Possible 10th-Century Buddhist Monastery Site Uncovered in India
Archaeological Survey of India researchers has discovered a tenth-century structure in one of three mounds identified as possible Buddhist sites on the Hazaribagh Plateau in northeastern India, around 110-km from capital Ranchi, ASI officials said on Tuesday.
The ASI identified three mounds in the foothills having links to Buddhism last year.
The excavation of the first mound last year led to the discovery of a complete shrine with a central and two subsidiary shrines, just two metres below the surface. However, the excavation work was suspended after two months due to the Covid-19 pandemic triggered lockdowns and some other reasons.
In the second round of excavation, beginning the last week of January this year, the second mound, around 40-meters away from the first mound or central shrine, was excavated and a small Buddha Vihar like structure was discovered.
“We started excavation in the second mound of the area in January last week, where a huge structural mound, similar to a small Buddha Vihar, was found with three cells (rooms).
In the west corner of the structure, we found five sculptures of Gautam Buddha in a seated position and one sculpture of Tara, which indicates that it might also be a centre of Vajrayana,” said Dr Neeraj Mishra, an assistant archaeologist at ASI.
The discovery will help understand the impact of Buddhism in Jharkhand.
Spread over a 50-metre long and 50-metre wide area, three cells and hoards of artefacts including statues of Gautam Budha and Tara, the female Bodhisattva in Mahayana Buddhism who appears as a female Buddha in Vajrayana Buddhism, were discovered.
“As per the evidence found here, it appeared that the structures had been built during the Pala period. During the excavation, we found an inscription on a stone slab. The paleographic dating of the inscription suggests that it was of 10th century AD, meaning the Pala period,” said Dr Mishra.
It might have been a big religious centre then, as it is located on the side of the old Grand Trunk road, connecting Sarnath in Uttar Pradesh to Bihar, home to historic Bodh Gaya where Buddha attained salvation, he added.
He recalled that a shrine and two subsidiary shrines, spread over 30 metres long and 50 metres wide area, were discovered last year. “It was a single storey temple. An entry gate and stairs were also found there.”
Historians and archaeologists find the discovery of great importance, which will help understand the history and influence of the dynasty in Jharkhand.
Historian Dr DN Ojha, dean of, social sciences department at Ranchi University, said ancient history talks about the arrival of Buddhist monks in this area and the extension of Buddhism’s reach here.
“However, there was also a debate on this. The recent discovery in Hazaribag would work as big evidence to support the theory of extension of Buddhism and arrival of monks here,” he added.
Lasers removed stains on a fresco in Pompeii’s House of the Ceii
One of Pompeii’s most action-packed frescoes has regained some of its colours after lasers removed centuries-old stains and restorers touched up worn paint.
Featuring a lion chasing a bull, wild boar bearing down on deer and a leopard pouncing on sheep, the large fresco adorned the garden wall of the Pompeiian magistrate Lucius Ceius Secundus. Vegetation runs along the foot of the fresco, while the owner’s passion for Egypt is revealed by images on a sidewall of sacred Egyptian buildings and African pygmies hunting hippopotamuses and crocodiles.
The artwork — of hunting scenes — was painted in the so-called ‘Third’ or ‘Ornate’ Pompeii style, which was popular around 20–10 BC and featured vibrant colours.
In 79 AD, however, the house and the rest of the Pompeii was submerged beneath pyroclastic flows of searing gas and volcanic matter from the eruption of Vesuvius. Poor maintenance since the house was dug up in 1913–14 saw the hunting fresco and others deteriorate, particularly at the bottom, which is more vulnerable to humidity.
The main section of the fresco depicts a lion pursuing a bull, a leopard pouncing on sheep and a wild boar charging towards some deer. Frescos commonly adorned the perimeter walls of Pompeiian gardens and were intended to evoke an atmosphere — often one of tranquillity — while also creating the illusion that the area was larger than in reality, much as we use mirrors today.
A stunning fresco in the garden of Pompeii’s Casa dei Ceii (House of the Ceii) has been painstakingly laser-cleaned and touched up with fresh paint by expert restorers
‘What makes this fresco so special is that it is complete — something which is rare for such a large fresco at Pompeii,’ site director Massimo Osanna told The Times.
