Category Archives: WORLD

EUROPE, TURKEY, WORLD

12,000-year-old massive underground tunnels are real and stretch from Scotland to Turkey

12,000-year-old massive underground tunnels are real and stretch from Scotland to Turkey

Is it possible that ancient cultures were interconnected thousands of years ago? According to thousands of underground tunnels that stretch from North Scotland towards the Mediterranean the answer is a big yes.

While the reason behind these sophisticated tunnels remains a mystery, many experts believe that this huge 12,000-year-old network was built as a protection against predators and other dangers 12,000 years ago.

Some experts believe that these mysterious tunnels were used as modern-day highways, allowing the transition of people and connecting them to distant places across Europe.

In the book Secrets Of The Underground Door To An Ancient World (German title: Tore zur Unterwelt) German archaeologist Dr Heinrich Kush states that evidence of huge underground tunnels has been found under dozens of Neolithic settlements all over the European continent. These tremendous tunnels are often referred to as ancient highways.

According to Dr Kusch, the fact that many of these tunnels still exist today, after 12,000 years indicates that the tunnels must have been both complex and huge in size.

“Across Europe, there were thousands of them says Dr Kusch,” in Germany, we have discovered hundreds of meters of underground tunnels. In Austria, we have found hundreds more. These underground tunnels can be found everywhere across Europe and there are thousands of them.” Said the German archaeologist.

While some of the tunnels are relatively small- some of them measure over a meter in width, there are other tunnels that have been found with underground chambers and storage areas.

The fact that these tunnels have been found points towards incredible ancient ingenuity which is anything but what history books tells us today. Ancient mankind had the knowledge and tools to build complex structures over ten thousand years ago.

Evidence of that is the Pyramids of Bosnia in Europe and their incredible underground tunnels that go on for kilometres.

Dr Kusch states that ‘Across Europe, there were thousands of these tunnels – from the north in Scotland down to the Mediterranean.

They are interspersed with nooks, at some places it’s larger and there is seating, or storage chambers and rooms. They do not all link up but taken together it is a massive underground network.’

Cappadocia in Turkey is another incredible example. The underground city of Derinkuyu is another piece of evidence that points towards the perfection and long-lost construction methods of our ancestors.

The underground city of Derinkuyu is perhaps one of the greatest achievements in underground construction together with the huge network of tunnels.

The geological features of the stone from Derinkuyu is something that is very important; it is very soft. Thus, the ancient builders of Derinkuyu had to be very careful when building these underground chambers providing enough pillar strength to support the floors above; if this was not achieved, the city would have collapsed, but so far, archaeologists have not found evidence of any “cave-ins” at Derinkuyu.

12,000-year-old massive underground tunnels are real and stretch from Scotland to Turkey

Other ancient monuments such as Gobekli Tepe are more pieces of crucial evidence that point towards incredible skills and knowledge by people who inhabited our planet over ten thousand years ago.

According to Dr Kusch, chapels were often built at the entrances to the underground tunnels because the Church were afraid of the heathen legacy the tunnels might have represented, and like many other things, the church wanted to make sure word about the tunnels was kept as a secret.

In some of the tunnels, writings have been discovered which refer to these underground tunnels as gateways to the underworld.

EUROPE, NORWAY, WORLD

Archaeologists Extract 1,300-Year-Old Wooden Ski From Norwegian Ice

Archaeologists Extract 1,300-Year-Old Wooden Ski From Norwegian Ice

The long-lost ski of a pair used more than 1,300 years ago has been discovered on a Norwegian mountain top. The first ski was uncovered in 2014 and seven years later, the Digervarden ice patch melted enough to reveal its wooden counterpart – together they make the oldest pair of skis ever to be found.

On September 26, a team of Norwegian archaeologists led by the Secrets of Ice program hiked three hours up Mount Digervarden to the spot where the first ski was discovered.

Using GPS position and photos taken from the initial visit, the researchers located the second ski under the ice, which they chipped away with an axe and melted with boiling water to break the artefact free.

Archaeologists Extract 1,300-Year-Old Wooden Ski From Norwegian Ice
The second ski was better preserved than the first, perhaps because it was buried more deeply in the ice.

