Category: Historic

Pre-Human Fossils Suggest Mankind Emerged From Europe Rather Than Africa

The common lineage of great apes and humans split several hundred thousand earlier than hitherto assumed, according to an international research team headed by Professor Madelaine Böhme from the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of Tübingen and Professor Nikolai Spassov from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

The researchers investigated two fossils of Graecopithecus freybergi with state-of-the-art methods and came to the conclusion that they belong to pre-humans. Their findings, published today in two papers in the journal PLOS ONE, further indicate that the split of the human lineage occurred in the Eastern Mediterranean and not — as customarily assumed — in Africa.

Present-day chimpanzees are humans’ nearest living relatives. Where the last chimp-human common ancestor lived is a central and highly debated issue in palaeoanthropology. Researchers have assumed up to now that the lineages diverged five to seven million years ago and that the first pre-humans developed in Africa.

According to the 1994 theory of French palaeoanthropologist Yves Coppens, climate change in Eastern Africa could have played a crucial role. The two studies of the research team from Germany, Bulgaria, Greece, Canada, France and Australia now outline a new scenario for the beginning of human history.

Dental roots give new evidence

The team analyzed the two known specimens of the fossil hominid Graecopithecus freybergi: a lower jaw from Greece and an upper premolar from Bulgaria. Using computer tomography, they visualized the internal structures of the fossils and demonstrated that the roots of premolars are widely fused.

“While great apes typically have two or three separate and diverging roots, the roots of Graecopithecus converge and are partially fused — a feature that is characteristic of modern humans, early humans and several pre-humans including Ardipithecus and Australopithecus,” said Böhme.

The lower jaw, nicknamed ‘El Graeco’ by the scientists, has additional dental root features, suggesting that the species Graecopithecus freybergi might belong to the pre-human lineage. “We were surprised by our results, as pre-humans were previously known only from sub-Saharan Africa,” said Jochen Fuss, a Tübingen PhD student who conducted this part of the study.

Furthermore, Graecopithecus is several hundred thousand years older than the oldest potential pre-human from Africa, the six to seven million-year-old Sahelanthropus from Chad. The research team dated the sedimentary sequence of the Graecopithecus fossil sites in Greece and Bulgaria with physical methods and got a nearly synchronous age for both fossils — 7.24 and 7.175 million years before the present. “It is at the beginning of the Messinian, an age that ends with the complete desiccation of the Mediterranean Sea,” Böhme said.

Professor David Begun, a University of Toronto paleoanthropologist and co-author of this study added, “This dating allows us to move the human-chimpanzee split into the Mediterranean area.”

Environmental changes as the driving force for divergence

As with the out-of-East-Africa theory, the evolution of pre-humans may have been driven by dramatic environmental changes. The team led by Böhme demonstrated that the North African Sahara desert originated more than seven million years ago. The team concluded this based on geological analyses of the sediments in which the two fossils were found. Although geographically distant from the Sahara, the red-coloured silts are very fine-grained and could be classified as desert dust. An analysis of uranium, thorium and lead isotopes in individual dust particles yields an age between 0.6 and 3 billion years and infers an origin in Northern Africa.

Moreover, the dusty sediment has a high content of different salts. “These data document for the first time a spreading Sahara 7.2 million years ago, whose desert storms transported red, salty dusts to the north coast of the Mediterranean Sea in its then form,” the Tübingen researchers said. This process is also observable today. However, the researchers’ modelling shows that, with up to 250 grams per square meter and year, the amount of dust in the past considerably exceeds recent dust loadings in Southern Europe more than tenfold, comparable to the situation in the present-day Sahel zone in Africa.

Fire, grass, and water stress

The researchers further showed that, contemporary to the development of the Sahara in North Africa, a savannah biome formed in Europe.

Using a combination of new methodologies, they studied microscopic fragments of charcoal and plant silicate particles, called phytoliths. Many of the phytoliths identified derive from grasses and particularly from those that use the metabolic pathway of C4-photosynthesis, which is common in today’s tropical grasslands and savannahs. The global spread of C4-grasses began eight million years ago on the Indian subcontinent — their presence in Europe was previously unknown.

