19th-century beer bottles found under the staircase in England
WYAS Archeological Services made the finding back in February and subsequently sent out the bottles for analysis.
The team discovered a set of cellar stairs in the ruins of what was the Scarborough Castle Inn after investigating an area within the site of the former Tetley’s Brewery.
Neatly piled on the stairs was a collection of over 600 bottles, initially thought to contain ginger beer.
But it was discovered that the bottles were filled with alcohol and, even more, high concentrations of lead after the samples were sent for review by West Yorkshire Joint Services.
In a social media post, archaeological services WYAS said that the bottles contained 5.07 pH beer with 3% ABV alcohol. However, the liquid contained 0.13mg/l of lead, far above the WHO-recommended safe level in water of around 0.01mg/l.
Researchers analyzed hundreds of old beer bottles discovered in the United Kingdom.
The team said they suspect the high metal content would have come from lead pipes, and that the beer “would have been detrimental to health”.
The bottles themselves hail from a number of different breweries, with the most from ‘J. E. Richardson of Leeds’. The archaeologists hope to complete their work in the area in the next two weeks, after which they will compile a report of their findings.
Speaking to the drinks business, senior project manager at Archaeological Services WYAS, David Williams, said that the team thought the bottles dated to the later 19th century, “perhaps the 1880s”.
He added that the developer, Vastint, intends to keep the bottles and make a feature of them within the new development of the former Tetley’s Brewery.
“This excavation is giving us a great opportunity to uncover a part of Georgian and Victorian Leeds. The results so far are giving a real insight into the daily lives of the former residents of Leeds during this period,” he said.
In 1990 a strange type bluestone was found in Sierra Leone, West Africa by geologist and archeologist Angelo Pitoni, named the Sky stone (12000 BC).
The enigmatic stone was sent to research laboratories worldwide, The tests were carried out in laboratories of the University of Geneva, Rome, Utrecht, Tokyo, and Freiberg, Germany.
This was discovered in an old village outside of Freetown, Sierra Leone.
All experts agree that the bluestone isn’t similar to any type of rock known in nature so it must be artificial.
The Italian geologist believed that this is an extraordinary object: a strange crystal found in Sierra Leone diamond fields that resembles a pure turquoise similar to some found on the pectorals of Egyptian priests. Analyses performed on this “Stone of Heaven”, as he calls it, revealed that it is different from any other gemstone known to man.
Angelo Pitoni
This story continues with a trip to Asia during a rare gem and mineral sourcing trip by the American artist and designer, Jared Collins.
The dealer replied, “when I received several pieces of the stone, I too was thinking this story has no credibility, so just for the hell of it, I cut off a small sample from my larger piece and sent it over to Dr. Preeti at GRS Swisslabs to see what he had to say about it through testing. Dr. Preeti called me back to ask what this stuff was because he couldn’t determine its composition and ended up returning it as “unidentifiable.” Dr. Preeti only mentioned that he did not believe that the material itself was natural, but the element creating the blue color might be organic. – Jared Coins
In 2007, the National Geographic award-winning fine-art portrait photographer, Jared Collins, relocated his studio from New York City to Ubud, Bali where he set out to create a dramatic series of images documenting the most distinctive Balinese women adorned in ornate ceremonial costumes.
The actual sample of Sky Stone (above) submitted to GRS Swisslabs for testing and analysis.
Intrigued, but highly skeptical of the stone actually being anything it was claimed to be, Collins proposed to buy the small cutaway piece from the dealer so he could study it further, but the dealer just shrugged it off and refused to sell it.
He wouldn’t even name a price for the larger full stone. Collins was somewhat taken back by this as the dealer’s business was solely based on buying and selling stones, not collecting them.
As it turned out that night, Sky Stone was the only thing in the entire room not going to be made available for sale, and the only thing he was interested to take out of there. Collins ended up leaving Hong Kong with a haunting feeling that something important may have just slipped through his fingers and he never forgot about that bluestone.
Its composition was found to be composed of 77% oxygen, along with traces of carbon, silicon, calcium, and sodium.
The composition makes the “Sky Stone” similar to a kind of concrete or stucco and seems to have been artificially colored. The natives living in the area where the stone was found, already knew about its existence because this stone-like artifact used to pop out during the digging in the area.
