8,000 years of history to resurface at Turkey’s Tavşanlı Mound
Excavations set to start at a mound in the central Turkish province of Kütahya in September are expected to shed light on 8,000 years of history, archaeologists said.
An aerial view of the Tavşanlı Mound, Kütahya, central Turkey.
Dubbed the “Heart of Kütahya” over its shape detected through aerial footage, the “Tavşanlı Mound” located in the namesake district will be unearthed through the cooperation of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and Bilecik Şeyh Edebali University (BŞEU), along with the support of the Tavşanlı Municipality.
Academics from Ankara University, Ankara Hacı Bayram Veli University, Hacettepe University, Istanbul University, Zonguldak Bülent Ecevit University and Uşak University will also take part in the excavations, to be headed by Erkan Fidan, a faculty member at the archaeology department of the BŞEU.
An aerial view from the Tavşanlı Mound, Kütahya, central Turkey.
The excavations were launched through a presidential decree and are expected to last some 30 years.
Sezer Seçer Fidan, a Hittitologist who is also in charge of the Tavşanlı Mound site, told Anadolu Agency (AA) that the mound was once one of the largest settlements in western Anatolia.
“While previous settlements here were a conglomeration of a couple of villages, as the swamps were filled and drained, it becomes a site that could serve as the basis for urbanization and turn into a capital city.
This corresponds roughly to (a period) four to 5,000 years earlier. Urbanization at this site of course does not consist of a single-phase, but a formation that continues to expand over time,” Fidan said.
Archaeologists work on the Tavşanlı Mound, Kütahya, central Turkey.
She explained that the goal for excavations during this year is to uncover city walls dating back to the Hittites and modern ages, which would prove the importance and scale of the Tavşanlı Mound.
Fidan noted that the mound might contain information, documents and findings on those who have lived in western Anatolia for the last 8,000 years.
“The settlement here lasted until the end of the Bronze Age; therefore, we can see a number of ages stratigraphically. Here, we both want to monitor transitions between civilizations and the exact importance of such a large mound spanning a hectare (in size). … If we can detect buildings related to the Hittite period, then we can find written documents or findings.
It would be a very important finding for western Anatolia since written documents are very rare in this region,” she noted.
How fossilization preserved a 310-million-year-old horseshoe crab’s brain
Researchers have uncovered a never-before-seen fossilized brain from a 310 million-year-old horseshoe crab, revealing some surprises about the evolution of these wannabe crustaceans, according to a new study.
This fossilized horseshoe crab (Euproops danae), shown in the left image, held a perfectly preserved mold of its brain, shown close-up in panel B. Panel C shows a reconstruction of Euproops danae, including the position and anatomy of the brain.
The fossilized brain, which belongs to the extinct species Euproops Danae, was discovered at Mazon Creek in Illinois, where the conditions were just right to perfectly preserve the animal’s delicate soft tissue.
There are four species of horseshoe crabs alive today — all of which sport hard exoskeletons, 10 legs and a U-shaped head. Despite their name, these “crabs” are actually arachnids that are closely related to scorpions and spiders, according to The National Wildlife Federation.
Although horseshoe crab fossils are relatively common, nothing was previously known about their ancient brains, the researchers said.
“This is the first and only evidence for a brain in a fossil horseshoe crab,” lead author Russell Bicknell, a palaeontologist at the University of New England in Maine, told Live Science. The chances of finding a fossilized brain are “one in a million,” he added. “Although, even then, chances are they are even rarer.”
Soft tissues that makeup brains are very prone to rapid decay, Bicknell said. “In order for them to be preserved, either very special geological conditions, or amber, are needed.”
In this case, geology helped to keep the soft tissue in tip-top condition over the years and preserve the brain — or at least a copy of the brain. “We have a mould of the brain, not the brain itself, so to speak,” Bicknell said.
The deposits at Mazon Creek are made of an iron carbonate mineral called siderite, which forms concretions — mineral precipitations — that can quickly encase a dead body and fossilize it.
Although such concretions preserved the horseshoe crab’s body, the brain tissue still decomposed and eventually disappeared. However, as the brain rotted away it was replaced by a clay mineral called kaolinite, which created a cast of the brain.