The Digervarden ice patch is in Reinheimen national park, located in Nordberg, Norway. It is a popular archaeological site that has revealed several ancient treasures once used thousands of years ago.

However, the reason these forgotten items are surfacing is due to climate change melting the once-solid ice sheets. The newly discovered ski is 187 cm long and 17 cm wide, 17 cm longer and 2 cm wider than the first ski found in 2014.

Archaeologist Lars Holger Pilø, who was part of the excavation, wrote in a blog post that the preservation of the new ski is much better, which may be due to it being deeper in the ice.

The skis may have belonged to a hunter or traveller.
Close-up view of the repaired foothold of the 1,300-year-old ski Espen Finstad / Secrets of the Ice
In November 2020, Pilø and his colleagues found a trove of artefacts on a mountainside in Jotunheimen in Norway. The items included nearly 70 arrow shafts (pictured), shoes, textiles and reindeer bones

‘That may account for some of the differences in dimensions between the two skis,’ Pilø shared.

The long wooden plank features three twisted birch bindings, a leather strap and a wooden plug through the hole in the foothold.

The ski found in 2014 only had one twisted birch binding and a leather strap through the hole.

Both skis have a hole through the tip.  

There are slight differences in the pair, one being that the back end of the new ski, while the one found in 2014 is straight. Interestingly, the new ski shows signs of repairs and a piece of the back end is missing that could still be frozen in the ice.

‘Whether it broke when lost or while inside the ice may be possible to say at a later stage based on a careful study of the edge of the break,’ Pilø shared in the post.

‘The skis are not identical, but we should not expect them to be. The skis are handmade, not mass-produced.

‘They have a long and individual history of wear and repair before an Iron Age skier used them together and they ended up in the ice 1300 years ago.’

In November 2020, Pilø and his colleagues found a trove of artefacts on a mountainside in Jotunheimen in Norway. The items included nearly 70 arrow shafts, shoes, textiles and reindeer bones. 

The heads were made from a variety of materials — iron, quartzite, slate, mussel shell and even bone. 

Several still had the twine and tar used to affix them to a wooden shaft. 

WORLD

What if We Aren’t the First Advanced Civilization on Earth?

What if We Aren’t the First Advanced Civilization on Earth?

Earth scientists at the turn of the century, Gavin Schmidt among them, were enthralled by a 56-million-year-old segment of geologic history known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). What most intrigued them was its resemblance to our own time: Carbon levels spiked, temperatures soared, ecosystems toppled. At professional workshops, experts tried to guess what natural processes could have triggered such severe global warming. At the dinner parties that followed, they indulged in less conventional speculation.

During one such affair, Schmidt, now the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, couldn’t resist the comparison. If modern climate change — unambiguously the product of human industry — and the PETM are so alike, he mused, “Wouldn’t it be funny if it was the same cause?” His colleagues were charmed by the implication. An ancient race of intelligent, fossil-fueled… chickens? Lemurs? “But,” he says, “nobody took it seriously, obviously.” Until, nearly two decades later, he took it seriously himself. 

One day in 2017, Schmidt received a visit from Adam Frank, a University of Rochester astrophysicist seeking insight into whether civilizations on other planets would inevitably alter their climates as we have. Truth be told, Frank expected his alien conjecture to come across as mildly outlandish.

He was surprised when Schmidt interrupted with an even stranger idea, one he’d been incubating for years: “What makes you so sure we’re the first civilization on this planet?”

Worlds Within

One thing nearly all human creations have in common is that geologically speaking, they’ll be gone in no time. Pyramids, pavement, temples and toasters — eroding away, soon to be buried and ground to dust beneath shifting tectonic plates. The oldest expansive patch of the surface is the Negev Desert in southern Israel, and it dates back a mere 1.8 million years. Once we disappear, it won’t take Earth long to scrub out the facade human civilization has built upon its surface. And the fossil record is so sporadic that a species as short-lived as us (at least so far) might never find a place in it. 

