Category Archives: WORLD

Newly Identified Inscription Names Ancient Greek Students

Newly Identified Inscription Names Ancient Greek Students

Experts in the UK have discovered that an ancient Greek marble slab which had spent more than a century in storage is inscribed with the names of graduates of the Ephebic College, an elite military academy that prepared young Athenian men for adulthood, British broadcaster ITV reported on Thursday.

“On seeing it we realized that this was not a copy of an already known inscription, but it was a completely unique new discovery which had been in the storerooms of the [National Museum of Scotland] for a very long time, since the 1880s, and it listed a group of young men who called themselves co-ephebes or co-cadets and friends,” Dr Peter Liddel, a professor of Greek history and epigraphy at the University of Manchester, told ITV.

“It turned out to be a list of the cadets for one particular year during the period 41-54 AD, the reign of Claudius, and it gives us new names, names we’d never come across before in ancient Greek, and it also gives us among the earliest evidence for non-citizens taking part in the ephebate in this period,” added Liddel, who led the team that made the discovery.

Similar to a “graduate school yearbook,” the marble slab would probably have been displayed in the college and was intended to “create a sense of camaraderie and comradeship among this group of people who had been through a rigorous training program together and felt like they were part of a cohort,” Liddel told ITV.

Containing the names of 31 young men who made it through the rite of passage, the marble slab dates to the first century AD and is believed to offer valuable insight into Athenian society at the time. 

Magellan’s Strange Encounter With the 10-Foot Giants of Patagonia

Magellan’s Strange Encounter With the 10-Foot Giants of Patagonia

You may have heard of the mythical, gigantic former inhabitants who wandered the wastes of Patagonia… The vision of a faraway land, inhabited by towering giants, has captured an enchanted European imagination for many years. But was Patagonia really the home to these larger-than-life folk, or was it no more than a myth spread by fantasists…?

The first mention of the giants, supposedly twice the height of the normal human being, appeared in the Italian chronicler Antonio Pigafetta’s account of Ferdinand Magellan’s travels.

This official record reported that Magellan’s crew got more than they bargained for during their circumnavigation of the globe in the 1520s.

Pigafetta details a dancing and leaping giant on the shores of Argentina. Not one to take all the glory for himself, Magellan selflessly sent a poor crew member over to the gallivanting giant to make contact…

The giant was reportedly very friendly, and so colossally tall that the Europeans only reached his waist. Magellan named them ‘patagones’, and many believe this to have come from the Portuguese word ‘pata’, meaning ‘foot’.

Ferdinand Magellan (1480-1521)
Magellan's Strange Encounter With the 10-Foot Giants of Patagonia
“Here, have this bread, so as not to eat me instead.

The so-called giants left huge, gaping footprints in the snow because of the large guanaco-skin moccasins they wore on their feet. Patagonia may thus mean ‘land of the bigfoot’, which unsurprisingly contributed to the rumours and mythologisation of the Patagonian giants. One other suggestion, however, is that Magellan took the name from the giant Patagón, a prominent character in the sixteenth-century Spanish chivalric romance Primaleón, which Magellan had more than likely read.

Spanish explorers of the day often took inspiration from a recent good read; indeed, ‘California’ came from a mythical island of the same name in another Spanish romance, Las Sergas de Esplandián). Magellan captured two of these giants to take back to Spain with him, but they sadly died on the homeward voyage.

Then a century on, in 1628, Sir Francis Drake’s nephew detailed his uncle’s circumnavigation in The World Encompassed and mentioned once more the legendary giant-dwellers of Patagonia… Drake the nephew suggested that, though the native people were far taller than any Europeans the crew had seen, perhaps Magellan’s crew had exaggerated the size of the Patagones, thinking it unlikely that anyone would ever go back to Patagonia to check, and indulging their friends and family by spinning a good yarn…

You can spot the gigantic Patagones on this contemporary map (not to scale)

But then in 1615, the Dutch circumnavigators Willem Schouten and Jacob Le Maire found graves containing human bones on the Patagonian shores… bones of beings which appeared to be ten or eleven feet tall…

Later on in 1766, Captain John Byron (grandfather to the poet) also circumnavigated the world and the story spread that the crew had encountered enormous, nine-foot giants.