Kaolite is white in colour, whereas siderite is dark grey. This colour contrast meant the brain fossil “stood out more than it would have normally” from the rest of the fossil, Bicknell said.
The hunt is now on for more ancient brains that might have been fossilized in the unique geological conditions that preserved this horseshoe crab.
“The Mazon Creek deposit is exceptional,” Bicknell said. “If we started looking, we may be lucky enough to find more [brain fossils].”
The discovery provided researchers with the unique opportunity to study how the arachnids’ brains evolved over time. But to the researchers’ surprise, they found that the ancient brain, which dates to the Carboniferous period (359 million to 299 million years ago), was remarkably similar to that of a modern horseshoe crab.
“Despite 300 million years of evolution, the fossil horseshoe crab brain is pretty much the same as modern forms,” Bicknell said.
Bolza family turns 1,000-year-old Italian castle into Hotel Castello di Reschio
A 10th-century castle in the Umbrian hills has been restored and transformed into a hotel by Count Benedikt Bolza and his family, who created custom furniture for its 36 suites, restaurant and spa.
Welcoming its first guests in spring 2021, Hotel Castello di Reschio comprises 30 suites within the historic castle. The hotel sits within the sprawling Reschio estate, which was acquired by Count Antonio Bolza in 1994, lies on the border between Umbria and Tuscany and is dotted with farmhouses.
The crumbling buildings were slowly restored into private homes by his son Benedikt and daughter-in-law Donna before they turned their attention to the site’s impressive 1,000-year-old castle and surrounding structures.
The family lived in the stone “Castello” for a decade while they worked to protect and restore the architecture, then create interiors that respect the ancient building while offering modern comforts.
In total 30 suites were built within the castle itself, with some rooms having views of the central courtyard garden, while others look out over the rolling hills.
A further six suites were built next to the parish church.
All of the rooms were decorated with terracotta-brick or wooden floors, hand-stitched linen curtains, Italian fabrics, and locally crafted marble and brass vanities.
Benedikt Bolza also designed and crafted bespoke beds and lighting for the hotel via his own furniture brand, BB for Reschio. These are mixed with portraits, photos and other curios sourced from local antique markets.
“Benedikt has embraced an organic approach to the design, championing local craftsmanship and creating thoughtful, whimsical spaces that are filled with comfort and wit, while artfully nodding to the fascinating characters who once resided within the castle walls,” said the family.
The Tower Suite, which is entered over the castle’s gateway and spread over five levels, boasts two bedrooms, a living room, a study, and a roof garden with an open-air bathtub.
Dining options for guests include the Ristorante Al Castello, located in the castle’s western ramparts and serving Italian dishes made with produce grown on the estate.
The verdant Palm Court is a new structural addition modelled on iron-and-glass Victorian conservatories, which is intended as a space for reading, conversation or enjoying cakes and cocktails from the adjacent bar.
Another alternative is Il Torrino, the converted watchtower that serves light fare and drinks, and overlooks an oval swimming pool.
The hotel spa is situated in the vaulted stone cellar, where hammams, saunas and plunge pools are atmospherically lit by shards of sunlight through the arrow slits and windows.
Guests seeking a more active experience can explore the estate on foot or bicycle, or take horse-riding lessons at the Equestrian Centre. Many of the region’s historic towns and cities are also a short drive away, for those who wish to explore further afield.
Castles and ancient buildings across Italy have been converted into guest accommodation while maintaining their original charm and character.
Another example, also in Umbria, is a 12th-century watchtower that was reconstructed and turned into a holiday retreat.
The 70 Million-Year-Old History of the Mississippi River
In 1758, the French ethnographer Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz published The History of Louisiana, in which he wrote that the Mississippi River’s name meant “the ancient father of rivers.” Though his etymology was off—the Ojibwe words that gave us Mississippi (Misi-ziibi) actually mean “long river”—the idea has proven durable. “Ol’ Man River” buoyed Show Boat, the 1927 musical by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II.
The Mississippi Delta, seen from space in 2001.
During the 1937 flood, Raymond Daniell wrote in the New York Times about frantic efforts to raise barriers “faster than old man river could rise.”
