated the East, Caucuses, and Central Europe. No doubt the richness of the Caucuses region in ores, pastures, and timber proved extremely attractive to the evolving urban centers that the Maykop became inextricably linked too.
Auroch reconstruction based on the Gold Bull artefact from Maykop.
The Maykop: Pioneers That Changed The Western Steppes
Andrew Sheratt has characterized the Maykop as the “world’s first barbarian society” operating on the peripheries of the urban centers of the Near East. Indeed, the Maykop were instrumental in the diffusion of lifestyle and technology to the steppe region.
Acting as an intermediary between East and West, they were also an integral part of the technological revolutions of the 4th millennium BC, which included the wheel, wagon, the domestication of donkeys, sheep, and horses, and the cultivation of olives and wine. Several innovations in metallurgical and wool have been attributed to the Maykop, who were not only effective transferrers of knowledge but trailblazers in their own right.
Top image: The early Bronze Age Maykop culture of the Caucuses region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea dates to the 4th-3rd millennium BC and was connected to more places than you might think!
Does Ta Prohm Temple Depict a ‘Domestic’ Dinosaur?
Does Ta Prohm Temple Depict a ‘Domestic’ Dinosaur?
Mainstream paleontologists say that dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years before the evolution of modern humans. This, however, has not stopped the suggestion that some dinosaurs may have survived as relict populations and have appeared in human artwork. An example of artwork put forward as evidence for this view is a cryptic carving at Ta Prohm, a beautifully overgrown temple in Angkor, the capital city of the former Khmer Empire.
Ta Prohm was built during the reign of the Khmer ruler, Jayavarman VII (1181-1218 AD) as a monastery for Mahayana Buddhism. After the dissolution of the Khmer Empire, the temple was abandoned and reclaimed by the forest until the 19th century, when archaeological excavations at the site of Angkor began.
Ta Prohm is most famous today for the fascinating appearance of the giant tree roots which have wound their way through the loosened stones. However, that beautiful view is being carefully watched and maintained these days to ensure that the temple will not deteriorate further or become unsafe for the countless visitors who marvel at the site each year.
The famous 'Tomb Raider' doorway, Ta Prohm Temple, Angkor, Cambodia.
The reason that Ta Prohm has become important for those interested in living populations of dinosaurs is a creature engraved on the walls of the temple that, to some, bears a striking resemblance to a stegosaurus. What makes this creature saurian in appearance are protrusions on its back that look like the dorsal plates of the well-known dinosaur. This is an especially popular claim among young earth creationists who believe that it represents evidence that dinosaurs lived with humans late enough that they were engraved on temple walls.
Could this creature be a dinosaur? To the modern mind, it does resemble a dinosaur. There are, however, several problems with this hypothesis. The first problem is that the alleged plates also resemble artistic flourishes that occur in many other carvings around the temple.
They do look a little different from the other flourishes, but the possibility that they are flourishes cannot be ruled out. If the flourishes are removed, the creature bears less resemblance to a dinosaur and more resemblance to something like a rhinoceros.
Without the plate-like carvings above its back, there isn’t really much of a reason to suppose that this creature is a stegosaurus or any other dinosaur for that matter. For one thing, the animal lacks the prominent spikes on the back of the tail that are so characteristic of the dinosaur. Since this is a very distinctive feature of the animal, it seems unlikely that an artist would leave out that detail. Furthermore, on the back of the animal’s head are what appear to be ears or horns which the stegosaurus probably did not have. The creature’s head is also not the right shape.
Supporters of the position that the animal is a stegosaurus have suggested possibilities such as that the animal represents a stegosaurus species that lacked spikes. A particularly interesting suggestion is that the carving is a depiction of a domesticated stegosaurus where the spikes have been removed for safety reasons and the animal has been muzzled. According to this view, the ear-like structures are part of a harness.
To respond specifically to these two possibilities, it is possible that there existed an undiscovered species of stegosaurus that lacked spikes, but this requires us to make extra assumptions and back up what is currently speculation with even more speculation. We must not only assume that it represents a dinosaur, a fact that has not been established, but that it represents a dinosaur for which we don’t have evidence for its existence yet. This suggestion clashes with Occam’s razor.
The second explanation is problematic since we don’t have any unambiguous evidence that the stegosaurus was alive in historical times let alone that it was domesticated by humans. We have found no fresh bones or harnesses, or anything which would suggest domestication of large creatures like a stegosaurus. If there ever were domestic dinosaurs, this would be the only known evidence of it.
It Could be a Dinosaur, Or a Rhinoceros or Boar…
In light of this, it is more likely that the creature depicted on the temple is meant to represent a creature more well-known to the ancient Khmers. Scholars have noted that the creature bears resemblance to a boar, rhinoceros, or stylized chameleon, among other animals. It does not exactly resemble these animals either, but there are just as many reasons to suggest that it is a rhinoceros, its ears and the shape of its head, as there are to suggest that it is a stegosaurus, the protrusions resembling dorsal plates.
The creature’s identity is ambiguous at best. We cannot say for certain that it is not a dinosaur, but since we do have definitive evidence that the Khmers encountered rhinoceroses, boars, and chameleons but not living dinosaurs, it is more likely in light of the evidence and Occam’s razor, that it is one of the more mundane animals suggested and not a relict population of stegosaurus.
Others believe the Ta Prohm dinosaur is actually a rhinoceros.
Another issue has to do with the environment itself. Since we have no indisputable evidence of recent dinosaur remains that are not fossilized and encased in solid rock that is millions of years old, any living dinosaurs would have to be extremely rare and most likely restricted to a remote area where they would be safe from predators, such as humans, and abrupt changes in their environment.
As a comparison, the Wollemi pine tree, a relict population of a tree that was widespread in the Mesozoic, exists only in a very isolated part of Australia which has probably changed little over many millennia.
The prehistoric Wollemi pine, one of the rarest trees in the world.
At the time the temple was built, Cambodia was the home of a major urban civilization, the Khmer Empire and has been continually inhabited by humans since at least the Lower Paleolithic. Humans have definitely disturbed the environment in southeast Asia, felling forests and establishing farmland, towns, and cities.
As a result, it is by no means isolated from influences which could upset the environment and drive a vulnerable relict population into extinction. While this doesn’t make it impossible that there was a population of dinosaurs in the area to be detected by humans so late in history, it does make it less likely.
The only reason to conclude that it is a dinosaur is because it fits into some people’s preferred explanations, such as young earth creationists who believe that dinosaurs and humans coexisted or fringe thinkers who believe in a surviving relict population of dinosaurs that didn’t go extinct, which are valid, logically coherent positions, but ones that are not currently supported by any indisputable evidence.
Currently we have no unambiguous evidence from the fossil record or historical records that humans and dinosaurs coexisted; as a result, the explanation that the creature is a stegosaurus is a less likely position than the position that it is a rhinoceros, chameleon, boar, some other modern animal, or even a mythical creature. We have definite evidence that the rhinoceros, boar, or chameleon coexisted with humans and could have been encountered by humans and described by artists.
On the other hand, we do not have any evidence that dinosaurs were in the region at the same time as humans or that humans would ever have encountered them. Also, the densely populated Khmer Empire is an unlikely place to find a relict population of large prehistoric reptiles. More likely explanations need to be ruled out before the less likely explanation that the artist encountered a live dinosaur can be considered preferable.
