Category Archives: EUROPE

EUROPE, FRANCE, WORLD

Why There Are Six Million Skeletons Stuffed Into The Tunnels Beneath Paris

Why There Are Six Million Skeletons Stuffed Into The Tunnels Beneath Paris

One of his mysterious entrances into the French capital Paris should you be closely looking for. But if you trip over it, it shows a dark and dank and narrow tunnel underground world with a fascinating history.

The bones of 6 million people known as the French Empire of the Dead a reality brought to life in the recent CNN movie-lie underneath the City of Light where 12 million people are living there.

The Paris catacombs are a 200-mile network of old caves, tunnels, and quarries – and much of it is filled with the skulls and bones of the dead.

Much of the catacombs are out of bounds to the public, making it illegal to explore unsupervised. But nevertheless, it is a powerful draw for a hardcore group of explorers with a thirst for adventure.

A tourist-friendly, the legal entrance can be found off Place Denfert-Rochereau in the 14th arrondissement of Paris, near the Montparnasse district.

Here, visitors from all over the world can descend into the city’s dark and dank bowels for a whistle-stop tour of a small section of the catacombs.

One visitor told CNN: ‘I think people are fascinated with death. They don’t know what it’s about and you see all these bones stacked up, and the people that have come before us, and it’s fascinating. We’re trying to find our past and it’s crazy and gruesome and fun all at the same time.’

Why There Are Six Million Skeletons Stuffed Into The Tunnels Beneath Paris
The macabre mosaics lining the walls of the underground network are the remains of 6million former Parisians

The well-worn trail might be enough to satisfy the tourists, but other Parisians like to go further – and deeper – to explore the network. The name given to the group of explorers who go into the cave network illegally and unsupervised is Cataphiles.

The top-secret groups go deep underground, using hidden entrances all over the city. And they sometimes stay for days at a time, equipped with headlamps and home-made maps.

Street names are etched into the walls to help explorers navigate their way around the underground version of the city and some groups have even been known to throw parties in the tunnels or drink wine.

For catacomb devotees, the silence experienced deep in tunnels cannot be replicated anywhere else.

Urban explorer Loic Antoine-Gambeaud told CNN: ‘I think it’s in the collective imagination. Everybody knows that there is something below Paris; that something goes on that’s mysterious. But I don’t think many people have even an idea of what the underground is like.’

Empire of the dead: While much of the 200-mile network is out of bounds, a small section is open to tourists

Those caught exploring unauthorized sections of the network could end up out of pocket. Police tasked with patrolling the tunnels have the power to hand out fines of 60 euros to anyone caught illegally roaming the network.

A by-product of the early development of Paris, the catacombs were subterranean quarries which were established as limestone was extracted deep underground to build the city above.

However, a number of streets collapsed as the quarries weakened parts of the city’s foundations. Repairs and reinforcements were made and the network went through several transformations throughout history.

However, it wasn’t until the 18th century that the catacombs became known as the Empire of the Dead when they became the solution to overcrowding in the city’s cemeteries.

The number of dead bodies buried in Paris’s cemeteries and beneath its churches was so great that they began breaking through the walls of people’s cellars and causing serious health concerns.

So the human remains were transferred to the underground quarries in the early 1780s. There are now more than 6million people underground.

Space was the perfect solution to ease overcrowding in cemeteries but it presented disadvantages elsewhere. It is the reason there are few tall buildings in Paris; large foundations cannot be built because the catacombs are directly under the city’s streets.

The tunnels also played their part in the Second World War. Parisian members of the French Resistance used the winding tunnels and German soldiers also set up an underground bunker in the catacombs, just below the 6th arrondissement.

EUROPE, GREECE, WORLD

Newly-Discovered Remains Suggest Earliest Humans Came From Europe, Not Africa

Newly-Discovered Remains Suggest Earliest Humans Came From Europe, Not Africa

For 200,000 years on earth has been Homo sapien, give or take a few ten-thousand-year stretches. Much of that time is shrouded in the fog of prehistory.

