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Drought in Ireland Leads to Discovery of Neolithic Henge Drone footage captured amid a heatwave close to the 5000-year-old Newgrange neolithic passage tomb in County Meath, Ireland, on July 10 revealed an previously-undiscovered henge, sparking an investigation by the country’s National Monument ServiceThe footage was shot by Ken Williams in Brú na Bóinne, or the Boyne Valley, an area rich in neolithic sites and which was designated a a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993.Williams said that were it not for the recent heatwave and drought in the area, the remains of the henge would not have been seen.According to...

In 1923, famed British geologist Herbert Henry Thomas published a seminal study on Stonehenge, claiming to have found the precise spots where prehistoric people had quarried the stones. There was just one problem with his analysis: It was wrong. And it has taken geologists about 80 years to get it right, a new study finds. To debunk Thomas' work, Bevins and Ixer donned their Sherlock Holmes hats and examined Thomas' maps and rock samples. Thomas (1876-1935) was a geologist for the British Geological Survey who spent just one day in December 1906 surveying Mynydd Preseli... During his Preseli Hills visit,...

In the early Cretaceous period, between 125 and 120 million years ago, researchers discovered that dinosaurs began moving away from Europe. A team of scientists from the University of Leeds created a computer model of the fossil record of dinosaurs to figure out their migration pattern up until their extinction 65 million years ago. They found that there was a mass exodus of dinosaurs between 125 and 120m years ago while no new species were moving in. Lead author of the study published in the Journal of Biogeography, Dr Alex Dunhill, of Leeds University, said: "This is a curious result...

Modern humans' distant relatives left Africa earlier than previously thought—rewriting a key chapter in humankind's epic prequel, according to a discovery unveiled on Wednesday in Nature. Nearly a hundred stone tools found at the Shangchen site in central China may push back the spread of our ancient cousins—hominins—out of Africa by more than a quarter million years. The toolmakers lived at Shangchen on and off for 800,000 years between 2.1 and 1.3 million years ago, leaving behind tools that are unprecedented outside of Africa. The site's oldest tools are roughly 300,000 years older than Dmanisi, a 1.8-million-year-old site in the...

Found near the ruined Temple of Zeus in the ancient city of Olympia, the tablet has been dated to Roman times. It is engraved with 13 verses from the poem recounting the adventures of the hero Odysseus after the fall of Troy. The tale was probably composed by Homer in the late 8th Century BC. It would have been handed down in an oral tradition for hundreds of years before the tablet was inscribed. The exact date of the tablet still needed to be confirmed, but its discovery was "a great archaeological, epigraphic, literary and historical exhibit", the Greek culture...

BURLINGTON, Vt. — The trials of Odysseus are really not that different from the struggles of those learning to readjust after wars of today, modern veterans are finding. A small group of military veterans has been meeting weekly in a classroom at the University of Vermont to discuss "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" for college credit — and to give meaning to their own experiences, equating the close-order discipline of men who fought with spears, swords and shields to that of men and women who do battle these days with laser-guided munitions. Homer isn't just for student veterans. Discussion groups...

A mysterious ancient black granite sarcophagus has been discovered in Egypt. The tomb, which dates back to the Ptolemaic period between 305 B.C. and 30 B.C., was uncovered in the city of Alexandria. In a Facebook post, Dr. Mostafa Waziri, general secretary of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, announced that the 6-foot high sarcophagus, which is 8.7-feet long and 5.4-feet wide, is the largest ever found in Alexandria. The sarcophagus was found buried 16.4 feet below the surface. A layer of mortar between the lid and the body of the sarcophagus indicates that it has not been opened since it...

More than 3 million years ago, our adult human ancestors were walking on two feet and didn't have the option of a fashionable baby sling to carry their kids around in. Instead, Australopithecus afarensis toddlers had a special grasping toe that helped them hold on to their mothers and escape into the trees, reports a study published July 4 in Science Advances. The evidence comes from DIK-1-1 — a relatively complete 3.3 million-year-old skeleton of a 2.5- to 3-year-old female Australopithecus afarensisdiscovered in Dikika, Ethiopia. The skeleton, nicknamed Selam — after the word for peace in Ethiopia's official language of...

One of only two ceremonial parchment copies of the American Declaration of Independence has been found in Sussex. The rare artefact was discovered neatly folded away in the West Sussex Records Office in Chicester, where it had been stored for more than 50 years before it was tracked down by Harvard University academics. After rigorous testing, the parchment has been certified as authentic – just in time for the 242nd anniversary of its signing on 4 July 1776. ‘Terrific news’ “This is such terrific news about the Sussex Declaration,” Louise Goldsmith, leader of West Sussex County Council, said. “We have...