518-Million-Year-Old-Rocks Suggest Animal And Human Life May Have First Emerged In China – Scientists Say
518-Million-Year-Old-Rocks Suggest Animal And Human Life May Have First Emerged In China – Scientists Say
Jan Bartek - AncientPages.com - A new study based on an analysis of 518'million-year-old rocks that contain the oldest collection of fossils that researchers have on record. The researchers believe that Chengjian, a city in the mountainous Yunnan Province of China, is the origin of many of today’s species, including humans. This site is where complex organisms first developed, an event known as the ‘Cambrian Explosion’, a major time period in the history of the Earth.
Arthropod (Naroia).
Credit: Dr Xiaoya Ma
The ancestors of many animal species alive today may have lived in a delta in what is now China, new research suggests.
The Cambrian Explosion, more than 500 million years ago, saw the rapid spread of bilaterian species—symmetrical along a central line, like most of today's animals (including humans).
The 518-million-year-old Chengjiang Biota—in Yunnan, southwest China—is one of the oldest groups of animal fossils currently known to science and a key record of the Cambrian Explosion.
Fossils of more than 250 species have been found there, including various worms, arthropods (ancestors of living shrimps, insects, spiders, scorpions), and even the earliest vertebrates (ancestors of fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals).
The new study finds for the first time that this environment was a shallow-marine, nutrient-rich delta affected by storm floods.
The Cambrian seas teemed with new types of animal, such as the predator Anomalocaris (centre).
Credit: John Sibbick/Natural History Museum
The area is now on land in the mountainous Yunnan Province, but the team studied rock core samples that show evidence of marine currents in the past environment.
"The Cambrian Explosion is now universally accepted as a genuine rapid evolutionary event, but the causal factors for this event have been long debated, with hypotheses on environmental, genetic, or ecological triggers," said senior author Dr. Xiaoya Ma, a palaeobiologist at the University of Exeter and Yunnan University.
"The discovery of a deltaic environment shed new light on understanding the possible causal factors for the flourishing of these Cambrian bilaterian animal-dominated marine communities and their exceptional soft-tissue preservation.
"The unstable environmental stressors might also contribute to the adaptive radiation of these early animals."
Co-lead author Farid Saleh, a sedimentologist and taphonomist at Yunnan University, said: "We can see from the association of numerous sedimentary flows that the environment hosting the Chengjiang Biota was complex and certainly shallower than what has been previously suggested in the literature for similar animal communities."
Changshi Qi, the other co-lead author, and a geochemist at the Yunnan University, added: "Our research shows that the Chengjiang Biota mainly lived in a well-oxygenated shallow-water deltaic environment.
"Storm floods transported these organisms down to the adjacent deep oxygen-deficient settings, leading to the exceptional preservation we see today."
Fish (Myllokunmingia).
Credit: Dr Xiaoya Ma
Co-author Luis Buatois, a paleontologist and sedimentologist at the University of Saskatchewan, said: "The Chengjiang Biota, as is the case of similar faunas described elsewhere, is preserved in fine-grained deposits.
"Our understanding of how these muddy sediments were deposited has changed dramatically during the last 15 years.
"Application of this recently acquired knowledge to the study of fossiliferous deposits of exceptional preservation will change dramatically our understanding of how and where these sediments accumulated."
The results of this study are important because they show that most early animals tolerated stressful conditions, such as salinity (salt) fluctuations, and high amounts of sediment deposition.
This contrasts with earlier research suggesting that similar animals colonized deeper-water, more stable marine environments.
"It is hard to believe that these animals were able to cope with such a stressful environmental setting," said M. Gabriela Mángano, a palaeontologist at the University of Saskatchewan, who has studied other well-known sites of exceptional preservation in Canada, Morocco, and Greenland.
Lobopodian worm (Luolishania).
Credit: Dr Xiaoya Ma
Maximiliano Paz, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Saskatchewan who specializes in fine-grained systems, added: "Access to sediment cores allowed us to see details in the rock which are commonly difficult to appreciate in the weathered outcrops of the Chengjiang area."
The arthropod Leanchoilia from the Qingjiang fossil site, China.
Image credit: Fu et al, doi: 10.1126/science.aau8800.
This work is an international collaboration between Yunnan University, the University of Exeter, the University of Saskatchewan, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of Lausanne, and the University of Leicester.
The research was funded by the Chinese Postdoctoral Science Foundation, the Natural Science Foundation of China, the State Key Laboratory of Palaeobiology and Stratigraphy, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and by the George J. McLeod Enhancement Chair in Geology.
A reconstruction of early Cambrian ocean life in South China.
4-Billion-Year-Old Fossils Found -- This May Change Everything
4-Billion-Year-Old Fossils Found -- This May Change Everything
(Note: photo above is not the fossil in this article)
Scientists of all disciplines generally accept that the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. Paleontologists are dependent upon fossils to determine when the first life appeared on Earth, so fossilized microorganisms found in Australian Apex chert rocks that date back 3.465 billion years are generally considered to be the first confirmed life forms. That may change significantly as experts analyze a rock found in Quebec, Canada, with tiny fossilized filaments and other evidence suggesting they were made by bacteria that lived between 3.75 and 4.28 billion years ago. If this is confirmed, it pushes the birth of life on Earth back 300 million years to very near the birth of the planet itself. Does this qualify as a “This changes everything!” moment?
You never know which rock will change everything.
“This means life could have begun as little as 300 million years after Earth formed. In geological terms, this is quick – about one spin of the Sun around the galaxy.”
Dr Dominic Papineau, an associate professor in geochemistry and astrobiology at University College London and lead author of a report on the discovery published in the journal Science Advances, sounds pretty excited about the fossil in a press release. Of course, that could be because he found it – he collected it, along with others, from a former seabed in Quebec’s Nuvvuagittuq Supracrustal Belt (NSB) in 2008. The canhces of finding ancient fossils are excellent here – the NSB was once near a system of hydrothermal vents heated by magma. Besides panspermia and biblical creationism, hydrothhemal vests are thought to be places where heat and chemicals could react to form life that might live on metals and elements on the sea floor.
“One thing that I think is amazing is the sheer size of the tectonic branching structure, which is several millimetres, if not more than a centimetre in size.”
While he found the rock in 2008, this is the first time Papineau was able to use modern techniques to study what is inside them. His team sliced it with a diamond-encrusted saw, creating sections as thin as 100 microns -- about the thickness of paper but double the thickness of previous cuts. This allowed a computer to create a 3D model showing larger structures inside the rock. Papineau told The Guardian he could see tiny filaments, knobs and tubes of an iron oxide called haematite that today are made by bacteria living around hydrothermal vents that survive on iron-based chemical reactions. However, this structure resembling a stem with branches filled with distorted spheres appeared to be more than a single life form.
“I think what we are seeing is a microbial community – that they were working in concert and as the filaments grew from groups of these cells, they got intermingled and made a bigger, thicker haematite filament.”
Taken together with the mineralized chemical byproducts in the rock, Papineau and his colleagues are convinced these are microbial life forms that existed 4.25 billion years ago -- just 300 million years after Earth was formed. And yes, this is a game-changing discovery.
“Pushing the clock back is very important, because it tells us that it takes a very short time for life to emerge on a planetary surface. Very quickly after [Earth formed] there was microbial life taking place, eating iron and sulphur in these hydrothermal vents.”
All it took was one ...
While it adds to Earth’s history, what Papineau is more excited about is that this means the search for alien life forms can be extended to extremely young exoplanets. Of course, this assumes the age and origin of his fossils is confirmed by other scientists, and some think it could just be a chemical metamorphism caused by the magma heat released from the hydrothermal vents.
So, this discovery of a potentially 4.25-billion-year-old fossil may not have changed everything yet, but it’s already affecting a lot of exciting things.
