Ice Cores May Yield Clues To 5,000-Year-Old Mystery COLUMBUS, Ohio -- The latest expeditions to ice caps in the high, tropical Peruvian Andes Mountains by Ohio State University scientists may shed light on a mysterious global climate change they believe occurred more than 5,000 years ago. They hope that ice cores retrieved from two tropical ice caps there, as well as ancient plants retrieved from beneath the retreating glaciers, may contain clues that could link ancient events that changed daily life in South America, Europe and Asia. Something happened 5,200 years ago that was abrupt and very large-scale, explained Lonnie Thompson, professor of geological sciences at Ohio State and researcher with the Byrd Polar Research Center. As snow falls on these ice caps and is packed tightly over time, it forms stratigraphic layers indicating annual accumulations. Researchers can estimate the age of a core by counting these layers just as biologists date forests by counting tree rings. This is a soft-bodied plant, he said.
When Earth's Human Population Was 18,500! Scientists have calculated that for a period lasting one million years and beginning 1.2 million years ago, at a time when our ancestors were spreading through Africa, Europe and Asia, there were probably between 18,500 to 26,000 individuals capable of breeding (and no more than 26,000). This made them an endangered species with a smaller population than today’s species such as gorillas which number 25,000 breeding individuals and chimpanzees (21,000). Researchers have proposed a number of explanations , such as events in which a significant proportion of the population is killed or prevented from reproducing. One such event was the Toba super-volcano in Indonesia that erupted around 70,000 years ago, triggering a nuclear winter. The new research is concerned with the entire genome rather than specific genetic lineages studied in the earlier research work. Human geneticist Lynn B. Casey Kazan Sources: PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on January 19.
Living Bridges in India Have Grown for 500 Years (Pics) Photo Credit:Vanlal. via Flickr with photographer's permission Some of the smartest, most sustainable engineering feats were discovered hundreds of years ago, and many have gone unacknowledged. For evidence, take the bridge growers of northeastern India. Planning 10-15 years in advance, they build what may be the most sustainable foot bridges in the world -- by literally growing them out of living tree roots. These bridges are extremely sturdy, reach up to 100 feet long, and many are at least 500 years old.Requiring the harvesting of only a few betel nut trees to create, each root bridge is sturdy, efficient, and, well, alive. The War-Khasis, a tribe in Meghalaya, long ago noticed this tree and saw in its powerful roots an opportunity to easily cross the area's many rivers. Photo Credit: Vanial In order to make a rubber tree's roots grow in the right direction--say, over a river--the Khasis use betel nut trunks, sliced down the middle and hollowed out, to create root-guidance systems.
Signs of Atlantis found in southern Spain: scientists - Health Scientists say they may have discovered the lost city of Atlantis buried deep under the marshlands of southern Spain. The legendary city is believed to have been "swallowed up by the sea," as the Greek philosopher Plato so famously put it 2,400 years ago. He wrote of a great city destroyed by floodwaters following an earthquake deep under the sea — an image that resonates at a time when Japan is struggling to recover from a devastating earthquake and tsunami off its northeast coast. A National Geographic television special that aired on Sunday details the work of American, Canadian and Spanish scientists as they attempt to prove Atlantis existed by following up on space satellite images showing unusual features in an area just north of Cadiz. The area is near the Straits of Gibraltar — widely thought to be the "Pillars of Hercules" Plato mentioned in his description of the location of Atlantis. The team is led by archaeologist Richard Freund of the University of Hartford in Connecticut.
6 Foods To Eat If You're Skipping Meat "Lost" Language Found on Back of 400-Year-Old Letter Notes on the back of a 400-year-old letter have revealed a previously unknown language once spoken by indigenous peoples of northern Peru , an archaeologist says. Penned by an unknown Spanish author and lost for four centuries, the battered piece of paper was pulled from the ruins of an ancient Spanish colonial church in 2008. But a team of scientists and linguists has only recently revealed the importance of the words written on the flip side of the letter. The early 17th-century author had translated Spanish numbers—uno, dos, tres—and Arabic numerals into a mysterious language never seen by modern scholars. (Related: " 'Lost' Languages to Be Resurrected by Computers"? ) "Even though [the letter] doesn't tell us a whole lot, it does tell us about a language that is very different from anything we've ever known—and it suggests that there may be a lot more out there," said project leader Jeffrey Quilter , an archaeologist at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.
Setting Up A Food Storage Pantry | Personal Liberty Digest I strongly suggest you find a place in your home or on your property somewhere — either in a basement, spare bedroom, closet, junk room, under the stairway, heated garage, out building or root cellar — and turn it into your own home grocery store and pharmacy. Somehow, get shelves in there: Build them, have them built or buy them pre-built. The room needs to be well insulated so it doesn’t freeze in the winter or overheat in the summer. My pantry is located in the utility room next to my kitchen. My freezer is also located in this room, and I keep it stocked with the meats and frozen vegetables. I call my pantry “my home grocery store.” My Dehydrating, Sprouting And Baking Center On each side of my rolling shelves, I have regular shelves on which I keep my baking items. I like to dehydrate excess fruits and vegetables from my garden and orchard. I even dry tomatoes, onions, cabbage, corn, peas, beans and zucchini. I also sprinkle Italian herbs on slices of tomatoes and dry them. The Goal
The Ajanta Caves – Ancient Temples Carved from Rock Two thousand two hundred years ago work began on an extensive series of cave monuments in Maharashtra, India. Over a period of hundreds of years, thirty one monuments were hewn piece by piece from the rock face. Then, some speculate around the year 1000AD, they fell in to disuse. Dense jungle grew around, hiding the caves away from human eyes. They Ajanta caves lay undisturbed for hundreds of years. Then, in April 1819, during the time of the British Raj, an officer with the unassuming name of John Smith came rediscovered a doorway to one of the temples. One can only imagine what went through Smith's head when he made his find. The nearest human habitation is Ajinṭhā, a tiny village a few miles away from the caves. The first caves were hewn from the bare rock at the time of The Sātavāhana Empire which started around 230BC. There are paintings everywhere – literally. They were created using an ancient method. Image Credit Flickr User Ashok666
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