A 2,700-Year-Old Temple Discovered on the Greek Island of Evia
An aerial view of the horseshoe-shaped altar located inside the temple.
Archaeologists in Greece have discovered a 2,700-year-old temple that houses a horseshoe-shaped altar overflowing with offerings.
Constructed of bricks, the temple is 100 feet (30 meters) long and is located next to the Temple of Amarysia Artemis, a sanctuary dedicated to the Greek goddess Artemis, which researchers found in 2017 on the island of Evia, according to a translated statement from Greece’s Ministry of Culture.
During excavations in 2023, archaeologists found the second temple.
“One of the peculiarities of this temple is the significant number of structures found inside it,” the researchers wrote on Jan. 9 in a translated Facebook post detailing their findings.
Those structures included several hearths located in the temple’s nave, including the ash-caked altar stacked with offerings such as pottery; vases; Corinthian alabaster, or the carved mineral gypsum; gold and silver jewelry studded with coral and amber; amulets; and bronze and iron fittings. The altar also contained several pieces of charred bone.
Archaeologists unearthed several bronze figurines shaped like bulls and a ram as well as a bull’s head made of clay.
Some of the pottery pieces predate the newfound temple and were fired during the late eighth century B.C., leading researchers to suspect that the altar may have once resided outside the temple and was later moved indoors.
In the sixth century B.C., brick partitions were placed at the sanctuary’s heart for added support, leading researchers to think that the temple was “partially destroyed” by a fire, according to the statement.
Under the temple, archaeologists found several dry stone walls from a different building that once stood at the site, along with several bronze figurines shaped like bulls and rams.
They also unearthed remnants of buildings from the eighth and ninth centuries B.C. next to the first temple, as well as a fortification system dating to the more recent early Copper Age, or roughly 4000 to 3500 B.C.
Laser mapping reveals the oldest Amazonian cities, built 2500 years ago
A lidar map of the city of Kunguints in the Ecuadorian Amazon reveals ancient streets lined with houses.
Archaeologists once believed the ancient Amazon rainforest was an inhospitable place, sparsely populated by bands of hunter-gatherers. But the remains of enormous earthworks, pyramids, and roads from Bolivia to Brazil discovered over the past two decades have proved conclusively that the Amazon was home to large, complex societies long before European colonizers arrived. Now, there’s evidence that another human society—the oldest yet—left its mark on the region: A dense network of interconnected cities, now hidden beneath the forest in Ecuador’s Upano Valley, has been revealed by the laser mapping technology called lidar.
The settlements, described today in Science, are at least 2500 years old, more than 1000 years older than any other known complex Amazonian society.
Lidar, which allows researchers to see through forest cover and reconstruct the ancient sites below, “is revolutionizing our understanding of the Amazon in pre-Columbian times,” says Carla Jaimes Betancourt, an archaeologist at the University of Bonn who wasn’t involved in the new work.
Finding such an ancient urban network in the Upano Valley highlights the long-unrecognized diversity of ancient Amazonian cultures, which archaeologists are just beginning to be able to reconstruct.
Stéphen Rostain, an archaeologist at CNRS, France’s national research agency, began excavating in the Upano Valley nearly 30 years ago. His team focused on two large settlements, called Sangay and Kilamope, and found mounds organized around central plazas, pottery decorated with paint and incised lines, and large jugs holding the remains of the traditional maize beer chicha.
Radiocarbon dates showed the Upano sites were occupied from around 500 B.C.E. to between 300 C.E. and 600 C.E. “I knew that we had a lot of mounds, a lot of structures,” Rostain says. “But I didn’t have a complete overview of the region.”
That changed when Ecuador’s National Institute for Cultural Heritage funded a lidar survey of the valley in 2015. Specially equipped planes beamed laser pulses into the forest and measured their return path, revealing topographic features otherwise invisible under the trees.
The lidar data allowed Rostain and his collaborators to see the connections between settlements and also uncovered many more. “Each day it was Christmas, with a new gift,” Rostain says. The team identified five large settlements and 10 smaller ones across 300 square kilometers in the Upano Valley, each densely packed with residential and ceremonial structures.
