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Many thousands of years ago life flourished in the Mongolian Gobi desert... Archaeologists found many traces of old camps... located on the shores of lakes - now dried. Based on the findings, researchers concluded that thousands of years ago richness of species of animals lived in the study area, benefiting the ancient inhabitants of the desert. Archaeologists discovered mainly stone tools and the waste associated with their production... The oldest finds are represented by a massive stone tools made by the Middle Palaeolithic communities (200 thousand - 40 thousand years ago). Archaeologists have also discovered smaller stone products from later...

Study of 44 ancient Middle Eastern genomes supports idea of independent farming revolutions in the Fertile Crescent. Two Middle Eastern populations independently developed farming and then spread the technology to Europe, Africa and Asia, according to the genomes of 44 people who lived thousands of years ago in present-day Armenia, Turkey, Israel, Jordan and Iran. ...the research supports archaeological evidence about the multiple origins of farming, and represents the first detailed look at the ancestry of the individuals behind one of the most important periods in human history — the Neolithic revolution. Some 11,000 years ago, humans living in the...

"Patagonia turns out to be the Rosetta Stone - it shows that human colonisation didn't immediately result in extinctions, but only as long as it stayed cold," says study leader Professor Alan Cooper, ACAD Director. "Instead, more than 1000 years of human occupation passed before a rapid warming event occurred, and then the megafauna were extinct within a hundred years." The researchers, including from the University of Colorado Boulder, University of New South Wales and University of Magallanes in Patagonia, studied ancient DNA extracted from radiocarbon-dated bones and teeth found in caves across Patagonia, and Tierra del Fuego, to trace...

The age of the dinosaurs ended 66 million years ago, when an asteroid six miles in diameter crashed into what is now southeastern Mexico. The world went up in flames. Dinosaurs, along with the massive reptiles that ruled the sea and the sky, perished as forest fires raged across the globe, dust blotted out the sun, and Earth experienced intense heat, frigid cooling, and then more heat. Conventional wisdom states that mammalian diversity emerged from the ashes of the mass extinction, ultimately giving rise to our own humble species. But according to a study in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology,...

CO2 is only a bit-player in the drama of world climate, while the main characters are ice, dust and albedo....Ice age cycles have something to do with precession: the slow wobble of the axis of the Earth. The ancient Egyptians and Greeks knew of precession and called it the Great Year, because it gives warm and cool seasons over its approximate 23,000-year cycle. But there is a problem with invoking the Great Year as the regulator of ice ages, because we should really get an interglacial warming every 23,000 years or so. And we don’t – they only happen every...

Millions of years ago, a series of nearby supernovae sent radiation and debris raining down to Earth. The events left traces of radioactive iron-60 embedded in the sea floor and even on the Moon, and now, researchers are saying they may have had life-altering effects on the early inhabitants of our planet. At just hundreds of light-years away, two major stellar explosions may have spurred changes to the environment, and even increased the rates of cancer and mutation.

A deluge that swept the Land of Israel more than 7,000 years ago, submerging six Neolithic villages opposite the Carmel Mountains, is the origin of the biblical flood of Noah, a British marine archeologist said Tuesday. The new theory about the source of the great flood detailed in the Book of Genesis comes amid continuing controversy among scholars over whether the inundation of the Black Sea more than seven millennia ago was the biblical flood. In the theory posited by British marine archeologist Dr. Sean Kingsley and published in the Bulletin of the Anglo-Israeli Archaeological Society, the drowning of the...

A deluge that swept the Land of Israel more than 7,000 years ago, submerging six Neolithic villages opposite the Carmel Mountains, is the origin of the biblical flood of Noah, a British marine archeologist said Tuesday. The new theory about the source of the great flood detailed in the Book of Genesis comes amid continuing controversy among scholars over whether the inundation of the Black Sea more than seven millennia ago was the biblical flood. In the theory posited by British marine archeologist Dr. Sean Kingsley and published in the Bulletin of the Anglo-Israeli Archaeological Society, the drowning of the...

A deluge that swept the Land of Israel more than 7,000 years ago, submerging six Neolithic villages opposite the Carmel Mountains, is the origin of the biblical flood of Noah, a British marine archeologist said Tuesday. The new theory about the source of the great flood detailed in the Book of Genesis comes amid continuing controversy among scholars over whether the inundation of the Black Sea more than seven millennia ago was the biblical flood. In the theory posited by British marine archeologist Dr. Sean Kingsley and published in the Bulletin of the Anglo-Israeli Archaeological Society, the drowning of the...

It's a terrifying vision: A violent eruption of Italy's Mount Etna triggers a massive collapse of one flank of the volcano, sending 35 cubic kilometers of debris--the equivalent of 10,000 Cheops pyramids--hurtling at 400 kilometers an hour into the Ionian Sea. The Big Splash unleashes a 50-meter-tall wall of water that, within a few hours, wipes out coastal settlements across the Mediterranean. This catastrophe happened 8000 years ago--and a Mediterranean monster of similar magnitude could happen again. That's the scenario invoked in an analysis in last week's Geophysical Research Letters. "It was an extraordinary event, probably the largest tsunami unleashed...

