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The team who worked on the Stonehenge Riverside Project in 2009 are to return to their findings to explain the eating habits of the people who built and worshipped at the stone circle over four thousand years ago... the new 'Feeding Stonehenge' project will analyse a range of materials including cattle bones and plant residue... Initial research suggests the animals were brought considerable distances to the ceremonial site.. The original Stonehenge Riverside project, which strengthened the idea that nearby Durrington Walls was part of the Stonehenge complex, yielded a surprisingly wide range of material ranging from ancient tools to animal...

Believers in human-caused global climate change have been placed under an uncomfortable spotlight recently. That is thanks to the Climategate scandal, centering on e-mails hacked from the influential Climate Research Unit (CRU) at England’s University of East Anglia. The e-mails show scientists from various academic institutions hard at work suppressing dissent from other scientists who have doubts on global warming, massaging research data to fit preconceived ideas, and seeking to manipulate the gold standard “peer review” process to keep skeptical views from being heard. Does this sound familiar at all? To me, as a prominent skeptic of modern Darwinian theory,...

The remains of the first dwelling in Nazareth that has been dated back to the time of Jesus have been unveiled - just days before Christmas. The find that could shed new light on what the hamlet was like during the period the New Testament says Jesus lived there as a boy, Israeli archaeologists said. The dwelling and older discoveries of nearby tombs in burial caves suggest that Nazareth was an out-of-the-way hamlet of around 50 houses on a patch of about four acres. It was evidently populated by Jews of modest means who kept camouflaged grottos to hide from...

In 388 AD a Christian mob led by a local bishop destroyed the synagogue of Callinicum, a Greco-Roman city in northern Syria. The attack angered emperor Theodosius I, who had declared Christianity the religion of the Roman state just eight years earlier. As the Jewish community enjoyed a protected status under Roman laws, he ordered the synagogue be rebuilt be rebuilt at bishop's expense. This triggered Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, to write the emperor a letter defending the obliteration of the Jewish temple. What could possibly be wrong with destroying a "house of betrayal and godlessness" where Christ's name...

AnalysisMany balk at this element of the Nativity story, but historical and astronomical evidence tends to corroborate it. By Michael J. MillerDuring a 2007 BBC radio interview, the archbishop of Canterbury deconstructed elements of the Nativity story. “Stars simply don’t behave like that,” Rowan Williams said. Asked about the existence of three wise men, he replied, “It works quite well as legend.”But years ago Father Walter Brandmüller, president of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences, published an essay applying the historical-critical method to the question of the Nativity story. (The essay is reprinted without cumbersome footnotes in Light and Shadows: Church...

Science is one of the great achievements of the human mind and the biggest reason why we live not only longer but more vigorously in our old age, in addition to all the ways in which it provides us with things that make life easier and more enjoyable. Like anything valuable, science has been seized upon by politicians and ideologues, and used to forward their own agendas. This started long ago, as far back as the 18th century, when the Marquis de Condorcet coined the term "social science" to describe various theories he favored. In the 19th century, Karl Marx...

Dedicated scientists are working hard to close the gaps, fix the errors and finally complete the human genome sequence. ...Deanna Church has few distractions from the job that lies before her. On her computer sit 888 open 'tickets', or outstanding problems with the human genome sequence. Although that number fluctuates, it's a not-so-subtle reminder that she and her team at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) have a long way to go... --snip-- By April 2003, the sequencing had surpassed the international project's technical definition of completion — the sequence contained fewer than 1 error per 10,000 nucleotides and...

A Sami (Lapp) family in Norway around 1900Photo: Library of CongressIn the freezing far northern reaches of Europe live an indigenous, semi-nomadic people of fishermen, fur trappers and reindeer herders. Like a thin but stubborn sheet of ice, these people have inhabited Sápmi, a large but sparsely populated area covering parts of northern Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia’s Kola Peninsula for thousands of years. They remained closely tied to nature throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, as their clothes, dwellings and other trappings of culture bear witness – here beautifully frozen in film. These people are the Sámi.Sami family in...