How, then, would observers in the distant future know we were here? If the direct evidence of our existence is bound for oblivion, will anything remain to tip them off? It’s a short step from these tantalizing questions to the one Schmidt posed to Frank: What if we are the future observers, discounting some prehistoric predecessor that ruled the world in long, long ago?

Frank’s mind whirled as he considered. A devotee of the cosmos, he felt suddenly dazed by the mind-boggling immensity of what lay beneath, rather than above, him. “You’re looking at Earth’s past as if it were another world,” he says. At first glance, the answer seems self-evident — surely we would know if another species had colonized the globe like Homo sapiens did. Or, he now wondered, would we?

Take the analogy where the planet’s entire history is compressed into a single day: Complex life emerged about three hours ago; the industrial era has lasted only a few thousandths of a second. Given how rapidly we are rendering our home uninhabitable, some researchers think the average lifespan of advanced civilizations may be just a handful of centuries. If that’s true, the past few hundred million years could hide any number of industrial periods.

Humanity’s Technosignature

In the months after that conversation, Frank and Schmidt crafted what seems to be the first thorough scholarly response to the possibility of a pre-human civilization on Earth. Even sci-fi has mostly neglected the idea. One 1970s episode of Doctor Who, however, stars intelligent reptilians, awakened by nuclear testing after 400 million years of hibernation. In homage to those fictional forebears, the scientists dubbed their thought experiment the “Silurian hypothesis.”

Both scientists are quick to explain that they don’t actually believe in the hypothesis. There isn’t the slightest evidence for it. The point, as Frank puts it, is that “the question is an important one, and deserves to be answered with acuity,” not dismissed out of hand. Moreover, he says, “you can’t know until you look, and you can’t look until you know what to look for.” To see what traces an industrial civilization might leave behind, they start with the only one we’re aware of. 

Our seemingly indelible mark on this planet will someday be reduced to a thin layer of rock, composed of the eclectic materials with which we’ve constructed the human world. Collectively they will make up our “technosignature,” the unique imprint that accompanies every technological species. For example, the sediment from our current geological epoch, the Anthropocene, will likely contain abnormal amounts of nitrogen from fertilizer, and rare-earth elements from electronics. Even more telling, it may harbor veins of substances that don’t occur naturally, like chlorofluorocarbons, plastics and manufactured steroids. (In fact, that’s the premise of an ominous short story Schmidt wrote to accompany the study.) 

Of course, there’s no reason every civilization must unfold in the same way. Some may never avail themselves of plastic. But they must share certain universal features. Probably they would disperse indicator species, like mice and rats in our case, in their travels. And Schmidt notes that even aliens can’t violate the laws of physics: “Does every technological species need energy? Yes, so where does the energy come from?” 

We humans conquered our planet with the help of combustion, and it seems reasonable to bet that ascendant life forms everywhere do the same. It’s just intuitive, Frank says: “There’s always biomass, and you can always set biomass on fire.” For a long time we’ve founded our industry on fossil fuels, and, climatic consequences aside, that will leave a geological footprint. Carbon occurs in three types, called isotopes. When we burn the tissues of long-dead creatures, we change the ratio of isotopes in the atmosphere, a shift known as the Suess effect. Scientists have noted similar ratios in events like the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, and if anyone is looking in another 50 million years, they should have no trouble seeing it in the Anthropocene.

Anyone Out There?

So what about the PETM? Did those fumes originate in the engines of primeval jalopies? Unlikely. The carbon surge of that period was far more gradual than the one that began with our Industrial Revolution. The same is true of other comparable events in the distant past; geologists have yet to find anything as abrupt as the Anthropocene. That said, the brevity may be the problem — it can be incredibly difficult to make out short intervals in the rock record, as well as at the astronomical level. Which brings us to the Fermi paradox. 

If the universe is so vast, with so many livable planets, why haven’t we found any hint of intelligent life? That’s what puzzled the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi. One solution is that plenty of civilizations have arisen, but they fizzle out so quickly that few exist at any given moment. Time, like space, is enormous, and humans may not overlap with many other extraterrestrial world-builders, reducing our chance of discovering any. Then there’s a more optimistic scenario: They may evade our notice not because they died off but because they mastered the art of sustainability, making their technosignatures less conspicuous.

