Friday, September 28, 2012

Ancient cave art could be Neanderthal's



Could these be stencils of Neanderthal hands? (Source: Pedro Saura)

Anna Salleh
ABC


 Researchers have found cave paintings in Spain that are up to 40,000 years old, suggesting they might have been created by Neanderthals.

Dr Alistair Pike, of the University of Bristol, and colleagues, publish their research in the journal Science.

The practice of art is considered an important stage in the development of human cognition, along with the use of symbols, and possibly language.

But determining the age of cave art has often been difficult, especially using radiocarbon dating.
Pike and colleagues instead used a technique called uranium-thorium dating to find out the minimum age of calcite deposits overlying art in 11 different caves in northern Spain.

Among the 50 paintings studied, the researchers found a 40,800-year-old disc, a 37,000-year-old hand stencil and a 35,600-year-old club-shaped symbol.

As well as giving insight into how painting styles changed over time, the findings suggest cave painting in Europe started 5000 to 10,000 years earlier than previously thought.

This is at the same time that modern humans were arriving in Europe and Neanderthals were dying out.

Pike says either modern humans arrived already painting or they developed the skill once they arrived - as part of cultural innovation triggered by competition with Neanderthals.

"Alternatively, cave painting started before the arrival of modern humans, and was done by Neanderthals," says Pike.

"That would be a fantastic find as it would mean the hand stencils on the walls of the caves are outlines of Neanderthals' hands, but we will need to date more examples to see if this is the case."

The artwork was found in an area that includes the UNESCO World Heritage sites of Altamira, El Castillo and Tito Bustillo.

"Useful contribution"

Australian archaeologist Dr Iain Davidson who has also dated cave art in Spain welcomes the new research.

"It's a really useful contribution," says Davidson, an emeritus professor at the University of New England.

He points to two other findings since this paper was accepted for publication that push back the date for art in caves in Europe.

Earlier this year publications reported the engraving of female genitalia dated at around 37,000 years and the discovery of flutes made from bone and ivory dated at around 40,000 years.

"We now have dates of around 40,000 in three parts of Europe for things that would be called 'art' in general," says Davidson.

He says the lack of good skeletal remains from around that time in Europe mean it is difficult to know who is actually responsible for the artwork found there.

But, Davidson says the latest evidence calls for a rethink of the traditional view that Neanderthals could not possibly have had the cognitive abilities of modern humans - a view that he himself has held for a long time.

"I think I was wrong," says Davidson.

"There does seem to be tenuous evidence that Neanderthals were experimenting with pigment. There is slightly plausible evidence that they were creating objects out of bone. All of this suggests they had something like the abilities that modern humans have."

Davidson says the question of whether Neanderthals had similar cognitive abilities raises the difficult question of how that came about.

Genetic evidence suggests the ancestors of modern humans and Neanderthals diverged 400,000 years ago and didn't interbreed, he says.

So, how would Neanderthals and modern humans both have developed the same cognitive abilities?

Either they evolved independently the same abilities under different selective pressures, says Davidson, or they did in fact interbred with each other to transfer genetically-determined traits.

Mars rover finds evidence of stream



NASA's Mars rover, Curiosity, has discovered gravel once carried by the waters of an ancient stream that "ran vigorously" through the area.

Scientists had previously found other evidence of the one-time presence of water on the Red Planet, but the US space agency says this is the first time stream-bed gravels have been discovered.

Project scientist John Grotzinger says the rocky outcrop, called Hottah, "looks like someone jack-hammered up a slab of city sidewalk, but it's really a tilted block of an ancient stream bed".
Curiosity also investigated a second outcrop, called "Link".

The pictures transmitted by Curiosity show the pebbles have been cemented into layers of conglomerate rock at a site between the north rim of the Gale Crater and the base of Mount Sharp - where Curiosity is heading.

Curiosity science co-investigator Rebecca Williams says the sizes and the shapes of the rocks give an idea of the speed and the depth of the stream.

"The shapes tell you they were transported, and the sizes tell you they couldn't be transported by wind," she said.

"They were transported by water flow."

The scientists estimate the water was moving briskly at one metre per second and ran somewhere between ankle and hip deep.

The high number of channels between the rim and the newly discovered rock bed suggests the stream was not a one-time occurrence but that many streams flowed or repeated over a long time.