James Gaussman and the Jewelled Pyramid of China Egyptian pyramids? Sure, everyone knows about the ones at Giza - and a few aficionados might know about the 138 others (!) scattered around them. Mesoamerican pyramids? Okay, a lot of folks know about them, too -- or even that the great one at Cholula is considered to be the largest one in the world. (reconstruction of a typical Chinese pyramid - image via) But, unfortunately, not many people know that pyramids have come in other flavors as well, including the mysterious and legendary ones in China. (photo by Santha Falia, ;...

NAZARETH, Israel — Israeli archaeologists say they have uncovered remains of the first dwelling in Nazareth that can be dated back to the time of Jesus.They say the find sheds a new light on what Nazareth might have been like in Jesus' time — probably a small hamlet with about 50 houses populated by poor Jews.Archaeologist Yardena Alexandre of the Israel Antiquities Authority says remains of a wall, a hideout and a cistern were found after builders dug up a convent courtyard.Alexandre said Monday archeologists also found clay and chalk vessels used by Galilean Jews of the time — an...

DURHAM, N.C. -- The Egyptians supposedly used it to guide the construction the Pyramids. The architecture of ancient Athens is thought to have been based on it. Fictional Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon tried to unravel its mysteries in the novel The Da Vinci Code. "It" is the golden ratio, a geometric proportion that has been theorized to be the most aesthetically pleasing to the eye and has been the root of countless mysteries over the centuries. Now, a Duke University engineer has found it to be a compelling springboard to unify vision, thought and movement under a single law of...

The University of PennsylvaniaSarah Tishkoff, professor in the departments of genetics and biology at University of Pennsylvania, is collecting samples in Africa. Collaboration by University of Pennsylvania and Cornell University PHILADELPHIA –- People who identify as African-American may be as little as 1 percent West African or as much as 99 percent, just one finding of a large-scale, genome-wide study of African and African-American ancestry released today. An international research team led by scientists from the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell University has collected and analyzed genotype data from 365 African-Americans, 203 people from 12 West African populations and...

Hundreds of people in Southwest Michigan claim to have seen cougars. Michigan Citizens for Cougar Recognition, a group started six years ago by local attorney and Van Buren County Commissioner Denise Noble, has catalogued nearly 200 cougar sightings in Allegan, Van Buren, Kalamazoo and St. Joseph counties. Add in Barry, Cass and Berrien counties, and total cougar sightings reported in Southwest Michigan jump to 412. Allegan County had the third highest number of reported cougar sightings in the state, with 62. Van Buren County came in fifth, with 58. Kalamazoo County was seventh in the state, with 54. Noble said...

This is the first report of venom in the lineage that leads to modern birdsLAWRENCE, Kan. — A group of University of Kansas researchers working with Chinese colleagues have discovered a venomous, birdlike raptor that thrived some 128 million years ago in China. This is the first report of venom in the lineage that leads to modern birds. "This thing is a venomous bird for all intents and purposes," said Larry Martin, KU professor and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Institute. "It was a real shock to us and we made a special trip...

Just in time for Christmas, archaeologists on Monday unveiled what may have been the home of one of Jesus' childhood neighbors. The humble dwelling is the first dating to the era of Jesus to be discovered in Nazareth, then a hamlet of around 50 impoverished Jewish families where Jesus spent his boyhood. Archaeologists and present-day residents of Nazareth imagined Jesus as a youngster, playing with other children in the isolated village, not far from the spot where the Archangel Gabriel revealed to Mary that she would give birth to the boy. Today the ornate Basilica of the Annunciation marks that...

Portuguese scientists have found a depression on the Atlantic Ocean floor they think may be an impact crater. The roughly circular, 6km-wide hollow has a broad central dome and has been dubbed the "Fried Egg" because of its distinctive shape. It was detected to the south of the Azores Islands during a survey to map the continental shelf. If the Fried Egg was made by a space impactor, the collision probably took place within the past 17 million years... It lies under 2km of water about 150km from the Azores archipelago. The depressed ring sits roughly 110m below the...