The cities are interspersed with rectangular agricultural fields and surrounded by hillside terraces where people planted crops, including the corn, manioc, and sweet potato found in past excavations. Wide, straight roads connected the cities to one another, and streets ran between houses and neighborhoods within each settlement. “We’re talking about urbanism,” says co-author Fernando Mejía, an archaeologist at the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador.
A large complex of earthen platforms in Nijiamanch, one of the urban settlements in the Upano Valley.
Although the researchers don’t yet know how many people lived in the Upano Valley, the settlements were large: The core area of Kilamope, for example, covers an area comparable in size to the pyramid-studded Giza Plateau in Egypt or the main avenue of Teotihuacan in Mexico.
The extent of Upano’s landscape modification rivals the “garden cities” of the Classic Maya, the authors say. And what’s been discovered so far “is just the tip of the iceberg” of what could be found in the Ecuadorian Amazon, Mejía says.
The network of roads connecting the Upano sites suggests they all existed at the same time. They are a millennium older than other complex Amazonian societies, including Llanos de Mojos, a recently discovered ancient urban system in Bolivia.
The Upano Valley cities were denser and more interconnected than sites in Llanos de Mojos, Rostain says. “We say ‘Amazonia,’ but we should say ‘Amazonias,’” to capture the region’s ancient cultural diversity, he says.
The details of each culture, however, are still coming into view. People in both the Upano Valley and Llanos de Mojos were farmers who built roads, canals, and large civic or ceremonial buildings. But, “We’re just beginning to understand how these cities were functioning,” including how many people lived in them, who they traded with, and how they were governed, says Jaimes Betancourt, who studies Llanos de Mojos.
So it’s too soon to compare the Upano cities with societies such as the Classic Maya and Teotihuacan, which were “much more complex and more extensive,” says Thomas Garrison, an archaeologist and geographer at the University of Texas at Austin who specializes in lidar and wasn’t involved in the work. Still, he says, “It’s amazing that we can still make these kinds of discoveries on our planet and find new complex cultures in the 21st century.”
Mystery Of Pyramids Submerged On the Cuban Coast More Than 50,000 Years Ago
In 2001, a Cuban-Canadian research team discovered what could be the ruins of an ancient city that sank more than 50,000 years ago between Yucatan and the western coast of Cuba. The team worked on “Project Exploramar,” which discovered the well-preserved USS Maine, three miles off the Cuban coast at 1150 m depth in 2000.
On December 7, 2001, BBC News announced the discovery of an ancient sunken city with unusual features off the coast of the Guanahacabibes peninsula in the Pinar del Río province of Cuba. It was found using an underwater robot equipped with cameras, lights, and sonars at more than 2,000 feet (650 meters) below the sea’s surface covering an area of 2 square kilometers (200 hectares).
The discovery was reported by Canadian Marine Engineer Paulina Zelitsky along with her husband Paul Weinzweig. She stumbled upon the fantastic geometric patterns which she found 2000 feet underwater while studying the grainy, black and white sonar images on her computer screen, searching for a scientific explanation.
Map showing the location of the supposed ancient city discovered by Paul Weinzweig and Paulina Zelitsky.
Paulina Zelitsky was born in Poland and studied engineering in the former Soviet Union. During the Cold War, she worked on a submarine base in Cuba but defected to Canada, where she married Paul Weinzweig, and together, they set up a company called Advanced Digital Communications (ADC).
The expedition that resulted in the discovery of megalithic structures off the coast of Cuba was a joint venture between ADC, the National Geographic Society, and the Centre for Marine Archaeology and Anthropology at the Cuban Academy of Sciences in Cuba. The Cuban government employed Zelitsky & her team to assist in the location of a sunken treasure that is believed to lie off the coast in a variety of vessels.
The structures, located at a depth of approximately 650 meters, seemed to have an urban pattern and generated significant headlines such as “The Discovery of Atlantis in Cuba.” ADA mapped the ocean floor surrounding Cuba for three years under contract with the Cuban government. Using their 265-foot ship, Ulises, they found about 20 shipwrecks, including the USS Maine, and vast oil fields in deep waters around the island.
The shapes appear to be arranged in patterns, the scientists say. The images, made with sophisticated sonar, show an area of about 100 by 200 meters.
“The structures we found on the side scan sonar simply are not explicable from a geological point of view. There is too much organization. too much symmetry, too much repetition of form,” Weinzweig said.