“The phytolith record provides evidence of severe droughts, and the charcoal analysis indicates recurring vegetation fires,” said Böhme. “In summary, we reconstruct a savannah, which fits with the giraffes, gazelles, antelopes, and rhinoceroses that were found together with Graecopithecus,” Spassov added

“The incipient formation of a desert in North Africa more than seven million years ago and the spread of savannahs in Southern Europe may have played a central role in the splitting of the human and chimpanzee lineages,” said Böhme. She calls this hypothesis the North Side Story, recalling the thesis of Yves Coppens, known as East Side Story.

The findings are described in two studies pubished in PLOS ONE titled “Potential hominin affinities of Graecopithecus from the Late Miocene of Europe” and “Messinian age and savannah environment of the possible hominin Graecopithecus from Europe.”

Teenage woolly mammoth with soft tissues intact found on Yamal peninsula

She is 42,000 years old and has come a long way for her Australian debut. First, she was recovered from the frozen mud in Siberia that was her tomb for so long. Then she was packed into a crate at a tiny museum in Russia and flown to a humidity-controlled cube at the Australian Museum.

Mammoths – Giants of the ice age

The ice age world of woolly mammoths will be brought to life in Mammoths – Giants of the Ice Age, exclusive to the Australian Museum from 17 November 2017.

Baby Lyuba, the world’s most complete and best-preserved woolly mammoth, has arrived in Sydney. She is in remarkable condition, with her skin and internal organs intact. Scientists even found her mother’s milk in her belly.

We will finally be able to see her when she is unveiled as the centerpiece of the museum’s Mammoths – Giants of the Ice Age exhibition.

Lyuba, who died at 35 days, is one of Russia’s national treasures, and the government is reluctant to let her out of its sight too often. This is only the fifth time Shemanovsky Museum has let her out, and it’s her first trip to the southern hemisphere.

The mammoth was first spotted in 2007 by Yuri Khudi, a Siberian reindeer herder, who found her as the frost thawed on a muddy bank of the Yuribey River.

When he brought a team of scientists back to recover her, she was gone; someone else had got there first. The team tracked her to a village deep within Siberia’s frozen wasteland. She was propped up on the door of a shop. The shopkeeper had reportedly bought her for two snowmobiles and a year’s worth of food from Mr. Khudi’s cousin.

“And while she was propped up, a dog came up and chewed off her tail and her ear. If only for that she’d be completely intact,” says Trevor Ahearn​, the Australian Museum’s creative producer.

Lyuba (Lay-oo-bah) means love in Russian. The museum has chosen to surround her with models of huge, ferocious adult mammoths, much as the herd would have surrounded and protected her in life.

It is thought her feet had become stuck in a muddy hole on the side of a Siberian riverbank. Before her mother could yank her out, Lyuba slipped below the surface, where the mud choked her mouth and trunk.

But the mud that killed her also contained sediments and bacteria that created an acid barrier around her body, in effect pickling her. When the river froze over, she was left perfectly preserved.

Had she lived a full mammoth life – 60 years – Lyuba would have grown to more than three meters in height and about five tonnes. To sustain that bodyweight she would have consumed up to 180 kilograms of grass and 80 liters of water a day.

Mammoths lived in the late Paleolithic period, which stretched from about 200,000 BC, the time Homo sapiens first emerged in Africa, to 10,000 BC. Mammoths were uniquely adapted for the conditions, with small ears and thick, woolly fur. They ate grass and bark and roamed across Europe, North America, and Siberia.

That makes Lyuba the first of her kind to visit our shores, and it took the Australian Museum a fair bit of what director Kim McKay terms “cultural diplomacy” to get her over here. Negotiations involved the Shemanovsky Museum and the Russian government.

Mr. Ahearn says: “One of the first things we had to do before we brought Lyuba over here was absolutely guarantee our Russian colleagues that there was no possibility of her getting seized because there is some controversy over who owns her.

“She’s a little controversial in Russia, with her association with an oil company that helped bring her into the museum. I think it’s paranoia. Russia is feeling a little bit of pressure, so I don’t know if it’s founded. There are lots of myths; it’s all very hazy.”

The prospect of mammoth cloning

Scientists have two competing theories on why mammoths became extinct about 10,000 years ago. Both have important things to tell us about the modern environment – and perhaps contain a message about why we shouldn’t be trying to bring mammoths back.

The first theory is climate change. The ending of the ice age at about 10,000 BC may have dramatically reduced the area in which these cold-environment animals could survive.

The second theory is over-hunting. Mammoths, with their tonnes of fat, would have represented an incredibly valuable food source for early humans, who developed sharp spears to hunt them. Scientists think it is possible the mammoth is the first species humanity managed to push into extinction.