Alongside the haunting imagery of the now restored fresco, with its wild animals, the sidewalls of the garden featured Egyptian-themed landscapes, with beasts of the Nile delta-like crocodiles and hippopotamuses hunted by African pygmies and a ship shown transporting amphorae.
Experts believe the owner of the townhouse, or ‘domus’, had a connection or fascination with Egypt and potentially also the cult of Isis, that of the wife of the Egyptian god of the afterlife, which was popular in Pompeii in its final years.
In fact, the residence has been associated with one Lucius Ceius Secundus, a magistrate — based on an electoral inscription found on the building’s exterior — and it is after him that it takes its name, ‘Casa dei Ceii’.
The property, which stood for some two centuries before the eruption, is one of the rare examples of a Domus in the somewhat severe style of the late Samnite period of the second century BC.
The house’s front façade sports an imitation ‘opus quadratum’ (cut stone block) design in white stucco and a high entranceway set between two rectangular pilasters capped with cube-shaped capitals.
Casa dei Ceii’s footprint covered some 3,100 square feet (288 sq. m) and contained an unusual tetrastyle (four-pillared) atrium and a rainwater-collecting impluvium basin in a Grecian style, one rare for Pompeii, lined with cut amphora fragments.
The artwork — of hunting scenes — was painted in the so-called ‘Third’ or ‘Ornate’ Pompeii style, which was popular around 20–10 BC and featured vibrant colours, as pictured
The property, which stood for some two centuries before the eruption, is one of the rare examples of a domus in the somewhat severe style of the late Samnite period of the second century BC. The house’s front façade sports an imitation ‘opus quadratum’ (cut stone block) design in white stucco and a high entranceway set between two rectangular pilasters capped with cube-shaped capitals, as pictured
Other rooms found inside the property included a triclinium, where lunch would have been taken, two storage rooms, a tablinum which the master of the house would have used as an office and reception room and a kitchen with a latrine.
An upper floor, which partially collapsed during the eruption, would have been used by the household servants and appeared to be in the process of being renovated or constructed at the time of the catastrophe.
The garden on whose back wall was adorned by the hunting fresco, meanwhile, featured a canal and two fountains, one of a nymph and the other a sphynx.
During the excavation of the townhouse, archaeologists found the skeleton of a turtle preserved in the garden. The recent restoration work saw the paint film of much of the fresco — particularly a section featuring botanical decoration — carefully cleaned with a special laser.
The recent restoration work saw the paint film of much of the fresco — particularly a section featuring botanical decoration — carefully cleaned with a special laser. Experts also carefully retouched the paint in areas of the fresco that had been abraded over time, as well as instigating protective measures to help prevent the future infiltration of rainwater
‘What makes this fresco so special is that it is complete — something which is rare for such a large fresco at Pompeii,’ site director Massimo Osanna told The Times
Experts also carefully retouched the paint in areas of the fresco that had been abraded over time, protective measures have also been taken to help prevent the future infiltration of rainwater that could damage the artwork.
Experts believe the owner of the town house, or ‘domus’, had a connection or fascination with Egypt and perhaps the cult of Isis, that of the wife of the Egyptian god of the afterlife, which was popular in Pompeii in its final years. Pictured: the bull on the bottom right of the fresco.
Casa dei Ceii’s footprint covered some 3,100 square feet (288 sq. m) and contained an unusual tetrastyle (four-pillared) atrium and a rainwater-collecting impluvium basin in a Grecian style, one rare for Pompeii, lined with cut amphora fragments
Venetian Blue Beads Found in Alaska Predate Arrival of Columbus
Tiny glass beads from Venice made their way to Alaska decades before Christopher Columbus‘ arrival in the New World. The beads, the colour and size of blueberries, were uncovered in a house pit in Punyik Point, a seasonal Inuit camp near the Continental Divide in Alaska’s Brooks Range.
Archaeologists determined the objects were created between 1440 and 1480 following a radiocarbon-dating of twine that held the jewellery.
Researchers from the University of Alaska suggest the beads were among trinkets that passed hands through various trade routes — starting in Europe, then along the Silk Road to China, through Siberia and finally to the Bering Strait. According to the study, the new discovery resets the clock on when traded began between Europe and North America.
