Grand tree of life study shows a clock-like trend in new species emergence and diversity

IMAGE: The tree of life compiled by Temple
University researchers is depicted in a new
way -- a cosmologically inspired galaxy of
life view -- and contains more
than 50,000 species... view more

Credit: Temple University

Eurekalert | Mar 3, 2015

Temple University researchers have assembled the largest and most accurate tree of life calibrated to time, and surprisingly, it reveals that life has been expanding at a constant rate.

"The constant rate of diversification that we have found indicates that the ecological niches of life are not being filled up and saturated," said Temple professor S. Blair Hedges, a member of the research team's study, published in the early online edition of the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution. "This is contrary to the popular alternative model which predicts a slowing down of diversification as niches fill up with species."

The tree of life compiled by the Temple team is depicted in a new way --- a cosmologically-inspired galaxy of life view --- and contains more than 50,000 species in a tapestry spiraling out from the origin of life.
For the massive meta-study effort, researchers painstakingly assembled data from 2,274 molecular studies, with 96 percent published in the last decade. They built new computer algorithms and tools to synthesize this largest collection of evolutionary peer-reviewed species diversity timelines published to date to produce this Time Tree of Life.

The study also challenges the conventional view of adaptation being the principal force driving species diversification, but rather, underscores the importance of random genetic events and geographic isolation in speciation, taking about 2 million years on average for a new species to emerge onto the scene.

"This finding shows that speciation is more clock-like than people have thought," said Hedges. "Taken together, this indicates that speciation and diversification are separate processes from adaptation, responding more to isolation and time. Adaptation is definitely occurring, so this does not disagree with Darwinism. But it goes against the popular idea that adaptation drives speciation, and against the related concept of punctuated equilibrium which associates adaptive change with speciation."

Besides the new evolutionary insights gained in this study, their Timetree of Life will provide opportunities for researchers to make other discoveries across disciplines, wherever an evolutionary perspective is needed, including, for example, studies of disease and medicine, and the effect of climate change on future species diversity.

Researchers around the world utilize molecular clocks to estimate species divergence times, calculating DNA mutational rates with species divergence times from gene and genomic sequences, that together with the fossil record and geological history, provide a constantly improving view of Darwin's "grandeur of life."

These new results add to the decade-long efforts of the Timetree of Life initiative (TTOL), which includes internet tools and a book, led by team members Hedges and Sudhir Kumar. "The ultimate goal of the TTOL is to chart the timescale of life -- to discover when each species and all their ancestors originated, all the way back to the origin of life some four billion years ago," said Hedges.

As an ongoing service to the scientific community, Hedges and Kumar plan to continue adding new data to TTOL from future peer-reviewed studies. They also will improve their current tools, such as web and smartphone apps, and develop new tools, that will make it easier to access the information and to explore the TTOL, and for scientists to update the growing tree with their new data.

###

Besides Hedges and Kumar, other members of the research team that published this new article included Julie Marin, Michael Suleski, and Madeline Paymer.

Missing link? African bones predate earliest-known humans by 400,000yrs

Screenshot from vimeo user Arizona State University

RT | Mar 5, 2015

A newly discovered fossil has shaken up science’s view of human evolution and could be the missing link between apes and humans: 400,000 years older than the oldest human bone found, the discovery could entirely rewrite our story.

For decades scientists have been stumped on the gap between humans that walked bent over and those that walked upright. Who was the mysterious ancestor that joined the ape-like Australopithecus with the human-like Homo? We could be looking at an answer. It now appears the timeline for earliest upright humans goes back not to 2.3 – but to 2.8 million years.


Institute of Human Origins Discovery from Arizona State University on Vimeo.

An Ethiopian student at Arizona State University and an accompanying research team discovered the lower jawbone and five teeth in Ethiopia in 2013. Now, for the first time, the findings have been published in two papers simultaneously, while a third supprorted the notion that this could indeed be a unique species, and not a Homo habilis.

The fragments definitely belong to the Homo lineage (of which we are the only remainder), but scientists are puzzled about what the species exactly is. In fact, it could turn out to be a completely new one.

Found 250 miles from Addis Ababa, the fragments are believed to belong to our ancestor from when the current dry land was still wetlands, interspersed with trees providing shade and rivers nourishing them. It was discovered not too far from another famous find – Lucy, the ape-like Austrolapithecus afarensis, known to be the earliest potential ancestor of the human family.

That transition between the two types is the first time in our history we switched from bashing things with rocks to actually using our brains to solve puzzles, although there was another transitional type – the crude and less brainy Paranthropus – thought to have appeared just before the transition to Homo.

Chalachew Seyoum of ASU, screenshot
from video, Arizona State University

"There is a big gap in the fossil record between about 2.5 million and 3 million years ago — there's virtually nothing relating to the ancestors of Homo from that time period, in spite of a lot of people looking," study co-author and one of the leaders of the team, Brian Villmoare of the University of Nevada, told Live Science.

Now, for the first time, the 700,000-year hole between Lucy-like and Homo-type humans is beginning to fill up with information.

“This is a little piece of the puzzle that opens the door to new types of questions and field investigations that we can go after to try to find additional evidence to fill in this poorly known time period,” ASU Institute of Human Origins director William H. Kimbel said in the press release.

“It’s an excellent case of a transitional fossil in a critical time period in human evolution,” he added.
The nature of the new find is not without its naysayers: some scientists have posited that the fossil actually belongs to the well-known species of Homo habilis –the earliest known member of the Homo lineage. But careful digital processing has shown that these are not Homo habilis fragments and they in fact belong to a creature that came shortly before it.

It took years for scientists to get to where they are now. The research started in 2002 with painstaking surveying. The scientists were careful not to disturb anything unnecessarily. “So it took us basically 13 years to find this [human ancestor]. It doesn’t mean that the work that we did was wasted up until that time. But when we did find this [jaw], we were pretty excited that after all this time it actually worked out,” assistant professor and co-author Chris Campisano said.