In a stone-age version of "Iron Chef," early humans were dividing their living spaces into kitchens and work areas much earlier than previously thought, a new study found. So rather than cooking and eating in the same area where they snoozed, early humans demarcated such living quarters. Archaeologists discovered evidence of this coordinated living at a hominid site at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, Israel from about 800,000 years ago. Scientists aren't sure exactly who lived there, but it predates the appearance of modern humans, so it was likely a human ancestor such as Homo erectus.

A 4,000-year-old lentil seed unearthed in an archeological excavation has successfully sprouted after being planted. Project leader and Dumlupınar University archeology faculty Professor Nejat Bilgen said they found the seeds during an excavation undertaken last year in Kütahya province. Bilgen said a layer from the container in which they found the seeds was determined to be from the middle bronze age. He said his team found many seeds, but most had been burnt, adding that they had failed to make the others turn green before the recent success. The excavation team believes they found a silo because there were many...

...Anabel Ford, an archaeologist at UC Santa Barbara and director of the university's MesoAmerican Research Center, suggests... that the forest gardens cultivated by the Maya demonstrate their great appreciation for the environment. Her findings are published in the current issue of the Journal of Ethnobiology in an article titled "Origins of the Maya Forest Garden: Maya Resource Management." ...The ancient Maya, who farmed without draft animals or plows, and had access only to stone tools and fire, followed what Ford calls the "milpa cycle." It is an ancient land use system by which a closed canopy forest is transformed into...

Credit: Daniel Georg Döhne/Wikimedia Conventional wisdom holds that early humans survived on a diet of meat, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and the occasional tuber. Our love affair with cereals supposedly came later, about 20,000 years ago. But a new study hints that wild cereals were part of the human diet more than 100,000 years ago. Making cereals palatable is hard work. They have to be roasted in a fire or pounded into flour and cooked. Because the process is energy-intensive and requires specialized tools, many archeologists assumed that humans didn't begin consuming mass quantities of cereal until the advent of...

The language of the Comanche people, a lifeline of its culture, is fading fast. Its muted vowels and sapient cadence once echoed throughout the fenceless grasslands of the South Plains, but today it can muster barely a whisper... With a recent $215,000 two-year grant from the Administration for Native Americans, they'll shoulder the task on modern technology and a new generation of Comanche students eager to learn their ancestral tongue. "Its important for any language to have its say, to be documented," Williams said. "It's interesting for Comanche because it rose to dominance on the South Plains so quickly, then...

For his part, Peleg believes Qumran went through several distinct stages. As the morning heat mounts, he leads me up a steep ridge above the site, where a channel hewn into the rock brought water into the settlement. From our high perch, he points out the foundations of a massive tower that once commanded a fine view of the sea to the east toward today's Jordan. "Qumran was a military post around 100 B.C.," he says. "We are one day from Jerusalem, and it fortified the northeast shore of the Dead Sea." Other forts from this era are scattered among...

Do we have a little Neanderthal in us? That's not a reference to your behaviour at the end-of-year office party, but to the genes of our extinct cousins. With the imminent publication of the genome sequence of Homo neanderthalis, that question may finally be answered. So far no one has uncovered evidence of any cross-species romps -- at least none that left a trace in our DNA. The 3-billion-nucleotide Neanderthal genome is our best chance yet of finding out. Whether they did or didn't will make the headlines next year, but the importance of the Neanderthal genome reaches much further....

With us rode David S. Whitley, an archaeologist and expert on prehistoric rock art and iconographic interpretation. Having visited hundreds of sites all over the world, including Lascaux and Chauvet in France and the Côa Valley in Portugal, he believes the Coso Petroglyphs to be one of the most important rock art sites on earth. Mr. Whitley estimated that there may be as many as 100,000 images carved into the dark volcanic canyons above the China Lake basin, some as old as 12,000 to 16,000 years, others as recent as the mid-20th century. Floating across a landscape strewn with more...