Discovery Made
According to Zelitsky, the research vessel Ulises sailed in the Yucatan Channel just off the west coast of Cuba that day, hired by the Castro government to look for undersea oil and gas, as well as old treasure ships if they could be found.
As Zelitsky and Weinzweig were watching the screen, the empty plain of the sea bed suddenly gave way to images of massive geometric shapes, apparently cut from stone. As more shapes came into view, some appeared to be arranged in patterns over a large area of about 20 square kilometers.
Some stones seemed to be cut into blocks, and some blocks looked perfectly aligned. They appeared to form corridors and the outlines of rooms, the two scientists said. There were round stones and pyramid-shaped ones, too.
“The sea bottom in that area is an undulating sand plain. What they were seeing should not have been there. We were shocked, and frankly, we were a little frightened. It was as though we should not be seeing what we were seeing. Our first thought was maybe we found some kind of secret military installation,” said Zelitsky.
“Nothing is known for certain now,” Weinzweig noted, “but the oral tradition in early Mexico speaks of an advanced civilization of tall white people who came from the East, and of an island that sank in a great natural disaster.” In the ancient language of some early Central American Indians, he said, “The word Atlantic means ‘our good father,’ or, ‘the place where our good father rests.’”
Paulina Zelitsky and her husband Paul Weinzweig.
What if the intriguing shapes found by the sonar are just carved over the centuries by whimsical nature? Zelitsky and Weinzweig did not think so. Besides, she added that they believed it to be the remnants of a city that had been built by locals upon a land bridge connecting Cuba to the mainland at some point, although such a bridge is not known to have ever existed.
“There is no granite in Cuba or the Yucatan. That area features limestone,” Zelitsky said. Granite is found in Central Mexico and was used by ancient people such as the Maya and an older civilization, the Olmec, in their construction of cities and buildings.
This site, perhaps built by a culture that far pre-dates the famous Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula, might have been the victim of a vast, mysterious cataclysm that somehow dropped 2,000 feet beneath the surface of the sea. The Maya developed a magnificent civilization on the Yucatan Peninsula beginning about A.D. 250 and peaking about A.D. 900. Spain finally completed its conquest of the Maya in about 1500.
The Maya produced advanced architecture, paintings, pottery, and sculpture, and their grasp of mathematics and astronomy was remarkable for that time. They might have developed the first calendar and were among the first to make paper and books of tree bark. They cut large stone blocks and made buildings, courtyards, and pyramids, many for the worship of numerous gods.
But Zelitsky thought the Mega site pre-dates even the ancient Maya by a lot.
Then other voices arose that expressed their opinion about the discovery, such as Archaeologist Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews of Bad Archeology. According to him, during the ice age, the city would never have been above sea level unless the place it was built on had sunk first.
A computer-generated mock-up of the supposed city
“However, if we take Plato at his word – as we must if we assume Atlantis to have been a historical place – the violence of its sinking makes it improbable that an entire city could have survived plunging more than 600 m into an abyss. Rapid sinking would devastate structures; the persistence of mud just below the surface suggests that the sinking was not to a depth of 600-740 m. Unless we are prepared to jettison Plato’s text – the sole source for the story of Atlantis – we cannot identify the features found by Paulina Zelitsky with Atlantis,” he explained.
A similar discovery was made off the coast of Yonaguni Island in Japan in 1986. The find was known as the “Yonaguni Monument,” an artificial rock formation submerged in prehistory. There, strange megaliths up to 5 stories high were found.
Are the Cuba underwater ruins really the sunken underwater city? Could it be another piece of evidence of the lost mystical Atlantis? Unfortunately, there is simply not enough imagery data, and the ruins might be anything. Interestingly, there seems to have been no real follow-up expedition to the site, which some have seen as rather suspicious and conspiratorial.
In a Californian gold mine, 40 million-year-old tools were found
At Table Mountain and other locations in the gold mining region around the middle of the nineteenth century, miners discovered hundreds of stone artifacts and human bones buried deep inside their tunnels.
Experts claim that these bones and artifacts were found embedded in layers from the Eocene epoch (38-55 million years).
