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For about a century, the novelty of horse diving from great heights into a tiny tank of water was all the rage in America. And was every bit crazy as it sounds. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ VIDEOS AT LINK............... A horse takes a practice dive at Atlantic City's Steel Pier Park in 1978. (John Margolies, Library of Congress) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Readers will inevitably take sides with this story. There will be outrage. Decidedly, animal rights activists for sure will howl with rage. The intent is not to spark debate or rekindle old controversy. What’s done is done, live and learn. In many ways, we...

Our ancestors may have kept foxes as pets long before domestic dogs came on the scene. Archaeological evidence suggests ancient human societies in South America revered foxes to such an extent that they were buried next to them. Scientists were surprised to find a fox buried in a human grave dating back 1,500 years in Patagonia, Argentina. They think the most likely explanation is that the fox was a highly valued companion or pet. DNA analysis shows the animal dined with prehistoric hunter gatherers and was part of the inner circle of the camp. A fox of the same species...

"This is the earliest evidence for the loss of seasonal egg laying yet identified in the archaeological record," says Dr Robert Spengler, leader of the Domestication and Anthropogenic Evolution research group at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, Germany, and principal investigator on the study."This is an important clue for better understanding the mutualistic relationships between humans and animals that resulted in domestication."The research team collected tens of thousands of eggshell fragments from archaeological sites along the main Central Asian corridor of the Silk Road. Using a method of biomolecular analysis known as ZooMS (Zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry) they were...

The Industrial Revolution started more than 100 years earlier than previously thought, new research suggests, with Britons already shifting from agricultural work to manufacturing in the 1600s. Seventeenth century Britain can be understood as the start of the Industrial Revolution, laying down the foundations for a shift from an agricultural and crafts-based society to a manufacturing-dominated economy, in which networks of home-based artisans worked with merchants, functioning similarly to factories. The period saw a steep decline in agricultural peasantry and a surge in people who manufactured goods, such as local artisans like blacksmiths, shoemakers and wheelwrights, alongside a burgeoning network...

During their numerous conquests across much of the known world, Alexander the Great and his horse Bucephalas led the elite Macedonian cavalry. According to one legend, they even discovered Himalayan salt, famous today for its pinkish tint and its essential trace elements required by the body. The horses had worked hard in battle and on the trail and during a moment of respite licked the salt-covered rocks in the hills overlooking the Hyaspes River. This alerted the soldiers to the salt deposits there. Whether the anecdote is true or not, it speaks to the bond between horse and rider and...

...Archaeologists already knew that the São Luís area, also called Upaon-Açu, meaning "big island" in the Tupí-Guaraní Indigenous languages, held traces of prehistoric human activity. For instance, a prehistoric jawbone was discovered at Farm Rosane in the 1970s and other artifacts found in São Luís have dated to 6,000 years ago, Wellington Lage, the lead archaeologist of the recent excavations, told Live Science. The remains were attributed to the Sambaquian peoples. This group relied on marine resources and built shell mounds with leftover food refuse that reached up to 100 feet (30 meters) high.The latest excavation, which began in June...

Early human hunter-gatherers ate mostly plants and vegetables, according to archeological findings that undermine the commonly held view that our ancestors lived on a high protein, meat-heavy diet.The evidence, from the remains of 24 individuals from two burial sites in the Peruvian Andes dating to between 9,000 and 6,500 years ago, suggests that wild potatoes and other root vegetables may have been a dominant source of nutrition before the shift to an agricultural lifestyle...Some have previously suggested that the shift to agricultural economies was driven by over-hunting, but the latest findings raise the possibility of a more gradual transition from...

William Taylor, an assistant professor of anthropology and curator of archaeology in the Museum of Natural History at CU Boulder, says this research shows that the story about people and horses in the Americas is "far more dynamic" than previously thought...Juan Bautista Belardi, a professor of archaeology at the Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia Austral in Argentina and Taylor's research colleague, and his team in Patagonia conducted all the field research at a canyon site called Chorrillo Grande 1 in southern Argentina. They unearthed the remains of an Aónikenk/Tehuelche campsite (people of the Indigenous Tehuelche nation traditionally used horses for...

Agriculture in Syria started with a bang 12,800 years ago as a fragmented comet slammed into the Earth's atmosphere. The explosion and subsequent environmental changes forced hunter-gatherers in the prehistoric settlement of Abu Hureyra to adopt agricultural practices to boost their chances for survival. That's the assertion made by an international group of scientists in one of four related research papers, all appearing in the journal Science Open: Airbursts and Cratering Impacts. The papers are the latest results in the investigation of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, the idea that an anomalous cooling of the Earth almost 13 millennia ago...

...Çavuştepe Castle is located in the Çavuştepe neighborhood on the Van-Hakkari-Iran highway in the Gürpınar District, 25 km southeast of Van. It was built in the middle of the 8th century BC by the Urartian King Sarduri II.The first excavations in Çavuştepe Castle were carried out under the presidency of Prof. Dr. Afif Erzen and continued to be done for 25 years between 1961 and 1986 while the second-period excavations started in 2014 and have been carried out under the chairmanship of Prof. Dr. Rafet Çavuşoğlu since then..."In our work this year, as in every year, we encountered a new...