Now it appears that the Mississippi is far older than Le Page thought, and it used to be far bigger than the Ojibwe could have imagined. And it might even become that big again in the future.
These are the extraordinary new findings unearthed by geologists including Sally Potter-McIntyre at Southern Illinois University, Michael Blum at the University of Kansas and Randel Cox at the University of Memphis, whose work is helping us better understand the monumental events, beginning in late Cretaceous North America, that gave rise to the Mississippi, swelling it to gargantuan proportions.
An 1832 expedition led by Henry Schoolcraft identified the Mississippi’s source as Lake Itasca in Minnesota.
In the late Cretaceous, around 80 million years ago, a mountain chain spanned the southern portion of the continent, blocking southbound water flows, so most North American rivers flowed to the Western Interior Sea or north to Canada’s Hudson Bay.
Eventually, a gap in those mountains formed, opening a path for the river we now know as the Mississippi to flow to the Gulf of Mexico. Scientists call that gap the Mississippi Embayment, but the rest of us know it as the Mississippi Delta, the vast flood plain that stretches from southern Missouri to northern Louisiana.
As recently as 2014, geological consensus held that the Mississippi began flowing through the embayment around 20 million years ago. But in 2018, Potter-McIntyre and her team concluded, based on the age of zircon fragments they excavated from sandstone in southern Illinois, that the river began flowing much earlier—some 70 million years ago.
The Mississippi was thus born when dinosaurs still roamed the planet; one can almost picture an alamosaurus bending its prodigious neck to drink from its waters. By contrast, the Missouri River, in its current form, dates back a mere two million years. Old Man River, indeed.
Still, 70 million years ago the Mississippi was nowhere near as large as it would become. Blum has detailed how the waterway grew as it added tributaries: the Platte, Arkansas and Tennessee rivers by the late Paleocene, then the Red River by the Oligocene.
Around 60 million years ago, the Mississippi was collecting water from the Rockies to the Appalachians; by four million years ago, its watershed had extended into Canada, and the Mississippi had grown to an enormous size, carrying four to eight times as much water as it does today, Cox and colleagues have found. “This was a giant river, on the order of the Amazon,” said Cox.
So the river’s larger-than-life role in culture was perhaps inevitable. Until the early 19th century, the Mississippi marked the western border between Spanish and American territory, and it continues to give life to the cities that sprang up along its route.
After Union forces captured Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln saw the emancipated river as a symbol of a nation unified: “The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea,” he wrote.
Mark Twain, the best publicist a river ever had, inspired 150 years’ worth of dreams about floating away from our troubles. And among members of the Ojibwe, Dakota and Chitimacha tribes, who still live on portions of ancestral lands in the Mississippi Valley, a spiritual connection to the river remains strong.
In 2013, Nibi Walk, a group of Indigenous women walked 1,500 miles along the Mississippi to advocate for clean water—an issue of vital importance to the 18 million Americans who get their drinking water from the river.
The river’s famed fluctuations have shaped American urbanization, too. The Great Flood of 1927 accelerated the Great Migration, as African Americans, disproportionately displaced, sought economic opportunity in cities such as Chicago and Detroit.
“Old Mississippi River, what a fix you left me in,” Bessie Smith sings in “Homeless Blues,” one of many songs about the 1927 flood. That disaster also ushered in an era of unprecedented public works, as the federal government sought to remake the river into a predictable route for moving bulk necessities like corn and coal.
The mighty river has inspired more than a thousand songs since 1900, including “Big River” by Johnny Cash and “Proud Mary,” in which John Fogerty (echoed later by Tina Turner) observes that “people on the river are happy to give.” That truism is confirmed every year when people who live along the Mississippi offer a meal and a shower to the dozens of strangers who test themselves against Old Man River by paddling small boats from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico.
Ancient Walls of Benin Were Four times longer than walls of china
In Benin, the capital city of present-day Edo State stood the walls of Benin (800 – 1400AD) which are the longest ancient earthworks in the world and apparently the largest man-made structure on earth.
The walls are a set of earthworks comprising of banks and ditches called Iya in the native tongue. It comprises 15 kilometres (9.3 miles) of “Iya” (banks and ditches) city and an estimated 16,000 kilometres (9,900 miles) in the rural areas surrounding Benin.
