http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1282779/Has-real-Atlantis-finally–modern-holiday-paradise.html

From: vancouversun.com 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1263965/Family

AOL News

2010-03-18

It’s being dubbed “Tasmania’s Valley of the Kings.” At the site for a proposed freeway overpass, archaeologists have uncovered what they say are the earliest southernmost artifacts of human life.

Still in the initial stages of excavation, a team of archaeologists unearthed thousands of artifacts near the town of Brighton on Australia’s island of Tasmania, including stone tools that belonged to ancient Aboriginal tribes.

The researchers, using a process called optically stimulated luminescence, were stunned by preliminary estimates that the oldest artifacts may date back 40,000 years, more than twice as old as expected.

The chief archaeologist at the dig, Robert Paton, told The Mercury newspaper that the age of the artifacts makes them “the oldest most southern site on the planet, giving us a glimpse into an unknown part of world history and the spread of Homo sapiens across the Earth.”

The discovery of what researchers are calling a “tribal meeting ground” has put a halt to the construction of a multimillion-dollar roadway that was to span the Derwent River in Tasmania’s Jordan River Basin. Revised plans for the road include an elevated span so that the road will run directly over the archaeological site.

In recent months, dozens of people have been arrested for protesting the construction in order to protect the expanding dig.

“A bridge over the top of this important site is only going to disturb it,” Aboriginal heritage officer Aaron Everett told The Mercury. “It takes away from the outlook of the whole site and as far as we are concerned the only option is to divert the road.”

“The bottom line is that nothing must go within a bull’s roar of the site,” the Tasmanian Aboriginal Center’s Michael Mansell told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

“In terms of culture and history, this region now represents Tasmania’s Valley of the Kings,” Mansell said, referring to the Egyptian World Heritage Site that dates to the 16th century B.C., or roughly 24,000 years younger than the artifacts found near Brighton.

Modern human beings are believed to have descended from a common ancestor that left the continent of Africa roughly 50,000 to 100,000 years ago.

“It’s important to keep in mind that the findings in Tasmania are preliminary,” Steven Kuhn, an anthropology professor at the University of Arizona, told AOL News. “If they do turn out to be 40,000 years old, that’s very old for Tasmania.”

Human artifacts dating 40,000 to 50,000 years have been found in Australia, north of Tasmania. By comparison, modern humans are believed to have reached North America 14,000 to 15,000 years ago.

http://www.henrymakow.com/forbidden_archeology.html

By Agence France-Presse | CosmosMagazine.com 

National Geographic

2010-02-27

A female “vampire” unearthed in a mass grave near Venice, Italy, may have been accused of wearing another evil hat: a witch’s.

The 16th-century woman was discovered among medieval plague victims in 2006. Her jaw had been forced open by a brick—an exorcism technique used on suspected vampires in Europe at the time.

The discovery marked the first time archaeological remains had been interpreted as those of an alleged vampire, project leader Matteo Borrini, a forensic archaeologist at the University of Florence in Italy, said when the skull was first revealed in March 2009.

New investigations have now shed light on who this “vampire” was, why people may have suspected her of dabbling in the dark arts, and even what she looked like.

“There is a piece of history to rewrite, to see this individual again after 500 years and also try to understand why the myth of vampire started,” Borrini says in a new National Geographic Channel documentary. (The National Geographic Channel is part-owned by the National Geographic Society, which owns National Geographic News.)

Vampire Myth Born of “Blood”

Borrini found the vampire skull while digging up mass graves on the Venetian island of Lazzaretto Nuovo. (See pictures of plague victims’ mass graves on another island near Venice.)

Belief in vampires was rampant in the Middle Ages, mostly because the process of decomposition was not well understood, Borrini says.

For instance, as the human stomach decays, it releases a dark “purge fluid.” This bloodlike liquid can flow freely from a corpse’s nose and mouth.

Since tombs and mass burials were often reopened during plagues to add new bodies, Italian gravediggers saw these decomposing remains and may have confused purge fluid with traces of vampire victims’ blood.

In addition, the fluid sometimes moistened the burial shroud near the corpse’s mouth so that the cloth sagged into the jaw. This could create tears in the cloth that made it seem as if the corpse had been chewing on its shroud.

Vampires were thought by some to be the causes of plagues, and the superstition took root that shroud-chewing was the “magical way” that vampires infected people, Borrini said.

Inserting objects—such as bricks and stones—into the mouths of alleged vampires was thought to halt the spread of disease.

(Related: “Vampire Moth Discovered—Evolution at Work.”)

Surprisingly Elderly “Vampire”

To flesh out more details about the Venice vampire, Borrini assembled a team of scientists.

Paleonutritionists pulverized some of the woman’s remains—discovered along with the skull—to look for certain elements in food that settle in the bones and endure after death.

