ASIA, CHINA, WORLD

150,000-Year-Old Pipes Baffle Scientists in China: Out of Place in Time?

150,000-Year-Old Pipes Baffle Scientists in China: Out of Place in Time?

In the province of Qinghai near Mount Baigong in China, there is a strange pyramid with three caves leading to the saltwater lake

Below the lake bed and on the coast there are iron pipes of about 150,000 years old that are some as thin as a toothpick.

What is baffling Chinese historians is that the area wasn’t thought to have been occupied by people until around 30,000 years ago.

And according to historians, the humans that were around were nomads, thus making it unlikely that they would have taken the time to install plumbing.

That leaves a 120,000-year gap of “who was here laying down the iron pipe?”

Aliens?

Yes, it’s a far-fetched possibility, but the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences isn’t ruling it out. Research fellow, Yang Ji told Xinhua News Agency the pyramid may have been built by intelligent beings.

He didn’t dismiss the theory that ancient extraterrestrials may be responsible as complete hogwash, but said: “it’s worth looking into and science would have to determine if there’s any truth.” Okay, so now that we’ve got the obligatory space alien theory out of the way, what about more likely theories?

The investigation into the pipes began in 2002 with some researchers believing the pipes were left over by a prehistoric civilization whose techniques were later lost to the humans that moved into the area.

Around the pipes leading to the area are “strangely shaped stones” protruding from the ground that are confusing historians even more.

So weird rocks are protruding from the ground and the pipes can’t be traced to a known civilization. If that wasn’t strange enough, the scientist isn’t entirely sure what they’re made of.

While the pipes are believed to be mostly iron, the head of publicity for the local Delingha government told reporters that the pipes were analyzed at a local smeltery and 8 percent of the material could not be identified.

The remaining material was a combination of ferric oxide, silicon dioxide, and calcium oxide which are byproducts of long interaction between iron and the surrounding sandstone.

One final theory is that they aren’t even pipes at all but fossilized tree roots. Fossilized tree roots of similar structures have been found in Louisiana and scientists found plant matter in some of the pipes and it looks very similar to tree rings.

It’s a long-standing geological theory that in certain temperatures and under certain chemical conditions, tree roots can undergo the transformation of soil into rock and in time, produce iron formations.

So, are they pipes laid down by an ancient tribe or space aliens? Or are they the result of iron-rich magma forcing its way up through the earth into fissures, or just fossilized tree roots? Whatever the case, the “oopart” (out of place artifact) is certainly a source of puzzlement and wonder for conventional scientists and historians alike.

AFRICA, EGYPT, WORLD

38 centimeter long finger found in Egypt left researchers clueless

38 centimeter long finger found in Egypt left researchers clueless

Researchers are traveling with photographs of a massive finger which are said to be 38 centimeters long, as they believe it is impossible and can not exist.

Although science suggests it’s impossible the finger found in Egypt is said to be true, and it has been X-rayed and comes with a certificate of authenticity.

The photographs of the large finger were captured in 1988, and at the time they were published in one of the leading newspapers in Europe.

The finger seems to suggest that it is evidence of giants having walked on the Earth in the past. The Bible even refers to Nephilim.

The remains of the finger are quite impressive, and the finger is a mummified humanoid finger that is 38 centimeters.

Egyptian researchers have said that the finger must have belonged to a creature that was more than 5 meters tall and in 1988 only a very few people were allowed to take photographs of what has been called an artifact that is incredible.

A grave robber was said to have discovered the huge finger when he was searching a tomb in Egypt that has not been disclosed. Entrepreneur Gregor Sporri wanted to buy the finger from the owner and made a good offer, but the owner said that he would not sell it.

Sporri said that the grave robber has a certificate to say that the finger was authentic and he also had an X-ray of the finger.

Sporri said that the finger was in a package that was oblong and it had a very musty smell to it. When he told the story about the finger in 2012, he said that he been very surprised when he had been shown the dark brown, huge finger.

Certificate of authenticity and X-Ray images of the giant finger

He went on to say that he had been allowed to pick it up and that he was also allowed to take photographs of the giant finger.