Screenshot from vimeo user Arizona State University

The expectation was that if they were to dig around the area, they would find Lucy’s contemporaries – not what looked like the missing link.

“We first started collecting fossils in the area around where the jaw was eventually found in 2012,” Campisano went on. “When we realized how old the sediments were, we thought we might be able to find more specimens of Lucy’s species and figure out what happened to that lineage. Instead, we were rewarded with a much more exciting discovery.”

“Honestly, it was an exciting moment…I had good experience in field surveying and knew where potential sediments are. I climbed up a little plateau and found this specimen right on the edge of the hill,” said Chalachew Seyoum, the student behind the find.

What we know for sure, according to Professor Kaye Reed of ASU, is that the creature walked on two legs and lived in eastern Africa. Diet and tool use are very important logical next steps to understanding just how clever this ancestor was.

The research continues at ASU for other fossils around the same area to find answers to those questions.

Screenshot from vimeo user Arizona State University

Graham Hancock Breaks the Set on TED Censorship, Lost Civilizations & War on Consciousness

BreakingtheSet | Jun 27, 2014 | CHANNEL

Abby Martin interviews author and philosopher, Graham Hancock, about the mysteries of ancient civilization, hidden societies from the past, censorship by TED Talks and the difficulty in getting these ideas accepted by mainstream archaeologists and historians.

Receding Swiss glaciers reveal 4000 year old forests - Warmists try to suppress findings

© Climate Change Dispatch.com

Sott.net | Jun 21, 2014 | Larry Bell \ Newsmax

Dr. Christian Schlüchter's discovery of 4,000-year-old chunks of wood at the leading edge of a Swiss glacier was clearly not cheered by many members of the global warming doom-and-gloom science orthodoxy.

This finding indicated that the Alps were pretty nearly glacier-free at that time, disproving accepted theories that they only began retreating after the end of the little ice age in the mid-19th century. As he concluded, the region had once been much warmer than today, with "a wild landscape and wide flowing river."

Dr. Schlüchter's report might have been more conveniently dismissed by the entrenched global warming establishment were it not for his distinguished reputation as a giant in the field of geology and paleoclimatology who has authored/coauthored more than 250 papers and is a professor emeritus at the University of Bern in Switzerland.

Then he made himself even more unpopular thanks to a recent interview titled "Our Society is Fundamentally Dishonest" which appeared in the Swiss publication Der Bund where he criticized the U.N.-dominated institutional climate science hierarchy for extreme tunnel vision and political contamination.

Following the ancient forest evidence discovery Schlüchter became a target of scorn. As he observes in the interview, "I wasn't supposed to find that chunk of wood because I didn't belong to the close-knit circle of Holocene and climate researchers. My findings thus caught many experts off guard: Now an 'amateur' had found something that the [more recent time-focused] Holocene and climate experts should have found."

Other evidence exists that there is really nothing new about dramatic glacier advances and retreats. In fact the Alps were nearly glacier-free again about 2,000 years ago. Schlüchter points out that "the forest line was much higher than it is today; there were hardly any glaciers. Nowhere in the detailed travel accounts from Roman times are glaciers mentioned."

Schlüchter criticizes his critics for focusing on a time period which is "indeed too short." His studies and analyses of a Rhone glacier area reveal that "the rock surface had [previously] been ice-free 5,800 of the last 10,000 years."

Such changes can occur very rapidly. His research team was stunned to find trunks of huge trees near the edge of Mont Miné Glacier which had all died in just a single year. They determined that time to be 8,200 years ago based upon oxygen isotopes in the Greenland ice which showed marked cooling.

Casting serious doubt upon alarmist U.N.-IPCC projections that the Alps will be nearly glacier-free by 2100, Schlüchter poses several challenging questions: "Why did the glaciers retreat in the middle of the 19th century, although the large CO2 increase in the atmosphere came later? Why did the Earth 'tip' in such a short time into a warming phase? Why did glaciers again advance in the 1880s, 1920s, and 1980s? . . . Sooner or later climate science will have to answer the question why the retreat of the glacier at the end of the Little Ice Age around 1850 was so rapid."

Although we witness ongoing IPCC attempts to blame such developments upon evil fossil-fueled CO2 emissions, that notion fails to answer these questions. Instead, Schlüchter believes that the sun is the principal long-term driver of climate change, with tectonics and volcanoes acting as significant contributors.

Regarding IPCC integrity with strong suspicion, Schlüchter recounts a meeting in England that he was "accidentally" invited to which was led by "someone of the East Anglia Climate Center who had come under fire in the wake of the Climategate e-mails."

As he describes it: "The leader of the meeting spoke like some kind of Father. He was seated at a table in front of those gathered and he took messages. He commented on them either benevolently or dismissively."

Schlüchter's view of the proceeding took a final nosedive towards the end of the discussion. As he noted: "Lastly it was about tips on research funding proposals and where to submit them best. For me it was impressive to see how the leader of the meeting collected and selected information."

As a number of other prominent climate scientists I know will attest, there's one broadly recognized universal tip for those seeking government funding. All proposals with any real prospects for success should somehow link climate change with human activities rather than to natural causes. Even better, those human influences should intone dangerous consequences.

Schlüchter warns that the reputation of science is becoming more and more damaged as politics and money gain influence. He concludes, "For me it also gets down to the credibility of science . . . Today many natural scientists are helping hands of politicians, and are no longer scientists who occupy themselves with new knowledge and data. And that worries me."

Yes. That should worry everyone.

13,000 yo skeleton sheds light on Native American origins

Reuters / Jorge Silva

RT | May 16, 2014

Divers have uncovered what they think is the oldest skeleton in the Americas, which dates back 13,000 years and belongs to a teenage Mexican girl. The DNA is very ancient, older than the east-Asian ancestors of ancient Native Americans.

The study, led by the Mexican government's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) with support from the National Geographic Society, was published in the journal Science on Friday.

The 15-16 year old Naia, as the scientists called her, was probably searching for water when she plunged to her death into an underground cave system during the last Ice Age. The place is ominously known as the ‘Hoyo Negro’ – the Black Hole – and is located in the Yucatan Peninsula in southeastern Mexico.