Mammoth cloning has always excited the popular imagination, and the exhibition dedicates a section to the possibilities.

So far, we have sequenced about 70 percent of mammoth DNA, so the raw material is not there yet. But even if we could, we shouldn’t, says David Alquezar​, manager of the Australian Museum’s genetics lab.

“The money to do that could be better invested in species that are endangered right now, rather than focusing our efforts on a species that has been extinct for 10,000 years,” says Dr. Alquezar.

400 Million Year Old Hammer discovered In Texas The London

This curious artefact was found in London, Texas, USA in 1934. The hammer was embedded in the rock and has been many theories about its origin, and most importantly its incredible age.

So how did the hammer end up being stuck in the rock? Well, to finish the hammer inside the rock it had to be built before the rock was formed and which was several million years ago.

After their discovery and all the questions raised by the hammer, the researchers decided to abandon the unbelievable discovery at the Somervell Museum in Texas.

The internal handle underwent the process of carbonization based on studies by the Metallurgical Institute of Columbia and the hammerhead was built with iron purity only achievable with modern-day technology.

According to analysis, the head of the hammer consists of 97 pure iron, 2 per cent chlorine and 1 per cent sulfur. Surprisingly researchers also found that the iron had undergone a process of purification and hardening, typical of the metallurgy of the twentieth century.

According to analysis, the rock encasing of the hammer was dated to the Ordovician era, more than 400 million years ago.

The portion of stone surrounding the hammerhead also presented abnormalities, seeming to have merged with some type of sheath covering the hammer. According to geologists, the slow process of petrification dates back hundreds of millions of years.

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This has led several ufologists and ancient astronaut theorists to a quick deduction of the context of the incredible discovery leading them to assume not only that there was a human civilization before the historical process of petrification in Texas, but that this ancient civilization already possessed the necessary technology for the fabrication of a hammer with modern features.

Evidence suggesting that the iron from the hammer might have originated from a meteorite is not a possibility according to researchers. The chemical analysis of the artefact also detected certain amounts of potassium, silicon, chlorine, calcium and sulfur.

Thus, this composition contradicts the hypothesis postulated that the hammerhead belonged to the fragment of a meteorite since the bodies of our solar system do not have that type of chemical composition.

Researchers also believe, that since the head of the hammer was found embedded into the rock, it suggests that the embedding process was performed under different atmospheric conditions to the current, different atmospheric pressure, more similar to those in the remote past.

Against the remote possibility that a meteorite with extremely rare and bizarre chemical composition and exceptional morphology, got caught, in prehistoric times, onto a piece of wood just as the head of the discovered hammer imprisons its handle, some researchers and ancient astronaut theorists point toward the fact that our planet was inhabited in ancient times, by civilizations with advanced technical and technological capacity, of which today we only have legends and items like this one who were trapped in the rock.

Unfortunately, some scientists do not agree with the theory that an ancient civilization created the hammer, and claim that it was only a metallurgical technique that had been eventually abandoned.

This extraordinary artefact belongs to the list of many other mysterious objects that have been discovered across the globe, and just like the Russian “microchip” or the 300 million-year-old screw, this item has caused debate among researchers and historians who are divided into groups, supporting and denying the possibility that the human race is much older than previously thought.

Whether this artefact is indeed a hammer dating back hundreds of millions of years, is something that will fuel debate among supporters of the ancient astronaut theory and conventional archaeologists, who both have provided arguments explaining the origin and age of the hammer.

This is the largest fossilized human turd ever found

Sometimes, scientists really are talking sh*t! The proof is in this fossilized excrement, which dates back to the 9th century. It was discovered about 40 years ago, and is famous for being the most expensive poo in the world!

The fossil is known as the Lloyds Bank Coloprite, the word “Coprolite” simply meaning fossilized dung. The rest of its name refers to the fact that it was found in 1972 by construction workers during the building of a Lloyds TSB branch in York, in the northwest of England.

Put simply, this is a fossilized human turd. Not only that but the largest and – bizarrely – most valuable on record.

It dates back to approximately the 9th century and the person responsible is believed to be a Viking. It currently rests at the Jórvík Viking Centre in the city of York, England.

Jórvík was the Viking name for York, with the Center part of an area that has yielded numerous treasures. Whether the Coprolite can be described as treasure is a question for the ages. That said, the details are fascinating.