That said, Frank is skeptical that a technological species could ever become undetectable — subtle, certainly, but not invisible. To build solar panels, you need raw materials; to acquire those materials, you need some other form of energy. As for wind power, recent research suggests that even if we raised enough turbines to power the planet, they too would contribute to short-term warming. This, Frank says, demonstrates at global scale the principle that there is no free lunch: “You cannot build a world-girdling civilization and not get some kind of feedback.”

The Search (and Fight) For Life

Since publishing the Silurian hypothesis, the authors have predictably attracted as many eccentrics as academics. “Everybody and their dog who has an ancient aliens podcast wanted to interview us,” Schmidt says. Both Schmidt and Frank realize the prospect of earlier earthlings is a seductive one. But regardless of who latches onto their hypothesis, they still see meaningful scientific lessons in their research.

For one, they hope it will inspire geologists looking in (and astrobiologists looking out) to hone their methods of detection. To identify a bygone civilization, they argue, scientists must search for a broad range of signals at once, everything from carbon fluctuations to synthetic chemicals. And they’ll need to pinpoint the rise and fall of these signals, given the importance of timing in distinguishing natural and industrial causes.

The hypothesis also bears on the famous Drake equation, used for calculating the number of active civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy. The equation assumes at most one civilization per inhabitable planet; an increase in that estimate could radically change its output or the probability that we have intelligent galactic neighbours.

Perhaps most importantly, Frank and Schmidt’s work represents a call to action and humility. It could be that both potential solutions to the Fermi paradox — extinction and technological transcendence — are possible. If so, we have a choice: “Are we going to live sustainably, or are we going to keep making a mess?” Schmidt wonders. “The louder we are in the cosmos, the more temporary we’re going to be.” Through one door, humans achieve a lasting place in the universe. Through the other we exit, leaving only a trail of cataclysmic breadcrumbs as a warning for the next big-brained saps to find — or overlook.

ASIA, ISRAEL, WORLD

Archaeologists find a 2,700-year-old toilet in a luxurious palace in Jerusalem

Archaeologists find 2,700-year-old toilet in luxurious palace in Jerusalem

Archaeologists in Israel have unearthed a private toilet dating from the seventh century B.C.E., a time when such a luxury would have been unheard of. According to Amy Spiro of the Times of Israel, the crew discovered the carved limestone fixture ahead of construction in Jerusalem’s Armon Hanatziv neighbourhood.

Archaeologists find 2,700-year-old toilet in luxurious palace in Jerusalem
The rare stone toilet is 2700 years old. Most likely used by one of the dignitaries of Jerusalem.

“A private toilet cubicle was very rare in antiquity, and to date, only a few have been found, mostly in the City of David,” says Yaakov Billig, who directed the dig for the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), in a statement.

“Only the rich could afford toilets. In fact, a thousand years later, the Mishnah and the Talmud discuss the various criteria that define a rich person, and Rabbi Yossi [suggests that] to be rich is [to have] a toilet near his table.’”

As Haaretz’s Ruth Schuster reports, a cubicle surrounding the toilet and a deep septic tank beneath it were both carved out of limestone bedrock. The bathroom measured about 5 by 6.5 feet.

The researchers are unsure whether the toilet was carved from bedrock or made out of a finer stone, Billig tells Haaretz.

Inside the toilet cubicle, the team found 30 to 40 bowls. Billig says it’s possible the vessels may have held aromatic oils or incense—early air fresheners for those making use of the facility.

Archaeologists have previously found a number of other toilets in Jerusalem, including one at a building known as the House of Ahiel. In 2016, experts announced the discovery of a separate commode in the ancient city of Tel Lachish, about 40 miles southwest of Jerusalem.

They suggested that ancient Israeli forces may have installed the toilet as a way of intentionally desecrating a pagan shrine. According to Haaretz,  this interpretation is a matter of considerable debate.

Prior to the invention of the modern flush toilet in 1596 and its widespread adoption in the 19th century, people relied on a variety of toilet technologies, reported Jimmy Stamp for Smithsonian magazine in 2014. Most used communal outhouses, chamber pots or humble holes in the ground.