Rumors flew furiously around Europe, and the line between fact and fiction grew increasingly blurred… There were bitter disputes between French and British scientists, the former believing that the latter were supporting the case for the existence of giants as a smokescreen, hiding what the French feared most: that British sailors were not really embarking on a giant-hunt in Patagonia, but rather scoping it out as an entry point to attack French territories in the New World.

It was in 1767 that the romantic vision of Patagonia as a wilderness hiding giants started to fade. French explorer Louis de Bougainville reported that the tallest Patagonian he came across was only 5ft 9in, and then, in 1773, the official account of the Byron voyage emerged… in reality, the so-called “giants” were only four inches taller than the most sky-scraping crew members.

The Tehuelche people

The Patagones is now thought to have been member of the indigenous Tehuelche tribe, a Mapudungun word meaning ‘Fierce People’. They are known to have been taller than the average European (who measured in at roughly five feet), and in all likelihood were the real Goliaths of Patagonia myth and legend.

2,100-year-old burial of woman lying on bronze ‘mermaid bed’ unearthed in Greece

2,100-year-old burial of woman lying on bronze ‘mermaid bed’ unearthed in Greece

Archaeologists have unearthed the ancient burial of a woman lying on a bronze bed near the city of Kozani in northern Greece. It dates to the first century B.C. 

2,100-year-old burial of woman lying on bronze 'mermaid bed' unearthed in Greece
A photo of the burial of a woman lying on a bronze bed. She lived sometime during the first century B.C.

Depictions of mermaids decorate the posts of the bed. The bed also displays an image of a bird holding a snake in its mouth, a symbol of the ancient Greek god Apollo.

The woman’s head was covered with gold laurel leaves that likely were part of a wreath, Areti Chondrogianni-Metoki, director of the Ephorate of Antiquities of Kozani, told Live Science in an email.

The wooden portions of the bed have decomposed. 

Gold threads, possibly from embroidery, were found on the woman’s hands, Chondrogianni-Metoki said. Additionally, four clay pots and a glass vessel were buried alongside the remains. No other people were buried with her. 

This image shows how the bed would have looked before the burial. It is made largely of bronze but had some wooden parts that have since decayed away.

Archaeologists are now analyzing the skeleton to determine the woman’s health, age when she died and possible cause of death.

The artefacts found with her suggest that she likely came from a wealthy background, and may have belonged to a royal family.

“We do not know much about the history of this area [during the first century B.C.],” Chondrogianni-Metoki told Live Science. Thousands of years ago, Kozani was near an important city called Mavropigi (the site is now a village) that housed a sanctuary dedicated to Apollo, Chondrogianni-Metoki said.

This mermaid head was found on the bed.

Historical records show that during the first century B.C., Roman control and influence in Greece was on the rise.

The Romans destroyed the city of Corinth in 146 B.C. and sacked Athens in 86 B.C. In 48 B.C. a crucial battle in northern Greece known as the Battle of Pharsalus saw the army of Julius Caesar defeat a force led by Pompey; the victory resulted in Caesar becoming the de facto ruler of Rome. 

It’s unclear when exactly in the first century B.C. this woman lived or if she would have witnessed or heard of any of those historic events. The woman’s remains are currently housed at the Archaeological Museum of Aiani in Greece.

Live Science contacted scholars not affiliated with the research for further insights on the discovery, but none were available to offer comment at the time of publication.

The Ancient Giants Of Nevada And The Mystery Of Lovelock Cave

The Ancient Giants Of Nevada And The Mystery Of Lovelock Cave

Was North America once inhabited by a race of giants? According to an old legend supported by several challenging archaeological finds, it is possible. Many Native American tribes tell stories about the long-forgotten existence of a race of humans that were much taller and stronger than ordinary men.