Detail of the microfossils that scientists believe are evidence of life existing 300m years after Earth’s formation.
Across Assam in India, sometimes in plain sight and sometimes hidden in the wilderness, archaeologists have found more sites to add to a long-standing mystery. In four previously unknown locations, 65 giant sandstone vessels bulge from the ground.
Some of these ancient objects are tall and cylindrical, others bulbous, yet others shaped like two cones stacked together. Some are partially or almost fully buried. Who made them, and what purpose they served, is unknown. Whatever their use, however, it seems more widespread than we knew.
The discovery brings the total number of known megalithic jar sites in Assam to 11. Similar sites have also been found in Laos and Indonesia. Together, they date between the second millennium BCE and 13th century CE. Human remains found in and around the Laos jars suggest those ones may have been used for mortuary practices.
Megalithic jar sites in Assam were first formally described in 1929 by British civil servants Philip Mills and John Henry Hutton, who reported six sites. The seventh site wasn't discovered until a 2016-2017 expedition, part of work to relocate and catalog the sites described by Mills and Hutton.
Led by archaeologist Tilok Thakuria of North Eastern Hill University in India, work recommenced in 2020, and that's when the previously unknown sites started to emerge.
Jars at Thaimodholing.
(Thakuria et al., Asian Archaeology, 2022)
"At the start the team just went in to survey three large sites that hadn't been formally surveyed. From there grids were set up to explore the surrounding densely forested regions," says archaeologist Nicholae Skopal of the Australian National University in Australia.
"This is when we first started finding new jar sites."
The four new sites were the village of Herakilo, at which 10 jars were found, six at the outskirts, and the remaining four relocated to the village; a ridgeline at Thaimodholing, where 12 badly damaged jars were found; a spur at Thaimodholing, where eight jars were found, some relocated a short distance from the original spot, possibly due to the construction of a road; and Lower Chaikam, where 35 jars were found in a field surrounded by dense forest.
When added to the seven previously known sites, a total of 797 jars have been identified, in various states of preservation, over an area of 300 square kilometers (115 square miles). These jars seem to have been deliberately positioned on ridges, spurs and hills, with views of lowlands.
Furthermore, archaeologists haven't found any sources of the sandstone from which the jars are carved in the vicinity of any of the sites.
"We still don't know who made the giant jars or where they lived. It's all a bit of a mystery," Skopal says.
Jars at Lower Chaikam.
(Thakuria et al., Asian Archaeology, 2022)
However, there are traces of clues to suggest that, like the Laos jars, the Assam jars may have been used for mortuary practices.
Mills and Hutton reported that one of the jars contained cremated bone fragments. British anthropologist Ursula Graham Bower lived with the Zemi Naga people in the 1930s; according to her reports, the Zemi believed that the jars were made by the lost Siemi people, for funerary purposes.
"There are stories from the Naga people, the current ethnic groups in north-east India, of finding the Assam jars filled with cremated remains, beads, and other material artifacts," Skopal notes.
It's likely there are many more jar sites out there in the heavily forested uplands of Assam, since the team only searched a limited area. This, the researchers said, is very important for protecting the heritage of Assam, as human habitation expands. Additional surveys are warranted with urgency across Assam, Meghalaya, and Manipur, the researchers note.
"It seems as though there aren't any living ethnic groups in India associated with the jars, which means there is an importance to maintain the cultural heritage," Skopal says.
"The longer we take to find them, the greater chance that they will be destroyed, as more crops are planted in these areas and the forests are cut down."
Finding more sites could also help archaeologists piece together not just what the jars were for, but the heritage of the mysterious people who made them.
The Great Pyramid of Giza is the largest of the three great pyramids of the Giza pyramid complex. There is more mystery and allure surrounding the three main Giza Pyramids, and the Great Pyramid of Giza specifically, to the degree that there are more fundamental unanswered questions remaining than those we have answered.
The Great Pyramid of Giza. Credit: Nina Aldin Thune CC BY 2.5.
Regardless of what textbooks, mainstream or alternative history books alike may tell you, the fact remains that nobody knows how the Great Pyramid of Giza was built. Not conclusively.
We do not even know for certain who built it, when it was built, nor for what purpose. The Ancient Greeks believed that the pharaoh of Ancient Egypt used hundreds of thousands of slaves to build the monument. Modern Egyptologists have beliefs ranging from agreement with the Greeks, to the ideas that a smaller specialized task force of skilled artisans was sufficient.
The idea that the structure was built (or at least planned) by a Lost Civilization around the End of the Last Ice Age c.10,500 BCE is especially convincing based on the evidence. Others claim that the Great Pyramid was built by ET’s or that it was manifested directly with thought by Higher Dimensional Beings.
I have no answers to offer you.
Let us first understand and explore the incredible facts of the Great Pyramid of Giza, before we delve into such speculations.
Unparalleled Precision of the Great Pyramid of Giza
The first thing to understand about the Great Pyramid is what it used to look like.
I have a feeling that from the image above, one might get the wrong impression of this structure. It looks roughly hewn, which is not remotely the case. It is nothing short than one of the most technically precise structures ever built, even while it was literally one of the first monumental structures built by human hands, and probably is the largest structure still, by mass.
The Great Pyramid used to be cased in gleaming white limestone. It would have been a glowing white beacon visible across the desert, reflecting light for all to see, that stood in this manner for at least 3800 years (by conventional dating). Rumor has it that it was topped with a golden capstone called the Pyramidion.
It wasn’t until 1303 CE that an earthquake fractured some of the casing stones, reaving a chink in this great monuments armour, so to speak, which allowed a sultan of the Mamluk dynasty to cart them away around 1356 CE to help build the city of Cairo.
The Great Pyramid With It’s Original White Limestone Casing. What the Great Pyramid of Giza would have looked like with its casing in tact, before it was mined in the Middle Ages to build Cairo, with its golden capstone. Credit:Openculture (Used without permission for educational purposes.)
Sir Flinders Petrie, a pioneering figure among Egyptologists, in the 19th century was the first scholar to take precise measurements of the dimensions of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Around 1880-82 he estimated the dimensions of the Great Pyramid in units of the Egyptian Royal Cubit (the unit of measure used in Dynastic Egypt) at 280 royal cubits tall, with each of the four sides at the base of the pyramid measuring 440 royal cubits in length.
Each cubit was almost twice as long as a modern meter, giving the Great Pyramid estimated dimensions of 146.6 meters tall with side lengths of about 230.3 meters.
The Great Pyramid of Giza originally stood some 481.0 feet tall (146.6 m). Though with the removal of the original white limestone casing in 1356 CE by a local sultan, and its presumed capstone at some point in antiquity, it’s height was diminished about 30 feet to 449.5 ft (137 m).
The sides of the Great Pyramid of Giza are each about 230 meters in length, enclosing a surface area some 52,900 meters squared. Each of the four sides differ slightly in length, but by an incredibly small margin, which is difficult to measure precisely as measuring the actual length of the base without the original outer casing is difficult.
What is certain is that all four sides have a length at the base within mere centimetres from one another, differing by a magnitude on the order of mere ten thousandths of a percent of the total base length. Furthermore, the base of the structure is almost perfectly level, any point of the base differing from horizontal by only . [5]
It is estimated to weigh about 6 million tonnes (12,000,000,000 lbs).
Conventional theory is that it was built over a 10 to 20 year period for a pharaoh. Though this time frame is hotly contested under grounds of sheer mathematical impossibility with the technology available.