As at that time, with its enormous length, it was speculated to be double the length of the Great Wall of China, until it was declared in the year 2012 (after five years of thorough measurement by Chinese surveyors) that the Great Wall has a length of around 21, 0000 km.
The time of construction is not precisely known which gives it different assumptions as to the date
First view: Graham Connah predicted the walls may have been built between the thirteenth and mid-fifteenth century CE.
Second view: Patrick Darling predicted the walls of Benin (in the Esan region) may have been built during the first millennium CE.
How the walls were built
The walls were built with a ditch and dike arrangement. The ditch was bored to form an inner moat with the excavated earth used to create the exterior rampart.
Remains
The Walls of Benin were destroyed by the British in 1897 during the named Punitive expedition. Disjointed pieces of the wall remain in Edo, with a large proportion of them being used by the residents for construction purposes. The little that remains of the wall is continually demolished for real estate developments.
Fred Pearce in an article in the New Scientist (September 11th 1999) said “They extend for some 16,000km in all, in a mosaic of more than 500 interconnected settlement boundaries.
They cover 2, 510 sq. miles (6, 500 square kilometres) and were all dug by the Edo people. In all, they are four times longer than the Great Wall of China and consume a hundred times more material than the Great Pyramid of Cheops.
They took an estimated 150 million hours of digging to construct, and are perhaps the largest single archaeological phenomenon on the planet.”
An ethnic mathematician named Ron Eglash explained the planned blueprint of the city using fractals at the ground level, not just in the city, also in the villages and in the rooms of houses.
He stated that “When Europeans first came to Africa, they considered the architecture very disorganised and thus primitive. It never occurred to them that the Africans might have been using a form of mathematics that they hadn’t even discovered yet.”
The walls of Benin were famously described by the Guinness Book of Records (1974 edition) as being “the world’s largest earthworks prior to the mechanical era.”
Also, Benin city was in the league of the first cities to have a likeness of street lighting with large metal lamps, a large number of feet high, built and placed around the city.
Excitement over wooden shipwreck found in Antigua’s seabed
“It’s the best thing I’ve found in 31 years of diving,” says Maurice Belgrave, pointing to the spot where a centuries-old shipwreck lay hidden under the water for more than 200 years.
The boat’s timber frame will be analysed to gauge where and when the wood was cut
Here at the Antigua Naval Dockyard, historic anchors, cannons and capstans are on bountiful display, testimony to the pivotal role it played as a safe harbour for Royal Navy warships protecting Britain’s valuable sugar-producing islands. The murky waters around it, however, conceal a wealth of secrets. Over the years, commercial diver Mr Belgrave has found everything from 18th Century tobacco pipes to live cannon balls deep in the sediment beneath.
“Most of the real history is on the seabed,” he tells the BBC. In 2013, a routine job cleaning an anchor chain unearthed his most impressive discovery to date: the remarkably well-preserved remains of a 250-year-old naval vessel.
Maurice Belgrave has been diving in the area for more than three decades
“Whenever I’m down there, I run my hands through the mud,” he explains. “I saw the lumbers and realised it was the skeleton of a real big boat.”
The presence of the 40-metre (130-ft) wooden ship was finally confirmed last month by a team of visiting archaeologists. Not only does its sheer size set it apart from other wrecks around the Caribbean island, but local historians also believe it to be the 1762 Beaumont, a French merchant ship later bought by a private individual, renamed the Lyon and used in the American Revolutionary War.
The mud which kept it concealed just feet below the surface, traversed by hundreds of yachts a year, is credited with keeping it intact, offering archaeologists a veritable time capsule to explore. Historians had long suspected the Beaumont was there – and a hydrographic survey, also in 2013, had given weight to that – but poor visibility made it tricky to locate.
Lack of funds hindered efforts to professionally scour the identified spot until recently when the French and Martinique governments – as well as the US-based Richard Lounsbery Foundation – paid for a visit by a group of international experts. The timing was impeccable too, preceding celebrations for this month’s fifth anniversary of the dockyard’s award of Unesco World Heritage Site status. Dr Reginald Murphy, Antigua’s Unesco representative, says this is a “major historical find”.