The reason it’s named after Lloyds Bank isn’t some weird corporate branding exercise. The hefty deposit, measuring 8″ x 2″ (20 cm by 5 cm), was found beneath the site of the famous bank in 1972. And here’s a fun fact for the day – “Coprolite” means fossilized human faeces! Paleofeces is also a term used to describe ancient human droppings found as part of archaeological expeditions.

This is one mighty archaeological achievement. The Australian Academy of Science observed in 2017, “Human coprolites are very rare and tend to only be preserved in either very dry or frozen environments, however, samples have been found that date back to the Late Paleolithic—around 22,000 years ago.”

For a complete specimen to last this long is awe-inspiring, if not exactly need-to-know information. How do they know it came from a Viking? The ingredients that went into the epic production provide some clues.

“He was not a great vegetable eater,” wrote the Guardian in 2003, “instead of living on large amounts of meat and grains such as bran, despite fruit stones, nutshells and other stools containing matter from vegetables such as leeks being found on the same site.”

That all sounds normal enough, however the Viking’s bowels were also packed with creepy crawlies.

In 2016, the website Spangenhelm referred to “the presence of several hundred parasitic eggs (whipworm)”, which “suggests he or she was riddled with intestinal parasite worms (maw-worm).”

These unwanted invaders can cause serious health problems. The BBC describes conditions such as “stomach aches, diarrhoea, and inflammation of the bowel.” Get enough worms and things get worse, as “symptoms may simulate those of gastric and duodenal ulcers.”

Parasites aren’t known for standing still either. Adults “can migrate from the intestine and enter other organs where they can cause serious damage, even moving into such places as the ear and the nose of unfortunate suffers.”

On a more agreeable note, the malodorous museum piece has been valued at an extraordinary $39,000. No less a publication than the Wall Street Journal reported on the coprolite in 1991, with one source claiming it was “as valuable as the Crown Jewels”.

British TV company Channel 4 delved deeper into the desiccated dropping in 2003, giving viewers an insight into what an ancient turd can reveal about the past. According to them, “if we ever succeed in extracting and analyzing DNA from the excrement, it could be possible to determine the kind of flora that this Viking had in his intestines.”

Those thinking that the excrement-based exhibit might lead to a boring existence are wrong. In fact, it’s faced potential disaster. 2003 is a significant year for the Lloyd’s Bank Coprolite, as it had a brush with destruction courtesy of an unsuspecting educator.

A Guardian report from the time writes that “all was well until two weeks ago when its display stand collapsed in the hands of an unfortunate teacher and, crashing to the floor, the rock-like lump broke into three pieces.”

Talk about a potentially sticky situation. What happens when fossilized faeces is damaged? It’s carefully glued back together of course! This saw the turd reconstructed as if it were a Roman vase or Aztec plate.

With careful maintenance, it’s hoped the Lloyds Bank Coprolite will go on for many years to come. For the individual whose historic diet resulted in the artefact, it was simply a bodily function. Centuries on, experts are flushed with their success in discovering it.

A Northern California couple found $10 million worth of rare coins dating back to the 1800’s San Francisco Mint Coin

A box with rare gold coins discovered by a couple of Californians walking their dog goes on sale with a $15,000 coin. Coins were priced at $11 million and were dated from 1847 to 1894. Several coins were auctioned at the Old San Francisco Mint and one of them — an 1874 $20 double eagle that is usually worth $4,250 — sold for $15,000.

Don Kagin, whose firm is handling the sale, says most of the remaining 1,400 coins had gone on sale on Amazon.com and Kagins.com after the auction.

The couple, whom Kagin declined to identify, found them last year buried under the shadow of a tree on their rural Northern California property.

Here are five things to know about the coins and their origin:

Why are they so Valuable?

Experts say paper money was illegal in California until the 1870s, so it’s extremely rare to find any coins from before that period.

Additionally, most of the coins are in mint condition, having been stashed away seemingly immediately after they were minted. They were valued by Don Kagin, a numismatist who is handling the sale and marketing of the coins.

Who Found them?

Kagin says the couple — a middle-aged husband and wife — does not want to be identified in part to avoid a gold rush on their rural Northern California property by modern-day prospectors.

They discovered the coins in eight cans buried in the shadow of an old tree on the property.

