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EGYPT 2000 BC: Drills were used that turned 500X faster than today's power drills and bored into granite rock with ease. Dentists worked with cement fillings, dental bridges, and inserted artificial teeth. Doctors performed pregnancy tests, determined the sex of an unborn child, fed nourishment through tubes, fitted artificial legs and hands; and used anesthetic and sophisticated instruments to perform bone and brain surgery? Mysterious moving walls, automatically flashing lights and lamps that shone century after century, non-stop? A detailed map of Antarctica dating back thousands of years, without ice! A 400 ft pyramid was found on the seabed. 44...

Neanderthals and other extinct human lineages might have been ancient mariners, venturing to the Mediterranean islands thousands of years earlier than previously thought. This prehistoric seafaring could shed light on the mental capabilities of these lost relatives of modern humans, researchers say. Scientists had thought the Mediterranean islands were first settled about 9,000 years ago by Neolithic or New Stone Age farmers and shepherds... For instance, obsidian from the Aegean island of Melos was uncovered at the mainland Greek coastal site of Franchthi cave in layers that were about 11,000 years old, while excavations on the southern coast of Cyprus...

Modern science has held that islands such as Cypress and Crete were first inhabited by seafaring humans approximately 9,000 years ago by agriculturists from the late Neolithic period. Simmons writes that research over the past 20 years has cast doubt on that assumption however and suggests that it might be time to rewrite the history books. He cites evidence such as pieces of obsidian found in a cave in mainland Greece that were found to have come from Melos, an island in the Aegean Sea and were dated at 11,000 years ago as well as artifacts from recent digs on...

IT LOOKS like Neanderthals may have beaten modern humans to the seas. Growing evidence suggests our extinct cousins criss-crossed the Mediterranean in boats from 100,000 years ago - though not everyone is convinced they weren't just good swimmers. Neanderthals lived around the Mediterranean from 300,000 years ago. Their distinctive "Mousterian" stone tools are found on the Greek mainland and, intriguingly, have also been found on the Greek islands of Lefkada, Kefalonia and Zakynthos. That could be explained in two ways: either the islands weren't islands at the time, or our distant cousins crossed the water somehow. Now, George Ferentinos of...

Archaeologists on the island of Crete have discovered what may be evidence of one of the world's first sea voyages by human ancestors, the Greek Culture Ministry said Monday A ministry statement said experts from Greece and the U.S. have found rough axes and other tools thought to be between 130,000 and 700,000 years old close to shelters on the island's south coast. Crete has been separated from the mainland for about five million years, so whoever made the tools must have traveled there by sea (a distance of at least 40 miles). That would upset the current view that...

<p>Early humans, possibly even prehuman ancestors, appear to have been going to sea much longer than anyone had ever suspected.</p> <p>That is the startling implication of discoveries made the last two summers on the Greek island of Crete. Stone tools found there, archaeologists say, are at least 130,000 years old, which is considered strong evidence for the earliest known seafaring in the Mediterranean and cause for rethinking the maritime capabilities of prehuman cultures.</p>

Human ancestors that left Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago to see the rest of the world were no landlubbers. Stone hand axes unearthed on the Mediterranean island of Crete indicate that an ancient Homo species -- perhaps Homo erectus -- had used rafts or other seagoing vessels to cross from northern Africa to Europe via at least some of the larger islands in between, says archaeologist Thomas Strasser of Providence College in Rhode Island. Several hundred double-edged cutting implements discovered at nine sites in southwestern Crete date to at least 130,000 years ago and probably much earlier, Strasser...

The current theory on human migrations into Japan is that the original inhabitants, the Jomon people, were met about 2,500 years ago by a separate group coming mainly from the Korean Peninsula, the Yayoi people. Archaeologists have identified fewer Jomon sites from the Late Jomon Period, the era immediately before the Yayoi arrival. Global temperatures and sea levels dropped during that period, which could have made life more difficult for the hunter-gatherer Jomon people. When the Yayoi people arrived, they brought wet rice farming to Japan, which would have led to a more stable food supply for the remaining Jomon...

Published: 17th April 2005 11:48 BST+1 Pompei discovery for Swedish archeologists (AFP) Swedish archeologists have discovered a Stone Age settlement covered in ash under the ruins of the ancient city of Pompei, indicating that the volcano Vesuvius engulfed the area in lava more than 3,500 years before the famous 79 AD eruption. The archeologists recently found burnt wood and grains of corn in the earth under Pompei, Anne-Marie Leander Touati, a professor of archeology at Stockholm University who led the team, told AFP. "Carbon dating shows that the finds are from prehistoric times, that is, from 3,500 years BC," Leander...