A noted historian debunks the conventional wisdom about America's War of Independence We think we know the Revolutionary War. After all, the American Revolution and the war that accompanied it not only determined the nation we would become but also continue to define who we are. The Declaration of Independence, the Midnight Ride, Valley Forge—the whole glorious chronicle of the colonists’ rebellion against tyranny is in the American DNA. Often it is the Revolution that is a child’s first encounter with history.Yet much of what we know is not entirely true. Perhaps more than any defining moment in American history,...

Top photo: Jim Robinson leads Free Republic's Clinton Impeachment Rally, aka March for Justice, Washington, D.C. October 31, 1998Center: Washington Post front page, December 20, 1998.Bottom: AP/World Wide Photo.For those who are unaware of Free Republic's history making in its early years, please know that Jim Robinson and the Freepers played a key role in getting Bill Clinton impeached. The impeachhment rally was broadcast live on C-SPAN (all four hours!)Founder of the D.C. Chapter of FreeRepublic.com, MrConfettiMan (who has since passed away) wrote his thoughts about the rally back then:Saturday, October 31st, The March for JusticeI drove into Washington for...

Antarctica not always so cold and remote.... Antarctica harbours bones of dinosaur sand petrified rain forests. Did continental-drift bring Antarctica to the poles...or was it a shift in the earth’s axis that not only caused the death of the Mega fauna, but placed a massive ice sheet on the continent? In 1929, a group of historians found an amazing map drawn on a gazelle skin. Research showed that it was a genuine document drawn in 1513 by Piri Reis, a famous admiral of the Turkish fleet in the sixteenth century. His passion was cartography. His high rank within the Turkish...

Research has revealed that a genetic variation protects against type 2 diabetes when inherited from a person's father, but increases risk of the same condition when it comes from the mother. It is among five DNA variants with different medical effects that depend on the parent of origin which have been identified by researchers at deCODE Genetics in Iceland... While hundreds of common genetic variations that affect disease risk have been discovered in the past two years, they together explain only a small fraction of the heritable factors that are known to play a part in conditions such as diabetes,...

A SHIPWRECK is a catastrophe for those involved, but for historians and archaeologists of future generations it is an opportunity. Wrecks offer glimpses not only of the nautical technology of the past but also of its economy, trade, culture and, sometimes, its warfare. Until recently, though, most of the 3m ships estimated to be lying on the seabed have been out of reach. Underwater archaeology has mainly been the preserve of scuba divers. That has limited the endeavour to waters less than 50 metres deep, excluding 98% of the sea floor from inspection. Even allowing for the tendency of trading...

Charter Colleges? Deborah Lambert, December 18, 2009 Amid the heavy-handed bureaucracies that dominate our nation’s colleges and universities, there are seeds of opportunity. Professor Marvin Olasky noted in a recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education that a move toward Charter Colleges might be the answer. Dr. Olasky, editor-in-chief of the news magazine World and a journalism professor at the U. of Texas, Austin, hails Rob Koons, “the University of Texas professor removed last fall as head of a UT Western Civilization program, who is proposing that Texas legislators back the creation of charter colleges, as they now support...

Thirteen stones sit hidden in the dense jungles of the range of mountains that make up Nakauvadra in Ra. Caves with drawings sit below them. They remain a mystery for the people of Narara Village. Deep in the jungles above the village of Narara in Ra stand 12 stones of similar size and shape. The thirteenth is a little longer then the rest. They stand as monolithic reminders of an era the people of Narara are struggling to understand. It takes about six hours on foot to get to these ancient monuments at the top of the range of mountains...

On one of the last of days of digging in Harvard Yard this fall, archaeologists believe they finally found evidence linked to one of the University's earliest buildings, the Indian College that stood on the site from 1655 to 1698. Archaeologists working in a chest-deep hole near Matthews Hall uncovered a narrow strip of dark earth in a lighter, orange-brown layer that marks natural soil. They believe that the dark earth is the bottom of an architectural trench most likely dug for the Indian College, built to house Native American students as part of the University's original mandate to educate...

...The plateau, with an average altitude above 4,000 meters and known as "the Roof of the World" in southwestern China, is one of the most challenging areas in the world for human settlement due to its environmental extremes, such as extreme cold and low oxygen levels. ...with the drastic drop of temperature on the Earth in the Last Glacial Maximum of the Late Paleolithic Age, about 23,000 years ago, many species could not adapt to the changes and died out... From the perspective of genetic continuity studies, geneticists had also attempted to find out when modern humans settled on the...