Another mystery related to the stone of heaven is that this artifact is always found in soil layers dating to at least 12000 BC. The stone was certainly produced by an unknown, highly advanced civilization lost in time.”
Sky Stone material was also claimed to have made a brief appearance at the weekend market in Marakesh, Morroco (where they also specialize in meteorites.) It was going by the name of “kryptonite.”
Maize, not metal, the key to native settlements’ history in New York
The Recent Cornell University research offers a more detailed historical timeline for the occupation of Native American sites in upstate New York, based on radiocarbon dating of organic materials and statistical modeling.
Reports from the study of a dozen sites in Mohawk Valley were recently published by Sturt Manning in the online journal PLoS ONE, the professor of classical archeology; and John Hart, curator in the research and collections division of the New York State Museum in Albany.
The findings, Manning said, are helping to refine our understanding of the social, political, and economic history of the Mohawk Valley region at the time of early European intervention.
The Iroquoian Study
The work is part of the Dating Iroquoia Project, involving researchers from Cornell, the University of Georgia, and the New York State Museum, and supported by the National Science Foundation.
The new paper continues and expands upon research on four Iroquoian ( Wendat) sites in southern Ontario, published by the project team in 2018. Using similar radiocarbon dating and statistical analysis methods, the 2018 findings also impacted the timelines of Iroquoian history and European contact.
A map showing the Mohawk Valley region in northeast North America and all the Iroquoian sites analyzed in this study.
“The Mohawk case was chosen because it is an iconic series of indigenous sites and was subject to one of the first big dating efforts in the 1990s,” said Manning. “We have now examined a southern Iroquois ( Haudenosaunee) case as well as a northern Iroquois (Wendat) case, and we again find that the previous dating scheme is flawed and needs revision.”
The Mohawk and Hudson river valleys were key inland routes for Europeans entering the region from the coast in the 16th and early 17th centuries. Colonization of the new world enriched Europe (Manning has described this period as “the beginning of the globalized world”) but brought disease and genocide to indigenous peoples, and their history during this time is often viewed in terms of trade and migration.
Iroquoian Trade Goods
The standard timeline created for historical narratives of indigenous settlement, Manning noted, has largely been based on the presence or absence of types of European trade goods – e.g., metal items or glass beads. Belying this Eurocentric colonial lens, trade practices differed from one native community to another, and not all of them accepted contact with, or goods from, European settlers.
Iroquois engaging in trade with Europeans.
To clarify the origins of metal goods found in the upstate New York settlements, the team used portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) analysis to determine whether copper artifacts were of native or European origin. They then also re-assessed the dates of the sites using radiocarbon dating coupled with Bayesian statistical analysis.
Bayesian analysis, Manning explained, is “a statistical method that integrates prior knowledge in order to better define the probability parameters around a question or unknown. In this case, archaeological and ethnohistorical information was combined with data from a large set of radiocarbon dates in order to estimate occupation dates for a set of Mohawk villages across the 13th to early 17th centuries.”
The focus was on the period from the late 15th to the early 17th century, he said, or “the long 16th century of change in the northeast”. The results “add to a growing appreciation of the interregional variations in the circulation and adoption patterns of European goods in northeastern North America in the 16th to earlier 17th centuries,” Manning said.
Iroquoian History Reevaluated
In previous indigenous site studies, where artifacts indicated trade interactions, researchers might assume “that trade goods were equally available, and wanted, all over the region,” and that different indigenous groups shared common trade practices, he said. Direct radiocarbon dating of organic matter, such as maize kernels, tests those assumptions and removes the colonial lens, allowing an independent timeframe for historical narratives, Manning said.
At several major Iroquois sites lacking close European connections, independent radiocarbon studies indicate substantially different date ranges from the previous estimates based on trade goods.
“The re-dating of a number of Iroquoian sites also raises questions about the social, political and economic history of indigenous communities from the 14th to the 17th centuries,” Manning said. “For example … a shift to larger and fortified communities, and evidence of increased conflict,” was previously thought to have occurred around the mid-15th century.
The study of the Iroquoian sites also raises questions about the dating of conflicts.
But the radiocarbon findings from some larger sites in Ontario and their cultivated maize fields ¬- 2,000 acres or more in some instances — date the sites from the mid-16th to the start of the 17th century, he said. “However, as this New York state study shows, other areas had their own and differing trajectories. Thus with direct dating we start to see real, lived, histories of communities, and not some imposed generic assessment,” Manning said.
