The ancient Greek Antikythera mechanism may be even older than thought. According to a New Scientist article, the portable clockwork computer would date to 200 B.C.
Here is a breathtaking new animation by Mogi Vicentini, an Italian astronomer and computer scientist, showing how the world's oldest computer helped the Ancient Greeks simulate planetary motions and predict lunar eclipses. For a full video of the virtual model, just visit Vicentini's website.
A few days ago I reported on the discovery in Tuscany of a lotion that is over 2000 years old, left almost intact in the cosmetic case of an aristocratic Etruscan woman (that's what I call an anti-ageing cream).
Her name was Thana Presnti Plecunia Umranalisa. But don't look for any of her descendants in Tuscany.
Researchers at the Universities of Florence, Ferrara, Pisa, Venice and Parma established that modern Tuscans show no genetic relationship to the Etruscans who occupied the area during the Bronze Age.
The research team compared DNA from the remains of Etruscans, Medieval Tuscans -- those who lived between the 10th and 15th centuries -- and people living in the region today.
While there was a clear genetic link between Medieval Tuscans and the current population, no link could be found between modern Tuscans and the Etruscans.
"Some people have hypothesized that the most ancient DNA sequences, those from the Etruscan era, could contain errors or have been contaminated, but tests conducted with new methods exclude this,'' said David Caramelli of Florence University and Guido Barbujani of Ferrara University.
The researchers believe that the structure of the Tuscan population underwent important demographic changes in the first millennium before Christ.
"Immigration and forced migration have diluted the Etruscan genetic inheritance so much as to make it difficult to recognise," they said.
The scientific data does not necessarily mean that the Etruscans died out.
Teams from Florence and Ferrara Universities are working to identify whether traces of the Etruscans' genetic inheritance may still exist in people living in isolated locations in the region.
The Parthenon Marbles again. A new imaging technique developed by the British Museum has found that the Elgin Marbles were originally coated with shades of blue (here is the full story).
Although scholars have long suspected that the Parthenon was once brightly colored, no evidence has previously been found to support this belief. Now the new study finally confirms that Athens' most sacred shrine was brigthly colored.
The splash of color in the Parthenon was not exception in antiquity. Last year, an intriguing exhibition called Gods in Color: Painted Sculpture of Classical Antiquity clearly showed that antique marble sculpture was not white, but colored.
Resulting from a 25 year research by an international team of of scholars led by Vinzenz Brinkmann, head of the Collection of Antiques of the Liebieghaus in Frankfurt, Germany, the exhibition reproduced more than 20 copies of famous ancient Greek marble statues and sculptures in their true colors of blue, red, green and yellow.
Call it a case of archaeology by biology. A new study published in the journal PloS One, finds that North Americans started dying from anthrax some 13,000 years ago.
Best known for the 2001
bioterror attacks that killed five people, the gram-positive, spore-forming Bacillus
anthracis was believed to be an Old World disease that was introduced in
North America by Christopher Columbus and other
conquistadors in the late 15th century.
But at least for anthrax, Columbus was not guilty.
When the explorer set foot in the Americas, the cattle-killer was already present in North American grasslands: the deadly anthrax spores arrived in North America over the now-vanished Bering Land Bridge that connected Asia and Alaska during a past Ice Age.
“Humans appear to have brought B. anthracis to this area from Asia and then moved it further south as an ice-free corridor opened in central Canada about 13,000 years ago," the researchers reported.
Just click
here to read the full story.
The face of Meresamun, a priestess who sang in the temples of Ancient Egypt hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, has been revealed to the world for the first time thanks to a X-ray with a light ten billion times brighter than the sun.
Known as Joint Engineering, Environmental and Processing beamline or Jeep, the cutting edge technology uses intense radiation known as synchrotron light to see through solid objects.
The Jeep beamline showed astonishing 3D images of the a 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummy, still wrapped in her linen bandages.