Glass beads made in Venice and found in Alaska by archaeologists. The findings were published in a January 2021 paper called “A Precolumbian Presence of Venetian Glass Trade Beads in Arctic Alaska,” by Michael Kunz and Robin Mills.
Mike Kunz, an archaeologist with the university’s Museum of the North in Fairbanks, discovered a total of 10 beads in three locations in the Brooks Range: Punyik Point, Kinyiksugvik and Lake Kaiyak House.
Kunz theorizes the baubles were just small piece of a number of trinkets that made their way various trade routes that began in Europe, then along the Silk Road to China, through Siberia and finally across the Bering Strait.
They were then presumably brought across the frigid Arctic Ocean to Alaska by kayak. Punyik Point was a popular stopping point for traders, Kunz says, because of the many caribou in the area.
Archaeologists in Arctic Alaska have found blue beads (top left) from Europe, possibly Venice, that might predate Christopher Columbus’ voyage to the New World.
‘And, if for some reason the caribou didn’t migrate through where you were, [it also] had excellent lake trout and large shrub-willow patches,’ he added. University of Wisconsin archaeologist William Irving found several turquoise beads at Punyik Point in the 1950s and 1960s.
But Irving had no way to know when they were deposited.
Flash forward to 2004, when Kunz and Bureau of Land Management archaeologist Robin Mills returned to the ancient campsite. They found three more beads there, along with copper bangles, metal loops that could have been earrings and other metal pieces that could have been part of a necklace or bracelet.
Artefacts found at Indigenous Alaskan sites include glass blue beads, copper bracelets and bangles, and iron pendants.
Wrapped around one of the bangles was a twine that had survived centuries of burial just a few inches below the surface. Because the twine is made of plant fibres — probably the inner bark of shrub willow, the scientists surmised— it meant they finally had an organic matter to conduct radiocarbon dating on using Accelerator mass spectrometry.
‘We almost fell over backwards,’ Kunz said in a release. ‘It came back saying [the plant was alive at] some time during the 1400s. It was like, Wow!’
With that information, along with radiocarbon dating of charcoal found nearby, they surmised the glass beads at all three locales arrived at some point between 1440 and 1480.
‘The beads challenge the currently accepted chronology for the development of their production methodology, availability, and presence in the Americas,’ the researchers wrote in a new paper in the journal American Antiquity.
‘This is the first documented instance of the presence of indubitable European materials in prehistoric sites in the Western Hemisphere as the result of overland transport across the Eurasian continent.’
According to Kunz and Mills, the beads probably made landfall at Shashalik, an ancient trading post north of modern-day Kotzebue, and then were transported further inland.
The archaeologists theorize they were part of a necklace or other piece of jewellery. The item’s location, at the entrance to an underground house, suggests it was dropped or discarded rather than intentionally buried.
Venice has been known as a glassmaking mecca for over 1,500 years, with the island of Murano the centre of production since at least the 13th century.
Columbus’ ships landed in the Bahamas in October 1492, before venturing on to Cuba and Haiti, where he started the first European settlement in the Americas since the Norse some 500 years earlier.
After briefly returning to Spain, Columbus made three more voyages to the New World between 1493 and 1502, exploring the Lesser Antilles, Trinidad, Puerto Rico and the northern coast of South America.
The bead variety, commonly known as ‘Early Blue’ and ‘Ichtucknee Plain,’ has been found throughout the Caribbean, the east coasts of Central and North America, and the eastern Great Lakes region, but only after Columbus’ arrival, generally between 1550 and 1750.
99-million-year-old ticks sucked the blood of dinosaurs
Researchers have uncovered some amazing pieces of the past preserved in ancient amber, from a new order of insects to whole baby birds. Now, another mind-blowing amber discovery surfaced, featuring a 99-million-year-old dinosaur feather along with several ticks, the oldest discovered so far.
A tick preserved in amber clutching a dinosaur feather
One tick still clings to the dino feather, engorged from its last blood meal, notes John Pickerell at National Geographic.
Abandon any Jurassic Park fantasies now before you get too excited. The extraction of DNA from amber has never been effective, and the short lifetime of DNA will make it too damaged to use anyway, states the press release.