They plan to keep a few of the coins themselves and use the money from the rest to pay off bills and donate to local charities. Money from Tuesday’s auction will benefit the effort to turn the Old Mint into a museum.

Where did the coins Come From?

Most of the coins were minted at the San Francisco Mint, according to Kagin. It’s not clear, however, who put them in the ground or how they were obtained, though theories have abounded.

Kagin says people have linked the coins to stagecoach bandit Black Bart, outlaw Jesse James and theft at the San Francisco Mint, but none of the theories has panned out.

What is in the Collection?

The treasure consists of four $5 gold pieces, fifty $10 gold pieces, and 1,373 $20 double eagles. Among the coins that will be on display in the crown jewel of the collection — an 1866-S No Motto $20 gold piece valued at more than $1 million.

How Does this Discovery Compare to Other Coin Find?

Kagin calls this coin to find the largest such discovery in U.S. history. One of the largest previous finds of gold coins was uncovered by construction workers in Jackson, Tennessee, in 1985 and valued at $1 million.

More than 400,000 silver dollars were found in the home of a Reno, Nevada, man who died in 1974 and were later sold intact for $7.3 million.

Gold coins and ingots said to be worth as much as $130 million were recovered in the 1980s from the wreck of the SS Central America.

But historians knew roughly where that gold was because the ship went down off the coast of North Carolina during a hurricane in 1857.

Mother Found Still Cradling Baby After 4,800 Years

It is a fitting discovery as Mother’s Day approaches. Archaeologists have uncovered the ancient remains of a young mother and an infant child locked in a 4,800-year-old embrace. The remarkable find was among 48 sets of remains unearthed from graves in Taiwan, including the fossils of five children.

Researchers were stunned to discover the maternal moment, and they say these Stone Age relics are the earliest sign of human activity found in central Taiwan.

Preserved for nearly 5,000 years, the skeleton found in the Taichung area shows a young mother gazing down at the baby cradled in her arms.

Researchers turned to carbon dating to determine the ages of the fossils, which they traced back to the Neolithic Age, a period within the Stone Age.

Excavation began in May 2014 and took a year for archaeologists to complete. But of all the remains found in the ancient graves, one pair set stood out from the rest.

‘When it was unearthed, all of the archaeologists and staff members were shocked.

‘Why? Because the mother was looking down at the baby in her hands,’ said Chu Whei-lee, a curator in the Anthropology Department at Taiwan’s National Museum of Natural Science.

According to the researchers’ measurements, the mother was just 160 cm tall, or 5 foot 2 inches. The infant in her arms is 50 cm tall – just over a foot-and-a-half.

This breathtaking discovery came as a surprise to the researchers on sight, but it isn’t the first of its kind.

In the past, archaeologists have dug up remains of similar moments which have been preserved for thousands of years.

Notably, Chinese archaeologists unearthed the interlocked skeletons of a mother and child last year from an Early Bronze Age archaeological site branded the ‘Pompeii of the East, the People’s Daily Online reported.

The mother is thought to have been trying to protect her child during a powerful earthquake that hit Qinghai province, central China, in about 2,000 BC.

Experts speculated that the site was hit by an earthquake and flooding of the Yellow River.

Photographs of the skeletal remains show the mother looking up above as she kneels on the floor, with her arms around her young child. Archaeologists say they believe her child was a boy.

5,000 Years old Pavlopetri is the oldest submerged city in the world

If you ask Greeks what do they know about Pavlopetri, they will probably look at you in amazement. Pavlopetri is the oldest submerged city in the world and only in 2011 became known to the world when BBC visited this place and using specialist laser scanning techniques on location accurately recreated three-dimensional models of artefacts!

In 1904 the geologist Fokion Negri reported an ancient city in the seabed between the island Elafonisos and beach Punta in southern Laconia.

Later, in 1967, oceanographer Dr Nicholas Flemming, University of Southampton, visited the underwater city and found the existence of an ancient submerged city in a depth of 3 – 4 meters!

In 1968 Dr Nicholas Flemming returned to Pavlopetri with a group of young archaeologists from the University of Cambridge and in collaboration with professor Angelos Delivorrias, they mapped and dated the sunken city.

They discovered a rare prehistoric residential town with many buildings, streets and even squares! Based on the findings, the team of the University of Cambridge announced that the Pavlopetri firstly inhabited in 2800 BC, while the buildings and streets dating from the Mycenaean period (1680-1180 BC)!!!