There is nearly zero topographical difference between the layout 13,000 years ago and now, only that water now dominates the entire cave network. But that is exactly what allowed the skull to be preserved in such pristine condition, and for the team to extract a lot of meaningful information from Naia’s DNA. The skull and the nearly complete skeleton lay unmoved, 40 meters below sea level, next to a variety of animals that once roamed the area – some of them extremely exotic ancestors of today’s creatures.

Naia gives scientists the "opportunity to help answer the question of Paleoamerican origins," paleontologist James Chatters, an author of the analysis which was published in the journal Science, told reporters this week. Her final resting place, "sealed off by water and darkness for more than 8,000 years, is a time capsule … of Central America at the end of the Ice Age."

Scientists named her Naia after a water nymph from Greek mythology. The slight, adolescent girl was approximately 4 feet, 10 inches tall at the time of her death.

One of the divers, Alberto Nava, recalls the moment when her skull was first discovered resting on top of a small ledge: “It was a small cranium laying upside down with a perfect set of teeth and dark eye sockets looking back at us,” Nava said.

There are two types of Native-Americans – the modern ones, and the ancient race, who arrived from northeast Asia 15,000-20,000 years ago. When it comes to looks, they share few features in common. While one may think of the modern branch as resembling the peoples of China, Korea or Japan, the older one’s individuals bore a much deeper resemblance to the peoples of Africa, Australia and the general South Pacific region. Their faces are generally narrower and forward projecting.

This offers up an interesting migration hypothesis – that the American continent was not colonized by separate migration events from various parts of Eurasia. Both the shape of Naia’s skull and her DNA indicate that there was only one major migration to the Americas, which took place when the Bering Strait was basically all traversable land.

Scientists say the news study has solved “the problem” of the varying features of the Paleoamericans vs. modern-day Native Americans. But the discovery of the once-in-a-blue-moon skeleton also raises other questions about human adaptation, Rasmus Nielsen, a geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, told USA today.

“Of course, it's interesting, because it raises a new question: Why are there (skull and facial) changes? Is it really true that Native Americans have evolved … in such a short amount of time?"

Chatters says that other human populations have evolved over similarly short time frames. A more thorough genetic of analysis of Naia is in the works to discover what other secrets can be gleaned from her bones.

Massive Dinosaur Soft Tissue Discovery In China – Includes Skin And Feathers!

The Truth | Mar 6, 2014 | Michael Snyder

A fossil bed in China that is being called “Jurassic Park” has yielded perhaps the greatest dinosaur soft tissue discovery of all time.  According to media reports, “nearly-complete skeletons” have been discovered that even include skin and feathers.  But of course if these dinosaurs are really “160 million years old”, that should be absolutely impossible.  Needless to say, this shocking discovery is once again going to have paleontologists scrambling to find a way to prop up the popular myths that they have been promoting.  What they have been telling us simply does not fit the facts.  The truth is that this latest find is even more evidence that dinosaurs are far, far younger than we have traditionally been taught.

Once upon a time, scientists believed that it would be impossible to find anything other than the hardened fossilized remains of extinct dinosaurs.  And if those dinosaurs really were millions of years old, those scientists would have been 100% correct.  But instead, we are now starting to find dinosaur soft tissue all over the place.  The following is an excerpt from a recent Daily Mail article about this new discovery in China…

Almost more impressive than the diversity of the biota is the preservation of many of the vertebrate specimens, according to the study published in the Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology.

Fossils include complete or nearly-complete skeletons associated with preserved soft tissues such as feathers, fur, skin or even, in some of the salamanders, external gills.

One is the feathered dinosaur Epidexipteryx whose soft tissues have been revealed by the use of ultraviolet light scanners.

A fossil of the salamander Chunerpeton shows not only the preserved skeleton but also its skin and external gills.

Wow.

Hopefully scientists in the west will get a chance to closely examine these soft tissue samples.

Prior to 1991, you would have been laughed out of the room if you had suggested that we might dig up the soft tissue of dinosaurs someday.

But all of that changed when Mary Schweitzer, a molecular paleontologist at North Carolina State University, did something that was absolutely unthinkable.  The following comes from an article in Smithsonian Magazine…

In 1991, Schweitzer was trying to study thin slices of bones from a 65-million-year-old T. rex. She was having a hard time getting the slices to stick to a glass slide, so she sought help from a molecular biologist at the university. The biologist, Gayle Callis, happened to take the slides to a veterinary conference, where she set up the ancient samples for others to look at. One of the vets went up to Callis and said, “Do you know you have red blood cells in that bone?” Sure enough, under a microscope, it appeared that the bone was filled with red disks. Later, Schweitzer recalls, “I looked at this and I looked at this and I thought, this can’t be. Red blood cells don’t preserve.”

Schweitzer showed the slide to Horner. “When she first found the red-blood-cell-looking structures, I said, Yep, that’s what they look like,” her mentor recalls. He thought it was possible they were red blood cells, but he gave her some advice: “Now see if you can find some evidence to show that that’s not what they are.”

What she found instead was evidence of heme in the bones—additional support for the idea that they were red blood cells. Heme is a part of hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen in the blood and gives red blood cells their color. “It got me real curious as to exceptional preservation,” she says.

Posted below is an excerpt from a 60 Minutes video report about her remarkable discovery…


Of course since that time, many others have also dug up dinosaur soft tissue.  At this point, more than thirty specimens have been discovered and tested, and the specimens have come from an impressive array of various dinosaurs…

The dinosaurs and other Mesozoic creatures that have yielded their biological material are hadrosaur, titanosaur, ornithomimosaur [ostrich-like dinosaurs], mosasaur, triceratops, Lufengosaurs, T. rex, and Archaeopteryx.

When Schweitzer originally made her discovery public, she was viciously attacked by other evolutionists who insisted that finding dinosaur soft tissue that was millions of years old was absolutely impossible.