Source: American Geophysical Union Date: November 28, 2006 Landslide At Mt. Etna Generated A Large Tsunami In The Mediterranean Sea Nearly 8000 Years Ago Geological evidence indicates that the eastern flanks of Mt. Etna volcano, located on Italy's island of Sicily, suffered at least one large collapse nearly 8,000 years ago. Pareschi et al. modeled this collapse and discovered that the volume of landslide material, combined with the force of the debris avalanche, would have generated a catastrophic tsunami, which would have impacted all of the Eastern Mediterranean. Simulations show that the resulting tsunami waves would have destabilized soft marine...

More than 3,200 years ago, life was abuzz in and around what is now this modern-day Israeli metropolis on the shimmering Mediterranean shore. To the north lay the mighty Hittite empire; to the south, Egypt was thriving under the reign of the great Pharaoh Ramses II. Cyprus was a copper emporium. Greece basked in the opulence of its elite Mycenaean culture, and Ugarit was a bustling port city on the Syrian coast. In the land of Canaan, city states like Hazor and Megiddo flourished under Egyptian hegemony. Vibrant trade along the coast of the eastern Mediterranean connected it all. Yet...

Comets, Meteors & Myth: New Evidence for Toppled Civilizations and Biblical Tales By Robert Roy Britt Senior Science Writer posted: 07:00 am ET 13 November 2001 "...and the seven judges of hell ... raised their torches, lighting the land with their livid flame. A stupor of despair went up to heaven when the god of the storm turned daylight into darkness, when he smashed the land like a cup." -- An account of the Deluge from the Epic of Gilgamesh, circa 2200 B.C. If you are fortunate enough to see the storm of shooting stars predicted for the Nov. 18...

Eco-ruin 'felled early society' The Argaric culture was an early urban society One of Western Europe's earliest known urban societies may have sown the seeds of its own downfall, a study suggests. Mystery surrounded the fall of the Bronze Age Argaric people in south-east Spain - Europe's driest area. Data suggests the early civilisation exhausted precious natural resources, helping bring about its own ruin. The study provides early evidence for cultural collapse caused - at least in part - by humans meddling with the environment, say researchers. It could also provide lessons for modern populations living in water-stressed regions. The...

"Our evidence shows definitively that the population decline in this period cannot have been caused by climate change," says Ian Armit, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Bradford, and lead author of the study. Graeme Swindles, Associate Professor of Earth System Dynamics at the University of Leeds, added, "We found clear evidence for a rapid change in climate to much wetter conditions, which we were able to precisely pinpoint to 750BC using statistical methods." According to Professor Armit, social and economic stress is more likely to be the cause of the sudden and widespread fall in numbers. Communities producing...

We've deluded ourselves into believing in the myth of the noble and peaceful primitive Nicholas Wade's Before The Dawn is one of those books full of eye-catching details. For example, did you know the Inuit have the largest brains of any modern humans? Something to do with the cold climate. Presumably, if this global warming hooey ever takes off, their brains will be shrinking with the ice caps. But the passage that really stopped me short was this: "Both Keeley and LeBlanc believe that for a variety of reasons anthropologists and their fellow archaeologists have seriously underreported the prevalence of...

Not so very long ago that many archaeologists regarded the Ancestral Puebloan people–or the Anasazi, as researchers once called them–as a rather peaceful, mystical group of astronomers, artists, priests and farmers. They based this idea largely on their observations of modern Puebloan peoples: the Hopi, the Zuni and others who lived in traditional pueblos, such as Taos, and who often lived quiet lives of ritual and spirituality. In the early 90s, some Southwestern archaeologists began questioning this received wisdom. David Wilcox, an archaeologist at the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff, hypothesized that the rulers of Chaco Canyon, a massive...

The cave bear started to become extinct in Europe 24,000 years ago, but until now the cause was unknown. An international team of scientists has analysed mitochondrial DNA sequences from 17 new fossil samples, and compared these with the modern brown bear. The results show that the decline of the cave bear started 50,000 years ago, and was caused more by human expansion than by climate change. "The decline in the genetic diversity of the cave bear (Ursus spelaeus) began around 50,000 years ago, much earlier than previously suggested, at a time when no major climate change was taking place,...

Broken ice dam blamed for 300-year chill 14:21 10 January 2006 NewScientist.com news service Kurt Kleiner A three-century-long cold spell that chilled Europe 8200 years ago was probably caused by the bursting of a Canadian ice dam, which released a colossal flood of glacial meltwater into the Atlantic Ocean. Two new papers, using different computer models, show that the massive freshwater flood accounts for evidence of the sudden climate change, which cooled Greenland by an average of 7.4°C, and Europe by about 1°C. It was the most abrupt and widespread cool spell in the last 10,000 years. Evidence for the...

An int'l research team at urging of TAU, Hebrew U. professors will drill half a kilometer to study year-by-year climate change from 500,000 years ago... The International Continental Scientific Drilling Program chose the Dead Sea as the site of its next drilling at the urging of Tel Aviv University's Prof. Zvi Ben-Avraham and the Israel Geological Survey's Dr. Mordechai Stein... sponsored by the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities... "We will be taking out a vertical piece about half a kilometer long which will allow us to get a picture of climate change on a year-by-year basis going back 500,000...