Pompeii's burial not its first disaster Sid Perkins From Denver, at a meeting of the Geological Society of America Recent excavations reveal that the ancient city of Pompeii, famed for its burial by an eruption of Italy's Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, suffered through several devastating landslides in the centuries preceding its volcanic demise. About three-fourths of Pompeii has been excavated, says Jean-Daniel Stanley of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. However, most of the digs in the city have extended down only to the ground level of dwellings that were standing in the 1st century. In...

First Pompeii uncoveredSamnites founded city in Third Century BC (ANSA) - Rome, February 1 - The origins of the famed buried city of Pompeii have emerged from years of excavations, an international conference in Rome was told Thursday. The first Pompeii was not built by the Romans or even by the Greeks who preceded them, but by an ancient people called the Samnites, Pompeii heritage Superintendent Piero Guzzo told a packed audience of archaeologists and scholars. Wielding photos of inscriptions, votive offerings and even entire buildings, Guzzo said "a new season of studies has begun". "For the first time we...

One of the world's best-preserved Bronze Age villages has been found at Nola, a few miles from Vesuvius, during routine tests before construction of a shopping center. A catastrophic eruption of the volcano, known to have taken place between 1800 and 1750 B.C., left this "Prehistoric Pompeii" in a state of remarkable preservation... Although much of the structure of the prehistoric huts was destroyed by the eruption, falling ash and volcanic mud hardened to create a kind of mold of the village in reverse, much like the casts of the victims of Vesuvius' more famous eruption. In addition to...

'Bronze Age Pompeii' Found in Italy Dec. 3 — Italian archaeologists have discovered one of the world's best-preserved prehistoric villages, a "Bronze Age Pompeii" that was buried in volcanic ash near the world-famous Roman city almost 4,000 years ago. The ancient settlement was overwhelmed by volcanic flow when Mount Vesuvius erupted around 1800 B.C., smothering the village near present-day Nola in southern Italy many centuries before Pompeii suffered the same fate. "This is by far the best-preserved prehistoric village in Italy and one of the best in the world. Everyday life in the ancient Bronze Age is preserved there," Giuseppe ...

With more than a year left before construction starts, the Alabama Department of Transportation (ALDOT) has begun demolition work for the proposed Mobile River bridge and Bayway project. The agency is currently in the process of tearing down nine buildings throughout the project site just south of downtown near Virginia Street, where the bridge will be footed. “Because the final design is in a preliminary phase, we don’t have exact locations on where the footings are going to be … ,” ALDOT spokeswoman Allison Gregg said. Some of the buildings were vacant before ALDOT acquired them, other owners and tenants...

 THE RED CHIEF AS TOLD BY THE LAST OF HIS TRIBE by Ion L. Idriess,  ANGUS AND ROBERTSON SYDNEY - LONDON, 1953 226 pages. The Red Chief by Ion L. Idriess is about a legendary Australian aboriginal chief that lived from about 1650 to 1745, long before any European presence. His life and times were passed down in oral history, from what may have been the last full blood of his tribe, to Senior Sargent John P. Ewing, mentioned in Gunneday in 1886.  (1829-1911) The recounting of the stories about Cumbo Gunnerah were conscientiously written down from about a...

What killed the dinosaurs? It’s a question as old as – well the dinosaurs themselves, and one that everyone from school children to scientists have been asking for decades. Movies like Jurassic Park and the Land Before Time only heighten that sense of wonder and raise the stakes behind that question. Now according to a new scientific study, it seems that black gold may have been the source of the dinos’ demise. Japanese researchers at Tohuku University and the Meteorological Research Institute authored a recent study in the research journal Scientific Reports suggesting that a meteor impact 66 million years...

Archaeologists in Israel have uncovered evidence of early cereal cultivation at a 23,000-year-old site in Galilee, effectively doubling the timespan humans are believed to have practiced farming.

A study of DNA from ancient farmers in Europe shows sharp differences from that of modern Europeans — results that are likely to add fuel to the debate over European origins. Researchers led by Wolfgang Haak of Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, argue that their finding supports the belief that modern residents of central Europe descended from Stone Age hunter-gatherers who were present 40,000 years ago, and not the early farmers who arrived thousands of years later. But other anthropologists questioned that conclusion, arguing that the available information isn't sufficient to support it. Haak's team used DNA from 24...

Archaeologists in Denmark have uncovered an incredibly rare find: a stone age axe held within its wooden handle. The 5,500-year-old Neolithic axe was found during archaeological surveys ahead of a multi-billion euro tunnel project. The axe seems to have been jammed into what was once the seabed, perhaps as part of a ritual offering. The lack of oxygen in the clay ground helped preserve the wooden handle.

The modern European gene pool was formed when three ancient populations mixed with one another within the last 7,000 years, Nature journal reports. Blue-eyed, swarthy hunters mingled with brown-eyed, pale skinned farmers as the latter swept into Europe from the Near East. But another, mysterious population with Siberian affinities also contributed to the genetic landscape of the continent. The findings are based analysis of the genomes of nine ancient Europeans.