To complete the monument in 20 years they would have to place 1 block every 4.57 minutes working night and day with no variance in pace. Leaving out the fact that they couldn’t have worked this fast, nor worked through the night at all, this theory is, frankly, absurd. At least the time time frame.
The Great Pyramid of Giza consists of around 2.3 million blocks of limestone and granite, enclosing an estimated volume of 2,300,000 cubic meters, some stones weighing as much as 80 tonnes (160,000 lbs).
Each block was placed with nearly incomprehensible precision, especially when considering the sheer volume of blocks that had to be placed. All errors in alignment would have been magnified at each successive layer. Yet the space between the internal blocks is little more than a razor blade in width, and the white limestone outer casing (at least those that remains) appear to have possessed an even tighter fit. So the incredible alignment of higher levels speaks to a level of technical precision at the base we need lasers to achieve today, if we can achieve it at all on this scale.
The monument is further aligned with remarkable accuracy to the 4 cardinal directions with an error of around 1/15th of a single degree.
Equivalent to an accuracy of 4 arc minutes. However the Great Pyramid is not aligned with magnetic north, but with true north, which has staggering implications for the level of knowledge, scientific and technical understanding of the builders.
There is a slight discrepancy between the north pointed towards with a compass and the actual direction of the north pole from a given position on the globe because of the curvature of the Earth itself.
From a given latitude if you were to point directly at the North Pole you would technically be pointing into the ground, rather than along the surface, because of the curvature of the Earth. The direction that you point in towards the North Pole will be in the same vertical plane with the North Star, Polaris, at least in this age. This vertical plane, depending on latitude, will differ from magnetic north as determined by a compass.
The builders of the Great Pyramid of Giza appear to have known the difference, even though they are supposed to not even had the compass back then. Even to align it with the North Star was no mean feat. They might have used the star Thuban in those times (assuming c.2500 BCE) which was the North Star then.
Interior Chambers
There are three known chambers within the Great Pyramid.
There is a subterranean chamber which is believed to be unfinished because of its rough appearance. Followed by the so-called Queen’s Chamber which is in the center of the pyramid above the Subterranean Chamber, and the so-called King’s Chamber above the Queen’s Chamber.
There is an entrance to the Great Pyramid of Giza on the north side, which was found only after dynamite was used to blast a whole into the pyramid. Upon entering the pyramid you travel a downward-sloping passage which ultimately goes to the subterranean chamber.
Though an upward sloping passage intersects with the entryway passage called the Ascending Passage. This takes you to another intersection where one passage breaks off horizontally taking you to the Queen’s Chamber. While the ascending passage continues upwards in what is called the Grand Gallery to the so-called King’s Chamber.
Encoded Information
One of the most startling aspects of the Great Pyramid of Giza is that the builders intentionally encoded mathematical and scientific knowledge into it’s dimensions. This is a fact contested by some Egyptologists, on the grounds that it is their belief this knowledge was well beyond the level of advancement of the Ancient Egyptians at the generally accepted date of construction. They believe that these mathematical symmetries were accidental, which is a statistically irrational.
One of the encoded mathematical quantities can be found as the ratio between the Great Pyramids perimeter and height.
It doesn’t matter if we take the perimeter-to-height ratio using Egyptian royal cubits (1760/280) or in modern meters (921.2/146.6). Regardless of what unit we measure the distances in, this ratio gives us an incredibly close approximation to .
The perimeter-height ratio in royal cubits is closer to if we use the common fractional approximation for as (22/7) whereas the precise estimates for the perimeter and height in meters give us accurate to the nearest thousandth.
This tells us that the Ancient Egyptians at the dawn of Egyptian History knew the number , which in itself is incredible. Other encoded numbers include relationships that refer to the Golden Mean and even possibly the Dimensions of the Earth.
Map of the Giza Pyramid Complex. The Great Pyramid of Giza (Pyramid of Khufu) with the Pyramid of Khafre and the Pyramid of Menkaure mimicking the stars of Orion’s belt in their position. Credit: MesserWoland CC BY-SA 3.0
The Builders of the Great Pyramid
The story told by Egyptologists is that the Great Pyramid of Giza was built as a tomb for the second pharaoh of the illustrious Fourth Dynasty (Dynasty IV) of the Old Kingdom of Ancient Egypt: Pharaoh Khufu.
Khufu is believed by many to have been the son of Snefuru, the first pharaoh of Dynasty IV. His father had three vastly smaller pyramids built in his honor, which are nothing compared to the Great Pyramid of Giza. The pyramids of Snefuru are the Red Pyramid, Bent Pyramid, and Meidum Pyramid all built at Dahshur. These are believed to represent nearly all attempts at pyramid building before the engineering marvel that is the Great Pyramid of Giza.
The Pyramids of the Giza Plateau. From left to right the Pyramid of Menkaure, the Pyramid of Khafre and the Great Pyramid of Khufu. The three smaller foreground pyramids are subsidiary structures associated with Menkaure’s pyramid.
Khufu was also the father of Pharaoh Khafre, to whom the second largest of the Giza Pyramids is attributed, and the grandfather of Menkaure, to whom the smallest of the three Giza Pyramids is attributed. In the image to the right, the three small pyramids in the foreground are known arbitrarily as the Queen’s Pyramids. The Great Pyramid of Giza is the most distant of the large three (furthest right), with the middle Pyramid of Khafre in the center, and the smallest Pyramid of Menkaure in the furthest to the left.
The only reason that these structures are associated with Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure is because this was a legendary association perpetuated by the ancient Greeks. It is from this association that we approximate a date of 2560 BCE for the Great Pyramid. However, the singular piece of evidence is a suspect piece of graffiti in one of the Relieving Chambers above the King’s Chamber.
It is suspect not only because grammatical mistakes in the graffiti itself, but in the fact that it was literally the last place explored. After finding not a shred of hieroglyphic script in any other part of the pyramids interior or exterior, literally the last place they looked, a place never supposed to have been entered at all because it was structural, they had to use dynamite to blast their way through some of the most massive stone blocks in the entire pyramid, they happened to find a misspelled inscription bearing Khufu’s name. Suspicious.
Various theories about the method of construction of the Great Pyramid have been proposed. Though not a single one of them are conclusive, as none of them work. The ramp theory (that they built a ramp to transport blocks up the pyramid to the level they were working on) is the most accepted, yet it holds no water because the ramp would have been larger than the pyramid itself.
Not a single one makes logical, realistic sense. We do not know conclusively how, why, or by whom this structure was built. Thus we do not technically know when either.
A Technological Marvel
There are so many unknowns about the Great Pyramid of Giza. At this time I have nothing constructive or conclusive to add to this state of affairs. All that we can take away from the Great Pyramid is a sense of awe and wonder, at the sheer technological skill required to build it.
Do not underestimate this piece of architecture, as it cannot be ignored. The sheer size of it. The incredible precision necessary for it to fit together so snugly after placing more than 2 million blocks of stones each of which weighing a couple thousand pounds minimum.
Remember also the mathematical relationships which give rise to advanced mathematical quantities, advanced at least for 4500 years ago, just after the earliest cultures are believed to have invented writing.
Try and get a sense of the mystery, rather than reducing this structure to certainties, of which there are few. How did they do this? When by conventional chronology this was one of the first 10 large scale structures every built by human hands?
How did they reach a level of technological precision superior to every architectural monument ever created by Egyptians in almost 3000 years afterwards?