The team found that the woman had eaten mostly vegetables and grains, suggesting a lower-class diet.

DNA analysis revealed that the woman was European, and a forensic odontologist ascertained the woman’s age by examining the skull’s long canine teeth with an advanced digital x-ray device.

The results showed that the woman was between 61 and 71 years old when she died. Borrini was “quite shocked” by this finding—most women didn’t reach such advanced ages in the 16th century, he says in the documentary.

In medieval Europe, when fear of witches was widespread, many people believed the devil gave witches magical powers, including the ability to cheat death.

That means such a relatively old woman—suspected after death of being a vampire—may have been accused in life of being a witch, the researchers say.

Witches Were Child-Eaters?

But old age alone probably wouldn’t spur an accusation of witchcraft, said Jason Coy, an expert in European witchcraft and superstition at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, who was not part of the new study.

Though average life expectancy in medieval Europe was low, around 40, that doesn’t mean most people died at 40, he said via email. It means infant mortality was high, bringing down the average.

So the Venice vampire was old, but not “freakishly so,” Coy said.

Rather, Europe’s misogynistic society specifically linked old women with witchcraft, because people “assumed that old women—especially widows—were poor, lonely, weak, and unhappy, and thus could be lured by the devil’s promises of wealth, sex, and power into forming a pact with him,” Coy said.

At the height of the European witch-hunts, between A.D. 1550 and 1650, more than 100,000 people were tried as witches and 60,000 were executed—the vast majority of them old women.

Germany was the witch-hunt heartland, Coy said. Italy was relatively “mild” in its treatment of witches, although the country was also rife with superstitions and protective charms. (Related: “Halloween Shines Light on Witchcraft Today.”)

In at least one historical reference, witches were said to eat children—possibly the origin of the Hansel and Gretel story, he added.

“So you could say that there is a tenuous link between flesh-eating zombies like your ‘Venetian vampire’ and witches: They’re both feared for breaking the ultimate taboo—eating human flesh.”

“Vampire of Venice” an Ordinary Woman

For the last step in forensic archaeologist Borrini’s work, he called on 3-D imaging experts to produce a digital model of the skull.

He then put markers where muscle attachments would have existed to reconstruct and rebuild the Venice vampire’s face. The result was the face of an “ordinary woman,” which perhaps brings the accused some “historical justice” centuries after her death, he said.

“It’s very strange to [leave] her now,” he lamented, “because after this year it’s sort of a friendship that’s created between me and her.”

By Heather Pringle | NationalGeographic.com 

NPR

2010-02-23

An Israeli archaeologist said Monday that ancient fortifications recently excavated in Jerusalem date back 3,000 years to the time of King Solomon and support the biblical narrative about the era.

If the age of the wall is correct, the finding would be an indication that Jerusalem was home to a strong central government that had the resources and manpower needed to build massive fortifications in the 10th century B.C.

That’s a key point of dispute among scholars, because it would match the Bible’s account that the Hebrew kings David and Solomon ruled from Jerusalem around that time.

While some Holy Land archaeologists support that version of history — including the archaeologist behind the dig, Eilat Mazar — others posit that David’s monarchy was largely mythical and that there was no strong government to speak of in that era.

Speaking to reporters at the site Monday, Mazar, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, called her find “the most significant construction we have from First Temple days in Israel.”

“It means that at that time, the 10th century, in Jerusalem there was a regime capable of carrying out such construction,” she said.

Based on what she believes to be the age of the fortifications and their location, she suggested it was built by Solomon, David’s son, and mentioned in the Book of Kings.

The fortifications, including a monumental gatehouse and a 77-yard (70-meter) long section of an ancient wall, are located just outside the present-day walls of Jerusalem’s Old City, next to the holy compound known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary. According to the Old Testament, it was Solomon who built the first Jewish Temple on the site.

That temple was destroyed by Babylonians, rebuilt, renovated by King Herod 2,000 years ago and then destroyed again by Roman legions in 70 A.D. The compound now houses two important Islamic buildings, the golden-capped Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque.

Archaeologists have excavated the fortifications in the past, first in the 1860s and most recently in the 1980s. But Mazar claimed her dig was the first complete excavation and the first to turn up strong evidence for the wall’s age: a large number of pottery shards, which archaeologists often use to figure out the age of findings.

Aren Maeir, an archaeology professor at Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv, said he has yet to see evidence that the fortifications are as old as Mazar claims. There are remains from the 10th century in Jerusalem, he said, but proof of a strong, centralized kingdom at that time remains “tenuous.”

While some see the biblical account of the kingdom of David and Solomon as accurate and others reject it entirely, Maeir said the truth was likely somewhere in the middle.

“There’s a kernel of historicity in the story of the kingdom of David,” he said.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1960661,00.html