But the new find, chronicled in the journal Nature Communications, does tell us a lot about the history and evolution of blood-sucking ticks.
David Grimaldi, paper co-author and American Museum of Natural History entomologist, was examining a group of amber specimens from a private collection when he and his colleagues realized they were looking at a feather and ticks, reports Nicholas St. Fleur at The New York Times.
“Holy moly this is cool,” Grimaldi tells St. Fleur he thought at the time. “This is the first time we’ve been able to find ticks directly associated with the dinosaur feathers.”
The researchers found five ticks stuck in the amber. these include a nymph or immature tick, the engorged tick, and two covered with beetle hair.
As Gretchen Vogel at Science reports, the larvae of these beetles live in nests and feed off of discarded bits of skin and feathers. They are covered in protective hairs that slough off, sometimes creating mats of the hairs in nests.
Ninety-nine-million-year-old amber specimens suggest ticks fed on dinosaur blood.
These tiny hairs tend to stick to anything else that visits the nest. So the presence of the larvae hair suggests that the ticks were infesting a dinosaur nest, possibly a brood of theropod dinos—the deep ancestors of modern birds.
As Pickrell reports, this find indicates two important things. First, it gives strong evidence to suggest that dinosaurs raised their young in nests. Second, it suggests that dinosaurs of the Cretaceous age had to deal with parasites like ticks as well.
“Seeing a tick preserved in the same resin flow as a feather provides a concrete example of the ecological relationship, where most of the previous evidence has been speculative,” Ryan McKellar, curator of invertebrate palaeontology at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Canada, who is not involved in the study, tells Pickrell.
Ricardo Pérez-de la Fuente, the co-author of the study and researcher at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, had long been pursuing the idea that ticks were dino parasites, Rebecca Hersher at NPR reports.
Pérez-de la Fuente has previously examined ancient ticks from other bits of amber covered in beetle hairs. But the combo of the tick and feather is the first hard evidence placing the two critters in close proximity.
Even so, most researchers believed that ticks only sucked the blood of early amphibians—and many millions of years later mammals—not feathered dinos, palaeontologist Ben Mans, who is not associated with the study, tells Hersher. This makes this most recent find a surprise.
One of those preserved ticks also represents a new species, which the researchers dubbed Deinocroton draculi. The scientists hope to follow up and figure out how the ancient tick fits into the family tree of the bloodsuckers.
As Pickrell reports, molecular clock analysis of modern ticks suggests that their ancient relatives first evolved some 200 to 300 million years ago, which means there’s still a long, bloody history of the critters for researchers to dig up.
12 Year Boy discovers rare dinosaur skeleton in a remote part of Canada
A 12-year-old boy made the discovery of his lifetime when he discovered a dinosaur fossil dating back 69 million years.
An amateur palaeontologist was walking with his father in a fossil-rich part of Alberta, Canada this July, when he saw bones protruding out of a rock. On Thursday, the skeleton’s excavation was completed.
The kid, Nathan Hrushkin, says that when he first looked at the bones, he was “literally speechless.”
Nathan Hrushkin, 12, and his father, Dion, discovered the partially exposed bones while hiking with friends in Horseshoe Canyon near Drumheller, Alberta.
“He told the BBC, “I wasn’t even excited, even though I know I should have [been]. “I was in so much shock that I had actually found a dinosaur discovery.”
Nathan, who has been interested in dinosaurs since he was six, often goes hiking in the Nature Conservancy of Canada’s protected site in the Albertan Badlands with his father.
“I’ve always just been so fascinated with how their bones go from bones like ours to solid rock.”
A year ago, they had found small fragments of fossils, and his father guessed that they were falling down from the rock above. So this summer Nathan decided to inspect. The fossilised bones were poking out of the side of a hill.
“Dad, you got to get up here!” he called to his father.
His father knew Nathan had found something by the tone of his voice.
“They looked like bones made of stone – you could not mistake them for anything else,” his father, Dion Hrushkin, said.
“It looked like the end of a femur – it had that classic bone look to it – sticking straight out of the ground.”
The bones belong to a young hadrosaur and have been dated at around 69 million years old.