And those evolutionists were right.

If the dinosaurs were really that old it would be impossible.

But now sample after sample and test after test have proven without a shadow of a doubt that we really are digging up dinosaur soft tissue.

Schweitzer and other paleontologists that are desperate to prop up their existing theories are now suggesting that “iron in the blood” could have preserved the soft tissue that we are finding for all of these millions of years.

If you believe that laughable theory, I have a bridge to sell you.

But there are a lot of people out there that are so desperate to keep believing their flawed version of “the truth” that they are actually buying it.

If you are interested in more of the technical details of this theory, you can find a more detailed explanation right here.

And of course it is not just soft tissue that scientists have to account for…

It is not just dinosaur soft tissue, either, but the presence of detectable proteins such as collagen, hemoglobin, osteocalcin, actin, and tubulin that they must account for. These are complex molecules that continually tend to break down to simpler ones.

Not only that, but in many cases, there are fine details of the bone matrix, with microscopically intact-looking bone cells (osteocytes) showing incredible detail. And Schweitzer has even recovered fragments of the even more fragile and complex molecule, DNA. This has been extracted from the bone cells with markers indicating its source such that it is extremely likely to be dinosaur DNA.

In this case, I think that it would be very appropriate to apply Occam’s razor.  The reason why we are finding dinosaur bones with soft tissue in them is because they simply are not very old.

And when we carbon date dinosaur bones, it tells us the exact same thing.

Due to the rate that it decays, there should be absolutely no measurable radioactive carbon left in anything that was once living that is greater than 100,000 years old.

So there should be absolutely no measurable radioactive carbon in dinosaur bones.

But instead, that is precisely what we find.  Here is one example…

“In June of 1990, Hugh Miller submitted two dinosaur bone fragments to the Department of Geosciences at the University in Tucson, Arizona for carbon-14 analysis. One fragment was from an unidentified dinosaur. The other was from an Allosaurus excavated by James Hall near Grand Junction, Colorado in 1989. Miller submitted the samples without disclosing the identity of the bones. (Had the scientists known the samples actually were from dinosaurs, they would not have bothered dating them, since it is assumed dinosaurs lived millions of years ago—outside the limits of radiocarbon dating.) Interestingly, the C-14 analysis indicated that the bones were from 10,000-16,000 years old—a far cry from their alleged 60-million-year-old age.”

And the truth is that radioactive carbon is being found in dinosaur bones that have been excavated all over the planet…

Real Science Radio interviewed a scientist returning from the American Geophysical Union’s conference in Singapore where his international team presented results from five respected laboratories documenting significant quantities of Carbon 14 in bones from ten dinosaurs excavated from Alaska, Europe, Texas, Montana, and China’s Gobi Desert.

Additional evidence for the young age of dinosaurs comes from the fact that we find very accurate depictions of dinosaurs in ancient artwork all over the planet.  This is something that I covered in my previous article entitled “Why Does Ancient Art Contain Depictions Of Flying Aircraft, Helicopters And Dinosaurs?”
Considering the fact that we only started digging up dinosaurs a couple hundred years ago, how did those ancient people know what they looked like?

That is something to think about.

I realize that this article is going to directly challenge things that a lot of people have believed all of their lives.

But we are never going to get anywhere if we just have blind faith in whatever the system tells us to believe.

It pays to question everything and to allow logic and reason to lead us to the truth.

So what are your thoughts on all of this?  Please feel free to share what you think by posting a comment below…

About the author: Michael T. Snyder is a former Washington D.C. attorney who now publishes The Truth. His new thriller entitled “The Beginning Of The End” is now available on Amazon.com.

Archeologists find 3,000-year-old burial site in Peru

© Press TV News Video

PERU | Mar 8, 2014 | PressTV News Videos

Every now and again, archaeologists stumble upon something new. This time around, they've discovered a burial site, containing human remains dating back three-thousand years.

Excavators working in Peru's city of Cusco have found ancient artifacts and skeletal remains of five individuals at the site. They believe the remains are from the pre-Incan Marcavalle culture. They were discovered in two double graves and a single one. Among the artifacts are tools, ceramic fragments and beaded necklaces. This latest discovery is significant because no human remains dating back to the Marcavalle culture have ever been found before.

11,000-year-old settlement found under Baltic Sea

© iStock
A newly discovered underwater site was
in fact some sort of a dump in which
nomadic Swedes discarded objects.

11,000-year-old settlement found under Baltic Sea
Feb 22, 2014 | Rossella Lorenzi \ Discovery News

Evidence of a Stone-Age settlement that may have been swallowed whole by the Baltic Sea has resurfaced near Sweden, revealing a collection of well preserved artifacts left by nomads some 11,000 years ago.

Dubbed by the local press "Sweden's Atlantis" after the fabled island which according to Greek philosopher Plato sank around 9600 B.C. in the Atlantic Ocean, the newly discovered site was in fact some sort of a dump in which nomadic Swedes discarded objects, according to a report by the Swedish daily The Local.

Buried 52 feet below the surface at Hanö, a sandy bay off the coast of Skane County in Sweden, the items include wood pieces, flint tools, animal horns, ropes, a harpoon carving made from an animal bone and the bones of an aurochs and an ancient cattle which became extinct in the early 1600s.

"There's wood and antlers and other implements that were thrown in there," project leader Björn Nilsson, archaeology professor at Södertörn University, told the Local.

Amazingly, the artifacts have been perfectly preserved because of the abundant oxygen-consuming gyttja -- a black, gel-like sediment which is formed when peat begins to decay.

"Around 11,000 years ago there was a build up in the area, a lagoon or sorts ... and all the tree and bone pieces are preserved in it. If the settlement was on dry land we would only have the stone-based things, nothing organic," Nilsson said.

Nilsson's team is continuing to excavate the area, looking for a potential burial site.

"What we have here is maybe one of the oldest settlements from the first more permanent sites in Scania and in Sweden full stop," Nilsson said.