Curiosity is on a two-year mission to investigate whether it is possible to live on Mars and to learn whether conditions there might have been able to support life in the past.

Thursday, September 27, 2012

Visualizing the 2012 Sea Ice Minimum


acquired September 13, 2012



acquired September 14, 1984




In August and September 2012, sea ice covered less of the Arctic Ocean than at any other time since at least 1979, when the first reliable satellite measurements began. The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) and NASA announced in mid-September that the extent of Arctic sea ice had dropped to 3.41 million square kilometers (1.32 million square miles)—well below the previous record of 4.17 million square kilometers (1.61 million square miles) set in 2007.


The maps above compare the Arctic ice minimum extents from 2012 (top) and 1984 (bottom). According to NSIDC, the average minimum extent for 1979–2000 was 6.70 million square kilometers (2.59 million square miles). The 1984 minimum was roughly that amount, so a comparison between 2012 and 1984 gives an idea of how much conditions this year strayed from the long-term average. The minimum ice extent in 2012 was about half the average. (Turn on the image-comparison tool to see the difference.)


Arctic sea ice grows through the winter each year and melts through the summer, typically reaching its minimum extent sometime in September. The extent can vary considerably from year to year, sometimes above the long-term average and sometimes below. Extent is defined as the total area in which the ice concentration is at least 15 percent.


The 2012 map was compiled from observations by the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR-2) sensor on the Global Change Observation Mission 1st–Water (“Shizuku”) satellite, which is operated by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). As of September, AMSR-2 data were still preliminary, as the mission was launched in May 2012 and instruments are still being fully calibrated and validated. But the data agreed with observations from the Special Sensor Microwave Imager/Sounder (SSMIS) from the U.S. Defense Meteorological Satellite Program.


The 1984 image was made from observations by the Scanning Multichannel Microwave Radiometer (SMMR) on the Nimbus-7 satellite. Sea ice in the 1984 image has a blockier appearance because that sensor had coarser resolution. The white circle over the pole in each image is a data gap resulting from satellites flying close to—but not directly over—the poles. The wider orbital coverage by AMSR-2 (and other satellite instruments) has shrunk the size of this gap. The area around the North Pole is ice-covered—an assumption confirmed by many airborne and ice-surface expeditions—but researchers use an average of the concentration just outside the gap to estimate the extent within.
The summer of 2012 witnessed periods of extremely rapid sea ice melt. “In June, sea ice lost about 170,000 to 175,000 square kilometers per day, but only for a few days,” NSIDC scientist Walt Meier explained. “Sea ice melt usually slows down in August to about 60,000 to 70,000 square kilometers a day. But this year, we saw melt rates upwards of 100,000 to 150,000 square kilometers a day, and those high melt rates persisted through the first half of the month.”


Once sea ice begins to melt, it becomes a self-reinforcing process. Because there is less ice to reflect sunlight back into space, more energy is absorbed by the darker ocean water. As sea ice extents drop, less ice survives from year to year. Ice that has formed since the last melt season—“known as first-year ice”—is thinner and more prone to melting than thicker multi-year ice. In the past decade, first-year ice has come to dominate the Arctic Ocean.


According to Comiso, the rapid loss of sea ice through June 2012 was likely associated with the loss of this first-year ice, which was unusually extensive in March 2012. The rapid decline in August 2012, he noted, was caused in part by a strong storm that stirred up the region, breaking ice apart and moving more of it to lower latitudes.


“Climate models have predicted a retreat of the Arctic sea ice; but the actual retreat has proven to be much more rapid than the predictions,” said Claire Parkinson, a climate researcher at NASA Goddard. “There continues to be considerable inter-annual variability in the sea ice cover, but the long-term retreat is quite apparent.”