These giants are described as both brave and barbaric and legends often mention their cruelty towards whomever they pleased.

The Paiute, a tribe that settled in the Nevada region thousands of years ago, have an outstanding legend about a race of red-haired giants called the Si-Te-Cah.

The Ancient Giants Of Nevada And The Mystery Of Lovelock Cave
The ancestors of the Paiute described them as savage and inhospitable cannibals.

In the Northern Paiute language, ‘Si-Te-Cah’ literally means ‘tule-eaters.’

Legend has it that the giants came from a distant island by crossing the ocean on rafts built using the fibrous tule plant.

As odd as it may sound, this legend repeats itself all over the Americas, suggesting it might be an incomplete chronicle of a real event that happened long ago.

In Crónicas del Perú, sixteenth-century Spanish conquistador Pedro Cieza de León recorded an ancient Peruvian tale about the origin of the South American giants.

According to legend, they “came by sea in rafts of reeds after the manner of large boats; some of the men were so tall that from the knee down they were as big as the length of an ordinary fair-sized man.”

Could the giants of Peru and the Si-Te-Cah have been survivors of a massive cataclysm who took refuge on the American continent?

Legend tells that the Si-Te-Cah waged war on the Paiute and all other neighbouring tribes, spreading terror and devastation. Finally, after years of conflict, the tribes united against the common enemy and began to decimate them.

The last remaining red-haired giants were chased off and sought shelter inside a cave. The tribes started a fire at the cave entrance, suffocating and burning alive the Si-Te-Cah. Those driven out by the smoke were also killed.

The tribes then sealed off the mouth of the cave so that no one might set eyes on those who had once plagued their land. They were all but forgotten until a random event brought them back to light.

In 1886, a mining engineer named John T. Reid happened to hear the legend from a group of Paiutes while prospecting near Lovelock, Nevada.

The Indians told him that the legend was real and the cave was located nearby. When he saw the cave for himself, Reid knew he was onto something.

Reid was unable to begin digging himself but news spread and soon, Lovelock cave was attracting attention. Unfortunately, the attention was profit-driven as guano deposits were discovered inside.

A company started by miners David Pugh and James Hart began excavating the precious resource in 1911 and had soon shipped more than 250 tons to a fertilizer company in San Francisco.

Any artefacts that might have been discovered were probably neglected or lost.

After the surface layer of guano had been mined, strange objects started to surface.

This led to an official excavation being performed in 1912 by the University of California and another one took place in 1924. Reports told about thousands of artifacts being recovered, some of them being truly unusual.

Although their claims have not been verified (it comes as no surprise), sources said the mummified remains of several red-haired ancient giants were found buried in the cave.

Measuring between 8 to 10 feet in height, these mummies have since been referred to as the Lovelock Giants.

Another intriguing find was a pair of 15 inch-long sandals that showed signs of having been worn. Allegedly, other unusually large items were recovered but have since been locked away in museum warehouses and private collection.

A piece of evidence that remains on-site until this day is a giant hand print, embedded on a boulder inside Lovelock Cave. We won’t go into further debate pertaining to this aspect and its implications.

Needless to say, this discovery has led many into believing the Paiute legend of the Si-Te-Cah might be more than just folklore.

Around the same time as the second Lovelock Cave excavation, another dig revealed a set of equally-disturbing finds.

According to a 1931 article published in the Nevada Review-Miner, two giant skeletons had been found buried in a dry lake bed close to Lovelock, Nevada.

The oversized remains measured 8.5, respectively 10 feet in height and were mummified in a manner similar to the one employed by ancient Egyptians.

Another common trait between these mummified giant remains and the ones discovered as far south as Lake Titicaca is the presence of red hair.

While some scientists believe the reddish colour is a result of the interaction with the environment in which they were buried, the mummies verify the legends, which described the Si-Te-Cah and their kin as red-haired giants.