Everything we know has been assembled into the principles of evolutionary theory by deciphering fossil record. Nonetheless, new discoveries have the ability to refresh their information and bring researchers to new results that have not yet been considered.

This may just have happened a set of 8 million years old teeth. The upper and lower jaw of an ancient European ape was recently examined by scientists.

Their findings suggest that the forebears of mankind may have originated in Europe before migrating to Africa, potentially upending a scientific consensus that has stood since Darwin’s day.

Rethinking humanity’s origin story

The frontispiece of Thomas Huxley’s Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863) sketched by natural history artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins.

As reported in New Scientist, the 8- to 9-million-year-old hominin jawbones were found at Nikiti, northern Greece, in the ’90s.

This upper mandible was found in Nikiti, northern Greece

Scientists originally pegged the chompers as belonging to a member of Ouranopithecus, a genus of an extinct Eurasian ape.

David Begun, an anthropologist at the University of Toronto, and his team recently reexamined the jawbones.

They argue that the original identification was incorrect. Based on the fossil’s hominin-like canines and premolar roots, they identify that the ape belongs to a previously unknown proto-hominin.

The researchers hypothesize that these proto-hominins were the evolutionary ancestors of another European great ape Graecopithecus, which the same team tentatively identified as an early hominin in 2017.

Graecopithecus lived in south-east Europe 7.2 million years ago. If the premise is correct, these hominins would have migrated to Africa 7 million years ago, after undergoing much of their evolutionary development in Europe.

Begun points out that south-east Europe was once occupied by the ancestors of animals like the giraffe and rhino, too.

“It’s widely agreed that this was the found fauna of most of what we see in Africa today,” he told New Scientists. “If the antelopes and giraffes could get into Africa 7 million years ago, why not the apes?”

He recently outlined this idea at a conference of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.

It’s worth noting that Begun has made similar hypotheses before. Writing for the Journal of Human Evolution in 2002, Begun and Elmar Heizmann of the Natural history Museum of Stuttgart discussed a great ape fossil found in Germany that they argued could be the ancestor (broadly speaking) of all living great apes and humans.

“Found in Germany 20 years ago, this specimen is about 16.5 million years old, some 1.5 million years older than similar species from East Africa,” Begun said in a statement then.

“It suggests that the great ape and human lineage first appeared in Eurasia and not in Africa.”

EUROPE, WORLD

Real-Life Excalibur Found Underwater In Bosnia – Medieval Sword In Stone Pulled Out

Real-Life Excalibur Found Underwater In Bosnia – Medieval Sword In Stone Pulled Out

A 700-year-old sword stuck in the solid rock was pulled out. Credit: Igor Radojicic, the mayor of nearby Banja Luja, the second-largest city in Bosnia

The 700-year-old weapon is being compared to King Arthur’s legendary magical sword because of similarities in how it was discovered.

According to ancient legend, King Arthur was the only person able to pull a sword called Excalibur from a stone, making him the rightful heir to Britain in the 5th and early 6th centuries.

We haven’t been able to locate King Arthur’s legendary sword, but this discovery is stunning, nevertheless.

The archaeologists who recently pulled the 14th-century sword from the Vrbas River will not be getting a royal status but their find is being called archaeologically significant.

Archaeologists report they have pulled a Medieval sword embedded in rock at the bottom of the Vrbas River in Bosnia.

Igor Radojicic, the mayor of nearby Banja Luja, the second-largest city in Bosnia

The 700-year-old sword was found 36 feet underwater, stuck in a rock while archaeologists were excavating a nearby castle.

Only one other sword like this is thought to have been found in the Balkans in the past 90 years.

According to Ivana Pandzic, archaeologist and curator at the Museum of the Republika Srpska said: “The sword was stuck in solid rock, so special care was needed when pulling it out.

The blade has been dated back to around the 14 century and is the first sword to be found near the medieval city of Zveča.

The medieval castle nearby was destroyed in 1777 but had likely been home to medieval nobility who ruled over the local village of Zvecaj.