Sporri said that a bill had been placed at the side of the finger so that comparison in size could be got and the finger was bent and split open, and it had been covered in mold that had dried.

Could this be evidence that points towards the existence of giant beings that walked on Earth in the distant past?

Once Sporri left Egypt he decided that he would like to find out more about the giant finger and he set about trying to find where the body belonging to the finger was located.

He made his way back to Egypt in 2009 and went looking for the man who owned the finger, but he could not find him and it left scientists along with researchers scratching their heads.

All that remains of the giant finger are photographs that were taken of the finger along with stories of the huge creature that walked among humans, which the finger must have belonged to. Scientists and researchers have many mixed feelings about the relic.

One of the issues they have with the finger is that it does not fit in with conventional theories that have come from historians and archaeologists.

In fact, many have said that the finger could not possibly exist. But is the photographs proof that giant creatures did walk on planet Earth in Egypt or was the finger no more than a hoax?

CROATIA, EUROPE, WORLD

Nomadic Warriors’ Remains Unearthed in Croatia

Nomadic Warriors’ Remains Unearthed in Croatia

ZAGREB, CROATIA—Archaeology Org reports that the remains of an Avar warrior dating to the late seventh or early eighth century A.D.

Archaeologists have been found in a tomb in eastern Croatia, near the site of the Roman city of Cibalae. The Avars were Eurasian nomads who arrived in Europe in the sixth century A.D.

During archaeological studies at the city cemetery of Vinkovci, which had started before the coronavirus pandemic and resumed these days, and investigating Avar graves, discovered by workers who had been expanding burial plots.

The City museum archeologists have discovered remains of an Avar warrior and a set belt that can be dated to the turn of the 7th to the 8th century, which is, according to Vinkovci city museum archaeologist Anita Rapan-Papesa, a very valuable find.

She said that previously there had been no Avar graves in Vinkovci, but that it was a known fact that there had been Avars in the area.

“When we observe the walled grave we have discovered, it turns out that Avars saw how Romans were buried so they made their own copies of Roman graves,” the archaeologist specializing in the Middle Ages said.

In addition to the walled grave, the archaeologists explored an ordinary earthen grave, where they found a warrior and his horse, with unique bridle ornaments.

Rapan-Papeša underscored that the border of the protected archaeological site in Vinkovci went through the middle of the field where the Avar graves had been unearthed and that they were the westernmost graves in the area of the former Roman city of Cibalae.

There are five more Avar graves to be explored, and as the work on expanding burial plots in the city cemetery in Vinkovci continues, further archaeological research will continue, as well.

AUSTRALIA, WORLD

Australian Aboriginal people were baking bread and farming grain 20,000 years before Egypt

Australian Aboriginal people were baking bread and farming grain 20,000 years before Egypt

What would your response be if you were asked who were the world’s first bakers? Many people think of ancient Egypt first, where it is believed that bread was baked about 17,000 BCE first. But there is evidence that grindstones were used in Australia to turn seeds into flour 30 thousand years ago.

The Gurandgi Munjie group is revitalizing native crops once cultivated by Aboriginal Australians, baking new bread with forgotten flours.

At Cuddie Falls, in New South Wales, Archeologists found evidence of this in the form of an ancient grinding stone that was used to turn grass seeds into flour.

These were the bakers of antiquity. It took Egypt 12,000 years to repeat this baking experiment. Why don’t our hearts fill with wonder and pride?

“Environmentally it’s a pretty good deal,” says Pascoe of growing these native crops.
This map gives an indication of how much we can learn from Aboriginal grain production. Norman Tindale documented that Aboriginal grain harvests occurred over most of the Australian continent but contemporary grain areas make up less than a quarter of that area.

Australian sovereign nations cultivated domesticated plants, sewed clothes, engineered streams for aquacultural and agricultural purposes, and forged spiritual codes for the use of seed in trade, agricultural enterprises, marriage, and ceremony.

This was and is an incredible human response to the difficulties of fostering economic, cultural and social policies. It may be unique in its longevity but also in its ability to flourish without resort to war.

