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Recent excavations conducted at the Stonehenge site, the first after 40 years, uncovered a series of pieces of evidence to the fact that pilgrims from all over Europe visited the monument for healing purposes. Archaeologists Geoffrey Wainwright and Timothy Darvill based their conclusion on the fact that the skel... |
23 September 2008
10:35 GMT |
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Ethiopia is the only African country that kept its own language and writing for over 25 centuries and the only African country with a strictly national writing system. Christianity rooted in Ethiopia starting the 4th century. The kingdom of Aksum was at its peak. Ezana, the most illustrious king of this dynasty, chos... |
8 April 2008
09:21 GMT |
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America still had to wait for an Ice Age to pass when modern humans entered Australia. Australian Aborigines make one of the world's oldest continuous culture (perhaps just the Bushmen of South Africa are older); some Australian archaeological sites revealed a 40,000-year-old Aboriginal presence. Now, a researc... |
8 April 2008
04:28 GMT |
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All the anthropologic manuals talk about the Clovis people as the first Native Americans. But South American fossils show that the continent was already inhabited by Asian Blacks (the type of the Papuans and Australian Aborigines) by the time Clovis entered North America. And a new research published in the journal "... |
4 April 2008
03:00 GMT |
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On the European plains, mysterious giant stones are found, forming alleys, circles or giant tables called "dolmens". They are the first monuments built by the mankind. A granite forest of dolmens and menhirs covers the Menec Field, near Carnac (French Brittany). In total, there are about 1,169 stones, with an average... |
31 March 2008
16:46 GMT |
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There is nothing more defining for the Egyptian civilization than the royal tombs called pyramids. Donald Redford, professor of Classics and ancient Mediterranean studies at Penn State has attempted, on Physorg.com, to explain how the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids, based on their solar religion. The Egyptian s... |
28 March 2008
09:45 GMT |
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The Neolithic (New Stone Age) was a period in the technological development of Homo sapiens that started at the end of the Ice Age, 10,000 years ago, and ended around the Mediterranean Sea and other areas about 5,500 years ago, when the Bronze Age started.It was the period when first human settlements appeared. Peopl... |
25 March 2008
12:27 GMT |
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One of the wonders of the American southwest is found in northeastern Arizona: an enormous petrified forest, a real geological treasure the scientists learned about to the end of the 19th century. Petrified Forest National Park from Arizona comprises a surface of 218,533 acres (341.5 sq mi; 885 km˛) of petrified wood... |
20 March 2008
10:19 GMT |
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During the Ice Age, the North Sea was just a grassy plain dwelt by mammoths, deer and ... humans. Now, the Dutch Jan Meulmeester, an amateur archaeologist, has discovered a unique collection of Stone Age hand axes made of material coming from the bottom of the North Sea. 28 axes, possibly up to 100,000 years old, wer... |
18 March 2008
05:04 GMT |
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Indonesia makes the world's largest archipelago, with 17,000 islands. One of its largest islands is Sulawesi (Celebes), which is like a bridge between Australia and Asia. A particular universe in Sulawesi is represented by Tana Toraja ("the Land of the Highlanders"), in the southern part of the island, dominated... |
13 March 2008
17:51 GMT |
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On the southern part of the French Brittany, near the town of Carnac (Karnag) and the village of Locmariaquer, very close to the Gulf of Morbihan, the most expensive Neolithic (New Stone Age) menhirs in the world are to be found. "Menhir" comes from the Celtic words "maen" (stone) and "hir" (long). These construction... |
10 March 2008
09:48 GMT |
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The Olmecs preceded the Maya culture by about a millennium and represent the oldest complex civilization in the Americas. They were the first to invent a writing system, as revealed by stone (serpentine) blocks, the so-called Cascajal blocks, found in 2006 in Southern Veracruz, Mexico. Their civilization is regarded ... |
28 February 2008
09:16 GMT |
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The most spectacular calcareous relief in the world could be considered the Chinese Stone Forest. The Stone Forest National Park of Shilin-Lunan (Yunnan) is located in the Lunan Yu Autonomous County, 126 km (79 mi) southeast of Kunming, at altitudes of 1,700-2,000 m. It has an area of over 340 square km (135 square m... |
26 February 2008
08:51 GMT |
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Stonehenge represents one of the most beautiful prehistoric places worldwide, located on the plain of Salisbury, about 130 km (80 mi) off London. Why was it raised there? The assembly was not formed just of the megaliths we see today, but it also comprised a circular fortification and an odd ring made of filled holes... |
15 February 2008
14:06 GMT |
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1.A rain forest represents an explosion of life, the peak of biological diversity on Earth. But the trees that make the current rainforest emerged during the Cretaceous, at the sunset of the dinosaur realm. So, when did the first rainforest appear? And how did it look like?The underground workings of a coalmine, in ... |
20 December 2007
10:23 GMT |
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Ancient cities were usually located on main rivers whose waters were a source of food and sometimes protection. But on the northwestern extremity of the Arabian Desert there was a city renowned for its lack of water: Petra. In the arid areas of the Middle East the caravan routes connected cities located at great dist... |
12 December 2007
08:38 GMT |