“Janko Vracar, a historian of the Republika Srpska Museum, the main museum in the mainly Serb entity of Bosnia, told the media that the sword was of a type used from the end of the 13th to the first half of the 15th century, based on analysis of the blade,” Balkan Insight reports.

Experts are now trying to work out how the weapon came to be embedded in the rock and why.

EUROPE, NORWAY, WORLD

6,000-Year-Old Pre-Viking Artifacts Discovered in Norway as Climate Change Melts Glaciers

6,000-Year-Old Pre-Viking Artifacts Discovered in Norway as Climate Change Melts Glaciers

Over thousands of years, ancient objects hidden in snow and ice in the Norwegian mountains appear at an unprecedented rate, with archeologists trying to gather them all before it is too late.

The research results were remarkable: iron arrowheads from 1,500 years old, tunics from the Iron Age and even the remains of the wooden ski with leather binding left somewhere behind sometime in the year 700.

The cause behind the rapid emergence of these old relics is climate change, which dramatically reduces the alpine ice, which is a time capsule for lost treasures, by low natural snow and hotter summers.

Lars Pilö, an archeologist who works for the county council of Oppland, told Archaeology in 2013 that “ice is a time machine.” “When you’re really lucky, the artifacts are exposed for the first time since they were lost.”

Unlike glaciers, which tend to crush and grind objects as they move down a mountain, the majority of artifacts coming out of Norway are being recovered from ice patches.

These isolated non-moving accumulations of ice and snow are significant to the archeological record because of their extreme stability, with many containing layers of seasonal snowpack dating back thousands of years.

Sections of ice in the Juvfonne snow patch in Jotunheimen, Norway, are an astounding 7,600 years old, according to a 2017 study.

An Iron Age tunic recovered from the Lendbreen ice patch in August 2011. 

Despite their remote setting and scarce visits from modern-day humans, ice patches for thousands of years were veritable hot spots for ancient hunters.

In the summer, reindeer herds often crowd together on the islands of snow and ice to escape pesky, biting botflies, which have a strong aversion to the cooler temperatures. In the past, hunters would follow, losing or forgetting precious equipment along the way that was later buried and preserved in the winter snows.

Some items, such as the 1,600-year-old knife shown in the video below, look as if they were lost only a few decades ago.

Because ice patches in the past have contracted and expanded due to temperature shifts, many of the objects recovered have likely one time or another been exposed and then reburied by snow and ice. They also have a tendency to be carried by meltwater.

As explained on the Secrets of the Ice Facebook page, the 2,600-year-old arrows shown in the image below were washed downslope far from the place they were originally lost.

Arrows discovered in the scree of an ice patch were later determined to date back to 600 B.C.

Some of the most exciting finds are those objects found emerging from the surface of the ice, a sign that they have previously been untouched by melting, according to researchers from the Oppland County Council.

These artifacts are generally exceptionally preserved, with organic materials such as leather and fabric still present. It’s also an indication of the severity of anthropogenic global warming, with certain ice patches in Norway estimated to have retreated to levels last seen during the Stone Age.

“It’s very impressive when you can say this melting ice is 5,000 years old, and this is the only moment in the last 7,000 years that the ice has been retreating,” Albert Hafner, an archaeologist at the University of Bernsays Hafner, told Archaeology. “Ice is the most emotional way to show climate change.”

The preserved remains of a 3400-year-old hide shoe discovered on an ice patch in 2006. Over the last 30 years, some 2,000 artifacts have been recovered from Norway’s melting ice fields.

Unfortunately for archaeologists, the rate of ice loss coupled with the extremely small annual windows of opportunity to scour the alpine patches means some newly exposed items will break down and disappear before anyone has a chance to study them.

“This material is like the library of Alexandria. It is incredibly valuable and it’s on fire now,” George Hambrecht, an anthropologist at the University of Maryland, College Park, told New Scientist.

Right now you might be thinking, “I want to help find and preserve these incredible artifacts!,” and we agree, it sounds like quite the adventure to take a romp into the Norwegian wilderness and possibly stumble upon a well-preserved Viking Sword (see below). The reality, however, is that fieldwork can sometimes be laborious and uncomfortable, with every day at the mercy of Mother Nature’s fickle moods.