Further Reading
Secrets of the Great Pyramid | Peter Tompkins | Harper Collins | 1978
A Legend That Turns Out To Be Real? Hibernating Alien Discovered Inside Secret Chamber In The Great Pyramid
A Legend That Turns Out To Be Real? Hibernating Alien Discovered Inside Secret Chamber In The Great Pyramid
A strange story about the Great Pyramid of Giza appeared in the March 2000 issue of the Egyptian magazine Rose El-Yussuf.
According to the article, in 1988, French Egyptologist Louis Caparat, discovered this mummy in 1988 in a secret room of the Great Pyramid and, “was found in a crystalline transparent case. At first the alien appeared to be hibernating,” or in a state of suspended animation. It’s believed to be a “humanoid,” which is a mix between an extraterrestrial race and human DNA.
A papyrus found near the body tells of this being’s encounter with the Pharaoh Khufu. Apparently, it said that this convinced the Pharaoh to build the Great Pyramid as a tomb for this being after he had announced the future arrival of other beings of his species (Source: the Egyptian magazine “Rose El-Yussuf” relayed by “The World Of The Unknown” in Issue 283 April 2000).
It was also determined from the papyrus that the people whom lived in Egypt during the Neolithic period was already very mixed, mostly consisting of people from the Mediterranean and Negroid that were dolichocephalic (Greek word meaning to have an elongated head).
The last update on this was that “Caparat sent a message to a colleague in Spain, Francisco de Braga, a biologist, inviting him to come to Egypt” to take blood, cell, tissue and DNA samples from the dead alien.” But when Dr. de Braga arrived in Cairo, he was detained by the Egyptian Ministry of State Security and put on a plane back to Madrid. According to Rose El-Yussuf, the dead alien was taken to a laboratory at an undisclosed location by Egyptian military intelligence.
Editor’s Note: Please take this story with a grain of salt. Mysterious dead bodies have been turning up in the Great Pyramid since Abdullah Al-Mamun first broke into the Great Pyramid in 813 A.D. Abdullah, who was the son of the famous caliph, Haroun Al-Raschid, hired a crew of Egyptians who laboriously bored a hole right through the Pyramid’s wall.
According to author Peter Tompkins:
“Some Arabian authors have reported that Al-Mamun found in the sarcophagus a stone statue in the shape of a man. They say that within the statue lay a body wearing a breastplate of gold set with precious stones, an invaluable sword on his chest, and a carbuncle ruby on his head the size of an egg, which shone as with the light of day.”
– Secrets of the Great Pyramid by Peter Tompkins
On the other hand, there have been a lot of strange goings-on at the Great Pyramid since 1996, including secret UNESCO teams visiting, unmarked military vehicles and black helicopters seen at Giza, and the recent round of heavy construction.. It’s anyone’s guess what is really going on out there.
Another mummified alien (5’ 3”) was also found buried in an ancient pyramid, but this time by the archaeologist, Dr. Viktor Lubek. This one was found near Lahun, when exploring a small pyramid south of the Dynasty doceaba of Senusret II, which contains the queen of the pharaoh. This of course was not revealed immediately to the public either, and dates back to about 1880 B.C. According to a source at the Egyptian Antiquities Department, “The mummy of what appears to be an alien, dates back (to about 1880 B.C.) and it seems it would be a humanoid.” Apparently this statement, along with details and photographs of the find, were made under the condition of remaining anonymous. Inscriptions on the tomb of the mummy showed that this being was a counselor to the pharaoh and was named Osirunet, meaning “star” or “sent from heaven.” The body was said to be buried with great respect and care, and was accompanied by a number of strange artifacts made of a synthetic material that is not found in any other Egyptian tomb. Also the source claimed, “It’s unclear what sex it was, but we do know it had unusual reptilian-type skin, no external ears and overly large, almond-shaped eyes.”
The anonymous person that provide this find’s details claimed that the discovery has caused great controversy among Egyptian officials, who want to keep it hidden until a “plausible explanation” for the strange mummy can be made. The Egyptian government has consulted a number of respected archaeologists, but to date none can explain the finding in ordinary terms. According to the source, “The Egyptians refuse to believe that their heritage came from outer space.” The last update on this was that the mummy was to be flown to a university in Florida where specialists will examine it more closely.
It turns out that the CIA has banned archaeologists to excavate in certain areas. Some journalists had already noticed that the CIA was very interested in making their own excavations before the ban was put in place. So far there are three “hidden” openings around the Sphinx that lead to underground tunnels that are prohibited. One opening is located in-between the two front paws, another on the south side, and one on the north side.
According to the British journalist Graham Hancock, the CIA has discovered not one, but 9 chambers under the Sphinx, some of which containing metal objects. These hidden underground chambers were actually recorded in the Emerald Tablets that were supposed to be written by Thoth/Hermes. The Emerald Tablets were said to be each molded out of a single piece of emerald (green) crystal, with its true origin (possible Atlantis) lost in legends that go back over 10,000 years. Its first known translation was made into Greek by Alexandrian scholars and was actually put on display in Egypt in 330 B.C. However, around 400 A.D. it was reportedly buried somewhere on the Giza plateau to protect it from religious zealots who were burning libraries around the world at that time.
If the intelligence agencies want to get their hands on a device or documents, it means they think that the civilization of ancient Egypt was, in some areas, much more advanced than ours. Two of the most well-known descriptions of aliens mating with humans, thereby creating humanoids, comes from Robert Temple’s “The Sirius Mystery” (which tells the story of the African Dogon Tribe) and Genesis in the Bible.
“The son of God saw the daughters of men were beautiful, and they took them wives which they chose among them. (…) There were giants in the earth in those days, and also later, because the son of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children: these are powerful men who, from ancient times, were men of renown “
(Genesis 6: 2-4)
Greek mythology refers to these giants as Nephilim, or fallen angels who have taught men: math, writing, music, witchcraft/alchemy, astrology, etc. These lessons were also listed in the Kabbalah, which caused many crusades to chase these secrets in Jerusalem.
A legend among the Hopis states that there was once a great temple city of wisdom built by the Star People, the Kachinas. Many of the Hopi clans visited this city during their respective migrations throughout the Americas and later shared stories of it when all the clans reunited at their final destination on the Hopi Mesas. This mysterious city, known as Palatkwapi, the “Red House,” was where the Star People taught important rituals and secrets of the universe that are still enacted and honored by the clans.
Over the last one hundred years there has been much speculation regarding the location of Palatkwapi. An abundance of ethnographers have located Palatkwapi in the Sedona-Verde Valley region, but there have also been other academics who have placed it much further south. Most everyone agrees, however, that the City of the Star People was someplace south of the Hopi Mesas. One Hopi legend of the Patki or Water Clan recounted by ethnographer Alexander M. Stephen in Hopi Journey states: “...no one knows just where the Red Land is, but it is someplace in the far southwest [of Hopiland].” Distance is, of course, relative, especially when you are traveling by foot.
The striking red stone of Cathedral Rock, Sedona, Arizona.
Some researchers claim that Palatkwapi was Palenque in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, which is not to the southwest of Hopiland. Outside of having once possessed buildings painted red, this jungle city seems to contradict many of the known facts regarding the “Red House.” For example, one of the definitive Hopi legends regarding Palatkwapi maintains that the city was surrounded by “high walls,” and that the city’s name “seems to be derived from a high bluff of red stone.” There are no high bluffs of red stone in Palenque, nor was its temple compound completely destroyed by an ancient deluge. If there was a major deluge in the city’s past it is recorded in the “ Maya Flood Myth ,” which is, however, an astronomical event depicted on its temple walls. Moreover, Palatkwapi’s destruction began with the burning of the pine forest surrounding it and Palenque is in the middle of a sweltering tropical jungle consisting of cedar, mahogany, and sapodilla trees. And if Palatkwapi is linked to the Mayan city of Palenque simply because of the similarity between their names, let it be known that Palenque is not the city’s original name.