Australia’s reluctance to acknowledge what was lost can be witnessed in our ignorance of the birth of baking, the gold standard of economic achievement.

Why is this? Is it a malicious refusal to recognize the economic triumphs of the people from whom the land was taken or a simple culture of forgetting fostered by the bedazzlement of Australian resources and opportunities?

Grinding grain into flour, and Lake Mungo bread made from Panicum descompositum

If we could rid ourselves of the myth of low Aboriginal achievement and nomadic habits, we might move toward a greater appreciation of our land.

We might begin to wonder about the grains that explorer Thomas Mitchell saw being harvested in the 1830s, and the yam daisy monoculture he saw stretching to the horizon of his ‘Australia Felix’, the early name given to western Victoria.

These crops must have been grown without pesticides and chemical fertilisers and in harmony with the climate; surely they are worthy of our investigation.

If you search for Australian research into yam daisies you inevitably come across, Beth Gott, an honorary research fellow at Monash University.

She has almost single-handedly led the interest in this wonderful plant. Inspired by her work, a Landcare group and Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in East Gippsland have begun field trials into the staple of the southern Aboriginal economies.

A yam daisy garden under trial as a crop in East Gippsland.

Similarly, the fish traps at Brewarrina seen by Mitchell and other explorers created economic conditions that allowed the people to live in semi-sedentary villages of over 1000 people; Mitchell marveled not just at the villages’ size but also their comfort and elegance.

Since Mitchell’s report, however, you will look in vain for later reference to the Brewarrina fish traps even though some archaeologists have speculated that they maybe 40,000 years old and as such the oldest human construction on the planet.

Even if you accept the more common age of 15,000 years, these structures are still amongst the world’s first. Until recently, the sole publication about them was a 50-page book published in Brewarrina in 1976.

When we eventually acknowledge the food plants adapted to Australian conditions and domesticated by Aboriginal people, let’s hope we don’t just celebrate them every ‘Baker’s holiday’ but recognize the intellectual property Aboriginal Australia has vested in them.

AFRICA, EGYPT, WORLD

Tutankhamun’s dagger of space origin, research suggests

Tutankhamun’s dagger of space origin, research suggests

Thousands of years later Pharaoh Tutankhamun, the king of a boy who ruled Egypt around 1332-1323 BC, has known his share of fame in a world thousands of years after his life. And the fame is sure to grow as an exciting new discovery set the international media on fire.

An Egyptian and Italian research team has just published a paper that reveals that King Tut’s beautiful dagger, already an object of admiration and wonder, turns out to have been made from a meteorite.

Yes, he had a space dagger.

The paper, with the immediately intriguing title “The meteoritic origin of Tutankhamun’s iron dagger blade,” reveals that X-ray analysis showed the dagger to be made mostly of iron, with small amounts of nickel and cobalt.

This particular combination of elements was the key to tracing the dagger’s origins to a meteorite.

“The introduction of the new composite term suggests that the ancient Egyptians… were aware that these rare chunks of iron fell from the sky already in the 13th century BCE, anticipating Western culture by more than two millennia,” write the researchers, led by Daniela Comelli, an associate professor at the Department of Physics of Milan Polytechnic.

This is remarkable in that it proves that Egyptians were well-versed in adopting iron, while the rest of humanity was still living in the Bronze Age.

In fact, the researchers see the quality of the dagger’s blade as indicative of Egyptian mastery of iron work.

The dagger, which was found in the wrapping of the mummified pharaoh in 1925, was analyzed utilizing X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, a technique that energetically excites various compounds within the object to compare different radiation wavelengths.

This allows researchers to figure out which elements are present without damaging the object.

Once they figured out the iron in the compound came from a meteorite, researchers looked back through historical records to pinpoint which meteorite it was.

They concluded it was the Kharga meteorite, which was found 150 miles west of the city of Alexandria, near the seaport city of Mersa Matruh (known as Amunia at the time of Alexander the Great).

Researchers also think that this finding adds special meaning to the term “iron from the sky” which was a hieroglyph found in ancient Egyptian texts.