An illustration of early humans hunting an elephant using spears. (courtesy Tel Aviv University) When elephants started disappearing from the Middle East some 400,000 years ago, it was a major crisis, and not just for the ancient elephants. Early humans across the region, including in what is now Israel, depended on elephants for their diet. Eventually, humans adapted, learning how to hunt smaller prey such as bison, deer and gazelles, until those, too, disappeared from the landscape or their numbers were too small to hunt. This forced humans to adapt to even smaller prey such as rabbits and birds, and,...

On Aug. 25, 2023, a video appeared of Muslim girls covered from head to toe in all black burqas, dancing to a song that praised Islam and cursed "infidels" — that is, all non-Muslims. The video — which would make ISIS proud and chill Western audiences — was taken on a woman's college campus in India, Talimuddin Niswan Women's Degree College in Mau. Swati Goel Sharma, the journalist who shared the video, wrote:A glimpse into the brainwashing and radicalisation that goes on in religious minority institutes [meaning Muslim schools in India]. Women covered from head to toe in burqa are...

Apart from Garfield’s legendary love of lasagna, perhaps no food is more associated with cats than tuna. The dish is a staple of everything from The New Yorker cartoons to Meow Mix jingles—and more than 6% of all wild-caught fish goes into cat food. Yet tuna (or any seafood for that matter) is an odd favorite for an animal that evolved in the desert. Now, researchers say they have found a biological explanation for this curious craving. In a study published this month in Chemical Senses, scientists report that cat taste buds contain the receptors needed to detect umami—the savory,...

Archaeologists in Siberia have discovered the untouched 3,000-year-old grave of a person thought to be a charioteer — indicating for the first time that horse-drawn chariots were used in the region.The skeletal remains were interred with a distinctive hooked metal attachment for a belt, which allowed drivers of horse-drawn chariots to tie their reins to their waists and free their hands. This type of artifact has also been found in Chinese and Mongolian graves.Aleksey Timoshchenko, an archaeologist at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told Live Science in an email that the object was...

Like the teeth themselves, under the right conditions the gunk on your teeth may survive not just thousands but millions of years in the grave. Isn't that good to know.Advanced dental decay and plaque buildup have been detected in Dryopithecus carinthiacus, a primate that lived in Europe 12.5 million years ago, suggesting it doted on high-sugar fruit. Sivapithecus sivalensis, who lived between 9.3 to 8.7 million years ago in Pakistan, was also apparently frugivorous. Analysis of ancient plaque has shed light on the mobility of Neanderthals and other hominins, as implied by dietary changes, and shored up the thesis that...

Wild parrots tend to fly in flocks, but when kept as single pets, they may become lonely and boredWhen humans are feeling lonely, we can call or video chat with friends and family who live far away. But, scientists asked, what about pet parrots? New research suggests that these chatty creatures may also benefit from virtually connecting with their peers. Domesticated parrots that learned to initiate video chats with other pet parrots had a variety of positive experiences, such as learning new skills, researchers from Northeastern University, the University of Glasgow and MIT report this month in Proceedings of the...

...the group examined the remains of a dog found in a tomb in what was once a city called Tralleis, in what is now modern Turkey.The dog remains were found at a dig site in Aydın back in 2007, but were considered too delicate for study at the time—they were put in safe storage instead. In 2021, the team on this new effort retrieved the bones and began a slow study of the bones to learn more about the dog.Though the specimen was not complete, the research team was still able to determine that it was a dog and that...

Conclusive evidence of chicken breeding in the Yayoi period of Japan has been discovered from the Karako-Kagi site.The chicken is one of the most common domesticated animals, with a current estimated population of over 33 billion individuals. They are reared for their meat and eggs, and may be kept as pets.The chicken is believed to have been domesticated in Southeast Asia about 3500 years ago, following which they were carried to all corners of the world. The exact date of introduction of chicken breeding to Japan is under debate, as there are no historical records and archeological evidence is inconclusive.Professor...

In the Anavlochos mountain range in eastern Crete, archaeologists have found hundreds of ancient terracotta fragments, mostly from female figurines, that were left as votive offerings in natural rock cavities in the seventh century B.C. Within one of these cavities was a more peculiar collection of well-worn objects, including a terracotta plaque of a woman and a steatite bead that likely both date to the eighth century B.C., as well as a seventh-century B.C. terracotta horse figurine. The cavity also contained a three-sided Minoan sealstone dating to between 1850 and 1700 B.C.—at least 1,000 years earlier than the other items....

Species of the horse genus Equus first appeared on the North American continent during the Pliocene era and spread to and across Eurasia beginning around 2.5 million years ago. They disappeared from the Western Hemisphere during the megafauna extinction event at the end of the Pleistocene and the last glacial period. The return of equids to the Americas through the introduction of the domestic horse (Equus caballus) is documented in the historical literature but is not explored fully either archaeologically or genetically. Historical documents suggest that the first domestic horses were brought from the Iberian Peninsula to the Caribbean in...