In 2007 Dr Jon Henderson and Dr Chryssanthi Frenchman from the University of Nottingham visited Pavlopetri and in collaboration with the Director of the Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities Ilias Spondilis undertook a research program for further archaeological investigations Pavlopetri.

The project had a duration of five years (2009-2013), and it aimed to shed light on research questions concerning the dating and character of the submerged village in Elaphonisos and the role of the town in the control of the Laconian Gulf.

So, if you are interested in underwater archaeology, this is the ideal place, as the architectural remains of this sunken city are visible at a depth of about three meters!

Pavlopetri is in Lakonia, in Peloponnese, which is 4 hours drive from Athens or 2.5 hours from Kalamata International Airport.

Pavlopetri is a fantastic finding, and there is a beautiful documentary by BBC, which will reveal you a spectacular view of an unknown world and civilisation 5000 years ago!

The Varna Man, who lived around the 5th Millennium BC, is the wealthiest burial at that time

The site, located on the outskirts of the Black Sea resort of Varna, was discovered accidentally when tractor operator Raicho Marinov was cutting a trench to lay an electric cable for a local factory.

He suddenly noticed small squares of shiny yellow metal, bracelets of the same material, green-coloured artefacts, and flakes of flint.

Rushed to the local museum, the objects were soon identified as prehistoric stone tools, corroded copper axes, and, clearly associated with them, golden ornaments. The association was what mattered: the implication was that the gold artefacts were older than any others ever discovered anywhere.

Museum curator Michail Lazarov and Sofia University professor Georgi Georgiev immediately set about organising a rescue excavation, and the museum’s young archaeologist, Ivan Ivanov, was appointed to lead it.

Ivanov’s team eventually uncovered 281 graves, more than half with grave goods, 18 of them exceptionally rich, and one of them among the richest graves ever excavated.

The date of the cemetery has recently been pushed back to the 5th millennium BC. A radiocarbon determination now gives it as c.4500 BC.

The discoveries

About 200 crouched or, far more commonly, extended inhumations have been uncovered in the two-thirds of the cemetery so far excavated. Both males and females are represented.

The bodies were placed in flat graves formed of shallow pits without mounds. The remaining graves are ‘cenotaph graves’ – where nobody is present but where grave goods have been laid out – or ‘mask graves’, where a life-size ceramic mask has been substituted for an actual body.

Three cenotaph graves, three mask graves, and a number of the inhumations are extremely rich. The total assemblage includes 3,000 gold artefacts weighing over 6kg.

The richest burial is of a man in his mid-40s buried with no less than 990 separate gold objects, including beads, rings, and a variety of decorations for body, clothing, and hair, among them a penis sheath. This man was also buried with copper axes, other copper tools, and a sceptre in the form of a perforated stone axe or mace.

In addition to gold and copper, the exotic materials represented among the grave goods include graphite, spondylus shell, dentalium shell, carnelian, and marble. Ceramic containers were also present in many graves.

The deductions

Varna implies three major developments in the mid-5th millennium BC. First, given the range of exotic material, Varna must have been part of an extensive trading network, allowing some members of this Early Chalcolithic community to become rich and powerful.

Second – presumably because of its role in trade – the Varna community appears to have developed extreme social differentiation at a very early date, judging by the fact that most graves contain no or few grave goods, while a minority are exceptionally rich. The social gap between the many unfurnished inhumations and the Grave 43 man seems huge.

Third, on the evidence of Grave 43 – by implication that of a warrior, a ruler, and perhaps, given the common character of early chieftainship, some sort of priest-king – the transition from a more matriarchal Neolithic to a more patriarchal Chalcolithic/Bronze Age form of social organisation was well advanced at Varna.

The presence of bull-shaped objects among the goldwork – most of which is otherwise non-representative – coupled with the penis sheath certainly implies a cultural preoccupation with virility and male power.

10,000 Year Old Rock Paintings Depicting Aliens And UFOs Found in India

Even before the great tectonic plate shift, the former central province of India, now Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, was the site of pre-agrarian human settlement. That is why a number of prehistoric cave paintings have been discovered in the region. Some of them are known to us like Bhimbetka where we mainly find cave paintings made by a hunter-gatherer population.