Nathan knows that the fossils are protected by law, so when they got home, he and his father logged in to the website for the Royal Tyrrell Museum, which is located in Alberta and devoted to the study of prehistoric life. The museum advised them to send photos of their discovery and its GPS coordinates, which they duly did.
The Badlands are home to many fossils, and a dinosaur – named the Albertosaurus – was discovered by Joseph Tyrell in the late 1800s. But the part of the conservation site where they were walking was not known for fossil discoveries, so the museum sent a team of experts to excavate.
So far they have found between 30 and 50 bones in the canyon’s wall, all belonging to one young Hadrosaur, estimated to be aged about three or four.
“I was probably like most kids, the Tyrannosaurus Rex was probably my favourite kind [of dinosaur],” Nathan says.
“But after my discovery, it’s most definitely the Hadrosaur.”
The dinosaur is scientifically significant, the museum claims, because the fossil is about 69 million years old, and records from that time period are rare.
“This young Hadrosaur is a very important discovery because it comes from a time interval for which we know very little about what kind of dinosaurs or animals lived in Alberta. Nathan and Dion’s find will help us fill this big gap in our knowledge of dinosaur evolution,” the museum’s palaeo-ecology curator, François Therrien, said in a statement.
Nathan says he’s enjoyed learning more about dating dinosaur bones, and that the whole process has been “surreal”.
“It’s going to be great to see them, after months of work, finally take something out of the ground,” he says.
Pre-Adamites? Did Ancient Civilizations Develop On Earth Before Written History?
The timeline of human existence has captured the attention of philosophers, scientists, and ordinary, curious people throughout the ages. Of course, there is the famous tale of Adam and Eve, but were they truly the first humans to walk the Earth? There is a growing body of research that suggests modern humans were not the first intelligent beings to live on our planet.
Did Pre-Adamites Exist?
There are groups from all belief systems — Christians, conspiracy theorists, alien researchers, evolutionists, and more — who believe pre-Adamites (humans or intelligent beings that walked the Earth before Adam) actually existed.
The idea of the possibility of a pre-Adamite civilization and discussion about the origin of the human race is not a new one. Debates on the topic have been taking place since 170 AD. Over the years, many theories swirled about, enticing logical and romantic thinkers alike to explore further, look deeper, and question what they had been taught.
The Christian Debate
A growing number of Christians and people of other faiths believe modern-day humans were not the first — and possibly are not the last.
The Bible has clear passages about events that have taken place and that will take place at some point, stating human existence operates on a 7,000-year cycle. Based on scripture now, the Earth is only a little over 6,000 years old. However, a great deal of scientific evidence indicates it is much, much older.
The Bible does not specifically state Adam was the first man ever to walk the Earth. There are too many gaps in the information contained in that chapter to get a clear picture.
Consider the account of Noah and the Great Flood. All humans were wiped out, except for Noah and his family. It’s quite possible a new Adam and Eve were born out of this catastrophe, starting the cycle anew. Therefore, it’s not entirely irrational to have doubts over whether or not Adam and Eve were truly the first humans on Earth.
In the book of Genesis, we read the Earth was without form and void — as if it had experienced a great catastrophe. We know from scripture that water already covered the Earth, and scientists are now finding, under the great bodies of water of the world, evidence of entire civilizations. These findings raise more questions than answers. How do we mesh science with scripture? Is it possible?
Many events documented in the biblical texts seem to be supported by science. Can these two seemingly oppositional systems coexist and come together to give us a more complete picture of where we came from?
Consider that the original biblical texts have been translated repeatedly. The version we use today has only been around since the 1600s, and the Catholic church uses a heavy hand in changing the scripture and the structure of the book itself. If you stop and think about it, perhaps we’ve lost something in all the edits and translations. Maybe we don’t have the whole story.
Keep in mind, there is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9).
The Scientific Debate
Traditionally, science and religion are diametrically opposed, with religion calling for faith and science calling for a fact. However, scientific findings in recent years seem to be closing that gap. Scientists present evidence that dinosaurs once roamed the Earth. Christians open their Bibles to the book of Job to read about what appears to be dinosaurs coexisting with humans. More recently found civilizations and objects defy all scientific and biblical teaching.
