Free Republic

A relief exhibited at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece shows an ancient Greek youth practicing by balancing a football on his thigh in front of a small boy. This means that football, albeit in a primitive form, is at least 2,400 years old and very likely has its origins in ancient Greece. Looking at this lovely ancient artifact today, one can say that the man seems to be showing his son how to control the ball like an ancient Greek Lionel Messi. According to archaeologists, the depiction of the figure playing with the ball dates back to the...

Aerial Image of the foundation of a Roman stone building. Length of the leveling staff (White) at the upper edge of the Picture: 5 meters. Credit: Dennis Braks ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- During their first Gernsheim dig last year, Frankfurt University archaeologists suspected that a small Roman settlement must have also existed here in the Hessian Ried. Now they have discovered clear relics of a Roman village, built in part on the foundations of the fort after the soldiers left. This probably occurred around 120 AD. At the time the cohort (about 500 soldiers) was transferred from the Rhine to the Limes, and...

The largest collection of early American skulls ever studied is lending credence to a controversial theory that two distinct populations of humans--rather than one--colonized the New World. If true, the findings indicate that people who shared an ancestry with modern day Australians and Melanesians may have settled on the continents somewhat earlier than immigrants from northeast Asia. Not so long ago, the origins of the first Americans seemed fairly certain: Beginning about 12,000 years ago, people from northeast Asia entered North America via the Bering landbridge in several waves of immigration. These ancestors of present-day Native Americans spread out to...