That said, the Oppland County Council did accept volunteers last spring and it’s possible, especially with so many finds emerging from the ice each year, that others may be called upon to assist.

“We may not find much (or we could strike the jackpot, who knows),” Lars Pilø wrote last April in the Secrets blog. “It all depends on the melting conditions, and they develop over the summer and during fieldwork. If we are unlucky, the scenery and the team spirit make up for the lack of finds.”

A Viking sword discovered in 2017 and dating back to c. AD 850-950.
ENGLAND, EUROPE, WORLD

‘One of the greatest finds’: experts shed light on Staffordshire hoard

‘One of the greatest finds’: experts shed light on Staffordshire hoard

A collection of Anglo-Saxon gold artifacts known as the Staffordshire hoard has been hailed as ‘one of the greatest finds of British archaeology’ by researchers.

The archaeologist believes the booty originated in a series of Dark Age battlefields, during conflicts between rival English kingdoms. now they believe they were captured in several big mid-seventh century battles.

The gold, dubbed the Staffordshire Hoard, may have been recovered at up to six major military encounters. It is said that this treasure was taken from Northumbria, East Anglia and possibly Wessex by the English Midland kingdom of Mercia.

The collection-the greatest golden treasure ever found – is one of the most important archaeological discoveries ever made in Britain.

'One of the greatest finds': experts shed light on Staffordshire hoard
Dr. Fern believes the items were taken from Northumbria and East England by Mercian armies from a kingdom in the center of what is now England, The Guardian reports

In an area in south-eastern Staffordshire, archäologists will publish a complete account after ten years ‘ detailed research of hundreds of high-status gold and silver artifacts that a metal detector found a decade ago.

The resulting book, published by the world’s oldest historical organization, describes all of the hoard’s 700 objects, including 4kg of gold items and 1.7kg of silver.

The ancient artifacts amazingly do not seem to reflect the wide range of gold and silver artifacts that would have existed in Anglo-Saxon society.

Research instead suggests the material is almost exclusively military in nature.

Even one of the small number of ecclesiastical objects in the hoard appears to have been of a potential military character. Highlights of the Staffordshire Hoard include golden fittings from up to 150 swords, gold and garnet elements of a high-status fighting knife.

Other notable items include a spectacular gilded silver helmet, an impressive 30cm-long golden cross, a beautiful gold and garnet pectoral cross, a probable bishop’s headdress and what is thought to have been a portable battlefield shrine.

A reconstruction of a gold helmet from the period.

An extraordinarily ornate bishop’s headdress is the world’s earliest surviving example of high-status ecclesiastical headgear.

Dating from the mid-seventh century AD, its presence in an otherwise predominantly military hoard suggests its religious owner may well have been performing a supporting role on a battlefield.

The headdress bears no resemblance to later medieval or modern bishops’ miters and will likely trigger debate among historians as to its stylistic origins, due to its similarity to those worn by early medieval clerics.

The discovery may, therefore, prompt scholarly speculation that the style of headwear worn by senior Christian priests in the early medieval period could have been at least partly inspired by perceived biblical precedent.

The headdress, crafted in gold and inlaid with garnets and white and dark red glass, dates from the period when Christianity was being re-established across many of the local kingdoms that would eventually become England.

It represents the status and prestige of the Church – but, significantly, it is decorated with typical pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon semi-abstract animal designs as well as seven Christian crosses.

If indeed the archaeologists are right in believing it to be potentially an early-to-mid-seventh century bishop’s headdress, it would have been worn, perhaps during royal or other ceremonial events, by the first or second generation of clergy involved in the re-Christianisation of what is now England.

The portable shrine, potentially presided over by the owner of the headdress or a similar senior cleric, was probably designed to be carried into battle on two horizontal poles. Only seven elements of the shrine, all made of gold, have survived.