Evidence of what could be Australia's earliest human occupation has been found on the fringe of desert in the country's remote northwest, according to archaeologists. Peter Veth, of the Australian National University, said an artefact dated at between 45,000 and 50,000 years old found near the shores of Lake Gregory could be the start of a 25-year study into Australia's first humans. "This is the first evidence of human activity ... in the arid northwest of the continent which can be dated to a time before the last great Ice Age," he said in a statement. It was likely to...

Proof that pre-historic people placed bunches of flowers in the grave when they buried their dead has been found for the first time, experts have said. Archaeologists have discovered a bunch of meadowsweet blossoms in a Bronze Age grave at Forteviot, south of Perth... Pollen found in earlier digs had been thought to have come from honey, or the alcoholic drink mead but this find may finally rule that theory out. Dr Kenneth Brophy, from the University of Glasgow, said the flowers "don't look very much. Just about three or four millimetres across. But these are the first proof that...

Egypt on Thursday lifted a nine-ton gate of the goddess Isis which carved out of red granite and discovered in the port area on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. The gate is one of the rare artifacts discovered in 1998 by an archaeological survey carried out by the Greek archaeological mission in cooperation with the diving team of the Department of the Sunken Antiquities in Alexandria, said the Egyptian Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni during the ceremony. Hosni noted that a committee of the UNESCO would meet with Egyptian archaeologists to study the establishment of the museum under...

LONDON — A British medical journal has published findings saying a mistress of 16th-century French King Henry II may have died from consuming too much drinkable gold. When French experts dug up the remains of Diane de Poitiers last year, they found high levels of gold in her hair. -snip-

Could the Earth become a "snowball" in future? For the last million years, the Earth has been in its coldest state since the Neoproterozoic. We are now living in a relatively warm episode, some 80,000 years from the next glacial maximum, but some evidence suggests that each successive glaciation over the last several cycles has been getting stronger and stronger. During the most recent glacial event, 20,000 years ago, the deep ocean cooled to near its freezing point, and sea ice reached latitudes as low as 40 to 45 degrees north and south, still far from the critical threshold needed...

In a stone-age version of "Iron Chef," early humans were dividing their living spaces into kitchens and work areas much earlier than previously thought, a new study found. So rather than cooking and eating in the same area where they snoozed, early humans demarcated such living quarters. Archaeologists discovered evidence of this coordinated living at a hominid site at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, Israel from about 800,000 years ago. Scientists aren't sure exactly who lived there, but it predates the appearance of modern humans, so it was likely a human ancestor such as Homo erectus. Yet this advanced organizational skill was...

A team of archaeologists and scientists says it has, for the first time, found pieces of a burial shroud from the time of Jesus in a tomb in Jerusalem. The researchers, from Hebrew University and institutions in Canada and the US, said the shroud was very different from the controversial Turin Shroud. Some people believe the Turin Shroud to have been Christ's burial cloth, but others believe it is a fake. The newly found cloth has a simpler weave than Turin's, the scientists say. The body of a man wrapped in fragments of the shroud was found in a tomb...

PARIS (AFP) – Sea levels were likely eight metres higher around 125,000 years ago when polar temperatures were 3-5 degrees C warmer, says a new study published Wednesday to show the effects of global warming. The research by the US universities of Harvard and Princeton was released in the journal Nature as the world's nations met in Denmark to forge a strategy to head off harmful effects of global warming blamed on greenhouse gases. To understand the potential effects of a rise in temperature, the researchers reexamined data about the last interglacial stage -- a warmer period within an ice...

Burial Cloth Found In Jerusalem Cave Casts Doubt On Authenticity of Turin Shroud By MATTHEW KALMAN 16th December 2009 Archaeologists have discovered the first known burial shroud in Jerusalem from the time of Christ's crucifixion - and say it casts serious doubt on the claimed authenticity of the Turin Shroud. Ancient shrouds from the period have been found before in the Holy Land, but never in Jerusalem. Researchers say the weave and design of the shroud discovered in a burial cave near Jerusalem's Old City are completely different to the Turin Shroud. Discovery: The shrouded body of a man was...

