Free Republic

Archaeologists have found what they think is evidence of low-chromium crucible steel in the 11th century in what is now Chahak in Iran, a long time and a long way away from the European Industrial Revolution. The metal would have been used to manufacture armour and weapons, including swords and daggers. "This research not only delivers the earliest known evidence for the production of chromium steel dating back as early as the 11th century CE, but also provides a chemical tracer that could aid the identification of crucible steel artefacts in museums or archaeological collections back to their origin in...

Whilst on a walk close to Dingwall, I came across a site that struck me as being slightly mysterious, atmospheric and with an air of neglect about it. I was immediately fascinated, and started to try and find out more about it. I established that it was an early religious site, privately owned, and asked the landowner if I could have permission to survey it. This granted, and because of the difficult access, I began to form a plan of just how to carry this out. A specific parking place for one car was established and the survey began.

President Donald Trump’s national security adviser warned the Syrian government against using chemical weapons in the impending battle for Idlib Province, the last remaining rebel stronghold populated by more than 2 million people. If chemical weapons are used, National Security Adviser John Bolton promised the U.S. would deliver a counterattack ...

When Ariela Algaze signed up for a spring 2018 course on museums, she didn't expect to get wrapped up in the mystery of an ancient Egyptian mummy case that Jane Stanford herself purchased more than 100 years ago... Algaze's research led her to discover information that was not known by university scholars - including inscriptions on the coffin and the name of the mummified woman inside it... Algaze learned that the artifact contained writing after sifting through hundreds of its fragments, which have been stored in three boxes, unstudied for decades. The mummy case, which Jane Stanford purchased in 1901,...

Did climate change already kill all the aliens we've been searching for? According to astrophysicist Adam Frank, it's certainly a possibility — and whether humans are doomed to the same fate may already be out of our hands. Frank, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester in New York, is the lead author of a new paper published May 1 in the journal Astrobiology that aims to take what Frank calls a "10,000-light-year" view of anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change. Using mathematical models based on the disappearance of a real-life lost civilization here on Earth (the former...

By comparing genomic signatures from 71 mitochondrial and seven nuclear genomes of ancient North American and Siberian dogs spanning a period of 9,000 years, the research team was able to gain a clearer picture of the history of the first canine inhabitants of the Americas. The oldest dog remains in the Americas date to about 9,000 years ago... These dogs persisted for thousands of years in the Americas, but almost completely vanished after European contact, the researchers found... The team also discovered that the genomic signature of a transmissible cancer that afflicts dogs appears to be one of the last...

Freeper SunkenCiv used to regularly post fascinating and learned articles on archeologicy and history topics. But no posts from SunkenCiv that I can remember for many months. Does anyone here know what happened?

‎SunkenCiv hasn't posted anything since 7‎/‎11‎/‎2016‎ ‎9‎:‎37‎:‎18‎ ‎AM. Anyone know anything?

Ahram Online spoke with Minister of Antiquities Mamdouh Eldamaty regarding an upcoming radar scan of Tutankhamun’s tomb to determine if Queen Nefertiti is buried in a hidden chamber. The theory that Nefertiti may be buried in Tutankhamun’s tomb was introduced by Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves. Ahram Online (AO): What is your opinion about Reeves' theory, and could it be true? Minister: It is a respectable scientific theory that could prove right or wrong, and when examining the west and north walls of Tutankhamun’s burial chamber, I realised that all the evidence that Reeves mentioned regarding the existence of hidden chambers is...

The incredible discovery was made in South Africa, around 150 km west of port Maputo. There, we find the remains of a huge metropolis that measures, according to tests, around 1500 square kilometers. This ancient city is, according to researchers, part of an even larger community with about 10,000 square kilometers and is believed to have been constructed 160,000 to 200,000 years before Christ. The region is somewhat remote and the "circles" have often been encountered by local farmers who assumed they were made by some indigenous people in the past. But, oddly, no one ever bothered to inquire about...

LONDON — The United States pressed Argentina to end its investigation of Iranian complicity in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in which nearly 100 people were killed. Western diplomatic sources said the administration of President Barack Obama urged Argentina on several occasions to either stop or limit the investigation into the bombing of the Argentine-Israeli Mutual Association in Buenos Aires. The sources said the U.S. appeals marked one of the demands by Iran for a reconciliation with Washington. “Argentina had hard evidence against at least one Iranian leader, which prevented him from traveling abroad,” a source said.

“You cannot impose your will, you can’t impose your values, you can’t impose your standards, your institutions on other societies and other countries. It has never worked; it never will work, as noble as you believe [the effort] is,” he is quoted as saying. This conclusion is partially based on his experience as an  infantry soldier in the Vietnam War, as he explains: “The violence, the horrors, the suffering that I saw [in Vietnam] conditioned me … I saw the suffering of our own troops; I saw the suffering of the Vietnamese people; I saw terrible things, which war always...

The search engine gives unpredictable results, but we also have "Latest Topics" which list from newest to oldest and has "Next page" at the bottom of each page; there are keywords and topics; and as a last resort there is Google and Bing.

SunkenCiv always has the most beautiful photos of distant galaxies and comets and stuff. The other night, he posted this photo of a planet that was just stunning. I thought that maybe I should go outside and look at all the stars I was missing. I walked out the back door and started across the back yard looking up to see what was in the sky. This is kind of dangerous as I have four dogs and you should watch where you step in the back yard because if you don't you might step in dog crap and drag it...

Seven centuries after their demise, the skeletons of 12 plague victims have been unearthed in the City of London, a find which archaeologists believe to be just the tip of a long-lost Black Death mass burial ground. Arranged in careful rows, the bodies were discovered 2.5 metres below the ground in Charterhouse Square in works for a Crossrail tunnel shaft beside the future ticketing hall for Farringdon station. Tests are needed to confirm the skeletons' provenance, but the discovery should shed more light on life and death in 14th-century Britain and help scientists to understand how the plague mutated.

OTTAWA – Ancient, mummified camel bones dug from the tundra confirm that the animals now synonymous with the arid sands of Arabia actually developed in subfreezing forests in what is now Canada's High Arctic, a scientist said Tuesday. About 3.5 million years ago, Strathcona Fiord on Ellesmere Island's west-central coast would have looked more like a northern forest than an Arctic landscape, said paleobotanist Natalia Rybczynski of the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa.

This site is 12,000 years old, the most advanced strutures ever found. Several video's on the link

“Gold Finger - A New Take On Operation Grand Slam With A Tungsten Twist” I’ve already reported on irregular physical gold settlements which occurred in London, England back in the first week of October, 2009. Specifically, these settlements involved the intermediation of at least one Central Bank [The Bank of England] to resolve allocated settlements on behalf of J.P. Morgan and Deutsche Bank – who DID NOT have the gold bullion that they had sold short and were contracted to deliver. At the same time I reported on two other unusual occurrences: 1] - irregularities in the publication of the...

I'd been here a couple of months, and had begun to worry about handling all the threads. Sooooo, today I grabbed all of the pages by source, grabbed the tables of links to posts to and from me, and sorted them (the easy way, well, as easy as it gets) alpha instead of chrono. Please, don't tell me that there's a way to do that automatically, or my brain will hurt.