The Auriferous Gravels of the Sierra Nevada of California, written by Dr. J. D. Whitney, the leading government geologist in California, was published in 1880 by Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Comparative Zoology.
However, because the information went against accepted Darwinist theories on human origins, it was excluded from scholarly discussions. In 1849, gold was found in the gravels of old riverbeds on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, drawing large numbers of rowdy adventurers to settlements including Brandy City, Last Chance, Lost Camp, You Bet, and Poker Flat.
Initially, solitary miners searched for flakes and nuggets among the gravels that had made their way into the present-day streambeds. Auriferous (gold-bearing) gravels were quickly washed from hillsides by high-pressure water jets while other gold-mining businesses bored holes into mountainside deposits and followed the gravel deposits wherever they led.
The miners found hundreds of stone items as well as human fossils. The scientific community received the most crucial information from Dr. J. D. Whitney.
Artifacts from hydraulic mining and surface deposits were of questionable age, while deep mine shaft and tunnel artifacts could be more accurately dated. According to J. D. Whitney, the geological evidence revealed that the auriferous gravels were at least Pliocene in age.
However, according to modern geologists, some of the gravel layers are Eocene in origin. In Tuolumne County’s Table Mountain, several holes were dug, traveling through thick strata of latite, a basaltic volcanic substance, before arriving to the gravels containing gold.
In other instances, the tunnels stretched hundreds of feet horizontally beneath the latite top. The age of findings from the gravels directly above the bedrock might be between 33.2 and 55 million years old, and those from other gravels could be between 9 and 55 million years old.
According to William B. Holmes, a physical anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution, “If Professor Whitney had fully appreciated the story of human evolution as it is understood today, he would have hesitated to announce the conclusions formulated, notwithstanding the imposing array of testimony with which he was confronted.” Or, to put it another way, the theory had to be rejected if the evidence did not support it, which is exactly what happened.
The Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, still has some of the items Whitney mentioned on exhibit.
Darwinism and other isms had an effect on how archaeological evidence was handled in Hueyatlaco, Mexico. Archaeologists working under the direction of Cynthia Irwin-Williams found stone tools there in the 1970s that were associated to bones from butchered animals.
A group of geologists, including Virginia Steen-McIntyre, dated the location.
The age of the site was established using four different techniques: stratigraphic analysis, zircon fission track dating on volcanic layers above the artifact layers, tephra hydration dating of volcanic crystals found in volcanic layers above the artifact layers, and uranium-series dates on butchered animal bones.
The reason the archaeologists were hesitant to put an age on the site was because they thought that (1) no humans were around 250,000 years ago anyplace on the earth, and (2) no humans visited North America until at most 15,000 or 20,000 years ago.
At Table Mountain and other locations in the gold mining region around the middle of the nineteenth century, miners discovered hundreds of stone artifacts and human bones buried deep inside their tunnels.
Experts claim that these bones and artifacts were found embedded in layers from the Eocene epoch (38-55 million years). The leading government geologist in California, Dr. J. D. Whitney, disclosed this information.
Between 23 and 34 million years old, the well preserved praying mantis was found in amber
In a remarkable natural process, insects and even mammals can be preserved in time for all eternity by becoming encased in tree sap that eventually turns into amber.
In the hit movie Jurassic Park, a scientific character was able to draw dinosaur blood from mosquitoes imprisoned in amber, drawing attention to and popularizing this true phenomena.
A little praying mantis that was found in a piece of amber in 2016 was sold by Heritage Auctions for $6,000 in pristine condition.
Somewhere in the Dominican Republic, the amazing object was found. According to Heritage Auctions, this object is thought to be from the Oligocene epoch, making it somewhere between 23 million and 33.9 million years old. The auction description from a related sale reads as follows:
“The Praying Mantis, one of the rarest and most prized inclusions of all, is present in this specimen. Due to their terrified fight to escape the relentless ooze, these aggressive insects are typically deformed or without limbs when discovered.
The color patterns on this specimen’s short legs, tiny arm spikes, delicate antennae, and enormous, complex eyes are all perfectly maintained, though.
The bug, which is around 12 inches long and is enclosed in a gorgeous polished golden nugget that measures 134 by 114 by 1 inch, is a remarkable example of ancient life. The item is particularly impressive since it also includes three sizable, well-preserved click beetles, making it a museum-quality specimen.