H/T Sott.net

Testing the Blue: Ancient Egyptian Alchemy

Pic: Adventures
Unlimited Press (C)

Testing the Blue: Ancient Egyptian Alchemy
Jan 19, 2014 | Disinfo.com

Stephen S. Mehler, M.A.

Assisted by George T. Bayer, Ph.D.

I have often stated in the last few years that the definitive book on alchemy has yet to be written. This is primarily because the actual practices, procedures and true origin of the system have also not been correctly delineated. Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary defines the word alchemy in two ways:  “the medieval chemical science, the great objects of which were to transmute base metals into gold,” and “the power to transform, or act of transforming, something common into something precious.” I consider the first definition to be superfluous, which I will address, but the second definition will be paramount to the meaning of this article as to the true ancient practice.

I have been fortunate to work with, be a student of, Egyptian-born Egyptologist and indigenous wisdom keeper Abd’El Hakim Awyan (see Figure 1)—a collaboration which has resulted in my two books, The Land of Osiris (Adventures Unlimited Press) and From Light Into Darkness (Adventures Unlimited Press). Hakim and I have created a new discipline, Khemitology, as opposed to the outdated and incorrect term “Egyptology.” The ancients called their civilization KMT, which I have rendered as Khemit (thus the discipline of Khemitology), which meant “The Black Land” to describe the rich, dark alluvial soil full of silt from the river Nile when she floods, the basis of the civilization. Egypt is based on the Greek term Aegyptos and only referred to the early dynastic site of Memphis (Men-Nefer), not the whole civilization. The term “Aegyptos” only came into being around 200 BC, while the term KMT is thousands of years older.

Since one of the Arabic terms for modern Egypt is Al-Khem, it is obvious to me that this is where the word “alchemy” comes from. I would, therefore, define alchemy as:  “The arts and sciences of ancient Khemit, the knowledge of which was handed down to the Greeks and Romans, and became the basis of medieval alchemy and chemistry.” The idea that alchemy was simply to transform base metals into gold is a limited understanding, but the second definition offered by Webster’s, that of transforming something common to something precious, is very pertinent to this study. I would also add that the “act of transforming” involves processes that can be termed as “magic” or “magical,” in that the resulting “precious” material is not understood by the normal paradigms of chemistry.  

Continue reading..

'Largest Corinthian capital' unearthed in Turkey

© Today’s Zaman newspaper
Archeologists have unearthed a 20-ton
colossal Corinthian capital at the site of Kyzikos
Hadrian Temple in Western Turkey.

SOTT: 'Largest Corinthian capital' unearthed in Turkey
Oct 4, 2013 | World Bulletin

A group of archeologists have made a significant discovery in Turkey, unearthing an ancient Roman column piece touted as the largest of its kind. Ataturk University's archeology team brought to light on Friday a colossal Corinthian capital measuring 1.9m in diameter and 2.5 m in height in Erdek district.

"This is the largest and most exquisite Corinthian capital built within the territory of the Roman Empire," said team head Nurettin Kochan. The piece is crafted in the Corinthian order, chronologically the latest of three recognized ancient Roman architectural styles. It was found at the site of Kyzikos Hadrian Temple where excavation work has continued since August 15. Kochan said the discovery bore significance on a global scale and would contribute to Turkey's tourism sector.

He said the dimensions of the capital surpass those at the world-renowned Baalbek Temple in Lebanon, among the best preserved Roman temple sites.

"There's no other capital of this size in the Corinthian order," he said. "Kyzikos Hadrian Temple outshines even the Baalbek Temple of Jupiter in Lebanon, considered the largest and most spectacular Corinthian temple in the world."

Kochan said they have also found large pieces of frieze decorated with reliefs featuring larger-than-life representations of human, eagle and bull figures. Hadrian Temple is similar in size to the Temple of Artemis in the ancient city of Ephesus and the Temple of Apollo in Didim, both located in Turkey's Aegean region.

The excavations, carried out by a team consisting of university professors, grad and undergrad students and dozens of workers, will continue until October 8.

Giant Underground Stone Boxes Near The Pyramids In Egypt

Giant Underground Stone Boxes Near The Pyramids In Egypt
Aug 27, 2013 | Before its News

Giant Underground Stone Boxes Near The Pyramids In Egypt? Mysterious giant boxes below the Egyptian sands. More than 20 boxes were discovered. This is interesting and you can see everything very clearly. Watch

Scotland lunar-calendar find sparks Stone Age rethink

Scotland lunar-calendar find sparks Stone Age rethink
July 27, 2013 | Phys.org

Archeologists have discovered a lunar calendar in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, that is nearly ten thousand years old. Their findings show that the calendar makers (1) thought about time and (2) figured out a means to follow it at a period in history that was still in the Stone Age. The discovery is considered both surprising and important because it now places a calendar nearly five thousand years before what was previously considered as the first formal calendar, created in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago. But here, a discovery has been made of a calendar construct appearing to track the phases of the moon nearly 10,000 years ago.

Scientists are now calling this discovery in Scotland that seems to mimic the phases of the moon to track lunar months the world's oldest known calendar.

"What we are looking at here is a very important step in humanity's earliest formal construction of time, even the start of history itself," said Vincent Gaffney, professor of landscape archaeology at Birmingham University, who led the team who analyzed the pits and their functions.

Also referred to as the "Warren Field calendar," referring to the land area in Aberdeenshire where the calendar was found, the discovery consists of an array of 12 pits and arc. They appear to represent the phases of the moon, going from waxing and waning to central arc, corresponding to the lunar months of the year.

However, said Prof. Gaffney, because the lunar year does not correspond to the natural year, the sequence had to be calibrated annually, and the site seems to align along the midwinter solstice, indicating that each year it was calibrated, and kept good time.

The experts believe the site dates back to around 8000 BC. Gaffney and team in their paper on the subject observed that the site "also aligns on the south east horizon and a prominent topographic point associated with sunrise on the midwinter solstice. In doing so the monument anticipates problems associated with simple lunar calendars by providing an annual astronomic correction in order to maintain the link between the passage of time indicated by the Moon, the asynchronous solar year, and the associated seasons."