Some Mesopotamians had simple toilets as early as the fourth millennium B.C.E., wrote Chelsea Wald for Nature in 2016. About 1,000 years later, wealthy Minoans developed a system that used water to wash waste from their toilets into a sewer system. And, in ancient Greece and Rome, public latrines connected bench seats to drainage systems.

The excavation of the royal estate was discovered in Jerusalem. In the background is the City of David and the Temple Mount.

The newly identified toilet was not connected to a larger system, so servants would probably have had to empty it periodically, per Haaretz.

Researchers found it in the ruins of an ancient palace discovered last year. The team has also unearthed stone capitals and columns, as well as evidence of an ancient garden with orchids and aquatic plants, at the large estate, the Associated Press (AP) reports.

Inside the septic tank, archaeologists found remnants of pottery and animal bones and human waste, reports Rossella Tercatin for the Jerusalem Post. They plan to analyze these discoveries to find out more about dietary habits in the ancient city. 

The estate offered a view over the Temple Mount, and, according to Billig, it may have been a residence of a king of Judah. 

The team will present its findings at the conference “Innovations in the Archaeology of Jerusalem and Its Surroundings,” which is scheduled to take place Wednesday and Thursday both in Jerusalem and online.

NORTH AMERICA, U.S.A, WORLD

Ancient Americans made art deep within the dark zones of caves throughout the Southeast

Ancient Americans made art deep within the dark zones of caves throughout the Southeast

A group of recreational cavers explored a small, muddy stream tunnel south of Knoxville, Tennessee, on a cold winter day in 1980. They navigated a slippery mud slope and a tight keyhole through the cave wall, trudged through the stream itself, ducked through another keyhole and climbed more mud. Eventually, they entered a high and relatively dry passage deep in the cave’s “dark zone” – beyond the reach of external light.

Human figure from Mud Glyph Cave with raised right hand and Chunkey game piece in the left hand

On the walls around them, they began to see lines and figures traced into remnant mud banks laid down long ago when the stream flowed at this higher level. No modern or historic graffiti marred the surfaces. They saw images of animals, people and transformational characters blending human characteristics with those of birds, and those of snakes with mammals.

Ancient cave art has long been one of the most compelling of all artefacts from the human past, fascinating both to scientists and to the public at large. Its visual expressions resonate across the ages as if the ancients speak to us from deep in time. And this group of cavers in 1980 had happened upon the first ancient cave art site in North America.

Since then archaeologists like me have discovered dozens more of these cave art sites in the Southeast. We’ve been able to learn details about when cave art first appeared in the region, when it was most frequently produced and what it might have been used for. We have also learned a great deal by working with the living descendants of the cave art makers, the present-day Native American peoples of the Southeast, about what cave art means and how important it was and is to Indigenous communities.

Cave art in America?

Few people think of North America when they think about ancient cave art. A century before the Tennessee cavers made their own discovery, the world’s first modern discovery of cave art was made in 1879, at Altamira in northern Spain. The scientific establishment of the day immediately denied the authenticity of the site.

Subsequent discoveries served to authenticate this and other ancient sites. As the earliest expressions of human creativity, some perhaps 40,000 years old, European palaeolithic cave art is now justifiably famous worldwide.

But similar cave art had never been found anywhere in North America, although Native American rock art outside of caves has been recorded since Europeans arrived. Artwork deep under the ground was unknown in 1980, and the Southeast was an unlikely place to find it given how much archaeology had been done there since the colonial period.

Nevertheless, the Tennessee cavers recognized that they were seeing something extraordinary and brought archaeologist Charles Faulkner to the cave. He initiated a research project there, naming the site Mud Glyph Cave. His archaeological work showed that the art was from the Mississippian culture, some 800 years old, and depicted imagery characteristic of ancient Native American religious beliefs. Many of those beliefs are still held by the descendants of Mississippian peoples: the modern Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Coushatta, Muscogee, Seminole and Yuchi, among others.