Recently in the Hoshangabad district of Madhya Pradesh, just 43 miles from the local administrative centre of Raisen, ancient 10,000-year-old rock paintings depicting UFOs and extra-terrestrials have been discovered in the caves. The caves are hidden deep within the dense jungle in Charama region in Kanker district in tribal Bastar region. Located about 130km from Raipur, the caves come under village Chandeli and Gotitola.

A group of anthropologists working with hill tribes in a remote area have made a startling discovery of intricate prehistoric cave paintings depicting aliens and UFO type craft next to a look-alike ‘wormhole’ formation in the sky.

A few years back, a three-and-a-half- million-years- the old prehistoric human skull was discovered in the Ahthnor village of Madhya Pradesh by geologist Dr Arun Sonakia. Possibilities that the above image was drawn by those ancient humans can’t be ruled out, said Dr Sonakia.

The state of Chhattisgarh has an abundance of ancient rock paintings. Many sites have paintings of humans and animals in everyday scenes. However, some researchers have referred to some rather unusual paintings, such as those depicting what appear to be kangaroos and giraffes (mainly in Kabra hills of Raigarh area of the state of Chhattisgarh) which are not native to the country, as well as human-fish hybrid creatures. Now, it is claimed that aliens and UFOs can be added to this collection.

The paintings are done in natural colours that have barely faded despite the passing of years. The strangely carved figures are seen holding weapon-like objects and do not have clear features. Especially, the nose and mouth are missing. In a few pictures, they are even shown wearing spacesuits. The newly-discovered depictions date back some 10,000 years.

The images may be depicting extra-terrestrials and UFOs as the paintings include large, humanoid beings descending from the sky, some wearing what looks like a helmet or antennae, as well as a disc-shaped craft with three rays (or legs) from its base. There are several beliefs among locals from the area.

While few worship the paintings, others narrate stories they have heard from ancestors about ‘rohela people’, which translates to “the small sized ones”. According to legend, the ‘rohela people’ used to land from the sky in a round shaped flying object and take away one or two persons of village who never returned.

According to one archaeologist, the art reflects the belief among ancient humans that we are not alone in the universe. The findings suggest that humans in prehistoric times may have seen or imagined beings from other planets which still arouse curiosity among people and researchers.

Archaeologists typically identify them as ‘shamanic’ images of humans, or human-animal hybrids, and geometric forms. Images of figures with antlers, antennae, or spiritual rays are familiar, and in fact quite common, in shamanic art.

A clear image of what might be an alien or ET in a spacesuit can be seen in above a cave painting along with a classical flying saucer-shaped UFO that appears to be either beaming something down or beaming something up, in what might be an ancient UFO abduction scenario.

A force-field or trail of some sort is seen at the rear of the UFO. Also visible is another object that might depict a wormhole, explaining how aliens were able to reach Earth. Down below is the wormhole. The concept was discussed by physicist Stephen Hawking but in a skeptical manner. But isn’t it fascinating that ancient Indian possibly witnessed wormholes, UFO and alien visitations while Stephen Hawking remained skeptic about them?

Local archaeologist, Mr Wassim Khan, has personally seen the images. He claims that the objects and creatures seen in them are totally anomalous and out of character when compared to other, already discovered, examples of prehistoric cave art depicting ancient life in the area. As such, he believes that they might suggest beings from other planets have been interacting with humans since prehistoric times.

It may be better explained that encounters like this helped ancient Indian civilization to understand how those alien spaceship worked and later documented in ‘Vimana shastra’. This explanation, in turn, establishes the ‘ancient astronaut theory’ which postulates that human civilization was established with the assistance of benevolent space-travelling aliens.

On enlargement, two objects that look like hats floating in mid-air can be noticed, as also one of them appears to have portholes on it. Indian Vedic texts are full of descriptions of Vimanas. The Ramayana describes Vimanas as a double-decked, circular or cylindrical aircraft with portholes and a dome. It flew with “the speed of the wind” and made a “melodious sound”.

It is not uncommon in Madhya Pradesh that commoners claiming sight of UFO in nearby areas till this date. The latest entrant to the list of people in Madhya Pradesh that have claimed to have seen Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO), states Agriculture and Fisheries Minister Ramkrishna Kusmaria in July 2014.

Kusmaria said while he was on an official tour he spotted a UFO in Sukha village in Damoh district, about 135 miles from ancient cave painting site. Kusmaria said he clearly saw the object in the sky, and it was emitting sharp sparks. “The object caused damage to the standing crops in the area. I saw papaya fruits fall off the tree as the UFO passed by,” the minister said.