AMSR-2 is a follow-on to the successful AMSR-E instrument, a JAXA instrument that flew on NASA’s Aqua satellite. AMSR-2 detects microwave radiation in order to measure sea surface temperatures and wind speeds, sea ice concentrations, snow depth, soil moisture, water vapor, cloud liquid water, and precipitation. The AMSR-2 image is provided as a visual assessment of the state of sea ice through a special data access agreement with JAXA and with the principal investigator for sea ice, Josefino Comiso of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
  1. References

  2. NASA Earth Observatory (2009, April 20) Sea Ice.
  3. NASA Earth Observatory (n.d.) World of Change: Arctic Sea Ice.
  4. NSIDC (2012, September 19) Arctic sea ice reaches lowest extent for the year and the satellite record. Accessed September 24, 2012.
  5. NSIDC (2012, September 19) Arctic Sea Ice News and Analysis: Arctic sea ice extent settles at record seasonal minimum. Accessed September 24, 2012.
  6. NSIDC (2012, May 21) State of the Cryosphere: Sea Ice. Accessed September 24, 2012.
  7. WBUR Radio (2012, May 21) A New Low for Arctic Ice. Accessed September 26, 2012.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Jesse Allen, using data from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 AMSR-2 sensor on the Global Change Observation Mission 1st-Water (GCOM-W1) satellite. Caption by Michon Scott and Mike Carlowicz.
Instrument: 
GCOM-W1 - AMSR-2

Threshold to the Lost Realm





The precision cut and polished red granite facing stones of the pyramid at Abu Guhrob is a trademark of ‘Atlantean’ construction.



Beautifully round holes in the ‘basins’. What are they for? How were they drilled?

Videographer Ted St. Rain has an astounding grasp of the ancient mysteries. He’s been to a tour guide’s book full of sacred sites with a who’s who of alternative researchers. I’m not sure when the first domino began to fall in Ted’s mind. However, after only a short time at Abu Ghurob with me Ted proclaimed that he had the answer to the question of the purpose of this temple site.

“The Lost Realms by Zecharia Sitchin will help explain what we are seeing here,” he said.

In his Earth Chronicles series of books Sitchin claims that a race of extraterrestrials called Anunnaki came to earth over 450,000 years ago in search of gold. In addition to surface mining the Anunnaki used sophisticated water mining techniques to ‘filter’ or process the gold from the waters of earth.

Abu Ghurob, it seems, matches the description of their processing plants.

The Lost Realms is about the massive pyramids of South American and MesoAmerican cultures and their interactions with gods who set up pyramid/workshops there.

Sitchin cites the Mexican pyramids of Teotihuacán to support his theory. There are two pyramids—the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon—with the Avenue of the Dead running between them. Some scholars believe the Teotihuacán complex was begun 6,000 years ago and was known as the Place of the Gods.

The Pyramid of the Moon is an earthen mound. Some 2,000 feet to the south the path of the Avenue of the Dead reaches the Pyramid of the Sun. These pyramids are virtually identical to the Giza pyramids. Sitchin believes that there is no doubt that the designer of this complex had detailed understanding of the Giza pyramids. The most remarkable correspondence noted by Sitchin is the existence of a lower passageway running underneath the Pyramid of the Sun.

As Sitchin records, in 1971 a complex underground chamber system was discovered directly underneath the Pyramid of the Sun. A tunnel, seven feet high and extending for almost 200 feet, was also discovered. The floor of this tunnel was divided into segments and drainage pipes (possibly connecting to an underground water source?) were found. The tunnel led to a strange hollowed- out area shaped like a cloverleaf and supported by adobe columns and basalt slabs.

The enigma posed by this mysterious subterranean facility was amplified for Sitchin when he observed a path of six segments running along the Avenue of the Dead. These segments were formed by the erection of a series of double walls perpendicular to the course of the avenue. These six compartments are fitted with sluices at their floor level. Sitchin proposes that the whole complex served to channel water that flowed down the avenue. This complex, says Sitchin, was an enormous waterworks, employing water for a technological purpose.

This ceremonial center, notes Sitchin, has artificial water channels running through that diverted water from the nearby San Juan River. The water is channeled into the Ciudadela, a quadrangle that contains at its eastern side a third pyramid, called the Quetzalcoatl Pyramid.

As Ted continued his brainstorm at Abu Ghurob, he noted a key discovery at Teotihuacán. Underneath the Pyramid of the Sun archaeologists discovered mica, a dielectric mineral composed of delicate crystal that is a semiconductor. Its presence has perplexed ancient mystery writers Erich von Däniken and Graham Hancock.

The word “mica” is thought to be derived from the Latin word micare, meaning to shine, in reference to the brilliant appearance of this mineral (especially when in small scales). Mica has a high dielectric strength and excellent chemical stability, making it a favored material for manufacturing capicitors for radio frequency applications. It has also been used as an insulator in high voltage electrical equipment. Sheet mica is used as an insulating material and as a resonant diaphragm in certain acoustical devices.