After the Mud Glyph Cave discovery, archaeologists here at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville initiated systematic cave surveys. Today, we have catalogued 92 dark-zone cave art sites in Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia. There are also a few sites known in Arkansas, Missouri and Wisconsin.

What did they depict?

There are three forms of southeastern cave art.

  • Mud glyphs are drawings traced into pliable mud surfaces preserved in caves, like those from Mud Glyph Cave. 
  • Petroglyphs are drawings incised directly into the limestone of the cave walls.
  • Pictographs are paintings, usually made with charcoal-based pigments, placed onto the cave walls.

Sometimes, more than one technique is found in the same cave, and none of the methods seems to appear earlier or later in time than the others. Some southeastern cave art is quite ancient. The oldest cave art sites date to some 6,500 years ago, during the Archaic Period (10,000-1000 B.C.). These early sites are rare and seem to be clustered on the modern Kentucky-Tennessee state line. The imagery was simple and often abstract, although representational pictures do exist.

Archaic Period pictograph of a hunter and prey dated to 6,500 years ago.
Woodland Period petroglyph of a box-shaped human-like creature with a long neck and u-shaped head.

Cave art sites increase in number over time. The Woodland Period (1000 B.C. – A.D. 1000) saw more common and more widespread art production. Abstract art was still abundant and less worldly. Probably more spiritual subject matter was common. During the Woodland, conflations between humans and animals, like “bird-humans,” made their first appearance.

The Mississippian Period (A.D. 1000-1500) is the last precontact phase in the Southeast before Europeans arrived, and this was when much of the dark-zone cave art was produced. The subject matter is clearly religious and includes spirit people and animals that do not exist in the natural world. There is also strong evidence that Mississippian art caves were compositions, with images organized through the cave passages in systematic ways to suggest stories or narratives told though their locations and relations.

Mississippian Period pictograph showing an animal with talons for feet, a blunt forehead and long snout, with a long curving tail over the back.

Cave art continued into the modern era

In recent years, researchers have realized that cave art has strong connections to the historic tribes that occupied the Southeast at the time of the European invasion. In several caves in Alabama and Tennessee, mid-19th-century inscriptions were written on cave walls in Cherokee Syllabary.

This writing system was invented by the Cherokee scholar Sequoyah between 1800 and 1824 and was quickly adopted as the tribe’s primary means of written expression.

On a cave wall in Alabama, an 1828 Cherokee syllabary inscription relating to a stickball ceremony.

Cherokee archaeologists, historians and language experts have joined forces with nonnative archaeologists like me to document and translate these cave writings. As it turns out, they refer to various important religious ceremonies and spiritual concepts that emphasize the sacred nature of caves, their isolation and their connection to powerful spirits. These texts reflect similar religious ideas to those represented by graphic images in earlier, precontact time periods.

Based on all the rediscoveries researchers have made since Mud Glyph Cave was first explored more than four decades ago, cave art in the Southeast was created over a long period of time.

These artists worked in ancient times when ancestral Native Americans lived by foraging in the rich natural landscapes of the Southeast all the way through to the historic period just before the Trail of Tears saw the forced removal of indigenous people east of the Mississippi River in the 1830s.

As surveys continue, researchers uncover more dark cave sites every year – in fact, four new caves were found in the first half of 2021. With each new discovery, the tradition is beginning to approach the richness and diversity of the Paleolithic art of Europe, where 350 sites are currently known. That archaeologists were unaware of the dark-zone cave art of the American Southeast even 40 years ago demonstrates the kinds of new discoveries that can be made even in regions that have been explored for centuries.

ASIA, IRAQ, WORLD

Ancient maps of Jupiter’s path show Babylonians’ advanced maths

Ancient maps of Jupiter’s path show Babylonians’ advanced maths

Analysis of an ancient codebreaking tablet has revealed that Babylonian astronomers had calculated the movements of Jupiter using an early form of geometric calculus some 1,400 years before we thought the technique was invented by the Europeans.

This means that these ancient Mesopotamian astronomers had not only figured out how to predict Jupiter’s paths more than 1,000 years before the first telescopes existed, but they were using mathematical techniques that would form the foundations of modern calculus as we now know it.