Although previously excavated back in 2005, geophysical survey teams from several universities have been working to map the sites again and to look for further features. The Warren Field site was first discovered as unusual crop marks spotted from the air by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS).

The pit-creators are identified as a Mesolithic group, referring to a group of cultures between Paleolithic and the Neolithic. The three "lithics" belong to the Stone Age, and the Mesolithic were a transition group who succeeded in adapting to a collecting and fishing as well as hunting economy The question remains, why did these hunter gatherers track the phases of the moon? For hunting purposes? To explore celestial bodies?

One theory comes from project member, Dr Christopher Gaffney, Archeological Science at the University of Bradford:

"For pre-historic hunter-gatherer communities, knowing what food resources were available at different times of the year was crucial to survival. These communities relied on hunting migrating animals and the consequences of missing these events were potential starvation. They needed to carefully note the seasons to be prepared for when that food resource passed through, so from this perspective, our interpretation of this site as a seasonal calendar makes sense."

Mayan Discovery: Ancient Monument Reveals Royal Struggle

The Maya Snake queen Lady Ikoom was described
on an nearly 1500-year-old stone monument
unearthed at the Mayan city of El Peru.
Credit: hoto by Francico Castaneda; courtesy of
Proyecto Arqueológico El Perú-Waka´y PACUNAM

Mayan Discovery: Ancient Monument Reveals Royal Struggle
July 19, 2013 | Live Science | Tia Ghose

A nearly 1,500-year-old Mayan stone monument, inscribed with a story of an ancient power struggle, has been unearthed in Guatemala.

The stone slab, which dates to A.D. 564, was found in a small tunnel that adjoins the tomb of an ancient queen beneath the Mayan temple at the site of El Perú-Waka'.

The slab, almost 6 feet (2 meters) high and 3 feet (1 m) wide, is carved with the image of a large man in its center, and is inscribed with Mayan hieroglyphics. The text on the monument describes a tumultuous seven-year period when two dynasties battled for rule of the ancient kingdom.

Prior to discovering this monument, no one knew the names of Mayan rulers during the sixth century.

"It really does advance our knowledge of the history of this royal family and dynasty," said study co-author David Friedel, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis.

Ancient empire

The Mayan empire flourished in southern Mexico and parts of Guatemala for about six centuries, then mysteriously collapsed around A.D. 900. The Mayans built the massive city of Tikal, developed a hieroglyphic writing system and their own calendar, which infamously predicted the world would end in 2012.

However, because they usually wrote on paper, rather than stone, "most of their writing is gone," Friedel told LiveScience.

Earlier this year, Friedel and his colleagues were excavating the Mayan tomb of a royal woman named Lady K'abel, when they uncovered the massive stone stele. Carved into the stele was the outline of a man cradling a sacred bundle in his arms, and there were inscriptions describing his feats on the sides of the monument.

Though the stone was worn away in the center, the inscriptions on the side remained readable. [Photos: First Glimpse into a Mayan Tomb]

These hieroglyphs describe the conjuring of the three city gods
by the Maya King Chak Took Ich'aak.
Credit: hoto by Francico Castaneda; courtesy of Proyecto
Arqueológico El Perú-Waka´y PACUNAM

Tumultuous period

The team deciphered the inscriptions to reveal that a king known as King Wa'oom Uch'ab Tzi'kin, or He Who Stands Up the Offering of the Eagle, likely dedicated the stele to his father, King Chak Took Ich'aak, or Red Spark Claw, in 564. Both names were lost to history until now.

Because the Mayan calendar date was written on the slab, the team knows the exact day on which it was dedicated.

The inscription reveals that the death of the father, King Chak Took Ich'aak, in A.D. 556 ushered in a period of political turmoil as different groups grappled for supremacy.  His son ultimately took the throne.

The stele also describes a royal woman, Lady Ikoom, who was a holy person and probably the mother of the king who dedicated the stele.

The team hypothesizes that the stele is so worn because it was exposed to elements aboveground for over a century before being brought into the tomb in A.D. 702.

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitterand Google+. Follow LiveScience @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

Inconstant Radioactive Decay Startles Physicists | Space News

Inconstant Radioactive Decay Startles Physicists | Space News
June 14, 2013 | ThunderboltsProject

For many years a scientific controversy has been brewing far from the spotlight of mainstream media. How constant are physical constants? For decades the scientific consensus has been that "true constants", such as the speed of light and the gravitational force, remain unchanged over time. But in recent years more and more evidence has challenged this assumption. A telling example is now posed by observed changes in supposedly constant radioactive decay rates in relation to solar flares.

Antarctica's Ecosystem Is 33 Million Years Old

The Antarctic drilling vessel JOIDES Resolution
was used in the Integrated Ocean Drilling
Program to dig deep into Antarctic sediments.
CREDIT: Courtesy of IODP

Antarctica's Ecosystem Is 33 Million Years Old
May 28, 2013 | Live Science | Stephanie Pappas

The modern ecosystem of icy Antarctica is some 33.6 million years old, new research finds, with a system dating back to the formation of the polar ice caps.

The date is revealed by fossilized remnants of plankton found in Antarctic sediments, which show how plankton diversity plummeted when a big chill came along at the end of the Eocene Epoch and the beginning of the Oligocene Epoch. Before the transition, Earth was a toastier place, and a wide array of plankton survived even at the poles.

The study, published in the journal Science in April, focused on single-celled plankton called dinoflagellates, which contain materials that fossilize. Before the Eocene-Oligocene transition about 34 million years ago, Antarctic dinoflagellates were extremely diverse. When the ice pack formed, however, only plankton that could survive cold temperatures and a seasonal freeze-melt cycle remained.

Antarctica's ice pack is the floating sea ice that melts in the summer and freezes in the winter. At melt time, plankton in the Southern Ocean surrounding the continent get busy, chowing down on the nutrients freed up from the melting ice. The consequences are global, said study researcher Carlota Escutia of the Andalusian Institute of Earth Sciences in Spain.