“The emerging new and independent timeframe for northeast North America will now form the basis of a wider indigenous history,” Manning stated, “free from a Eurocentric bias, with several past assumptions open for an overdue rethink.” Cornell University has dedicated television and audio studios available for media interviews supporting full HD, ISDN, and web-based platforms.
Tests Underway to Solve Enigma of Naked Cerne Abbas Giant
For the first time, archaeologists attempt to establish the age of the mysterious Cerne Abbas Giant. The Cerne Abbas Giant is a 55 m nude chalk figure brandishing a giant club overlooking Cerne Abbas village in Dorset, England.
The origins and purpose of Britain’s largest chalk hill figure remain shrouded in mystery. The giant chalk figure was gifted to the National Trust in 1920 by the Pitt-Rivers family.
The charity and Gloucestershire University also conduct research to determine the age of the giant. Archeologists have excavated small trenches to enable samples of soil to be extracted from points on the giant’s elbows and feet.
An aerial view of the Cerne Abbas Giant, a hill figure near the village of Cerne Abbas in Dorset
A closer aerial view showing the hillside on which the giant is carved into which was gifted to the National Trust in 1920 by the Pitt-Rivers family. The charity is now researching the giant
Professor Phillip Toms from Gloucestershire University will attempt in the coming weeks to date the samples using a technique called optically stimulated luminescence (OSL).
Martin Papworth, a senior archaeologist at the National Trust, said: ‘The OSL technique is commonly used to determine when mineral grains in the soil were last exposed to sunlight.
‘It was used to discover the age of the Uffington White Horse in Oxfordshire in the 1990s, which was found to be nearly 3,000-years-old – even more ancient than we had expected.
‘We’re expecting the results of the tests in July. It is likely that the tests will give us a date range, rather than a specific age, but we hope they will help us better understand, and care for, this famous landmark.’
Volunteers from the National Trust cleaning and restoring the giant for the first time in 2019
Volunteers working to repair and refresh the Cerne Abbas Giant in Dorset. Archaeologists are attempting to determine for the first time the age of the mysterious Cerne Abbas Giant
Gordon Bishop, chairman of the Cerne Historical Society, said villagers were eagerly awaiting the results.
‘Although there are some who would prefer the giant’s age and origins to remain a mystery, I think the majority would like to know at least whether he is ancient or no more than a few hundred-years-old,’ he said.
‘Whichever may be the case, he is unique.’
In a separate analysis, environmental archaeologist Mike Allen will analyze soil samples containing the microscopic shells of land snails to learn more about the site’s past.
‘There are 118 species of snails in Britain and many of them are habitat-specific, so their preserved shells can help us establish what a landscape was like at a certain time, and to track changes in land use over time,’ he said.
‘They should help us to discover whether the giant was created on a grazed chalk hillside, or whether people purposely cleared scrub to prepare the land for the figure.’
Last year, the giant was refreshed for the first time in 11 years, with a team of volunteers hammering in 17 tonnes of new chalk by hand to counteract weathering and keep the giant visible for miles around.
Theories as to the purpose of the giant are unclear. Everything from it being an ancient spirituality symbol or likeness of Greco-Roman hero Hercules to a caricature of Oliver Cromwell, with the club a reference to repressive rule and the phallus a mockery of his puritanism, have been put forward as suggestions.
Local folklore has long held it to be a fertility aid and the earliest recorded mention of the giant dates from 1694.
It is one of the artifacts that a few have heard of, yet its characteristics are incredibly interesting. There have been dozens of objects discovered through the years that do not fit into the mainstream view of history, archaeology, and anthropology.
This discovery was made in 1998 when electrical engineer John. J. Williams found what appeared to be an electrical connector protruding from the ground on a hiking trip in North America.
The object was found in the middle of nowhere, far away from human settlements, industrial complexes, airports, factories, and electronic or nuclear plants. After digging further into the ground, Williams discovered a device with a triple plug, embedded into the rock.
Williams refused to give away the exact location where the object was found, which has led skeptics to conclude that this artifact is just another hoax. But is it?
Today the artifact is referred to as the Petradox, a device that has the undeniable aspect of an electrical component which ended up embedded into solid granite, stone composed of quartz and feldspar, with small traces of mica. There is a huge amount of secrecy surrounding the object.
