History is the source code of the future

Dermatoglyphic study: Da Vinci Fingerprint Reveals Arab Heritage?

Discovery Channel :: News :: Da Vinci Fingerprint Reveals Arab Heritage?:

Leonardo da Vinci may have had an Arab heritage, according to Italian researchers who have isolated and reconstructed the Renaissance master's fingerprint.

The fingerprint represents the only biological trace of the Florentine genius, said Luigi Capasso, an anthropologist at Chieti University.

"It is actually the first evidence of Leonardo's corporeality," Capasso told Discovery News.

Indeed, nothing is left of the painter, engineer, mathematician, philosopher and naturalist. The remains of Leonardo, who died in 1519 in Amboise, France, were dispersed in the 16th century during religious wars.

Son of an Arab slave, father of modern Europe.

Technorati Tags: history, Middle East, Da Vinci

Greek archaeologists discover Aristotle bust near Acropolis

Greek archaeologists discover Aristotle bust near Acropolis:

A recently-discovered bust of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle has been described by archaeologists as the best-preserved likeness ever found, reports said Wednesday.

Discovered under the Acropolis, the Roman-era marble bust of the famous philosopher had probably occupied the nearby villa of a wealthy Roman citizen, senior archaeologist Alcestis Horemi was quoted by the Greek newspaper Kathimerini as saying.

The 46-centimetre bust, which dates to the 1st century AD, is the first to depict Aristotle's hooked nose.

In an interesting way, because this is a Roman bust, this is just a knock-off of Greek sculpture.

Technorati Tags: Aristotle, Greece, history, puppy

Early Bronze Age Mortuary Complex Discovered in Syria

Early Bronze Age Mortuary Complex Discovered in Syria:

An ancient, untouched Syrian tomb that wowed the archaeological world on its discovery by Johns Hopkins University researchers nearly six years ago has revealed another secret: It is not alone.

The tomb, which was filled with human and animal remains, gold and silver treasures and unbroken artifacts dating back to the third millennium B.C., is actually one of at least eight located near each other in Umm el-Marra, archaeologist Glenn Schwartz said. That northern Syrian city is believed to be the site of ancient Tuba, one of Syria's first cities and the capital of a small kingdom, said Schwartz, Whiting Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins.

The new tombs were identified and excavated by the Johns Hopkins team in the summers of 2002, 2004 and 2006, with funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Dellheim Foundation of Baltimore and the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins. Given differences in ceramic objects found in the tombs, Schwartz and his team have concluded that they were built sequentially over three centuries, from about 2500 to about 2200 B.C. The tombs were built next to each other, with the complex expanding horizontally. Since they found no more than eight skeletons per tomb, the archaeologists hypothesize that these are tombs of different families or dynasties.

Technorati Tags: history, Syria

2,000-year-old Scottish city unearthed

The Inverness Courier: Iron Age remains hailed as crucial:

THE remains of a 2000-year-old city have been discovered under Inverness and it is being hailed as one of the most important recent discoveries in Scotland.

The find near Inverness Royal Academy was uncovered by a team who spent almost a year excavating the remains of seven large roundhouses and almost a dozen iron kilns.

Last year The Inverness Courier revealed the team from Headland Archaeology had uncovered the ancient city's "industrial estate" where iron was smelted, bronze was cast and glass was produced.

But at the weekend, at the final event of the Highland Archaeology Fortnight, archaeologist Ross Murray gave further details about what he and his colleagues had discovered so far about the city that once stood at the eastern end of the Great Glen.

"It would certainly have been of national importance and known internationally,” he said.

"They had a large industrialised production setup and would have been producing goods for trade with other countries."

This gets really interesting when you consider that Scotland was barely on the Roman radar, but this city apparently had an active trade going on across Northern Europe.

Technorati Tags: history, Scotland

Digital Darwin goes online

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Charles Darwin's works go online:

The complete works of one of history's greatest scientists, Charles Darwin, are being published online.

The project run by Cambridge University has digitised some 50,000 pages of text and 40,000 images of original publications - all of it searchable.

Surfers with MP3 players can even access downloadable audio files.

The resource is aimed at serious scholars, but can be used by anyone with an interest in Darwin and his theory on the evolution of life.

Here's the link. The text and images of original works. Very, very interesting.

Technorati Tags: history, Darwin

Houses found at Stonehenge

Discovery Channel :: News - Travel :: Ancient Stonehenge Houses Unearthed:

Nine Neolithic-era buildings have been excavated in the Stonehenge world heritage site, according to a report in the journal British Archaeology.

The structures, which appear to have been homes, date to 2,600-2,500 B.C. and were contemporary with the earliest stone settings at the site's famous megalith. They are the first house-like structures discovered there.

Julian Thomas, who worked on the project and is chair of the archaeology department at Manchester University in England, said Stonehenge could have been a key gathering place at the Neolithic era's version of a housing development.

The buildings all had plaster floors and timber frames, and most had a central hearth. Two, including a house possibly inhabited by a community chief or priest, were enclosed by ringed ditches, the largest measuring 131 feet across. Postholes indicate a wooden fence would have surrounded the smaller of the two structures.

Interesting thing to ponder: Was the windy and cold hill Stonehenge lies on a wooded area 4,600 years ago?

Technorati Tags: history, Britain

One day in the life: Britain records itself

History Matters: Pass It On

One Day in History' is a one off opportunity for you to join in a mass blog for the national record. We want as many people as possible to record a 'blog' diary which will be stored by the British Library as a historical record of our national life.