Its original Mayan name was Lakamha, meaning “Big Water.” Palenque is a Spanish name given it by the Conquistadors meaning “Fortified Place.” By contrast, Sedona and the Verde Valley possess almost all the characteristics that are ascribed to Palatkwapi, and this is why the most renowned Hopi historian and ethnographer, Jesse Walter Fewkes, conclusively identified it as the location of the ancient holy city. Fewkes was so convinced of his identification that he was prompted to name one of the most heavily petroglyph-adorned Hopi ruins in the Sedona area Palatki, which is a shortened version of Palatkwapi.
One difficulty in assigning a definite location for Palatkwapi are the many recorded land routes to it. This is the result of the various Hopi clans having arrived at the Red House via divergent pathways during their migrations. However, the routes taken by most of the clans when they left Palatkwapi and traveled north to the Hopi Mesas are very consistent and in many cases identical. It is this common route that has allowed ethnographers to definitively locate ancient Palatkwapi as the Sedona-Verde Valley area. In fact, this route still exists today and is known as the Palatkwapi Trail.
After closely studying the routes taken by 30 different clans after leaving Palatkwapi and traveling to the Hopi Mesas, Jesse Fewkes and other ethnographers synthesized a “universal route.” This universal route is fully delineated in The Fourth World of the Hopis by Harold Courlander. An abridged version of it, complete with northern Arizona place names, is presented below:
The clans that went north from Palatkwapi [Sedona-Verde Valley] stopped at one place and another, building winter villages, and then moving on. It is said that they settled at a place called Kunchalpi for some years. There they rested and grew their blue corn. Old people died and children were born, and thus in time there were many for whom Palatkwapi was only a word in the mouths of the grandfathers. But one night there was a bright shooting star in the northeastern sky, and it was taken as a sign that the migration should be resumed. So the people abandoned Kunchalpi and travelled again, drifting a little to the east, until they came to a site they named Hohokyam. There they settled again, planting their fields and resting from the journey. After many years they departed from Hohokyam and moved to another place, Neuvakwiotaka, which is now known as Chavez Pass, and there they remained for a long time. And later on, after many harvests at Neuvakwiotaka, they went on until they came to the little Colorado River near where the present town of Winslow stands. There they made a settlement that they called Homolovi, Small Mound, consisting of two villages, a larger one and a smaller one. The people of the Water and Sand Clans occupied the smaller village. Sharing the larger village were the Tobacco and Rabbit clans, the Sun Clan, and various others, including the Eagle, Hawk, Turkey, and Moon clans. After a time they were joined by the Badger Clan and a group called the Reed Clan….
After many moons the various clans at Homolovi were attacked by the Apaches, who also decided to move into the area and attacked the people in their fields and took away their crops. In order to protect themselves the clans then invoked the Twin Sons, Palöngawhoya and Pöqánghoya, who then met the Apaches on the battlefield. At first the Apaches laughed at the sight of the two boys, saying “Are there no men left in Homolovi?” Then the warrior brothers slung their heavy stones and killed some of the enemy, whereupon the laughing stopped. The Apaches shot some arrows, but Palöngawhoya and Pöqánghoya moved quickly this way and that and escaped the arrows. After that the Apaches rushed forward, and now each of the brothers took out a lightning arrow and shot it. The Arrows struck with a great flash and a thunderous noise. Many of the enemy lay dead or dying on the ground. Again the Apaches attacked, and again the warrior gods loosed their lightning arrows, and the ground was now covered with corpses. Those Apaches who were still alive fled from the field…
When it became time to resume their migration from Homolovi to the promised land, some of the clans decided to split off and travel north to the San Francisco Peaks and then to Wupatki, finally completing their journey at Oraibi in the Hopi Mesas. Meanwhile, the majority of the clans remained together, journeying first to Little Ruin Mound near Walpi, then to Awatovi, and finally to Oraibi.
Kachina procession.
Building Palatkwapi
….it was the Kachinas that built Palatkwapi.
As previously mentioned, although the destruction of Palatkwapi appears to coincide with the end of the Third World the period of its initial construction is nearly impossible to pin down.
If, for example, one subscribes to the time periods known as the Hopi Worlds (A “World” is a cycle of time. Historically, there have been Four Worlds) or the Dream Time of the Australian Aborigines, then Palatkwapi could have been constructed as recently as 10,000 years ago or as anciently as a million or more years ago. This is because the “Worlds” and “Dream Time” are very inexact time periods.
Drawings of Kachina dolls, from an 1894 anthropology book.
And then there is the question of how the city could have been constructed in the distant past. If the building of the ancient megalithic circles and temples occurred during the time the Hopis refer to as the First or Second Worlds - when humans had their crown chakra wide open and remained in continual communication with the Creator - their designs could have been spontaneously implanted by the Creator into the minds of their builders. The creative “Gods” could have also received some supernatural abilities to build the temples from the same source. While constructing the temples in Sedona these “Gods” would have also been assisted by the natural earth energies of the area. The amplifying vortexual power combined with the iron and crystal-infused particles would have first magnified the thought forms of the “Gods” and then magnetically united the Sedona sand into the solid formations delineated by the builders’ mental blueprints.
Kachina Dancers.
The extent records of Palatkwapi imply that its original builders were the Kachinas. They also reveal that the city’s initial construction preceded the Fourth World.
Some Fourth World construction (or reconstruction) is, however, said to have been overseen by the Kachinas and carried out by the Hopis and/or the members of other tribes residing at Palatkwapi. States Waters:
Under the supervision of the Kachinas, Palatkwapi was built in three sections. Completely surrounded by a high wall, the first section was reserved for ceremonial purposes; the second section, adjoining it, contained storage rooms for food; and the third section comprised the living quarters for the people of all clans. Underneath all three sections ran a river.
“The ceremonial section was the most important. There were no kivas then, as there are today, divided to accommodate initiates and ceremonial participants. Instead, there were two buildings, one for the initiates and one for ceremonial purposes. The ceremonial building was four stories high, terraced like the pueblos we see today. The main door opened to the east, and there were two smaller doors facing north and south.”
The Kachina.
On the first or ground floor the Kachina people taught the initiates the history and meaning of the three previous worlds and the purpose of the Fourth World to which man had emerged. On the second floor they taught the structure and functions of the human body and that the highest function of the mind was to understand how the great spirit worked within man. The spirits or Kachina people taught this so that the people would not become evil again and this Fourth World be destroyed like the first three.
In the third story initiates were taught the workings of nature and the uses of all kinds of plant life. Although the people were still relatively pure and there was little sickness, some evils would come, bringing resultant illnesses; and for each on there was a plant remedy for the people to remember.
The fourth story was smaller than the three below, making the ceremonial building resemble a pyramid. To this top level were admitted initiates of great conscience who had acquired a deep knowledge of the laws of nature. Here they were taught the workings of the planetary system, how the stars affected the climate, the crops, and man himself. Here too they learned about the “open door” on the top of their heads, how to keep it open, and so converse with their Creator.
(Note: The “open door” or Kopavi, that the Kachinas taught the Hopis about is known in the Hindu occult system as the Sahasrara or Crown Chakra that is situated at the top of the head.)
Kachina dancers, Shongopavi pueblo, Arizona, sometime before 1900.