Williams has received offers up to 500,000 dollars for the device but has refused to sell it. Williams stated that the artifact, however, is available to any researchers for analysis. So far, only a few individuals have taken the time to study the mysterious object, resembling without a doubt, an electrical component.
The Petradox is not an accretion, concretion, pumice or fossil. It does not contain any known resins, cement, glues, adhesives, limestone, mortar, or other non-rhyolite / non-granite binding agents. It is very hard.
The component itself is about 8 mm in diameter; the pins of the device are about 3 mm high, and the spacing between the pins is approximately 2.5 mm while the pin thickness is about 1 mm.
According to Williams, who has consulted an engineer and geologist to examine the object, the electronic component embedded in the granite reveals no trace of having been glued or welded in any known form, it is clear that the object already existed at the time of the formation of the rock.
According to geological analysis, researchers believe that the “rock” is at least 100,000 years old, something impossible if you believe that the object is of artificial origin.
The conventional understanding of the technological development of mankind tells us that there is no way humans could have made something like this at that time in history.
The device has been compared by some researchers to an electronic XLR connector or similar component. The artifact has a weak magnetic attraction, Ohmmeter readings indicate either open-circuit or very high impedance between the pins.
The artifact does not seem to be made out of wood, plastic, metal, rubber, or any other recognizable material. Williams has not allowed the object to be broken in half for analysis but X-ray tests have shown that the artifact has a mysterious “opaque internal structure” in the center of the stone.
According to Williams, melted blobs of a metallic-like material on the component’s periphery indicate that some metal object near the Petradox was subjected to such high temperatures to cause metal melting and molten metal splashing or sputtering onto the embedded component.
Skeptics firmly believe that this 100,000-year-old electrical component is a manufactured hoax, but Williams does not agree.
He is convinced that he has found a genuine artifact that belonged to an advanced ancient civilization or an extraterrestrial race. Williams is willing to let researchers authenticate the artifact under certain conditions: that he is present during the analysis and that the rock remains unharmed.
There are some of us who believe that science does not have an interest in these objects because they are afraid of what they might find out. The artifact has two possibilities.
While scientific analysis could confirm it as being an elaborate hoax, it could also radically change our understanding of the history of mankind and change the way we look at history and our origins.
It is the legend that drew legions of explorers and adventurers to their deaths: an ancient empire of citadels and treasure hidden deep in the Amazon jungle.
Spanish conquistadores ventured into the rainforest seeking fortune, followed over the centuries by others convinced they would find a lost civilization to rival the Aztecs and Incas.
Some seekers called it El Dorado, others the City of Z. But the jungle swallowed them and nothing was found, prompting the rest of the world to call it a myth. The Amazon was too inhospitable, said 20th-century scholars, to permit large human settlements.
Now, however, the doomed dreamers have been proved right: there was a great civilization. New satellite imagery and fly-overs have revealed more than 200 huge geometric earthworks carved in the upper Amazon basin near Brazil’s border with Bolivia.
An aerial picture of traces of earthworks built by a lost Amazonian civilization dating to 200AD.
Spanning 155 miles, the circles, squares and other geometric shapes form a network of avenues, ditches, and enclosures built long before Christopher Columbus set foot in the new world. Some date to as early as 200 AD, others to 1283.
Scientists who have mapped the earthworks believe there may be another 2,000 structures beneath the jungle canopy, vestiges of vanished societies.
The structures, many of which have been revealed by the clearance of forest for agriculture, point to a “sophisticated pre-Columbian monument-building society”, says the journal Antiquity, which has published the research.
The article adds: “This hitherto unknown person constructed earthworks of precise geometric plan connected by straight orthogonal roads. The ‘geoglyph culture’ stretches over a region more than 250km across, and exploits both the floodplains and the uplands … we have so far seen no more than a tenth of it.”
The structures were created by a network of trenches about 36ft (nearly 11 meters) wide and several feet deep, lined by banks up to 3ft high. Some were ringed by low mounds containing ceramics, charcoal and stone tools. It is thought they were used for fortifications, homes, and ceremonies, and could have maintained a population of 60,000 – more people than in many medieval European cities.
The discoveries have demolished ideas that soils in the upper Amazon were too poor to support extensive agriculture, says Denise Schaan, a co-author of the study and anthropologist at the Federal University of Pará, in Belém, Brazil. She told National Geographic: “We found this picture is wrong. And there is a lot more to discover in these places, it’s never-ending. Every week we find new structures.”