PARIS (AFP) – Experts on prehistoric man are rethinking their dates after a find in a southern French valley suggested our ancestors may have reached Europe 1.57 million years ago: 200,000 years earlier than we thought. What provoked the recount was a pile of fossilised bones and teeth uncovered 15 years ago by local man Jean Rouvier in a basalt quarry at Lezignan la Cebe, in the Herault valley, Languedoc. In the summer of 2008, Rouvier mentioned his find to Jerome Ivorra, an archaeological researcher at France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). The subsequent dig uncovered a large variety...

This could be humor, but the fraud and cost makes it very serious!JoNova is a freelance science presenter & writer: Professional speaker, author, and former TV host. The Skeptics Handbook: 164,000 copies printed.Click here or the image to view the page.Good Hunting... from Varmint Al

Salem, N.H. — At this leafless and gloomy time of year I traveled, in the spirit of the symbologist Robert Langdon of “The Da Vinci Code,” to America’s Stonehenge, in this town five miles from the Massachusetts border. Scholars have debated whether the stone cairns and chambers here were built by early American Indians, enterprising colonial settlers or, more controversially, a migrant European culture that visited these woods nearly 4,000 years ago. Determined to plumb these mysteries, I arrived at a rustic information center and gift shop on a cold and gray Sunday morning. Inside I was greeted by the...

Genetic changes that apparently allow humans to live longer than any other primate may be rooted in a more carnivorous diet. These changes may also promote brain development and make us less vulnerable to diseases of aging, such as cancer, heart disease and dementia. These key differences in lifespan may be due to genes that humans evolved to adjust better to meat-rich diets, biologist Caleb Finch at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles suggested. The oldest known stone tools manufactured by the ancestors of modern humans, which date back some 2.6 million years, apparently helped butcher animal bones....

WASHINGTON, DC (Herald de Paris) - EXCLUSIVE - Researchers have revealed the first images from the Caribbean sea floor of what they believe are the archaeological remains of an ancient civilization. Guarding the location’s coordinates carefully, the project’s leader, who wishes to remain anonymous at this time, says the city could be thousands of years old; possibly even pre-dating the ancient Egyptian pyramids, at Giza. The site was found using advanced satellite imagery, and is not in any way associated with the alleged site found by Russian explorers near Cuba in 2001, at a depth of 2300 feet. “To be...

In the black depths of the frigid Arctic Ocean, scientists on a 2005 expedition found a splash of color: The brilliant, blood-red Crossota norvegica jellyfish (pictured). The creature was spotted by a remotely operated vehicle 8,530 feet (2,600 meters) underwater during a two-month National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) expedition to the Canada Basin, the deepest and least explored part of the Arctic waters. Though C. norvegica is not a new species, several new deep-sea animals were discovered during the expedition--some of which were announced in recent research papers in 2009.

In the minutes after a strong earthquake struck offshore of the Indonesian city of Padang on Sept. 30, fears of a tsunami prompted hundreds of thousands of residents to evacuate the coastal city. Or try to. The traffic jam resulting from the mass exodus kept most of them squarely in the danger zone, had a tsunami followed the magnitude 7.6 temblor. Stanford researchers who've studied the city have concluded that fleeing residents would have a better chance of surviving a tsunami if instead of all attempting an evacuation, some could run to the nearest tall building to ride out the...

An investigation by the University of Kansas' Adrian Melott and colleagues reveals a promising new method of detecting past comet strikes upon Earth and gauging their frequencyLAWRENCE, Kan. — It's the stuff of a Hollywood disaster epic: A comet plunges from outer space into the Earth's atmosphere, splitting the sky with a devastating shock wave that flattens forests and shakes the countryside. But this isn't a disaster movie plotline. "Comet impacts might be much more frequent than we expect," said Adrian Melott, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas. "There's a lot of interest in the rate...