At precisely 3.10am, the guns thundered into life and the soldiers rose, lit up cigarettes and followed the booming artillery barrage into battle, their objective a French village named Le Hamel. As dawn loomed it was all over. The village had fallen, casualties were mercifully light (by World War One standards) and victory was complete. In his detailed planning, Australian commander Lieutenant General John Monash calculated this would take 90 minutes. It actually took 93. The Battle of Hamel, fought on July 4, 1918, was a sign of what was to come as allied forces achieved battlefield mastery after three...

America's founding document might be too politically incorrect for Facebook, which flagged and removed a post consisting almost entirely of text from the Declaration of Independence. The excerpt, posted by a small community newspaper in Texas, apparently violated the social media site's policies against hate speech. Since June 24, the Liberty County Vindicator of Liberty County, Texas, has been sharing daily excerpts from the declaration in the run up to July Fourth. The idea was to encourage historical literacy among the Vindicator's readers. The first nine such posts of the project went up without incident. "But part 10," writes Vindicator...

I never get tired of talking about archaeology confirming biblical history. So let's talk. Second Samuel 20 tells the story of a short-lived rebellion against the rule of King David led by a Benjamite named Sheba, a kinsman of David's predecessor, Saul. It's a short, almost enigmatic, tale involving, among other things, cloistered concubines, deadly beard-pulling, and an unintentionally—or perhaps not—comical siege scene that could have come out of a Monty Python movie. Comic or not, the site of the siege was a real place that testifies to the historical nature of the biblical narrative. In II Samuel, David, fresh...

Making Waves Over Noah’s FloodSome research backs the biblical story and some finds no evidence of the catastrophe By Robert Cooke STAFF WRITER January 14, 2003 Scientists are seriously challenging a recent, fascinating proposal that Noah's epic story - setting sail with an ark jam-full of animal couples - was based on an actual catastrophic flood that suddenly filled the Black Sea 7,500 years ago, forcing people to flee. In a detailed new look at the rocks, sediments, currents and seashells in and around the Black Sea, an international research team pooh-poohs the Noah flood idea, arguing that all the...

Attempting a new translation of “The Odyssey” is like directing “Hamlet.” Much of your audience knows the work well, and they take their seats with entrenched expectations and the intonations of favorite performances reverberating in their heads. At the same time, though, you will have audience members who have never seen the play, for whom you provide the introduction to a giant of Western literature. And let us not forget those who are there under duress, dreading the upcoming hours of boredom. You must find a way to speak to all these disparate groups, sneaking past the defenses of the...

Union and Confederate soldiers return to Gettysburg on 50th anniversary of Civil War battle that began 155 years ago tomorrow:    

A chart of basic biographical data for every signer of the Declaration of Independence. I am actually familiar with just 14 of the 56 names, which is kind of depressing and embarrassing. Almost one half were lawyers. Only one was unmarried. Eleven had at least 10 children. Fourteen lived to be at least 80 years old. Eight were foreign born - from England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.

Complex organic molecules have been discovered for the first time coming from the depths of Saturn's moon Enceladus, a new study reported. Spacecraft scheduled to launch soon could explore what this new discovery says about the chances of life within icy moons like Enceladus, the study's researchers said. The sixth largest of Saturn's moons, Enceladus is only about 314 miles (505 kilometers) in diameter. This makes the moon small enough to fit inside the borders of Arizona. In 2005, NASA's Cassini spacecraft detected plumes of water vapor and icy particles erupting from Enceladus, revealing the existence of a giant...

Students and scholars are up in arms over a decision to cut thousands of years from the Advanced Placement World History curriculum, with some historians fretting it will make the course too "Western-centric." “The College Board wants to remove over 8,000 of those years, and start the course in 1450 CE,” declares a petition seeking to prevent the change, which had already exceeded 11,000 signatures by press time.

Aztec human sacrifices were far more widespread and grisly that previously thought, archaeologists have revealed. In 2015 archaeologists from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) found a gruesome 'trophy rack' near the site of the Templo Mayor, one of the main temples in the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, which later became Mexico City. Now, they say the find was just the tip of the iceberg, and that the 'skull tower' was just a small part of a massive display of skulls known as Huey Tzompantli that was the size of a basketball court.

`Oumuamua, pronounced oh-MOO-ah-MOO-ah – is moving away from the sun faster than expected. The Hubble Space Telescope made the discovery, in cooperation with ground-based telescopes... The measured gain in ‘Oumuamua’s speed is tiny, these astronomers said. Plus, our sun is still trying to drag `Oumuamua back; that is, the sun’s gravity is still slowing down the object, though not as fast as predicted by celestial mechanics. Marco Micheli of the European Space Agency led the team that explored several scenarios to explain ‘Oumuamua’s faster-than-predicted speed. The most likely explanation is that `Oumuamua is venting material from its surface due to...