Year of Darkness: The Climate Cataclysm of 536 You’ve Never Heard Of
Year of Darkness: The Climate Cataclysm of 536 You’ve Never Heard Of
During 536 the world was beset by a long winter. Dubbed “the year of darkness” in the New Scientist, temperatures plummeted and the sun was dimmed by a vast fog which blocked its rays from hitting the earth during 24 hours a day over the course of 18 months. This climate cataclysm affected Europe, the Middle East and even parts of Asia over the course of the following decade. In fact, “this climatic downturn may well have profoundly altered the course of history.” But what caused this global climate cataclysm?
References in Historic Texts to a Global Climatic Cataclysm
Back in 2018, Science reported that the medieval historian Michael McCormick had stated that 536 “was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year.” In his historical work Historiae Ecclesiasticae , translating as “Church Histories”, the 6th century historian and church leader John of Ephesus wrote that “ the sun became dark and its darkness lasted for 18 months.”
Between the years 535 and 536, a series of major climatic events took place that could easily be described as a global cataclysm with catastrophic consequences. “Each day, it [the sun] shone for about four hours, and still this light was only a feeble shadow. Everyone declared that the sun would never recover its full light again,” detailed Ephesus.
In fact, according to Brandon Specktor in LiveScience, “the fall of the Roman Empire may have been a partial result of the decade of famine and plague that began in A.D. 536.” The fall in temperatures was in fact the beginning of the coldest decade to have been experienced during the last 2,000 years.
These low temperatures, falling as low as 1.5 C in summer time for example, led to crop failures and famine recorded across the world. Just a few years later, in 541 AD, Justinian’s Plague killed as many as 100 million people throughout the Mediterranean, a dire time to be alive indeed.
Destruction from The Course of Empire, by Thomas Cole.
John of Ephesus is not the only writer to mention this climate cataclysm. Procopius, who lived between 500 and 565 AD and was a late antiquities Byzantine scholar and historian, also refers to the strange behavior of the sun during 536 AD.
Believing it to be a bad sign foretelling coming events, Procopius stated “and it came about during this year that a most dread portent took place. For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during this whole year, and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear.”
Another reference to the climate cataclysm of 536 comes from the 6th century writer Zacharias of Mytilene, who authored a chronicle that contains a section referring to the “Dark Sun” between 535 and 536 AD.
The sun began to be darkened by day and the moon by night, while the ocean was tumultuous with spray from the 24th of March in this year till the 24th of June in the following year... And, as the winter was a severe one, so much so that from the large and unwonted quantity of snow the birds perished... there was distress... among men... from the evil things.”
Zacharias of Mytilene (Chronicle, 9.19, 10.1)
These three extracts are just a representative sample of numerous accounts from all over the world, written during the era in question. In all cases, the sun was described as getting dimmer and losing its light. Many also described it as having a bluish color.
The effects were also observed with the moon. It simply wasn’t as bright anymore. The reduction of the light resulted in the reduction of heat on the planet. A lack of rain and a very long winter resulted in crop failures and for birds and other wildlife to perish, as Zacharias of Mytilene writes. Famine and plagues struck many areas and there were a huge number of deaths.
In China and Japan, the event was also recorded in great detail. With scarce water, there were massive droughts and death followed. Hundreds of thousands of square miles became infertile. The Beishi chronicles, the official history of the Northern Dynasties, mentions that in the province of Xi’an 80% of the population died and the survivors ate corpses to survive. The year was 536.
The catastrophic event also struck Korea, the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Australia. While written records do not exist for all countries, archaeological and geological data revealed evidence of the climatic changes. Studies done on the trunks of trees, for example, showed that 536 AD had been the coldest in 1,500 years.
The important question in all of this is why did it happen? While there are no definite answers for the climate cataclysm of 536, one theory put forward for the worst year in history is that there was a large asteroid or comet impact which landed in the sea (if it had hit land there would be evidence of a crater).
Geologist Dallas Abbott is one proponent of this view and bases his view on evidence that he found studying ice cores from Greenland . However, this wouldn’t explain the dim light of the sun, and no tsunamis have been recorded for this period, which would have occurred if an asteroid landed in the ocean.
Another theory that has been put forward is a gigantic volcanic eruption , as the dust thrown up into the atmosphere could have caused the dimming of the light. One candidate is Krakatoa, located between the islands of Java and Sumatra in Indonesia. Indeed, the Pustaka Raja Purwa (meaning “Book of the Ancient Kings”) written in 1869, describes an ancient volcano.
There was a furious shaking of the earth, total darkness, thunder and lighting… Then came forth a furious gale together with torrential rain and a deadly storm darkened the entire world… When the waters subsided it could be seen that the island of Java had been split into two, this creating the island of Sumatra.
Although this manuscript refers to the year 416 AD and not 535 AD, the fact that it was written in the 19th century could account for inaccuracies in the time reference.
On the left: The ice core drilling site at Colle Gnifetti in Switzerland. On the right: A section of the ice core used to decipher evidence about the climate cataclysm of 536.
Searching for Answers: Understanding the Climate Cataclysm of 536
Whether or not a definitive answer will ever be found is unknown, but that hasn’t stopped scientists from trying to find one. One thing that is quite peculiar about this global climate cataclysm is that it is a virtually unknown event.
Why is it that this climatic event is not taught in schools? Why isn’t there a plethora of research examining it? Perhaps it is because it reminds us of our fragility as human beings and the fact that no matter how powerful and “advanced” mankind becomes, we are still at the mercy of nature.
While historians have known about this climate cataclysm for a long time, they have remained puzzled as to its causes. In 2018, the analysis of a 72-meter-long (253 foot) core of ice from a glacier in the Swiss Alps , which serves as a logbook of naturally occurring and human created events, has concluded that an immense volcanic eruption in Iceland spread ash throughout the Northern Hemisphere in 536. There were two more eruptions in 540 and 547. Their results were published in the journal Antiquity.
But, why does a volcanic eruption affect global temperatures? “When a volcano erupts, it spews sulfur, bismuth, and other substances high into the atmosphere, where they form an aerosol veil that reflects the sun's light back into space, cooling the planet,” explains Ann Gibbons in Science.
According to the Antiquity study, by 640 the ice core shows traces of lead, which they concluded is evidence of a so-called “silver-smelting boom.” Live Science explains that this silver boom is a sure sign of “an economy rebounding in the darkness of starving, disease-stricken Europe, and the emergence of a new merchant class ready to trade in precious metals.” Humanity began to recover from the dire effects of climatic conditions of 536.
Top image: 536 was a year of climate cataclysm. Winter landscape by Caspar David Friedrich.
Earliest Maya Calendar Fragment Found in Guatemala
Earliest Maya Calendar Fragment Found in Guatemala
A new study published in the journal Science Advances has announced the discovery of the earliest known use of the Maya calendar. This discovery of the glyph “7 Deer” on mural fragments from deep inside a pyramid at the San Bartolo archaeological site in the jungles of northern Guatemala indicates that the calendar was in use even as far back as between 300 and 200 BC. Until now the earliest evidence of its use found elsewhere in Guatemalawas dated to the first century BC, according to a Reuters report.
The mural fragment containing “7 Deer”, at top.
(Karl Taube / Proyecto Regional Arqueológico San Bartolo – Xultun)
Maya Calendar Glyph Amongst 7,000-Piece “Jigsaw”
The San Bartolo archaeological site shot into news in 2001 for the discovery of a new semi-hidden Maya city, reports the newspaper El Pais . The San Bartolo complex contained a pyramid that consisted of a series of temples, each larger than the last, built one atop the other till the structure eventually reached a height of about 100 feet (30 m).