“This shows just how highly developed this ancient culture was,” historian Matthieu Ossendrijver from Humboldt University in Germany told Maddie Stone at Gizmodo. “I don’t think anybody expected something like this would be discovered in a Babylonian text.”

The key to figuring this out was a single, 50-year-old photograph of an astronomical tablet, which Ossendrijver used to decode the meaning of a strange trapezoid that had been carved into the stone more than 2,000 years ago.

For decades, researchers had been confounded by four Babylonian tablets held by London’s British Museum that all cite this trapezoid shape in the text referring to Jupiter’s movements across the sky. While we have plenty of archaeological evidence that basic geometry was often used in Babylonian mathematics, until now, we’ve only seen signs of them using arithmetic. 

So why would they be referring to geometrical calculations based on the long and short sides of a trapezoid? Without the codebreaking tablet in the photograph above, it just didn’t add up.

These cuneiform tablets were excavated from sites in Babylon and Uruk (now Iraq) in the 19th century and transported to the British Museum. Ossendrijver has known the contents of the four tablets like the back of his hand for decades, but until encountering this photograph, he’d never seen the fifth. 

“When I found this tablet last year, I immediately thought of these other tablets that I knew about, a few of which I translated myself,” Ossendrijver told Joshua Sokol at New Scientist. “But I never understood them.”

Essentially, this tablet held the key to understanding how the Babylonians used the trapezoid shape to predict Jupiter’s position, which was integral to their beliefs about the weather, the price of goods, and the fluctuating river levels throughout the year.

“The now-decoded ‘text A’ describes a procedure for calculating Jupiter’s displacement across the ecliptic plane, the path that the Sun appears to trace through the stars, over the course of a year,” says Maddie Stone at Gizmodo.

“According to the text, the Babylonians did so by tracking Jupiter’s speed as a function of time and determining the area under a time-velocity curve.”

Pretty impressive, right?

And what’s fascinating is French and British scholars had been using the same technique during the 14th century – using trapezoids to calculate measurements of velocity and displacement – and everyone had assumed it originated with them.

“In 1350, mathematicians understood that if you compute the area under this curve, you get the distance travelled,” Ossendrijver told Gizmodo. “That’s quite an abstract insight about the connection between time and motion. What is shown by [these texts] is that this insight came about in Babylonia.”

His findings have been published in Science.

MEXICO, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

El Pital: A Massive Ancient Port City Home to 150 Pyramids

El Pital: A Massive Ancient Port City Home to 150 Pyramids

The remains of a huge, ancient port city believed to have flourished for 500 years during the decline of the Roman Empire have been discovered on Mexico’s Gulf Coast, the National Geographic Society announced Thursday.

With more than 150 earthen pyramids and other buildings, the biggest 100 feet high, the port seems to have been North America’s largest coastal city 1,500 years ago. The site, in the state of Veracruz, has been named El Pital for a nearby town.

Although digging has not begun at the site, an examination of the surface has already yielded artefacts and information that establish the city’s importance as a multiethnic political, commercial and agricultural centre from AD 100 to 600.

150 pyramids

El Pital could provide important clues to gaps in ancient Mexican history in areas bordering the seats of the Mayan and Aztec empires, said American archaeologist S. Jeffrey K. Wilkerson of the Institute for Cultural Ecology of the Tropics in Tampa, Fla. He is directing the exploration, which is partly funded by National Geographic.

El Pital residents probably traded with their contemporaries at Teotihuacan, the site of the famous pyramids north of the capital that was built by a civilization that predated the Aztecs.

The city is likely to have been an early rival of El Tajin, a later city 40 miles away that until now was the biggest archaeological site in northern Veracruz. El Pital appears to have been larger than El Tajin, controlling an area that included more than 40 square miles of suburbs and farmland and probably influencing an area several times that large.

The discovery could also have significant ecological implications because the ancient civilization seems to have supported more than 20,000 people–similar to the population of the area today–using farming techniques less harmful to the environment than the intensive chemical agriculture now practised there.