Similar methods can be used in Amber to preserve animals. Researchers discovered a newborn snake’s preserved bones last year that they estimated to be 99 million years old.
One of the scientists who examined the snake specimen is Michael Caldwell, a professor in the biological sciences division at the University of Alberta in Canada. The specimen was given the name Xiaophis myanmarensis by Caldwell and his team.
“Despite being a young snake, it has highly distinctive characteristics on the top of the vertebrae that have never been observed in any fossil snakes of its species.
According to Caldwell, Xiaophis belongs to a group of snakes that appear to be extremely old near the base of the snake family tree.
“Amber gathers whatever it comes in contact with, acting almost like super glue, and keeps it for a hundred million years. It is obvious the snake was living in a forest because, when it captured the young snake, it also caught the forest floor with the bugs, plants, and insect dung, the man stated.
Iron Age Celtic Woman Wearing Fancy Clothes Buried in This ‘Tree Coffin’ in Switzerland
THE ANCIENT corpse of a woman buried in a hollowed-out tree has been found in Switzerland. It’s believed the woman, who died 2,200 years ago, commanded great respect in her tribe, as she was buried in fine clothes and jewellery.
The ancient corpse of a woman buried in a hollowed out tree in Zurich, Switzerland. Pictured are parts of her remains including her skull (top), as well as her jewellery (blue, bottom)Credit: Zurich archaeology department
Scientists say the woman was Celtic. The Iron Age Celts are known to have buried members of their tribe in “tree coffins” buried deep underground.
The woman’s remains were found in the city of Zurich in 2017, according to Live Science.
An analysis carried out by the city’s archaeology department shows she was around 40 years old when she died in 200 BC.
Her bones suggest she did little manual labour during her lifetime, suggesting she was someone of importance.
Artist’s impression of the woman in her coffin. The coffin was made out of a hollowed tree trunkCredit: Zurich archaeology department
And here’s how they found itCredit: Zurich archaeology department
“A specialist determined the order of the layers of clothing on the basis of the textile, fur and leather scraps preserved in the grave,” a statement said.
“So the woman wore probably a dress made of fine sheep’s wool, about another woolen cloth and a coat of sheepskin.”
Her jewellery consisted of bronze bracelets, a delicate bronze belt and a stunning necklace strung with amber and glass beads.
And of particular interest to scientists was the clasp on the woman’s necklace.
Both ends of the bling had a clip known as a brooch that allowed the woman to string blue and yellow beads onto it.
Jewellery buried with the womanCredit: Zurich archaeology department
A necklace found in the coffinCredit: Zurich archaeology department
It’s been proposed the woman may have known a Celtic man who was buried about 260 feet from her grave.
He was found buried with a sword, shield and lance. The pair were buried in the same decade.
The Celts are most commonly associated with Britain, but actually stretched as far as modern day Turkey.
They were renowned for being fierce fighters – the conquering Romans built Hadrian’s Wall to protect themselves from the Celts who had fled north.
This 48-Million-Year-Old Fossil Has an Insect Inside a Lizard Inside a Snake
Palaeontologists have uncovered a fossil that has preserved an insect inside a lizard inside a snake – a prehistoric battle of the food chain that ended in a volcanic lake some 48 million years ago.
Pulled from an abandoned quarry in southwest Germany called the Messel Pit, the fossil is only the second of its kind ever found, with the remains of three animals sitting snug in one another.
“It’s probably the kind of fossil that I will go the rest of my professional life without ever encountering again, such is the rarity of these things,” palaeontologist Krister Smith from Germany’s Senckenberg Institute told Michael Greshko at National Geographic. “It was pure astonishment.”
Smith and his team suspect that the iguana ate a shiny insect meal, and then two days later was swallowed headfirst by a juvenile snake.
It’s unclear how the snake ultimately died, but what we do know is it got too close to the deep volcanic lake that once bubbled in the Messel Pit, and was either poisoned or suffocated by the toxic fumes.
Its corpse likely slid into the lake after death, where the Russian doll of skeletons was preserved perfectly for millions of years.
Rare ‘Nesting Doll’ Fossil Uncovers Beetle in Lizard in Snake. Snake with lizard and beetle: The rare tripartite fossil food chain from the Messel Pit.