Proponents of alternative history believe these violent giants were none other than the biblical Nephilim, the forsworn offspring of the ‘Sons of God’ with the ‘daughters of men.’

If this is true, there’s little chance we might get to see any of the giant mummies. Those interested in keeping history secret will never disclose their location.

Limestone Wall In Bolivia Has Over 10,000 Dinosaur Footprints Belonging To 10 Different Species

Limestone Wall In Bolivia Has Over 10,000 Dinosaur Footprints Belonging To 10 Different Species

Cal Orcko is a small town that is situated three miles south of the city of Sucre in Bolivia. It is home to the largest and most spectacular collection of dinosaur footprints of the Cretaceous era.

Even though the site remained closed for almost eight years after this paleontological discovery, it has been opened for visitors now.

A 300-foot-long limestone wall is located in Cal Orko, Bolivia, that has over 10,000 dinosaur footprints etched on it. The footprints belong to approximately 10 different dinosaur species that walked the earth about 68 million years ago. A 1.2-kilometre-long and 80-meter-high wall exists in Bolivia’s Cal Orko. The wall is a limestone slab that dates back to the dinosaur era.

Limestone Wall

It is covered with numerous dinosaur tracks that experts believe belong to approximately ten different species of dinosaurs. Currently, more than 10,000 individual dinosaur footprints have been identified on the limestone wall.

Christian Meyer, a Swiss palaeontologist, once commented that in 1998, they were able to recover only around 3,000 dinosaur tracks. Then in 2007, the number of footprints rose to 5,000, and in the latest survey, they have encountered over 10,000 individual dinosaur footprints in the limestone slab.

The most prominent tracks on the limestone wall are those of the quadrupedal titanosaurs. The tracks of the bipedal, carnivorous dinosaurs can also be found across the entire wall.

Other dinosaur species whose footprints were found on the wall include the theropods, ornithopods, ankylosaurs, and quadrupedal ornithopods.

The wall gives an impression that the dinosaurs were walking vertically. But in reality, the wall was originally the floor of a shallow lake from the Cretaceous period. It was due to tectonic movements that the floor became vertical.

Since the limestone slab is almost vertical, it gives the impression that the dinosaurs were walking vertically, like lizards on a wall. But experts have provided a more logical explanation. The limestone slab was originally the floor of a shallow lake of the Cretaceous era that once flowed through South America.

According to geologists, the floor of the lake has moved several times as a result of tectonic plate movement. Sixty-eight million years ago, the floor was walked upon by hundreds of dinosaurs leaving behind their footprints in the process.

The unique climate fluctuations at Cal Orko, Bolivia are believed to be the reason behind the spectacular presence of paleontological remains.

Why is it that there is such a concentration of dinosaurs remains in this area? Experts believe that it has something to do with the unique climatic fluctuations of the area. The large feet of the dinosaurs sank into the mushy shoreline of the lake that used to exist there.

When drought hit the area, the tracks solidified. Wet weather returned once again and sealed the footprints below layers of sediment and mud. Experts believe that this wet-dry pattern was repeated as many as seven times which led to the prints getting preserved on the floor of the lake.

And the best part was that tectonic activities shifted the floor into a vertical viewing angle, enabling this wonderful paleontological spectacle to be viewed by the species that continued living on this planet after the dinosaurs.

The Cal Orko Parque Cretacico hosts a museum, and models of dinosaurs, fossils, and related paleontological information and offers a guided, one-hour tour to a few selected areas of the dinosaur footprint wall.

Today, guided tours are offered to visitors to get a glimpse of the dinosaur footprints. Visitors are provided with a helmet as a safety requirement because of the cement factory that is located near the wall.

The guides point out the footprints of the Theropods (carnivorous dinosaurs) and Sauropods (long-neck herbivores). Lengths of the footprint trackways range from 26 feet to as long as an amazing 65 feet.