“The (population) density we’re seeing far exceeds anything that preceded it in this area and even those that follow until the end of the 20th Century,” Wilkerson said. “Something special was going on technologically that allowed that to happen and that has not occurred in the intervening 1,500 years.”

The fields around El Pital were made highly productive by some of the largest earth-moving projects of their time. Canals were dug to drain wetlands or to channel fresh water into rich estuaries that brackish water would otherwise have left infertile.

Residents also appear to have constructed an artificial island to guard the two slow-moving rivers that provided access to their city from the Gulf of Mexico. One of those rivers is the Nautla, Mexico’s 26th-largest river, notable because it floods every year, like the ancient Nile, leaving farmers a layer of rich silt.

The city’s demise may have been connected to a megacycle of El Nino, a climatic phenomenon that resulted in six months a year of the cold, windy rains known as nortes , Wilkerson theorized.

Some cocoa farmers still lived in the region at the time of the Spanish conquest, but the disease had mainly wiped them out by the end of the 16th Century. The jungle reclaimed the area until plantation owners cleared it again in the 1930s and 1940s.

Today’s farmers rely on chemicals to fertilize plantations in what is now one of Mexico’s most important banana and citrus regions. Those chemicals have stained ancient ceramic fragments–whose varied patterns led scientists to believe that the area was multiethnic–and even obsidian, an extremely dense volcanic material seldom penetrated, Wilkerson said.

Besides everyday ceramics, archaeologists have found a mask that resembles the image of the ancient rain god Tlaloc and a four-inch clay head believed to depict a sacrificed ballgame player. Residents of El Pital seem to have been major fans of ballgames: Eight courts have already been identified in the area.

“This is an extensive site with huge monuments for that period,” said Enrique Nalda, technical secretary of Mexico’s National Institute of Archeology and History, which granted Wilkerson a permit to explore the El Pital area.

Some of the pyramids at El Pital.

Ironically, Wilkerson discovered El Pital because the institute nearly two years ago refused to allow him to continue working in an area farther upriver, where he has carried out investigations over the last three decades.

ASIA, KAZAKHSTAN, WORLD

A Valley in Kazakhstan Home to Countless Massive Stone Spheres

A Valley in Kazakhstan Home to Countless Massive Stone Spheres

Close to the town of Shetpe in Western Kazakhstan lies the Valley of Balls – or Torysh, as it is known in Kazakh. It consists of numerous ball-like rock formations strewn across a wide range of steppe land. The balls range in size from tiny marble-like rocks to huge boulders the size of a car.

The Torysh Valley in Kazakhstan is home to a unique landscape. Scattered across the surface are countless stone spheres of different sizes.

It’s as if in the distant past, it rained massive spheres from the heavens. The unique Kazakhstani spheres are found in the southwestern part of the country, amidst mountains, valleys, deserts, and tundra.

The spheres are believed to be more than 150 million years old, and they are unusual not only because of their age but by their shape and impressive size. Some of the Spheres are as large as a car, while some spheres are only a few centimetres in diameter.

How they came into existence is also exciting and is the result of science facts mixed with folklore or even legends.

Scientists say the region is home to a geological wonder and that the spheres most likely date back from the Jurassic to the early Cretaceous period, between 180 and 120 million years.

Furthermore, it is thought that the stone spheres are composed of silicate or carbon cement.

The researchers that travelled to Kazakhstan to study the spheres believe they are the result of massive concretions. However, alternative researchers hold that these massive stone spheres are the ‘ancestors’ of more recent spheres discovered in Costa Rica and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Those who believe they are not naturally made argue the massive stone spheres of Kazakhstan result from long-lost civilizations that existed on Earth before written history.

But the truth is that the valley of spheres is poorly reached.

Nonetheless, there could be various geological explanations ranging from megaspherulites – crystalline balls created in volcanic ash and then exposed by weathering – to cannonball concretions – a process where an area’s sediment tends to accumulate around a more rigid core.

In addition, some argue that the speeches are also the result of a process called spheroidal weathering, where the conditions are perfect for eroding rocks, giving them a spherical form.

However, since not all the spheres in the enigmatic valley are of the same size, researchers believe the stone ‘balls’ are most likely the result of megaspherulites.