"This phenomenon influences the dynamics of global primary productivity," Escutia said in a statement. Primary productivity is the basis of the food chain: Photosynthetic organisms such as plankton take sunlight and nutrients such as iron and nitrate and turn them into organic compounds. Larger organisms then eat the plankton and make use of those compounds to provide themselves with energy.

"The great change came when the [plankton] species simplified their form and found they were forced to adapt to the new climate conditions," Escutia said.

The icy ecosystem that formed after the Eocene is marked by high plankton numbers in the spring and summer, which sets off a short-lived feeding frenzy as plankton-eating species such as whales gorge themselves while they can.

"The explosion of dinoflagellates adapted to a temporary sea ice cover testifies to an in-depth reorganization of the food web in the Southern Ocean," study researcher Jörg Pross, a paleoclimatologist at Goethe University in Germany, said in a statement. "Our data suggest that this change may have promoted the evolution of modern baleen whales and penguins."

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

Ancient Human Innovations Linked to Climate Shifts

Stone tools known as bifacial points recovered
from Blombos Cave, South Africa. They were
made during the Middle Stone Age, about
75,000 years ago, by anatomically modern
humans. Scale bar: 1 cm (0.4 inches).
CREDIT: Courtesy of Christopher Henshilwood,
University of the Witwatersrand

Ancient Human Innovations Linked to Climate Shifts
May 21, 2013 | Live Science | Douglas Main

The climate of South Africa was once much wetter than it is today, and those lush times may have spurred human populations through especially innovative periods, new research shows.
Evidence from these ancient periods suggests humans produced new tools, and used symbolism in wall engravings. The findings suggest a tight link between abrupt climate changes and the emergence of modern human traits, researchers say.

"We provide for the first time really good evidence that the occurrence and disappearance of these first finds of human innovations are linked to climate change," said study author Martin Ziegler, an earth science researcher at Cardiff University in Wales.

Before these periods of innovation, humans were quite primitive, with the most impressive technology being hand axes, Ziegler said. But during these wet periods, more advanced stone and bone tools appear in the fossil record, as well as painted symbols on cave walls that suggest the development of language.

Archaeologists have also found some of the first evidence of constructed plant beds during these periods, and shells thought to be worn as adornments or jewelry, Ziegler said. Among the most important periods analyzed in the study date to 71,000, and a period between 64,000 and 59,000 years ago. [Top 10 Mysteries of the First Humans]

In the study, Ziegler's team reconstructed South Africa's climate over the last 100,000 years. They pieced together the record by analyzing sediment cores taken from the offshore region near the southeastern tip of Africa.

Chemicals within the sediment suggest how much rainfall fell nearby, Ziegler said, as well as other indicators of climate.

The climate reconstruction agrees with records from elsewhere in the world. During these lush periods in South Africa, much of the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa was experiencing a drought, while much of the Northern Hemisphere was very cold, Ziegler said. The study suggests that cold conditions in the north reoriented Atlantic Ocean currents, shifting the global monsoon belt — with its torrential rains — to the south, he said.

The study shows an association, but not a cause-and-effect relationship between wetter conditions and human innovation. But it may be that during these periods, drought farther north forced ancient humans into South African refuges, leading to a "bottleneck" of competition, and cross-cultural fertilization, Ziegler said.

Future work may look at the connection between human populations elsewhere, and local climate shifts.

But insights from these locations in South Africa are vital, because they are thought to "reflect the emergence of modern behaviors of innovation, language and cultural identity," the authors wrote in the study, published today (May 21) in the journal Nature Communications.

Email Douglas Main or follow him on Twitter or Google+. Follow us @livescience,  Facebook or Google+. Article originally on LiveScience.com.

Neanderthals’ large eyes might have led to their extinction

Neanderthals’ large eyes might have led to their extinction
Mar 14, 2013 | Phenomenica

Neanderthals became extinct because they had larger eyes than modern humans, a new study of skulls of the now extinct species has suggested.

As Neanderthals had larger eye, researchers believe more of their brain was devoted to seeing in the long, dark nights in Europe, at the expense of high-level processing, according to the BBC.

Neanderthals are a closely related species of human that lived in Europe from around 250,000 years ago. They coexisted and interacted briefly with our species until they went extinct about 28,000 years ago, in part due to an ice age, explained researchers of the study, which is published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B Journal.

The research team wanted to explore the idea that the ancestor of Neanderthals left Africa and had to adapt to the longer, darker nights and murkier days of Europe. The result was that Neanderthals evolved larger eyes and a much larger visual processing area at the back of their brains.

The humans that stayed in Africa, on the other hand, continued to enjoy bright and beautiful days and so had no need for such an adaption. Instead, these people, our ancestors, evolved their frontal lobes, associated with higher level thinking, before they spread across the globe.

Eiluned Pearce of Oxford University decided to check this theory.

She compared the skulls of 32 Homo sapiens and 13 Neanderthal skulls and found that Neanderthals had significantly larger eye sockets – on average 6mm longer from top to bottom.

Although this seems like a small amount, she said that it was enough for Neanderthals to use significantly more of their brain to process visual information.

Since Neanderthals evolved at higher latitudes, more of the Neanderthal brain would have been dedicated to vision and body control, leaving less brain to deal with other functions like social networking, she explained to BBC News.

 Prof Chris Stringer, an expert in human origins at the Natural History Museum in London but also involved in the research, also agreed.

“We infer that Neanderthals had a smaller cognitive part of the brain and this would have limited them, including their ability to form larger groups. If you live in a larger group, you need a larger brain in order to process all those extra relationships,” he said.

The researchers also assumed that the Neanderthals more visually focused brain structure might also have affected their ability to innovate and to adapt to the ice age that was thought to have contributed to their demise.

The results contradict emerging research that Neanderthals were not the stupid brutish creatures portrayed in Hollywood films, but may well have been as intelligent as our species.

Oxford University’s Prof Robin Dunbar, who supervised the study, said that the team wanted to avoid restoring the stereotypical image of Neanderthals.