This amazing limestone slab serves as a record and offers a glimpse of the ever-changing history that took place in the Cretaceous era.

Was There Another Civilization On Earth Before Humans?

Was There Another Civilization On Earth Before Humans?

It only took five minutes for Gavin Schmidt to out-speculate me. Schmidt is the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (a.k.a. GISS) a world-class climate-science facility. One day last year, I came to GISS with a far-out proposal. In my work as an astrophysicist, I’d begun researching global warming from an “astrobiological perspective.”

That meant asking whether any industrial civilization that rises on any planet will, through its own activity, trigger its own version of a climate shift. I was visiting GISS that day hoping to gain some climate science insights and, perhaps, collaborators. That’s how I ended up in Gavin’s office.

Just as I was revving up my pitch, Gavin stopped me in my tracks.

Was There Another Civilization On Earth Before Humans?

“Wait a second,” he said. “How do you know we’re the only time there’s been a civilization on our own planet?”

It took me a few seconds to pick my jaw off the floor. I had certainly come into Gavin’s office prepared for eye rolls at the mention of “exo-civilizations.”

But the civilizations he was asking about would have existed many millions of years ago. Sitting there, seeing Earth’s vast evolutionary past telescope before my mind’s eye, I felt a kind of temporal vertigo. “Yeah,” I stammered, “Could we tell if there’d been an industrial civilization that deep in time?”

We never got back to aliens. Instead, that first conversation launched a new study we’ve recently published in the International Journal of Astrobiology. Though neither of us could see it at that moment, Gavin’s penetrating question opened a window not just onto Earth’s past, but also onto our own future. We’re used to imagining extinct civilizations in terms of the sunken statues and subterranean ruins. These kinds of artefacts of previous societies are fine if you’re only interested in the timescales of a few thousands of years. But once you roll the clock back to tens of millions or hundreds of millions of years, things get more complicated. When it comes to direct evidence of an industrial civilization — things like cities, factories, and roads — the geologic record doesn’t go back past what’s called the Quaternary period 2.6 million years ago. For example, the oldest large-scale stretch of ancient surface lies in the Negev Desert. It’s “just” 1.8 million years old — older surfaces are mostly visible in cross-section via something like a cliff face or rock cuts. Go back much farther than the Quaternary and everything has been turned over and crushed to dust.

And, if we’re going back this far, we’re not talking about human civilizations anymore. Homo sapiens didn’t make their appearance on the planet until just 300,000 years or so ago. That means the question shifts to other species, which is why Gavin called the idea the Silurian hypothesis, after an old Dr. Who episode with intelligent reptiles.

So, could researchers find clear evidence that an ancient species built a relatively short-lived industrial civilization long before our own? Perhaps, for example, some early mammals rose briefly to civilization building during the Paleocene epoch about 60 million years ago. There are fossils, of course. But the fraction of life that gets fossilized is always minuscule and varies a lot depending on time and habitat. It would be easy, therefore, to miss an industrial civilization that only lasted 100,000 years — which would be 500 times longer than our industrial civilization has made it so far. Given that all direct evidence would be long gone after many millions of years, what kinds of evidence might then still exist? The best way to answer this question is to figure out what evidence we’d leave behind if human civilization collapsed at its current stage of development. Now that our industrial civilization has truly gone global, humanity’s collective activity is laying down a variety of traces that will be detectable by scientists 100 million years in the future. The extensive use of fertilizer, for example, keeps 7 billion people fed, but it also means we’re redirecting the planet’s flows of nitrogen into food production.

Future researchers should see this in characteristics of nitrogen showing up in sediments from our era. Likewise our relentless hunger for the rare-Earth elements used in electronic gizmos. Far more of these atoms are now wandering around the planet’s surface because of us than would otherwise be the case. They might also show up in future sediments, too. Even our creation, and use, of synthetic steroids, has now become so pervasive that it too may be detectable in geologic strata 10 million years from now. And then there’s all that plastic. Studies have shown increasing amounts of plastic “marine litter” are being deposited on the seafloor everywhere from coastal areas to deep basins and even in the Arctic.