Technorati Tags: history

"A few of our fellows went out and helped to bury him."

One of the greatest stories of humanity in warfare, the Christmas Truce of 1914 and the ensuing football match and hymn singing, has been contested periodically. History News Network reports that a letter documenting the event has been discovered:

A letter documenting the famous Christmas Day truce of 1914 when guns fell silent along the Western Front, and feuding German and British soldiers engaged in a friendly soccer match in the icy mud of No Man's Land in France, has been found 92 years after it was first written.

The letter, written in the British trenches by a British private, details the truce when the Kaiser's soldiers and British Tommies exchanged pleasantries and celebrated Christmas together, and engaged in what was to become famous as the world's only friendly football match between enemy soldiers during a war.

Written in pencil on five pages of paper torn from an Army-issue notebook, the private he tells his "dear Mater" how on a frosty, moonlit Christmas Eve the Germans began placing "lights all along the edge of their trenches and coming over to us - wishing us Happy Christmas etc".

He says it is "the most memorable Christmas" he has ever spent or is likely to spend: "since about teatime yesterday, not a shot has been fired on either side up to now".

Technorati Tags: history, World War I

Ancient man may have witnessed massive

Unusual meteorite found in Kansas - CNN.com:

Scientists located a rare meteorite in a wheat field thanks to new ground penetrating radar technology that someday might be used on Mars.T

he dig in Kansas Monday was likely the most documented excavation yet of a meteorite find, with researchers painstakingly using brushes and hand tools in order to preserve evidence of the impact trail and to date the event of the meteorite strike. Soil samples were also bagged and tagged, and organic material preserved for dating purposes.

Even before they had the meteorite out of the ground, the scientific experts at the site were able to debunk prevailing wisdom that the spectacular meteorite fall of Brenham, Kansas, occurred 20,000 years ago. Its location in the Pleistocene epoch soil layer puts that date closer to 10,000 years ago.

"We know it is recent," said Carolyn Sumners, director of Astronomy at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, as she surveyed progress on the dig. "Native Americans could have seen it."

If humans saw these kinds of spectacular meteor strikes, it lends some back story to the many apocalypse myths that exist around the world.

Technorati Tags: history, nature

A door opens and it is five million years later

Israeli scientists said on Wednesday they had discovered a prehistoric ecosystem dating back millions of years.

The discovery was made in a cave near the central Israeli city of Ramle during rock drilling at a quarry. Scientists were called in and soon found eight previously unknown species of crustaceans and invertebrates similar to scorpions.

This is one of those rare events where a real doorway to the ecological conditions of a specific place have been preserved, possibly intact, for longer than humans have been around. Extraordinary and, in a metaphysical sense alread a past fading away as it is explored. Knowing our world means knowing the past, because direct experience has to be processed into knowledge, which may not happen, as in this case, for eons.

Technorati Tags: history, ecology

That's a really old boat

Ship's timbers found in a cave in Egypt are 4,000 years old.

'Mao': The Real Mao - New York Times

I'd ordered Mao: The Unknown Story based on my continuing interest in China and how it became the incredible menage of opportunity and tyranny it is today. Now Nicholas Kristof, whose excellent reporting, with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, has been a constant source of insight, has given the book a review that, like China, is decidedly positive—in the sense that we need to be engaged with the country and its history—even as we are repelled by it.

I haven't read the book, yet, but this review deserves note.

Kristof calls the book "magisterial," but has a number of important comments to add in his review, 'Mao': The Real Mao - New York Times:

Another problem: Mao comes across as such a villain that he never really becomes three-dimensional. As readers, we recoil from him but don't really understand him. He is presented as such a bumbling psychopath that it's hard to comprehend how he bested all his rivals to lead China and emerge as one of the most worshipped figures of the last century.

Finally, there is Mao's place in history. I agree that Mao was a catastrophic ruler in many, many respects, and this book captures that side better than anything ever written. But Mao's legacy is not all bad. Land reform in China, like the land reform in Japan and Taiwan, helped lay the groundwork for prosperity today. The emancipation of women and end of child marriages moved China from one of the worst places in the world to be a girl to one where women have more equality than in, say, Japan or Korea. Indeed, Mao's entire assault on the old economic and social structure made it easier for China to emerge as the world's new economic dragon.

Perhaps the best comparison is with Qinshihuang, the first Qin emperor, who 2,200 years ago unified China, built much of the Great Wall, standardized weights and measures and created a common currency and legal system - but burned books and buried scholars alive. The Qin emperor was as savage and at times as insane as Mao - but his success in integrating and strengthening China laid the groundwork for the next dynasty, the Han, one of the golden eras of Chinese civilization. In the same way, I think, Mao's ruthlessness was a catastrophe at the time, brilliantly captured in this extraordinary book - and yet there's more to the story: Mao also helped lay the groundwork for the rebirth and rise of China after five centuries of slumber.

Mao bad is not the whole story. Mao good is not the story. But, if the Germans had won the Second World War in Europe and had become our main trading partner, what would we be saying about Hitler now? Authors Jung Chang and Jon Halliday clearly are of the opinion that no terrors are worth the progress made by China and I would generally agree. It is hard to say what, if anything, would be different about China (except its communism) economically and politically today if there had been no Mao. I suspect that, given the rise of other economies in the region, China could have climbed into modernism sooner and without the madness of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.

Technorati Tags: China, history, Mao, kristof