Indeed, this discovery proves that even such famous historical finds as King Tut’s tomb can still reveal groundbreaking secrets about the life of the ancients.

ASIA, CHINA, WORLD

A Mysterious X-Shaped Ancient Tomb has been Excavated in China

A Mysterious X-Shaped Ancient Tomb has been Excavated in China

Xbox???? no way…….. I see X-men…..or were the terra-cotta warriors’ avid gamers???

Maybe they are going to unearth the Wolverine …..let him save the world from us.

In any case ……. the tomb is considered to be 221-206 B.C. from the Qin dynasty. … the Qin dynasty was the first Imperial China dynasty to be established by the first Emperor

Xbox fans (you know who you are) are positively giddy of what appears to be a new discovery in China of a 2nd century BCE tomb that looks very much like the iconic logo of the popular gaming console. Needless to say, Microsoft likes it too.

Except for the rumors, the Chinese beat them to the technology and are now demanding a share of the profits. Will the descendants of the person in the tomb supplant Bill Gates on the world’s richest person lists? Should the company be getting ready for an invasion of terracotta soldiers?

Not much information seems to be available about the tomb. The photo appeared first on the Xbao twitter feed and was picked up by OnMSFT.com (see the picture here), which calls itself one of the original Microsoft-centered communities but is not affiliated with Microsoft.

The site traced the picture to a video posted on the Weibo YouTube channel and is of a newly-discovered tomb from the Qin dynasty.

Ah yes, that’s the Xbox 220 BC.

That might place it near the city of Xian, in Shaanxi province of China where the army of life-size, terracotta soldiers was found at the burial site of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty who ruled China from 221 BCE to 207 BCE.

There don’t appear to be any other tombs with the unique “X” on top of a circular dome.

More is known about the Xbox, of course. It was pitched to Bill Gates in 1998, announced to the public in 2000, and hit the market at the 2001 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas with a name and a logo that internal marketing people didn’t think would work.

How wrong they were. The original logo featured the text “XBOX” next to a large 3D “X.”

In 2005, 3D “X” was placed over a grey 3D ball – the image the tomb resembles.

Or is it the other way around?

“Most ancient Copyright claim in history incoming?” “Had a great selection of games, but only played in 0.00000000000004k”

The Twitter comments allude to the question – did Microsoft steal the logo from the Chinese? Did Emperor Qin Shi Huang die while playing an abacus version of the Xbox? Who knows? Until archeologists determine the real reason for the symbol, speculating is almost as much fun as playing on the Xbox.

CROATIA, EUROPE, WORLD

2,000-Year-Old Boat Unearthed in Croatia

2,000-Year-Old Boat Unearthed in Croatia

POREČ, CROATIA—According to an Archaeology org report, a 16-foot boat held together with rope and wooden pegs have been uncovered at the waterfront in the city of Poreč, which is located on the western coast of the Istrian Peninsula.

The boat is estimated to date to the first century A.D. “This finding is significant because it is well preserved and has many elements that are very rarely seen,” said archaeologist Bartolić Sirotić of the Regional Museum of Poreč.

The most important archaeological discovery in the last 30 years is that the boat is well preserved and has many rare elements.

At the very end of the Porec waterfront on the Porta de Mar site, at the intersection of the waterfront with Cardo Maximus street close to the former Kompas building the old wooden boat was found

The first of these boats was located in Pula. This is the third such boat found on the mainland in Istria and the first in Poreč. The boat was made by a sewing technique, which was characteristic of the northern Adriatic area.

“It is a Roman sewn ship from the 1st century AD. The technique of sewing the ship is known from earlier periods, from the time of Histra.

One of the oldest boats of this type was found at the site of Zambratija near Umag. This specimen from Poreč is one of three boats found on land that are not part of an underwater archaeological survey,” Bartolić Sirotić, an archaeologist from the Regional Museum of Poreč, told Jutarnji list before adding.

“This finding is significant because it is well preserved and has many elements that are very rarely seen. These are primarily the formwork, ribs, and keel. In years, it will be possible to make a preliminary reconstruction of the vessel.”