Wind, sun, and waves grind down large-scale plastic artefacts, leaving the seas full of microscopic plastic particles that will eventually rain down on the ocean floor, creating a layer that could persist for geological timescales. The big question is how long any of these traces of our civilization will last. In our study, we found each had the possibility of making it into future sediments. Ironically, however, the most promising marker of humanity’s presence as an advanced civilization is a by-product of one activity that may threaten it most. When we burn fossil fuels, we’re releasing carbon back into the atmosphere that was once part of living tissues. This ancient carbon is depleted in one of that element’s three naturally occurring varieties or isotopes. The more fossil fuels we burn, the more the balance of these carbon isotopes shifts. Atmospheric scientists call this shift the Suess effect, and the change in isotopic ratios of carbon due to fossil-fuel use is easy to see over the last century. Increases in temperature also leave isotopic signals. These shifts should be apparent to any future scientist who chemically analyzes exposed layers of rock from our era. Along with these spikes, this Anthropocene layer might also hold brief peaks in nitrogen, plastic nanoparticles, and even synthetic steroids. So if these are traces our civilization is bound to leave to the future, might the same “signals” exist right now in rocks just waiting to tell us of civilizations long gone?

Fifty-six million years ago, Earth passed through the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). During the PETM, the planet’s average temperature climbed as high as 15 degrees Fahrenheit above what we experience today. It was a world almost without ice, as typical summer temperatures at the poles reached close to a balmy 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Looking at the isotopic record from the PETM, scientists see both carbon and oxygen isotope ratios spiking in exactly the way we expect to see in the Anthropocene record. There are also other events like the PETM in the Earth’s history that show traces like our hypothetical Anthropocene signal. These include an event a few million years after the PETM dubbed the Eocene Layers of Mysterious Origin, and massive events in the Cretaceous that left the ocean without oxygen for many millennia (or even longer).

Are these events indications of previous nonhuman industrial civilizations? Almost certainly not. While there is evidence that the PETM may have been driven by a massive release of buried fossil carbon into the air, it’s the timescale of these changes that matter. The PETM’s isotope spikes rise and fall over a few hundred thousand years. But what makes the Anthropocene so remarkable in terms of Earth’s history is the speed at which we’re dumping fossil carbon into the atmosphere. There have been geological periods where Earth’s CO2 has been as high or higher than today, but never before in the planet’s multibillion-year history has so much buried carbon been dumped back into the atmosphere so quickly. So the isotopic spikes we do see in the geologic record may not be spiky enough to fit the Silurian hypothesis’s bill.

But there is a conundrum here. If an earlier species’ industrial activity is short-lived, we might not be able to easily see it. The PETM’s spikes mostly show us the Earth’s timescales for responding to whatever caused it, not necessarily the timescale of the cause. So it might take both dedicated and novel detection methods to find evidence of a truly short-lived event in ancient sediments. In other words, if you’re not explicitly looking for it, you might not see it. That recognition was, perhaps, the most concrete conclusion of our study.

It’s not often that you write a paper proposing a hypothesis that you don’t support. Gavin and I don’t believe the Earth once hosted a 50-million-year-old Paleocene civilization.

But by asking if we could “see” truly ancient industrial civilizations, we were forced to ask about the generic kinds of impacts any civilization might have on a planet. That’s exactly what the astrobiological perspective on climate change is all about.

Civilization building means harvesting energy from the planet to do work (i.e., the work of civilization building). Once the civilization reaches truly planetary scales, there has to be some feedback on the coupled planetary systems that gave it birth (air, water, rock).

This will be particularly true for young civilizations like ours still climbing up the ladder of technological capacity. There is, in other words, no free lunch. While some energy sources will have a lower impact — say solar vs. fossil fuels — you can’t power a global civilization without some degree of impact on the planet.