The Antigua Naval Dockyard is the only working Georgian dockyard in the Western Hemisphere
“You read about the Age of Sail and the size of the ships, but it’s not until you actually see one that you realise how massive and powerful they were; it’s a way of reaching into history,” he says.
“We have many artefacts and buildings from that era but nothing compared to this. It’s a real touch of reality.”
The six-day excavation revealed the vessel’s measurements to match the dimensions of the 900-ton Beaumont. Further research is required but if it is indeed the Beaumont, it could be the only shipwreck of its kind in the world, explains Antigua-based archaeologist Dr Christopher Waters.
Historians believe the wreck to be the 1762 Beaumont, a heavily armed French merchant ship
The Beaumont was built by the French East India Company, an imperial commercial enterprise founded in 1664 to compete with English and Dutch trading firms in what is today east Asia.
While there are other wrecks of vessels built by the company, there are no known ones with an intact hull, Dr Waters says. Its discovery is comparable to the Mary Rose “in terms of its size and the stories we may be able to tell of it”, he adds.
Leading the underwater team was Jean-Sebastian Guibert, an associate professor at the University of the Antilles in Martinique. He describes finding the ship – using high-tech sonar equipment and a magnetometer – as “like hitting the jackpot”.
Mr Guibert says it is the largest wreck he has seen in 15 years working in the region.
One thing researchers are not expecting to find as investigations continue is a “treasure trove”, Dr Waters says, as the vessel was likely stripped down. Neither will it be raised due to the expense and complexity of doing so.
But the ship could offer new insight into 18th Century wooden ship construction.
As a heavily armed merchant ship, the Beaumont was designed to travel from France to the Indian and Pacific oceans. After the collapse of the French East India Company, it served as a 56-gun warship in the French Navy from 1770 to 1772 before being bought and renamed. It was later captured by HMS Maidstone in 1778 while supporting the Thirteen Colonies in the American War of Independence.
“We know it was brought here; we just don’t know what happened to it,” Dr Waters says. “But it was very badly damaged and probably never left the harbour again.”
The ship’s size means far more funding is needed to continue the research. But its mere existence enhances the profile of the dockyard, the only working Georgian dockyard in the Western Hemisphere and a cornerstone of Antigua’s tourism industry.
For Mr Belgrave, the significance goes deeper still. As historians continue to piece together the stories of the enslaved Africans who built the dockyard 300 years ago and from whom many Antiguans are descended, this particular discovery has a special resonance.
“There’s a sweet music to this one,” he says. “I feel delighted that something so significant was rediscovered by me as an African.”
This Gorgeous Ice Cavern Has An Ancient Forest Underneath
Mendenhall Glacier is one of the most picturesque places that is situated in Southeast Alaska. It is whoppingly 13.6 miles long. There is a number of ice caves that can be located in this Glacier. Also, an ancient forest was revealed beneath the glacier in the last decade due to rapidly melting ice.
Basically, a glacier is a very large amount of snow piled up together and then turned into ice. Sadly, global warming is causing glaciers around the globe to melt at a speed that has never been seen before, and Mendenhall Glacier is a victim too.
Mendenhall Glacier has shrunk 1.75 miles since 1929 and will continue to do so unless there is a proper solution implemented for global warming.
As the glacier is continuously retreating, remains of an ancient forest have been revealed underneath the glacier.
Well, preserved stumps and trunks can be now seen clearly after more than 2000 years.
Some of those trees still have their roots intact to the ground. The preservation is that good! Some of those still have the bark with them. It is quite possible to determine the age of those trees because most of them are in a growth position.
The research team that worked on these trees are calling them spruce or hemlock based on their diameter of the trunk and the trees growing in the region present day.
The Earth has passed different ice ages since its beginning. In those ice ages, glaciers have grown, advanced, and also shrunken and retreated. During those different periods, they send out liquefied ice streams that push aprons of gravel beyond the edge of glaciers.
A similar thing happened with this uncovered ancient forest; it was sealed in what can be called the Tomb of Gravel.
This melting of ice is something that we should be highly concerned about. But at the same time, we can also spend our time learning about the climate of the old ages thanks to these kinds of events.