Many of the mounds were symmetrical and slanted to the north, prompting theories that they had astronomical significance.
Researchers were especially surprised that earthworks in floodplains and uplands were of a similar style, suggesting they were all built by the same culture.
“In Amazonian archaeology, you always have this idea that you find different peoples in different ecosystems,” said Schaan. “So it was odd to have a culture that would take advantage of different ecosystems and expand over such a large region.”
The first geometric shapes were spotted in 1999 but it is only now, as satellite imagery and felling reveal sites, that the scale of the settlements is becoming clear. Some anthropologists say the feat, requiring sophisticated engineering, canals, and roads, rivals Egypt’s pyramids.
The findings follow separate discoveries further south, in the Xingu region, of interconnected villages known as “garden cities”. Dating between 800 and 1600, they included houses, moats, and palisades.
“These revelations are exploding our perceptions of what the Americas really looked liked before the arrival of Christopher Columbus,” said David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z, a book about an attempt in the 1920s to find signs of Amazonian civilizations. “The discoveries are challenging long-held assumptions about the Amazon as a Hobbesian place where only small primitive tribes could ever have existed, and about the limits the environment placed on the rise of early civilizations.”
They are also vindicating, said Grann, Percy Fawcett, the explorer who partly inspired Conan Doyle’s book The Lost World. Fawcett led an expedition to find the City of Z but the party vanished, bequeathing a mystery.
Many scientists saw the jungle as too harsh to sustain anything but small nomadic tribes. Now it seems the conquistadores who spoke of “cities that glistened in white” were telling the truth. They, however, probably also introduced the diseases that wiped out the native people, leaving the jungle to claim – and hide – all trace of their civilization.
Hundreds of tunnels which date back at least 10,000 Years have been Discovered in Brazil
Research teams in South America have found many gigantic burrows that are so massive and neatly constructed that you’d be forgiven for thinking humans dug them as a passageway through the forest.
The structure was huge, and according to Jenner, it’s still the largest known palaeoburrow in the Amazon and is twice the size of the second-largest palaeburrow in Brazil.
They are much older than they seem, they are estimated to be at least 8,000 to 10,000 years old, and they can not be explained by any known geological process. But then there are the massive claw marks lining the walls and the ceilings
Throughout Brazil, you can find the iconic statue of Christ the Redeemer and the awe-inspiring mountains of Corcovado and Sugarloaf. Travelers and adventurers will find in the country a magnificent slate of fauna like the giant anteater, many types of sloths, armadillos, otters, and even capybara in the country. However, Brazil has more than meets the eye. In fact, the country has its fair share of mysteries.
In 2010, geologist Amilcar Adamy from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, found a giant hole a few miles north of the Bolivian border. Upon investigation, he realized that the hole could not have been naturally made. None of the caves Adamy explored looked like anything the tunnels featured, with their round passages and smooth floors.
The mysterious tunnels have since then been discovered by various experts around the country and have opened up an entirely new realm of possibilities for geological studies.
Geologist Heinrich Theodor Frank stumbled across the tunnels while driving on the national Novo Hamburgo Highway. While driving, a hole of around one meter in diameter caught his attention. The hole was located at a construction site, and after further investigation, Frank discovered that the hole led to a complex underground tunnel. The tunnel was about 70 centimeters high and a few meters in length, with what appeared to be strange scratches on the ceiling of its walls.
After further exploration, Frank realized that hundreds of similar tunnels existed all over Brazil. The state of Rondonia alone has a large complex of 600 meter-long tunnels. Not only that, but 2,000 burrows with similar characteristics have also been found. Not even the locals in the area knew about the origins of the tunnels. Further tests showed that the tunnels were not man-made in origin.
Urban legends point towards various “historical” and even supposed “mythological” origins of the mysterious tunnels. Some say the tunnels were created by Indians, Jesuits, slaves, or even revolutionaries. Others believe the tunnels are a giant anthill or were even made by bears. Very rare few points towards a great mythological serpent that may have used the tunnel as its home.
Regardless, geological evidence alone proves that the tunnels were not created by Brazilian natives. The Indians who lived in Brazil even before the Europeans arrived did not use iron, and therefore had no means of digging through the hard rocks around the tunnels.