The Anunnaki, Sitchin claims, utilized some form of spacecraft. In the Vedic literature of India, there are many descriptions of ancient flying machines that are generally called Vimanas and may be equated with the craft of the Anunnaki. Some call them ancient Atlantean craft. Interestingly, these craft utilized mica in a profound way.

The Vymanika Shastra (sometimes given other spellings) is a text of disputed age which deals heavily with the operational features of these flying vehicles. According to ‘Aakaasha-tantra’, by mixing black mica solution with neem and bhoonaaga decoctions and smearing the solution on the outer body of the vimana made of mica plates and exposing to solar rays, the plane will look like the sky and becomes ‘cloaked’.

Sitchin was perplexed by the presence of this mineral beneath the pyramid at Teotihuacán. Then he remembered the water flowing from the San Juan River and how it was artificially channeled to this site. What he proposed is that the river was channeled along the Avenue of the Gods and underneath the pyramid. Through a chemical reaction caused by the mica (or, I wonder, could it have been a harmonic process?) gold was pulled from the river water.

Drainage holes are spread throughout Teotihuacán. Sitchin theorizes these were used to sluice the gold into chambers where the Anunnaki could collect it.

“Just like you see here,” said Ted, pointing to one of the massive square alabaster basins or sluices at Abu Ghurob. Those basins, it turns out, were decanters.

“I was thinking about Sitchin’s theory,” said Ted, “because here’s the pyramid here. Now, keep in mind that 10,000 years ago this area was a lush jungle with water everywhere.”

Indeed, the Abu Ghurob site was beginning to look a lot like the Teotihuacán lay out. The only thing missing was the mica.

It didn’t take very long before we found huge sheets of mica in front of the pyramid. The pieces were falling into place.

As Ted explained, “the theory is that, like Teotihuacán, Abu Ghurob was a gold refining facility. What they would do,” Ted proposed, “is bring gold laden water in from the Nile. It would flow over the mica sheets (which may have covered this entire site). Through the piezoelectric effect produced by the mica electricity was produced. The water would be channeled into the basins and would be spun around inside and flow up and out through the round holes in the sides. The gold would filter down and remain in the basins to be scooped out at the end of the day.”

Is Abu Ghurob a ‘stargate/power plant of the Anunnaki’? Is it connected to Teotihuacán? No one can, as yet, say for sure. One thing is certain, this place of the gods is not only one of the greatest treasures of ancient Khemet, but of our whole world. It deserves further investigation.

Saturday, September 22, 2012

Mappa Mundi from Evesham Abbey, ca. 1390-1415


Notice several features in the map above which are different from modern maps:

As was typical for mappae mundi, this map is oriented to the East instead of the North
Paradise was usually located at the far corner of the world, however, (various maps represented Paradise differently but) this map presents “Earthly Paradise” in an inset box that distinguishes it somewhat from the rest of the map.  The map maker wanted to convey the theological message that Paradise was on earth yet humans no longer had access to it.
Relative distances and shapes of land masses are not accurately represented
Jerusalem is the center of the world
Many major cities and other features are not included.

The Evesham world map, now owned by the College of Arms in London, was almost certainly commissioned for its prior, Nicholas Herford, in about 1390 and was amended some twenty years later. It probably derives from a lost map accompanying a continuation of Ranulph Higden's popular encyclopedia, the Polychronicon (originally composed between about 1320 and 1360), that was also created in Evesham at that time.

Where the large thirteenth-century world maps such as the Hereford and Ebstorf and even the simple map that Higden selected to accompany his Polychronicon, are universalist in nature, the Evesham world map is Anglocentric, reflecting the mentality of England during the Hundred Year's War with France.

Within the traditional geographical and spiritual framework, the preoccupation with the universal, ancient, religious and mythical which had dominated the earlier large world maps has yielded primacy to the illustration of the contemporary kingdom of England and of English patriotism in its territorial, dynastic and commercial aspects.

The Evesham map thus challenges further the traditional but misguided view of the immutability over the centuries of the medieval mappamundi.

Bibliographic note


    Based on a paper read at 14th International Conference on the History of Cartography, Uppsala and Stockholm, 14 to 19 June 1991.
    Also published as: The Evesham World Map: A Late Medieval English View of God and the World. In: Imago Mundi 47 (1995) pp. 13–33.