Remains of 90 million-year-old rainforest discovered under Antarctic ice
This artist’s illustration shows a young Purussaurus attacking a ground sloth in Amazonia 13 million years ago.
When dinosaurs roamed the Earth 90 million years ago, the planet was much warmer, including Antarctica at the South Pole. But in a surprising twist, researchers have discovered evidence that Antarctica also supported a swampy rainforest at the time, according to a new study.
Researchers captured a slice of the seafloor using a drill rig aboard a polar research vessel on West Antarctica’s Amundsen Sea between February and March in 2017. The sediment core sample was taken near the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers.
CT scans of the sediment core revealed pristine samples of forest soil, pollen, spores and even root systems so well preserved that they could identify cell structures. The soil included examples of pollen from the first flowering plants found this close to the South Pole.
Tina van de Flierdt and Johann Klages work on the sample of ancient soil.
They dated the soil, its fine-grained clay and silt to 90 million years ago. Their study was published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
“During the initial shipboard assessments, the unusual colouration of the sediment layer quickly caught our attention; it clearly differed from the layers above it,” said Johann Klages, study author and geologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute. “We had found a layer originally formed on land, not in the ocean.”
Scientists know that during the age of the dinosaurs, conditions were warmer. The mid-Cretaceous era, from 80 million to 115 million years ago, was the warmest period for Earth in the past 140 million years, the researchers said. The surface of the sea likely reached 95 degrees Fahrenheit in tropical areas. And the sea level was 558 feet higher than it is now.
But there has been no evidence about what conditions were like at the South Pole. This is the southernmost sample of the Cretaceous period collected so far, revealing what Antarctica was like between 83 and 93 million years ago.
This map shows how the continents were arranged 90 million years ago. A red X marks the drill site.
“The preservation of this 90-million-year-old forest is exceptional, but even more surprising is the world it reveals,” said Tina van de Flierdt, study co-author and professor in the Imperial College London’s Department of Earth Science and Engineering. “Even during months of darkness, swampy temperate rainforests were able to grow close to the South Pole, revealing an even warmer climate than we expected.”
Sediment cores can record a lot of information about climate, acting as a time capsule for average temperature, rainfall and vegetation.
“To get a better idea of what the climate was like in this warmest phase of the Cretaceous, we first assessed the climatic conditions under which the plants’ modern descendants live,” Klages said.
The findings paint an unusual portrait of the South Pole, where West Antarctica’s coast was free of the ice caps that cover it now and swampy rainforests covered the area instead.
The average daytime temperature was 53 degrees Fahrenheit. While that sounds mild to us, this is incredibly warm for a location near the South Pole, where current daytime temperatures hover between negative 76 degrees to 14 degrees Fahrenheit. And, as the researchers point out, it’s only two degrees warmer than Germany at the moment in March.
The Antarctic ice sheet didn’t exist at the time. River and swamp temperatures were likely around 68 degrees Fahrenheit. And the Antarctic summer temperature was likely around 66 degrees Fahrenheit. They estimate rainfall reached about 97 inches per year — about the same as Wales today.
The forests were similar to those now found on New Zealand’s South Island, the researchers said.
But how did Antarctica sustain temperate rainforests without year-round sunlight? Even millions of years ago, the South Pole endured what’s known as a four-month polar night when no sunlight can be seen. The researchers investigated the levels of carbon dioxide that would have been in the atmosphere at the time.
They found atmospheric carbon dioxide was much higher than expected based on existing climate models. Carbon dioxide has a warming effect on the atmosphere and the planet, creating a greenhouse effect by trapping heat from the sun.
The high amount of carbon dioxide, combined with an ice sheet-less Antarctica covered in vegetation created the right conditions for a rainforest environment.
“We now know that there could easily be four straight months without sunlight in the Cretaceous. But because the carbon dioxide concentration was so high, the climate around the South Pole was nevertheless temperate, without ice masses,” said Torsten Bickert, study co-author and geoscientist at the University of Bremen’s MARUM research centre.
But the scientists still don’t know what caused Antarctica to cool off enough to form ice sheets, which leads them to their next challenge.