Throughout the world, ancient cities are being discovered; not on mountaintops or in forests, but under the ocean. These include:
What are these ancient underwater cities? Are they evidence of a pre-Adamite civilization? Many of them have elaborate structures and display a level of technology scientists say was not possible at the time they would have been in use. Could carbon dating and other methods scientists use to date materials really be that far off? That’s not just a decade or two but a multi-billion-year error. Scientists believe they have definitive evidence or are at least very close, to support their timelines.
Some scientists believe they have found evidence of the inhabitants of some of these civilizations. A flash frozen civilization in Antarctica is of particular interest. The skeletons looked vaguely human except for the elongated skulls. Who were they? What were they? Scientists speculate an ancient race that has long since died out.
Conspiracy theorists, on the other hand, believe they are an alien race that came here to escape their dying planet. They set up their civilizations and “seeded” the Earth. That is what we humans are.
Everyone has a story, a theory about what took place. The truth is, there are very strange things on this planet that cannot be explained by our current understanding of history, science, technology, and culture. What do we do? We press on. We continue to explore. We keep our minds open and keep searching for the truth.
Regardless of our belief systems, nothing can be learned by blindly walking through life ignoring what does not fit in the history books. Skeptics must acknowledge these ancient civilizations are real, and they were left here for a reason. Why weren’t they destroyed? Is this part of an elaborate puzzle, a higher test to separate the wheat from the chaff?
As for the scientists, are they doing all they can? Is science truly utilizing all available resources to explore these civilizations and search for clues that would change the way we view society and the world? The fact that these structures and entire cities were left behind and buried, only for us to find them so many years later, suggests intent.
When you are deciding what to believe, the greatest tool that can be sharpened and utilized is your critical thinking.
World Oldest DNA Discovered in 1.2 Million Year Old Mammoth Teeth
As part of a study that uncovers new information about extinct animals, scientists have discovered the oldest DNA on record, extracting it from the molars of mammoths that roamed northeastern Siberia up to 1.2 million years ago
Scientists announced on Wednesday that they have successfully retrieved and sequenced DNA from three different mammoths— elephant cousins that were among the large mammals that dominated Ice Age landscapes — entombed in permafrost conditions conducive to the preservation of ancient genetic material.
While the remains were discovered starting in the 1970s, new scientific methods were needed to extract the DNA.
An artist’s reconstruction shows the extinct steppe mammoth, an evolutionary predecessor to the woolly mammoth that flourished during the last Ice Age.
The oldest of the three, discovered near the Krestovka river, was approximately 1.2 million years old. Another, from near the Adycha river, was approximately 1 to 1.2 million years old. The third, from near the Chukochya river, was roughly700,000 years old.
“This is by a wide margin the oldest DNA ever recovered,” said evolutionary geneticist Love Dalén of the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Sweden, who led the research published in the journal Nature.
Until now, the oldest DNA came from a horse that lived in Canada’s Yukon territory about 700,000 years ago. By way of comparison, our species, Homo sapiens, first appeared roughly 300,000 years ago.
DNA is the self-replicating material that carries genetic information in living organisms — sort of a blueprint of life. “This DNA was extremely degraded into very small pieces, and so we had to sequence many billions of ultra-short DNA sequences in order to puzzle these genomes together,” Dalén said.
Most knowledge about prehistoric creatures comes from studying skeletal fossils, but there is a limit to what these can tell about an organism, particularly relating to genetic relationships and traits.
Ancient DNA can help fill in the blanks but is highly perishable. Sophisticated new research techniques are enabling scientists to recover ever-older DNA.
“It would be a wild guess, but a maximum of two to three million years should be doable,” Dalén said.
That could shed light on some bygone species but would leave many others unattainable — including the dinosaurs, who went extinct 66 million years ago.
Palaeontologists Love Dalén and Patricia Pecnerova with a mammoth tusk on Wrangel Island, Arctic Ocean.
“When we can get DNA on a million-year time scale, we can study the process of speciation (formation of new species) in a much more detailed way. Morphological analyses on bones and teeth usually only allow researchers to study a handful of characteristics in the fossils, whereas with genomics we are analysing many tens of thousands of characteristics,” Dalén said.