According to Frank, there is no natural geological process known to man that can produce the features of the tunnels. These features include the circular or elliptical cross-sections that branch, rise, and fall around the area. The geographic distribution of the tunnels is another mystery to scientists. The tunnels were only found in the southern parts of Brazil – particularly in the states of Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina. They don’t exist anywhere else.
The claw marks on the walls of the tunnels are also peculiar. Prehistoric animals such as giant armadillos or possibly mega-sloths are thought by many to be possible creators of such marks. The biggest burrows, with sizes of up to five feet in diameter, may have been dug by ground sloths that have adapted to the area’s environment and developed digging skills.
Giant armadillos, though shorter than sloths, may also have the skills necessary to dig these tunnels as well. The grooves along the ceiling may, in fact, be marks the animals have left whenever they pause or stop working. Unfortunately, there are no specific indications of these animals living in the country. Moreover, the sheer size of the tunnels cannot possibly be made by any “giant” armadillos or sloths – at least, ones that we know of.
The giant armadillo, the largest existing member of its family, weighs between 65 and 90 pounds and is native to South America. However, its burrows are about 16 inches in diameter, and only up to 20 feet long. If the tunnels’ five foot wide and 250-feet long burrows are in fact dug my animals, then it should be one extremely big creature – one that has not been discovered yet. However, it seems there is still another possibility.
Frank eventually sent photographs of the tunnels to Marcelo Rasteiro of the Brazilian Society of Speleology. He introduced the notion of “paleoburrows” excavated by living organisms in any geological age.
Examples of these organisms include worms in the Cambrian Era, mollusks in the Mesozoic Era, or rats in the Pleistocene. These are all organisms that have lived millions of years ago. Until the early 2000s, hardly any burrows attributed to extinct animals can be found in the scientific literature. In fact, it was only in 2015 that Adamy himself had the opportunity to extensively explore the mysterious tunnels.
If this paleoburrow theory is to be believed, then the tunnels in Brazil may have been created between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago. If this is the case, then the Rondonia tunnels Frank has discovered may be the first – and the largest – paleoburrow in the Amazon. These tunnels can actually be found all over the world, which adds even more depth to the mystery. Frank said similar caves could be found in countries such as Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina.
Until scientists can figure out who, what, or how these paleoburrows were made, they will remain an unfathomable enigma.
A 28,000-year mysterious pyramid is discovered at the top of Mount Padang, in west java Indonesia
Indonesian scientists have recently found an ancient pyramid- that is hidden in plain sight for thousands of years – buried inside a mountain in Indonesia.
Located atop Mount Padang in West Java, the structure is topped by an archaeological site that holds rows of ancient stone pillars.
Scientists become the first Europeans to discover Gunung (Mount) Padang in the early 20th century, they must have been awestruck by the sheer scale of their ancient stone surroundings.
Scientists claimed that a pyramid-like hill on top of Mount Padang in West Java isn’t natural – it as made by humans thousands of years ago.
According to scientists, there’s a series of channels and chambers belonging to a 10,000-year-old pyramid buried underneath Gunung Padang in West Java. They believe Gunung Padang’s layers of rocks were man-made and its slopes span at least 150,000 square meters of land.
The exploration proves that the structure does not cover just the top but also wraps around the slopes covering about 15 hectares area at least.
Scientists noted, “The structures are not only superficial but rooted into greater depth.”
Researchers Danny Hilman Natawidjaja told Live Science, “It’s a unique temple. It’s not like the surrounding topography, which is very much eroded. This looks very young. It looked artificial to us.”
Scientists used an array of techniques to peer underground including ground-penetrating radar surveys, X-ray tomography, 2D and 3D imaging, core drilling, and excavations — the researchers gradually uncovered several layers of a sizable structure. It spread over an area of around 15 hectares (150,000 square meters) and had been built up over millennia, with layers representing different periods.
At the very top were pillars of basalt rocks framing step terraces, with other arrangements of rock columns forming walls, paths, and spaces. They estimated this layer to be about 3,000 to 3,500 years old.
Scientists noted, “Underneath the surface, to a depth of about 10 feet (3 m), was the second layer of similar rock columns, thought to be 7,500 to 8,300 years old. And a third layer, extending 49 feet (15 m) below the surface, is more than 9,000 years old; it could even date to 28,000 years ago.”