The State Department of Archaeology and Culture in Chhattisgarh is seeking assistance from the Indian Space Research Organisation to research a set of ancient rock paintings found inside caves near the town of Charama in Kanker district, in the tribal Bastar region.

7.2 million-year-old Pre-human fossil suggests mankind arose in Europe, not Africa

The human lineage separated from that of apes about 7 million years ago in Africa, according to the widely agreed narrative of human evolution. Hominins (early humans) are thought to have lived in Africa until they first spread to Asia and then to Europe around 2 million years ago.

Today, the narrative is being updated by a team of scientists from the University of Tubingen in Germany and the University of Toronto in Canada. They claim that the oldest human ancestor originated in Europe, not Africa, about 7.2 million years ago, about 200,000 years older than previously believed, in two parallel research published in the journal PLOS One.

The researchers base their bold hypothesis largely on the analysis of two fossils: a mandible (lower jaw) found in Greece in 1944 and an upper premolar tooth found in Bulgaria in 2009.

The fossils belonged to an ape-like creature known as Graecopithecus freybergi (“El Graeco,” for short), which roamed the Mediterranean region between 7.18 and 7.25 million years ago.

Though the fossilized jawbone from Greece has been around a while, most scientists had dismissed it as a source of good information due to its poor condition. “It’s not the best specimen in the world,” David Begun of the University of Toronto, who co-authored the new research, told HISTORY.

“It has a lot of damage to the surface of the jawbone itself and a lot of damage to the teeth, so they’re really hard to see, they’re difficult to measure, and it’s hard to say what they look like.” But when Begun’s colleague, Madelaine Böhme, had the idea of using computer tomography, or CT-scanning, to look inside the mandible, things got more interesting.

“We saw that the roots of the teeth embedded in the mandible were perfectly preserved…and they gave us a lot of new information that we never had about this specimen,” Begun said. “The canine root is quite short and slender and indicates that the canine was small. That’s really important, because in apes—and male apes in particular—the canine is quite large.” This holds true for most male primates, Begun explained, but not all. “This root shows that the canine was already reduced, which is a characteristic that you only see in humans and our fossil relatives.”

In addition, analysis of the two fossils showed that some of the roots of the bicuspid teeth of Graecopithecus—what we call the premolars—had simplified, or fused to form fewer roots. “That is again something that you only see in humans and our fossil relatives. It is extremely rare to find it in living apes, and you don’t see it in any fossil apes from the same time period,” Begun noted.

In the second, complementary study based on sediment in Greece and Bulgaria from that time, Begun and his colleagues found that the climate during the period El Graeco lived there would have been similar to the dry savannahs known to have encouraged the shift to bipedalism that marked early hominin evolution. In fact, it would have been highly similar to the climate of eastern Africa.

If Graecopithecus is in fact a hominin, it would slightly predate the earliest known human ancestor found in Africa, Sahelanthropus tchadensis. Discovered at a site in Chad, Sahelanthropus is believed to be between 6 and 7 million years old.

Begun emphasized that the new hypothesis doesn’t affect the later story of modern humans and their emergence from Africa. “That story is completely intact,” he told HISTORY. “This is about what happened millions and millions of years before that when the human lineage in its entirety arose.”

Some other experts in human evolution are skeptical of Graecopithecus’ newly anointed status as the earliest known hominin. In particular, they question the claim that the jawbone and tooth shape alone establish its pre-human status.

“We just don’t have enough evidence to come to that conclusion,” Bernard Wood of George Washington University, who was not involved with the new study, told HISTORY. “It’s perfectly possible that one or more fossil apes have roots like that.”

As he pointed out, it’s not uncommon for primates to evolve the same morphological traits or features independently from each other. “If you asked me, how much would I be prepared to bet that this is a hominin,” Wood continued, “you’d have to persuade me to put more than a quarter on [it].”

Begun acknowledges the possibility that El Graeco’s tooth shape and size may have occurred independently from early humans and admitted he would like to have more and better-preserved fossil evidence supporting the new hypothesis. Still, he stands behind his and his colleague’s conclusions about Graecopithecus, based on the fossil evidence they do have—and he believes there is likely more out there.

“I think there’s a pretty good chance that we’ll find new sites in the next few years. We might get lucky, and find some more, better-preserved teeth, and especially limb bones, that could help to answer this question more definitively.”