EUROPE, NORWAY, WORLD

Divers exploring a shipwreck share video of encounter with enormous alien-like egg sac

Divers exploring a shipwreck share video of encounter with enormous alien-like egg sac

The deep seas reveal the most alien-looking life we will ever have without leaving Earth. Over and over. This was exactly the case at the recent water dive in the vicinity of Ørstafjorden, Norway.

While discovering a shipwreck of the Second World War, according to the BBC, sailors were on their way back, when they stumbled upon a mysterious translucent orb floating just 50 feet above the ocean floor.

At first sight, the giant blob looking totally alien, with a tissue-like material inside it — as large as the strange divers swimming around it — looks.  One of the researchers documented the strange encounter on video.

As it turned out, the otherworldly-looking object was actually a giant squid egg sac.

In the two-and-a-half minute recording of the encounter, divers Ronald Raasch and Nils Baadnes can be seen curiously circling the enormous ball, which appeared translucent in the cloudy water.

As they inspected the orb closer, they shined their flashlights onto the surface of the object’s exterior — illuminating the silhouettes of the swarms of tiny, maggot-like creatures wriggling around inside. The egg sac was likely carrying thousands of baby squids.

The official account for the researchers’ REV ocean vessel tweeted out the full video of the encounter, complete with the divers’ conclusions about the strange-looking orb: “#Mysterysolved! Captain Baadnes & Ronald Raasch discovered this giant gel ball while diving in Orstafjord, which is actually an eggmass of 10-armed.”

These egg masses are very rarely glimpsed because the sacs fill up with water and sink down toward the bottom of the ocean floor, where it is difficult for divers to reach.

But this latest sighting in the deep waters off the shores of Norway isn’t the first time that marine researchers have unexpectedly crossed paths with these giant jelly nurseries.

In 2015, squid expert Danna Staaf captured her encounter with a 13-foot-wide red flying squid egg mass while diving in the Gulf of California. In the subsequently-released study, Staaf noted that the giant egg sac likely functioned as a protective shield for the squid embryos inside it, keeping them safe from predators and parasites.

“We know that mama squid has these special glands in her body that make jelly and she mixes that jelly with her eggs in some way,” Staaf explained in a video published by National Geographic.

“And it’s concentrated. So when she produces it, it’s just a concentrated ball of snot with eggs in it, basically. We don’t know exactly what the chemicals are but they have some reaction, some ability to absorb water and expand in water. And we’ve all seen artificial chemicals like that… but this is just nature’s version of that.”

Todarodes sagittatus, the European flying squid that lives in the Norwegian Sea and which might have been the species that laid the egg sac in question.

The elastic nature of the egg sac is also believed to help maintain enough space between each squid embryo so that each egg can get enough oxygen to somehow support the development of the baby squids.

When Staaf and her team tried to grow young squid inside the laboratory using in vitro fertilization, the embryos — grown without the protective egg sac from their mother — became infected and were unable to mature properly.

One unsolved question still remains from Baadnes’ and Raasch’s recent egg encounter: Which species of squid did the egg sac come from? Although the REV account attributed the eggs to a “10-armed squid,” there are no known squid species with that many tentacles.

It’s difficult to pinpoint which species may have laid the giant egg sac. For one, several different species lay their eggs inside similar jelly-like protectors. The egg sacs between different species aren’t easily distinguishable simply by looking at them, either.

The baby squid visible within the egg sac.

Some possible species known to live in the Norwegian waters are the Boreoatlantic armhook squid (Gonatus fabricii) and the European flying squid (Todarodes sagittatus), but we’ll never know for sure where this enormous egg mass came from.

There is much that scientists still don’t know about these elusive sea creatures and how they breed, and the little we know about these animals might as well make them alien to us after all.

EUROPE, ITALY, WORLD

‘Lovers of Modena’ Buried Hand-in-Hand Turn Out to Be Men

‘Lovers of Modena’ Buried Hand-in-Hand Turn Out to Be Men

The investigators have shown that a skeleton couple found holding their hands at a tomb in Italy were both men.