The pyramid found in San Bartolo was named Las Pinturas (meaning “the paintings”) after the still intact murals depicting scenes from Maya mythology found in the topmost chamber. It is from the center of the pyramid that the team encountered over 7,000 mural fragments from an earlier era. In fact, radiocarbon dating has concluded that these fragments date back to between 300 and 200 BC.
Mural fragment depicting Maya calendar glyph and illustration showing the visible “7 Deer” day sign.
(Heather Hurst & David Stuart / Proyecto Regional Arqueológico San Bartolo – Xultun)
Some of the fragments are as small as a fingernail and others measure up to 8-by-16 inches (20-by-40 cm). They have been dubbed by anthropology professor and study co-author Heather Hurst of Skidmore College in New York state as a “a giant jigsaw puzzle.”
After 10 years of trying to fit together the pieces of the 7,000-piece jigsaw, the researchers have now discovered that two of the fragments add up to the “7 Deer” glyph of the Maya 260-day Tzolk’in divinatory calendar , according to the website Gizmodo.
University of Texas professor of Mesoamerican art and writing David Stuart, who is lead author of the research, described the fragments as “two small pieces of white plaster that would fit in your hand, that were once attached to a stone wall,” according to Reuters. “The two pieces fit together and have black painted calligraphy, opening with the date ‘7 Deer.’ The rest is hard to read,” he went on to say.
The deliberate knocking down of older structures and building newer ones atop them was once a pretty widely prevalent Maya construction practice. “When a new structure is made, they bury the old one. It doesn't just break and is thrown away, it's something sacred, as if they were burying the family,” Boris Beltrán, co-director of the San Bartolo-Xultun Regional Archaeological Project is quoted as saying by El Pais .
“When painting an image, the Mayans believed that the act of painting brought the figure to life,” explained his colleague Heather Hurst. “So when the end of its use came, they had to remove it with respect.”
7 Deer: Project members publish a mural fragment that bears earliest datable evidence of the 260-day Maya calendar in Science Advances today!
— Proyecto Regional Arqueológico San Bartolo-Xultun (@SbxProject) April 13, 2022
Understanding the Sacred Maya Calendar
The 260-day Tzolk’in calendar is one of many inter-related ways that the advanced Mesoamerican Maya civilization structured time. There was also a 365-day solar year, a larger system called the “Long Count” and a lunar year. The 260-day Tzolk’in calendar is a sacred calendar that is still followed by some indigenous communities today, according to Science Alert .
There are no months in this calendar and days are named from 1 to 20 in a set order and are represented by glyphs. They repeat 13 times a year in a cyclical fashion. Some of the other days are named 8 Stars, 9 Jade/Water, 10 Dogs and 11 Monkeys. “This calendar system has lasted for at least 2,200 years, maintained by the Maya during times of incredible change, stress and tragedy,” Stuart said, reports Reuters.
The Mayan writing system consisted of 800 glyphs and the earliest evidence of its use so far also comes from San Bartolo. The glyphic notations found on 11 of the 7,000 mural fragments suggest that well-developed writing and artistic systems were already in place among the Maya by this time and the calendar had been in use for several years.
“The scribal tradition represented in these 11 fragments is diverse, expressive, their technology for paint preparation and calligraphic fluidity is impressive – this was a well-established tradition of writing and art,” Reuters quotes Hurst as saying. She also said that other sites should provide more examples, perhaps even earlier examples.
The Maya were an astonishingly advanced people who built temples, observatories, palaces and pyramids and had sophisticated farming without using metal tools or the wheel. San Bartolo dates to the Maya Preclassic period from 400 BC to AD 250. The Preclassic period was followed by the Classic period when Mayan culture flourished and cities like Tikal in Guatemala, Palenque in Mexico and Copan in Honduras were created.
Before the San Bartolo “7 Deer” discovery, the calendar system of 260 days was believed to have originated elsewhere, in Oaxaca. But the new evidence is just as old and throws open the question of place of origin. Experts hope that the San Bartolo site will open a window to further understanding of the development of ancient Maya astronomical and writing traditions and it will therefore continue to be researched for many years to come.
Top image:Left; Maya Calendar representation ( Niciak/ Adobe Stock), Right; Mural fragment depicting Maya calendar glyph and illustration showing the visible “7 Deer” day sign. Source: Heather Hurst & David Stuart / Proyecto Regional Arqueológico San Bartolo – Xultun
Long before the Incas rose to power in Peru and began to celebrate their sun god, a little known civilization was building the earliest known astronomical observatory in the Americas.
While not quite as old as sites like Stonehenge, these ancient ruins, known as Chankillo, are considered a "masterpiece of human creative genius", holding unique features not seen anywhere else in the world.
Based in the coastal desert of Peru, the archaeological site famously contains a row of 13 stone towers, which together trace the horizon of a hill, north to south, like a toothy bottom grin.
The Thirteen Towers of Chankillo.
(David Edgar/Wikipedia/CC BY-SA 3.0)
Apart from this remarkable structure, known as the Thirteen Towers, the ruins of the observatory also include a triple-walled hilltop complex called the Fortified Temple and two building complexes called the Observatory and the Administrative Center.
Completed over 2,300 years ago and abandoned in the first century of the common era, the site has remained a mystery to travelers for centuries.
Against a barren desert landscape and in broad daylight, the hilltop stone structures, which span roughly 300 meters (980 feet), don't look like much. But it's another story at dawn and dusk.
As the Sun rises in the east, an orb of light emerges somewhere along the ridge of towers. As the year proceeds, so too does the position of the sunrise, almost as though the light is flossing the toothy horizon.
On the summer solstice, for example, the sunrise emerges to the right of the rightmost tower. Whereas on the winter solstice, the sunrise emerges to the left of the leftmost tower.
The Towers of Chankillo were so carefully placed, that when an onlooker stands at a specific observation point below the ridge, they can predict the time of year within two or three days based just on sunrise or sunset. The observation point looking west towards the ridge – this is the Observatory structure – uses the sunset. At what's thought to be the east observation point, all that's left is the incomplete stone outline of a room, but it's in a symmetrical location and would have used the sunrise.
The September equinox, for example, is defined when the Sun sets between the sixth and the seventh tower, as captured in the image below.
The ancient civilization that designed the solar observatory is barely known, but it would have been one of the oldest cultures in the Americas. In fact, this culture predates the Inca culture, which also excelled at astronomy, by more than 1,000 years.
Because the Chankillo ruins attributed to this civilization are based in the coastal desert between Peru's Casma River and the Sechin river, the original builders are now known as the Casma-Sechin culture.
According to archaeological excavations, the observatory was probably built sometime between 500 and 200 BCE. Then, for some reason, the site was abandoned, and the towers fell into disrepair. In their heyday, archaeologists say the structures would have been plastered yellow, ochre or white and painted with graffiti or fingerprints.
Even when stripped of decoration and falling apart, however, the remains of these stone towers still faithfully record the days of the year. Conservation efforts are now under way to uphold the accuracy of the ancient calendar.
In 2021, the Chankillo Archaeoastronomical Complex officially joined the UNESCO World Heritage List for its outstanding craftsmanship and its insight into the worldview of ancient societies.
"Unlike architectural alignments upon a single astronomical target found at many ancient sites around the world, the line of towers spans the entire annual solar rising and setting arcs as viewed, respectively, from two distinct observation points, one of which is still clearly visible above ground," reads the UNESCO description.
"The solar observatory at Chankillo is thus a testimony of the culmination of a long historical evolution of astronomical practices in the Casma Valley."
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Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
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Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
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