A beetle inside a reptile inside a snake.
“To see this kind of trophic scale recorded within the gut of a snake is a very cool thing,” UK palaeontologist Jason Head from the University of Cambridge, who wasn’t involved with the study, told National Geographic.
While the combination of snake-lizard-bug is entirely unique in the fossil record, this isn’t the first time a prehistoric turducken has been discovered.
Back in 2008, Austrian researchers found a 250-million-year-old fossil that had preserved a shark that had eaten some kind of amphibian that had eaten a small fish.
It’s far more fragmentary than the Messel Pit fossil, but it was the first real indication that the food web of the time was far more complex than researchers had thought.
If anywhere is likely to be harbouring more of these types of fossils, it’s the Messel Pit, which in the past has served up the now notorious Darwinius masillae fossil, a fossilised beetle with its turquoise iridescence largely intact, and two turtles caught in the middle of doing, erm, turtle things…
The best-preserved fossils in the world from the Eocene epoch, which ran from around 56 to 34 million years ago, have been found here, and Smith and his team are already planning another trip back.
“This fossil is amazing,” says one of the researchers, Agustín Scanferla. “We were lucky men to study this kind of specimen.”
The find has been published in Palaeobiodiversity and Palaeoenvironments.
I have always been very interested in historical subjects, and Genghis Khan was one of the icons whom I have always had deep interest in. He was a great warrior and a highly intelligent man, he lead his armies through wars and had gained victories in countless wars that he has had.Even up till this day, people still read about him and look up to him for his great strength and courage. I hope you enjoy the article.
Öndörkhaan | Construction workers employed in road building near the Onon River in the Khentii province of Mongolia, have discovered a mass grave containing the remains of many dozens of human corpses lying upon a large rudimentary stone structure.
Forensic experts and archaeologists were called on the site, which was revealed to be a Mongolian royal tomb from the 13th century that the scientists believe to be Genghis Khan’s.
The team of scientists affiliated with the University of Beijing, has concluded that the numerous skeletons buried on top of the structure were most likely the slaves who built it and who were then massacred to keep the secret of the location.
The remains of twelve horses were also found on the site, certainly sacrificed to accompany the Great Khan in death.
A total of 68 skeletons were found buried together, almost directly over the top of a rather crude stone structure.
The content of the tomb was scattered and badly deteriorated, presumably due to the fact that the site was located beneath the river bed for hundreds of years until the course of the Onon River changed in the 18th century.
The remains of a tall male and sixteen female skeletons were identified among hundreds of gold and silver artifacts and thousands of coins.
The women are presumed to have been wives and concubines of the leader, who were killed to accompany the warlord in the afterlife.
The amount of treasure and the number of sacrificed animals and people, have immediately led the archaeologists to consider that the site was certainly the burial site of a really powerful Mongol warlord.
After realizing an extensive set of tests and analysis, they were able to confirm that the body belonged to a man aged between 60 and 75, who died between 1215 and 1235 AD.
Both the age, the date, the location, and the opulence of the site seem to confirm that the tomb does indeed belong to Genghis Khan.
The simple rock dome discovered by the archaeologists, was presumably buried beneath the Onon river for centuries.
The incontestable historical importance of Genghis Khan makes this new discovery one of the most important in the history of archaeology. Born Temüjin (which means “of iron”), he was the founder and Great Khan (emperor) of the Mongol Empire, which became the largest contiguous empire in history after his demise.
He is known for uniting the warring tribes of Mongolia and merging them into one before launching a series of military campaigns in China, Central Asia, the Middle East and even Eastern Europe. He conquered more than 31 million square kilometers of land during his lifetime.
His legacy has taken many forms besides his conquest and can still be found today, making him one of the most influential men in the history of mankind.
He connected the East and the West through the creation of the Silk Route, a trade route that would become and remain for centuries, the main network of trade and cultural transmission in Eurasia, opening long-distance, political and economic interactions between the civilizations.
Genghis Khan also has an incredible number of descendants, as some genetic studies have shown that he could be the direct ancestor of 1 human out every 200 who are alive today. In Mongolia alone as many as 200,000 of the country’s 2 million people could be Genghis Khan descendants.