When it was discovered in Modena’s Ciro Menotti cemetery in 2009, the skeletons made global headlines.

Their gender could not be determined because it was poorly preserved but it was widely believed that they were a man and a woman.

The University of Bologna and Modena researchers rejected that presumption by testing proteins in their tooth enamel and finding a peptide present only in men in both cases.

But researchers have been able to test proteins on tooth enamel using a new technique to reveal that male skeletons of the 4-6 th century AD are male.

The relationship between the pair remains a mystery, however, researchers say the couple was buried hand-in-hand on purpose.

Some suggest the skeletons – who were of similar age – could be related, such as brothers or cousins.

Other researchers claim they could have been soldiers who died in battle and the burial site was a war cemetery.  

This is the first time two men have been found buried holding hands, researchers at the University of Bologna revealed in Nature journal. 

Using a new technique, researchers were able to test the protein on tooth enamel to reveal the 4-6th Century AD skeletons were male

It is not known if the pair were homosexual, however, it is unlikely that the nature of their relationship would be recognized so clearly by the people who prepared the burial. 

‘At present, there are no other burials of this type,’ Study author Federico Lugli told Italy’s Rai news site. 

‘In the past several graves were found with pairs of individuals laid hand in hand, but in all cases, it was a man and a woman.

What was the link between the two individuals of the Modena burial, instead, remains for the moment a mystery’. 

The new discovery could now help researchers understand ancient funeral practices in Italy. 

EUROPE, ITALY, ROMANIA, WORLD

Ancient Romans Used Molten Iron to Repair Streets Before Vesuvius Erupted

Ancient Romans Used Molten Iron to Repair Streets Before Vesuvius Erupted

Whilst mostly related to the Vesuvius eruption, Pompeii’s legacy goes beyond the catastrophe and takes account of a vast chapter in history, from pre-Roman temples to astounding frescoes.

As it turns out, the legacy also boasts its fair share of innovative features, as was identified by independent scholars and researchers from the University of Massachusetts and the University of Texas.

To that end, according to a recent paper published in the American Journal of Archaeology in April, the Romans made use of molten iron to repair streets inside Pompeii before the Vesuvius eruption in circa 79 AD.

The study was carried out in 2014, with the assessment revealing how many of Pompeii’s streets were originally paved with stone. But over time, the passage of carts and carriages made their literal marks on the paths, thereby creating small depressions and ruts.

One particular case study revealed how a busy narrow stone-paved street inside the ancient city could get broken down in a matter of few decades.

Now while one of the straightforward solutions entailed repaving these sections with stones, the predicament related to how the process was not only time-consuming but also expensive.

So with typical Roman ingenuity, the ancient repairers tried their hand at an offbeat solution – in the form of pouring molten iron (or heated iron slag) to fill the gaps in the dilapidated streets. Suffice it to say, the molten state rapidly turned into a hardened form after being directed into these ruts and holes, thereby plugging the gaps.

On occasions, the Romans also used ground-up fragments of ceramics and terracotta, along with stone bits, to further fill the ruts and smooth them over.

Now while this solution was relatively cheap and seemingly straightforward, researchers are not certain of how the process of carrying and pouring the hot iron was conducted.

To that end, the iron slag, depending on its type and purity, had to be heated at a very high temperature ranging between 2,012 and 2,912 degrees Fahrenheit (1,100 to 1,600 degrees Celsius).

Interestingly enough, reconstructed models of ancient Roman furnaces have proved how some of the installations could reach such blisteringly hot temperatures.

Furthermore, the archaeologists had noted the deposit residues of heated iron on disparate places on the streets that didn’t need repairing, thus suggesting how the molten iron was sometimes even accidentally dropped during the renovation process.

Judging by such seemingly hasty and offhand techniques, according to one researcher, the dangerous repairing works entailing molten iron were possibly carried by state-sanctioned public slaves (under the directive of the magistrates).

And lastly, the scientists are also trying to analyze the iron composition within many of these Pompeii streets, which, in turn, could provide clues concerning the sources or the locations of the mines during the Roman times.