Once you realize, through climate change, the need to find lower-impact energy sources, the less impact you will leave. So the more sustainable your civilization becomes, the smaller the signal you’ll leave for future generations.

In addition, our work also opened up the speculative possibility that some planets might have fossil-fuel-driven cycles of civilization building and collapse. If a civilization uses fossil fuels, the climate change they trigger can lead to a large decrease in ocean oxygen levels.

These low oxygen levels (called ocean anoxia) help trigger the conditions needed for making fossil fuels like oil and coal in the first place. In this way, a civilization and its demise might sow the seed for new civilizations in the future. By asking about civilizations lost in deep time, we’re also asking about the possibility of universal rules guiding the evolution of all biospheres in all their creative potential, including the emergence of civilizations. Even without pickup-driving Paleocenians, we’re only now learning to see how rich that potential might be.

Rare 18th-Century Warship Rudder Found in the Solent

Rare 18th-Century Warship Rudder Found in the Solent

Rare 18th-Century Warship Rudder Found in the Solent
The rudder was discovered intact, 60m (200ft) from the main structure of the wreck

The lost rudder of a warship that sank in the Solent in 1758 has been discovered on the seabed, 60m (200ft) away from the main shipwreck. HMS Invincible – built by the French in 1744 and captured by the British in 1747 – is regarded as one of the most significant warships of its time.

The 11m-long intact rudder was spotted during a routine inspection of the site near Portsmouth.

Marine archaeologist Dan Pascoe said it was “unique and significant”.

“We weren’t particularly looking for it. A feature had shown up in geophysical surveys, 60m off the stern,” he said.

“It looks like it’s in pretty good condition and is complete from top to bottom.”

The 11m-long rudder has been scanned on the seabed

The 74-gun ship was lost when the rudder jammed and it ran aground on a sandbank between Langstone Harbour and the Isle of Wight, capsizing three days later. No lives were lost.

Mr Pascoe said: “The ship was highly manoeuvrable and the rudder was critical to its design.

“It’s the last piece of the jigsaw that tells the story of Invincible. It’s a fantastic, wonderful find and extremely rare – it only survived because it was buried.”

The rudder is due to be protected with sandbags to prevent it from being quickly eroded by the elements underwater, but bringing it to the surface and conserving it could cost up to £80,000, Mr Pascoe estimated.

“It’s a unique find – there are no other examples from warships of this era. Its future depends on whether it is financially viable to raise and find somewhere to display it,” he added.

HMS Invincible’s class of ships became the “backbone of the Royal Navy”, the National Museum of the Royal Navy said

A major excavation project, carried out by Poole’s Maritime Archaeology Sea Trust (MAST) and Bournemouth University experts, began on the wreck site in 2017.

Among the artefacts discovered were a gunpowder barrel, swivel guns, a bottle of corked rum and woodworking tools.

Many have since gone on display at the National Museum of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth.

The 6500-Year-Old Grave of the Unfortunate Ladies of Téviec

The 6500-Year-Old Grave of the Unfortunate Ladies of Téviec

Téviec would be a rather anonymous island located somewhere in Brittany, France, if it wasn’t for its great archaeological value thanks to the many finds – mainly from the Mesolithic Period – that have been excavated there. These finds include the skeletons of two women, dated between 6740 and 5680 BC, who may have been violently murdered.

Archaeologists Put Téviec on the Mesolithic Map

Téviec Island, Brittany, France. ( BCD)

Téviec is one of the very few known Mesolithic sites in Brittany, along with Pointe de la Torche, Hoëdic and Beg er Vil on the Quibe.

It has been the subject of a biotope protection scheme for the past 35 years. Therefore, landing on the island has become a troublesome task for contemporary archaeologists, since it is generally prohibited from 15 April to 31 August.

That wasn’t always the case, though. From 1928 to 1934, archaeologists Marthe and Saint-Just Péquart discovered and excavated a culturally and archaeologically rich Mesolithic site on the island, dating to between 5700 and 4500 BC.