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Their origins are traced in ancient Egypt, but they "traveled" around the world, reaching cities like Istanbul, London, Paris, Rome and New York. The obelisk is a stone column with four sides thinning towards the upper part and ending with a pointed, pyramidal top. The oldest obelisks are 4,000 years old, while the ... |
29 November 2007
02:56 GMT |
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About 300,000 people annually in US enter the hospitals because of the kidney stones (medically called renal lithiases). The pain is excruciating, like that felt by women when giving birth. Some believe this condition is something recent, linked to modern lifestyle and junk food. In reality, people have been tortured... |
8 November 2007
17:11 GMT |
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Amongst many theories trying to explain the humans' physical appearance is that of the marine ape. But a new research reveals the oldest evidence of Homo sapiens living 164,000 years ago on the sea shore and feeding on sea food. Besides the so-called 'beach party', the new research shows a much more ad... |
18 October 2007
07:07 GMT |
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Perfection is to be found in this stone: a blue diamond sold at $7.98 million, establishing a new record as the most expensive gemstone per carat bought at auction. The buyer is Moussaieff Jewellers of London, a specialist in rare stones and the stone was sold by a private Asian collector at a Sotheby's auction ... |
9 October 2007
15:11 GMT |
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Before Columbus and the Vikings, other sailors could have entered the Americas: the Polynesians. This is strongly suggested by chickens grown by tribes in Peru and Chile, which do not have European ancestry, but Polynesian, but also by some cultural facts common to tribes of the Amazon and Malayo-Polynesians from Ind... |
1 October 2007
06:48 GMT |
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Diamonds may be a woman's dream but this one would break her neck if put on a necklace: it has the size of two fists, 7,000 carats and doubles what was till now the world's largest known diamond, the Cullinan or "Great Star of Africa", found in South Africa in 1905.The new one has been found by a small mini... |
31 August 2007
13:41 GMT |
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Once, Britain was a peninsula attached to Europe, but when the ice melted at the end of the Ice Age, it flooded the English Channel, turning Britain into a special island with such special people ...Now, erosion on the floor of the Channel exposed a Stone Age settlement just off the Isle of Wight, found to be 8,000 y... |
10 August 2007
06:38 GMT |
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This is somehow like the case of the frozen mammoths that still have meat on them. But if those mammoths are tens of thousands of years old, these trees are 8 million years, dating back from the time when Europe was a subtropical wet paradise. The trees look like ghost forests, but this rare cluster of fossilized tre... |
2 August 2007
07:07 GMT |
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People were still carving stone for tools when they started seafaring adventures. Tools of the most ancient seafarers known by now were found on the seabed off Cyprus: they are over 12,000 years old, long before the island became populated with its first permanent inhabitants, 10,000 B.C. The newly found items could ... |
20 July 2007
05:37 GMT |
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They may not be famous like Brad Pitt or Mick Jagger but they are the masterminds due to which you can enjoy Jurassic Park and all dinosaur-linked issues. And the Chinese paleontologist Xu Xing seems to be the rock star of this domain. "Three years ago someone said to me: 'You are in the top three in history in ... |
13 July 2007
05:43 GMT |
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This eruption was almost as disastrous as the meteorite impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. 74,000 years ago, the Sumatran Toba (western Indonesia) volcano threw the world in a volcanic winter followed by a severe ice age after expelling 720 cubic miles (3,000 cubic kilometers) of magma and huge amounts of sulfuric ... |
6 July 2007
03:26 GMT |
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When they found some odd looking stones dated tens of thousands of years ago, archaeologists already made a picture of the way people lived during Stone Age. Early people left a lot of projectile points made of stone which must have been affixed to arrow and spear shafts. Are those stones really projectile points? Wh... |
26 June 2007
04:12 GMT |
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In Central Australia, at the eastern edge of the Gibson Desert, there is a sandstone horst, Ayers Rock, appreciated to be "the world's largest rock", rising 348 m (1,142 ft) over the desert plateau (its maximum height is of 863 m (2,831 ft)), with a circumference of 9.4 km (5.8 mi). This is what erosion left fro... |
15 June 2007
15:16 GMT |
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Olive oil consumption keeps rising as it is considered much healthier than other food oils. But the olive oil extraction leaves large amounts of agricultural residues, like olive vegetable water, browse leaves and solid waste. A new research made by Dr. Germán Tenorio Rivas, a member of the research group "Solids co... |
29 May 2007
05:44 GMT |
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The mystery of one the seven great wonders of antiquity (and the only one that still survives) may have been solved: the 4,500-year-old Egypt's Great Pyramid of Cheops could have been built from the inside out.The 146.6 m (480.9 ft) tall pyramid has 3 million stone blocks, each weighing roughly 2.5 tons, and the... |
31 March 2007
06:58 GMT |
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In the 1960s, archaeologists found the remains of 14 people at Wayland's Smithy, near Uffington White Horse, Oxfordshire. The bones were dated employing the latest technique at between 3590 - 3560 BC, and many clues made experts imagine that the people may have been killed in a Neolithic ("The Last Stone") Age ... |
13 March 2007
08:33 GMT |
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