The researchers gained insights into mammoth evolution and migration by comparing the DNA to that of mammoths that lived more recently. The last mammoths disappeared roughly 4,000 years ago.
The oldest of the three specimens, the Krestovka mammoth, belonged to a previously unknown genetic lineage that more than 2 million years ago diverged from the lineage that led to the well-known woolly mammoth.
Geneticist Tom van der Valk of SciLife Lab in Sweden, the study’s first author, said it appears that members of the Krestovka lineage were the first mammoths to migrate from Siberia into North America over a now-disappeared land bridge about 1.5 million years ago, with woolly mammoths later migrating about 400,000 to 500,000 years ago.
The Adycha mammoth’s lineage apparently was ancestral to the woolly mammoth, they found, and the Chukochya individual is one of the oldest-known woolly mammoth specimens.
DNA analyses showed that genetic variants associated with enduring frigid climes such as hair growth, thermoregulation, fat deposits, cold tolerance and circadian rhythms were present long before the origin of the woolly mammoth.
Scientists may have found one of the oldest Christian churches in the world
Using a celestial phenomenon, archaeologists are probing a mysterious structure buried deep underground in Russia. The structure could be one of the world’s oldest Christian churches, according to a new study.
The unknown structure sits in the northwestern part of the fortress of Naryn-Kala, a fortification in Derbent that dates to around A.D. 300.
The 36-foot-deep (11 meters) cross-shaped structure is almost completely hidden underground, save for a bit of a half-destroyed dome on top. But because it’s a UNESCO cultural heritage site, the structure is protected and can’t be excavated — and its function remains largely debated.
An unknown structure in the northwestern part of the fortress of Naryn-Kala could be one of the world’s oldest churches.
The structure may have served as a reservoir, a Christian church or a Zoroastrian fire temple, according to a statement from the MISIS National University of Science and Technology in Russia.
So, a group of researchers decided to harness a celestial phenomenon called cosmic rays to help them paint a picture of the structure, similar to how a group discovered a possible void in the Great Pyramid of Giza back in 2017. They call this method “muon radiography.”
Cosmic rays are a form of high-energy radiation that comes from an unknown source outside our solar system; they constantly rain down on Earth.
Though most of the rays crash into atoms in our planet’s upper atmosphere and don’t make it to the ground, some, called muon particles, are ejected from this collision and do hit Earth’s surface.
Muons travel through matter at nearly the speed of light. But as they travel through denser objects, they lose energy and decay. So, by calculating the number of muons travelling through various parts underground, researchers can paint a picture of an object’s density.
But for this method to work, the structure and the surrounding soil need to have at least a 5% difference in density, according to the study.
The researchers placed muon detectors about 33 feet (10 m) inside the mysterious structure and took measurements for two months. They found that the structure and surrounding soil do have enough of a density difference such that they could use this method to figure out the structure’s 3D shape.
3D-model of the underground room, obtained from the results of muon detection.
The fortress of Naryn-Kala in Derbent, Russia, dates back to around A.D. 300
The researchers don’t think the structure is an underground water tank, even though many historical sources refer to it as such. Rather, it might have been used for water storage in the 17th and 18th centuries, according to the statement.
“It seems very strange to me to interpret this building as a water tank,” co-author Natalia Polukhina, a physicist at the MISIS National University of Science and Technology, said in the statement. In the same fortress, scientists have identified another underground structure that really is a tank and is rectangular, she said. What’s more, during construction, the structure wasn’t buried but on the surface and was erected on the highest point of the fortress.
“What is the sense to put the tank on the surface, and even on the highest mountain?” she asked. “Currently, there are more questions than answers.”
This study wasn’t about making a new discovery but rather confirming that the method would reveal what the structure looked like. Next, the researchers hope to conduct an even more detailed analysis to create a full 3D image of the building, ultimately helping them to understand its purpose.
“The technique is very nice,” said Christopher Morris, a fellow of the Los Alamos National Laboratory who was not a part of the study. But “the only access [to the structure] seems to be from the void in the centre.” So they can only reconstruct it using data taken from a limited point of view, he added.
“I believe it is possible to reconstruct the buried structure,” if the group implements more detectors and gathers better data, Morris told Live Science. But “I do not know if this can reveal whether the structure is a church.”