The discovered boat is five meters long, although an archeologist revealed to the Jutarnji list that it was in fact a bit longer. It is 1.70 meters wide and had a sail.

It was well preserved because it was at a certain depth in the soil and could not be penetrated by oxygen. Certainly, a significant role in its conservation was played by the sludge with which it was covered.

“All this preserved it and the wood was not destroyed. We are now conducting research. Every stitch that is made is recorded.

The sewing technique is such that we have ropes that are tied with rope and sewn through holes that insert wooden nails called spots. And after that, the ribs, which are connected with this plate by the big wooden nails, are put on,” Bartolić Sirotić adds.

The archaeologist points out that the very context of the findings is very interesting because Poreč was once an ancient colony.

Excavations also show what the waterfront of Poreč once looked like. It was more recessed and lower than the present. The boat was found at an ancient pier.

AFRICA, EGYPT, WORLD

Possibly 10,000-Year-old rock Art Discovered in Egyptian Cave

Possibly 10,000-Year-old rock Art Discovered in Egyptian Cave

CAIRO, EGYPT—Egymonuments Reports that rock art has been discovered in a cave at Wadi Al-Zulma in North Sinai. Aymen Ashmawi of the Ministry of Antiquities said the images resemble a raised relief style and are thus different from those found in South Sinai.

Many of the newly found engravings depict animals, including camels, deer, mules, mountain goats, and donkeys. Remains of circular stone buildings have been found in the area of the cave. 

The cave is located high on a hillside, overlooking the valley and it is made of limestone. It is quite difficult to access. The height of the cave is 60 feet (20 m) and 45 feet deep (15 m). In the cavern, the team of experts was shocked to find a large number of rock carvings that are of a type not seen before.

The ancient cave was found in a mountainous area in Northern Sinai.

Ayman Ashmawy, a senior official with the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities told Egypt Independent that ‘this cave is the first of its kind to be found in the area’.

Sinai has a great many rock carvings and an important collection of them was found at al-Zaranji cave, earlier this year, in the south of the peninsula. 

Here a great many images were found that predated the Pharaohs and that possible date to 10,000 years ago. They were stylistically similar to other examples of cave art in the southern valleys of Sinai.

The rock carvings are of a type not seen before in the region.

Ayman Ashmawy told Egypt Independent that the newly explored ‘cave features an utterly unique assortment of carvings unlike those from the South Sinai valleys’. There are a great many more engravings than in the al-Zaranji cave.

The Director of Sinai Antiquities and head of the mission, Dr. Hisham Hussein told Egypt Today that ‘most of the scenes were carved along the walls of the inner cave’.

The carved images found in Northern Sinai are different from those found elsewhere in the Peninsula. They are more akin to bas-relief and the figures tend to be projected out of the surface of the cave walls.

The rock art found elsewhere in the area, such as those at al-Zaranji were made by chipping away the rocky surface of the caverns and apply pigments to color the engravings. 

Most of the carvings projected out of the surface of the cave walls.

Dr. Hisham told Ahram. online that the rock art depicts ‘animals, including camels, deer, mules, mountain goats and donkeys’. Some of the animals depicted have long ago disappeared from the area and this may help researchers to date the rock engravings.

Images of animals have also been uncovered in other caves in Sinai and other sites all around the world.

A great deal of animal waste and the remains of fires were found in the cave. This suggests that the local people still used the caves to shelter with their animals during the winter. It appears that the site had been used by people for millennia.

The carvings included animals such as camels, deer, mules, mountain goats and donkeys.

Ahram Online reports that ‘the remains of circular stone buildings were discovered’ and were unearthed near the location of the rock carvings. It was found some 140 feet (200 m) south of the site.

It is believed that these are the remains of an ancient settlement. It is not known if the settlement is contemporary with the rock art or if the people who lived there are responsible for the images deep in the limestone cave.

Dr. Hisham and his team will now record and catalogue the rock images. It is possible that more may be found elsewhere in the limestone cavern.

They will attempt to date the images based on their style and identify if they can be linked to any known historical society. It is too early to establish if the mysterious images were made by people from a previously unknown culture.

All In One Magazine