According to an inscription on the casket, Meresamun (whose name means “She Lives for Amun”) served as a “Singer in the Interior of the Temple of Amun”. She was in her late twenties or early thirties when she died.
An exhibition featuring the mummy is running at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute Museum ("The Life of Meresamun: A Temple Singer in Ancient Egypt”, until December 6, 2009)
Here is a video showing the virtual unwrapping of the mummy. One roughly oval-shaped amulet covers each of Meresamun's eyes. Her eyeballs are shrunken but intact.
Researchers have discovered the world's oldest stash of marijuana.
Found in a tomb in China's remote Xinjiang province, home to the Uyghur people who are Chinese Muslims, the cache of dried cannabis was dated at 2,700 years old.
According to a research paper in the Journal of Experimental Botany , the plant was clearly "cultivated for psychoactive purposes," rather than as fibre for clothing or as food.
The 789 gram find was contained in a leather basket and in a wooden bowl. Alongside, was a blue-eyed, light-haired Caucasian man believed to be a shaman of the Gushi culture.
"It was common practice in burials to provide materials needed for the afterlife. No hemp or seeds were provided for fabric or food. Rather, cannabis as medicine or for visionary purposes was supplied," American neurologist Ethan B. Russo, the paper main author, said.
The lack of moisture and the alkaline soil preserved the stash so well that it still looked green though it had lost its distinctive odour.
"To our knowledge, these investigations provide the oldest documentation of cannabis as a pharmacologically active agent," Russo and colleagues concluded.
Ötzi the Iceman, the 5300-year-old mummified "Iceman" discovered in 1991 in a melting glacier in the Ötztal Alps, is back in the news .
An international team of researchers led by Franco Rollo and Luca Ermini at the University of Camerino, Italy, has sequenced Öetzi's entire mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) genome - which is passed down through the maternal line – and found that he belonged to a previously unknown branch of the human family tree.
The sequence represents "the oldest complete Homo sapiens mtDNA genome," according to the report published in Current Biology.
The study overturns previous research that suggested Öetzi has some living relatives, since he belonged to a genetic lineage known as K1 -- a line shared by about 8% of modern Europeans.
Using advanced genome-sequencing technologies, Rollo's team investigated the K1 haplogroup, which in turn, can be divided into three clusters.
Surprisingly, the Iceman's DNA did not fit any of the three known K1 clusters. On the contrary, Ötzi's DNA was found to belong to a novel branch of K1. The researchers named it "Ötzi's branch", or K1ö.
"This doesn't simply mean that Ötzi had some 'personal' mutations making him different from the others but that, in the past, there was a group of men and women sharing the same mitochondrial DNA. Apparently, this genetic group is no longer present. We don't know whether it is extinct or it has become extremely rare." Rollo said.
At least for the moment, he said, that means no one can claim to be the descendant of Ötzi.
My latest news story on Egyptian mummies, from today Discovery News:
Egyptian Mummies Yield Earliest Evidence of Malaria
Basically, there are two reasons why this discovery is important. First, it reveals that malaria was endemic in ancient Egypt (this was only been speculated on the basis of the report by Herodotus and some very faint evidence form ancient Egyptian papyri).
Most importantly, the identification of ancient DNA for the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum may help develop new treatments: researchers are now hopeful to identify the “precursor” of the malaria pathogens.
How has the Parthenon in Athens managed to retain its magnificent structure and survive several major earthquakes since it was built in the fifth century B.C., asks the Daily Yomiuri, Japan's largest English-language newspaper.
To find the right answer, a team of Japanese scientists will next month look into seismic resistance secrets in the design of the 2,500-year-old monument.
Perennially clad in constructors' scaffolding, the Parthenon "had great resilience to earthquakes, as did most classical Greek temples," said Maria Ioannidou, the archaeologist in charge of conservation of the ancient Acropolis citadel where the Parthenon stands.
"The ancient Greeks apparently had very good knowledge of quake behaviour and excellent construction quality," Ioannidou said.
Here is the full story.
Photo courtesy of Kim O'Connor
Recent Comments