According to most historians, this is considered the end of the Mesolithic period in western France and it overlaps with the beginning of the Neolithic period.

Marthe and Saint-Just Péquart – after first discovering the tomb. 1928

The main finds at the site were substantial middens formed of oyster and clam shells and ten multiple graves containing 23 skeletons, including adults and children.

Among the shells were the remains of animals as well, such as dogs, crabs, fish, lobsters, seabirds, deer, and boar among others. Due to the acidity of the soil in the location, the bones have been remarkably preserved, even though many of the skeletons showed clear signs of brutality and violence, including one with an arrowhead embedded in its spine.

A midden, composed of shells, animal bones etc. provides insights into life on the island.

The Unfortunate Ladies of Téviec

The most fascinating and mysterious of all discoveries, however, is undoubtedly the grave that includes the skeletons of two women aged 25–35, dubbed the “Ladies of Téviec.” Their bodies were buried delicately in a pit that was partly dug into the ground and coated over with debris from the midden.

The corpses had been protected all these centuries by a roof made of antlers and supplied with pieces of flint, boar bones, and jewellery made of sea shells such as necklaces, bracelets, and ringlets for their legs. The grave collection was unearthed from the site as a whole and is now on display at the Muséum de Toulouse, where its restoration in 2010 earned several awards.

The Ladies of Téviec, both feature traumatic injuries to the skull.

The thing that shocked archaeologists the most though, was the blatant violence and brutality the two women sustained before they died. Scientists examining the skeletons concluded that one of them had suffered five blows to the head, two of which were possibly fatal, and had also received at least one arrow shot between the eyes.

The other body also had traces of injuries, but not as violent as the body of her “friend.” In recent years, however, this diagnosis is debated by some archaeologists, who claim that the immense weight of the soil above the grave may have been the cause of damage to the skeletons.

An obvious question that probably occurs upon reading this is: How could the weight and composition of any soil – no matter how heavy it might be –ever justify an arrow shot between the eyes? It doesn’t make any sense, does it?

A Very Cold Case: Attempts to Solve the Téviec Mystery Almost 6,500 Years Later

In 2012, replicas of the two skeletons were laid for the first time on a mortuary slab of Toulouse Natural History Museum, during an exhibition titled Prehistory: The Investigation, which became a big hit in France.

“When you create an exhibition, you need to create an atmosphere and a lot of TV shows are about CSI and forensics and they always start with a forensics table – and here it is,” said Dr. Francis Duranthon, the director of the Toulouse Natural History Museum, pointing to the mortuary slab.

In the city of Toulouse alone, more than a hundred thousand people visited the exhibition, while in Paris two hundred thousand people watched closely the attempt of the scientists to solve this prehistoric mystery.

Isotope analysis of the two women’s teeth showed a diet of seafood and meat. That caused scientists to speculate that the two females possibly came from a small community that farmed, harvested the sea, and hunted. The exhibition also revealed that this was probably a community where women fulfilled a more domestic role. “It is unusual to find women killed this way during this period,” said Duranthon and added, “What we know is that at least two people were involved in these killings.”

Exhibit A? Skull from the Téviec burial. This female died when she was 25 to 35 years old from a violent death with numerous skull fractures and bone lesions associated with the impact of an arrow.

According to several academics, raids, in order to steal food, were pretty common back then and they suggest that the two unlucky women could have been victims of a bloody raid. However, some historians claim that what possibly killed the women was a long series of unfortunate meteorological phenomena. Droughts back then would usually decimate a farming community, while an extreme hailstorm destroyed crops, and people would see these as signs that the gods needed to be appeased. Thus, the two women might have been sacrificed as victims of ritual murder, slain by people they knew – or even family members.

So, what really happened to the “Ladies of Téviec”? As it’s the case with many historical mysteries throughout the centuries…We will probably never know!