“They were very, very smart, but not quite in the same league as Homo sapiens,” he told BBC News.
He suggested that the difference might have been enough to tip the balance when things were beginning to get tough at the end of the last ice age.

ANI

Image credit: Wikimedia

Human intelligence is declining according to Stanford geneticist

AFP Photo / Johannes Eisele

Human intelligence is declining according to Stanford geneticist
Feb 18, 2013 | RT.com

Ever can’t help but think you’re surrounded by idiots? A leading scientist at Stanford University thinks he has the answer, and the bad news is things aren’t likely to get any better.

Dr. Gerald Crabtree, a geneticist at Stanford, has published a study that he conducted to try and identify the progression of modern man’s intelligence. As it turns out, however, Dr. Crabtree’s research led him to believe that the collective mind of mankind has been on more or a less a downhill trajectory for quite some time.

According to his research, published in two parts starting with last year’s ‘Our fragile intellect. Part I,’ Dr. Crabtree thinks unavoidable changes in the genetic make-up coupled with modern technological advances has left humans, well, kind of stupid. He has recently published his follow-up analysis, and in it explains that of the roughly 5,000 genes he considered the basis for human intelligence, a number of mutations over the years has forced modern man to be only a portion as bright as his ancestors.

“New developments in genetics, anthropology and neurobiology predict that a very large number of genes underlie our intellectual and emotional abilities, making these abilities genetically surprisingly fragile,” he writes in part one of his research. “Analysis of human mutation rates and the number of genes required for human intellectual and emotional fitness indicates that we are almost certainly losing these abilities,” he adds in his latest report.

From there, the doctor goes on to explain that general mutations over the last few thousand years have left mankind increasingly unable to cope with certain situations that perhaps our ancestors would be more adapted to.

“I would wager that if an average citizen from Athens of 1000 BC were to appear suddenly among us, he or she would be among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions, with a good memory, a broad range of ideas, and a clear-sighted view of important issues. Furthermore, I would guess that he or she would be among the most emotionally stable of our friends and colleagues. I would also make this wager for the ancient inhabitants of Africa, Asia, India or the Americas, of perhaps 2000–6000 years ago. The basis for my wager comes from new developments in genetics, anthropology, and neurobiology that make a clear prediction that our intellectual and emotional abilities are genetically surprisingly fragile.”

According to the doctor, humans were at their most intelligent when “every individual was exposed to nature’s raw selective mechanisms on a daily basis.” Under those conditions, adaption, he argued, was much more of a matter than fight or flight. Rather, says the scientists, it was a sink or swim situation for generations upon generations.

"We, as a species, are surprisingly intellectually fragile and perhaps reached a peak 2,000 to 6,000 years ago," he writes. "If selection is only slightly relaxed, one would still conclude that nearly all of us are compromised compared to our ancient ancestors of 3,000 to 6,000 years ago.”

That doesn’t mean it’s all downhill, though. Dr. Crabtree says, “although our genomes are fragile, our society is robust almost entirely by virtue of education, which allow strengths to be rapidly distributed to all members." 

"We have a long time to solve it. People 300 years ago had no idea where we'd be scientifically now," he says. "We'll be able to deal with this problem with a range of humane and ethical solutions."

Comet impact did not wipe out prehistoric humans

Image credit: NationalGeograpgic & Science/AAAS

Comet impact did not wipe out prehistoric humans
Feb 1, 2013 | Phenomenica

Comet explosions did not end the prehistoric human culture, known as Clovis, which existed in North America 13,000 years ago, according to a new research.

Researchers from Royal Holloway University, together with Sandia National Laboratories and 13 other universities across the United States and Europe, have found evidence that rebuts the belief that a large impact or airburst caused a significant and abrupt change to the Earth’s climate and terminated the Clovis culture. They argue that other explanations must be found for the apparent disappearance.

Clovis is the name archaeologists have given to the earliest well-established human culture in the North American continent. It is named after the town in New Mexico, where distinct stone tools were found in the 1920s and 1930s.

Researchers argue that no appropriately sized impact craters from that time period have been discovered, and no shocked material or any other features of impact have been found in sediments. They also found that samples presented in support of the impact hypothesis were contaminated with modern material and that no physics model can support the theory.

“The theory has reached zombie status. Whenever we are able to show flaws and think it is dead, it reappears with new, equally unsatisfactory, arguments,” said Professor Andrew Scott from the Department of Earth Sciences at Royal Holloway.

“Hopefully new versions of the theory will be more carefully examined before they are published,” Scott added.

The research was published in the journal Geophysical Monograph Series.

ANI

Large aquifer found under Mexican capital

Image credit: EFE

Large aquifer found under Mexican capital
Jan 23, 2013 | Phenomenica

A team of geologists has discovered a large aquifer far beneath Mexico City that could supply potable water to the capital for many decades and serve as a reserve basin in times of drought, authorities said Monday.

“It’s a deep aquifer of significant proportions, but they haven’t been quantified yet and the next step is to carry out the necessary studies to see its real potential for sustainable extraction,” Mexico City’s water systems director, Ramon Aguirre, said in a radio interview.

Although news accounts have said the aquifer could supply the capital’s water needs for a century, Aguirre did not confirm that estimate.

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“That would be great,” Aguirre said, adding that the water basin is an important discovery because it could provide emergency supplies during droughts.

“Even if there’s more than 100 years of extractable water … that doesn’t mean it’s enough to supply the city for more than 100 years. That difference needs to be pointed out,” the official said.

He also noted that development of this new reserve will not affect other Mexico City aquifers or lead to sinkholes because clay layers separate one water basin from another.

Mexico City has been gradually sinking for centuries because water is drawn from underground aquifers faster than it can be replenished by rainfall and other natural sources.

Aguirre said exploration work began 18 months ago and that up to three more years of studies will be needed to determine the aquifer’s yield capacity.

The project has an estimated price tag of as much as 500 million pesos ($39.3 million).

IANS