Prisca Sapientia, Science in Cryptomnesia, Dissident and Heretical Natural Philosophy, Abiotic Hydrocarbon Origin, Infinite Oil, The Cold Mantle, Expansion Tectonics, Pacific Biogeography, Euclidean Geometry, Electric Universe, Electromagnetic Gravity, Colliding Worlds, The Birth of Venus, The Reversal of Retrograde Rotation, Catastrophism, Global Pyramids, Atlantis In Antarctica, Extreme Human Antiquity, Ancient Technology, Giants and Dragons, Alien Astronauts, & Intelligent Design
black holes may be "building" their own host galaxy.
By experimentally switching genes off or on at specific stages in an animal’s lifecycle, UCSF scientists have discovered that vigor and lifespan can be significantly extended with no side effects. Many researchers believe that increasing lifespan will dampen reproduction. But the new study of the tiny roundworm commonly known as C. elegans shows that silencing a key gene only in adulthood increases longevity with no effect on reproduction.Perlman, D., Worm's Life Extended Sixfold, San Francisco Chronicle, Oct 2003
A UC San Francisco scientist seeking to understand the mysteries of aging has altered the genetics of a nearly microscopic worm to keep it alive and thriving for more than six times its normal lifespan.Highfield, R., Scientists Find the Elixir of Eternal Life - In A Worm, Telegraph, May 2007
Earlier experiments by noted molecular biologist Cynthia Kenyon and her colleagues had doubled and quadrupled the life spans of the primitive roundworm called Caenorhabiditis elegans by lowering the activity of a single gene, known as daf-2.
The seemingly far-fetched day when all of us could extend our life spans by up to 30 years simply by taking a pill has moved a step closer, with the discovery of a "longevity gene" in the humble worm.Harran, B., Secrets of the 'Immortal Worms', BBC, Mar 2008
The small waterway behind Nottingham's Queens Medical Centre looks unspectacular, but may help unlock the secret to increasing human lifespans.Stimulating 'Worm Gene' Could Help Repair Spinal Injuries, Daily Mail, Jan 2009
Scientist Aziz Aboobaker and fellow researchers use the outlet as a source of planaria (flatworms).
They say the worms are helping us understand stem cells and leading to advances in human medicine.
The planaria are special because they have a high proportion of adult stem cells, with Dr Aboobaker nicknaming them "immortal worms".
He says: "The coolest thing is that we can take a worm in the lab, chop its head off, and within seven days the worm has grown a whole new brain.
A gene that regenerates nerves in worms could be used in the same way to repair damaged cells in humans, researchers said today.Curran, S.P., et al., A Soma-to-Germline Transformation in Long-Lived Caenorhabditis Elegans Mutants, Nature, 459, Pages 1079-1084, Jun 2009
They hope their work could one day help people with spinal cord injuries.
The gene called dlk-1, is part of a network of four genes that exist in worms and humans and are essential for nerve repair.
'We found a pathway that not only regenerates nerves in the worm, but also exists in humans, and we think it serves the same purpose,' study author Dr Michael Bastiani of the University of Utah said.
Unlike the soma, which ages during the lifespan of multicellular organisms, the germ line traces an essentially immortal lineage. Genomic instability in somatic cells increases with age, and this decline in somatic maintenance might be regulated to facilitate resource reallocation towards reproduction at the expense of cellular senescence. Here we show that Caenorhabditis elegans mutants with increased longevity exhibit a soma-to-germline transformation of gene expression programs normally limited to the germ line. Decreased insulin-like signalling causes the somatic misexpression of the germline-limited pie-1 and pgl family of genes in intestinal and ectodermal tissues. The forkhead boxO1A (FOXO) transcription factor DAF-16, the major transcriptional effector of insulin-like signalling, regulates pie-1 expression by directly binding to the pie-1 promoter. The somatic tissues of insulin-like mutants are more germline-like and protected from genotoxic stress. Gene inactivation of components of the cytosolic chaperonin complex that induce increased longevity also causes somatic misexpression of PGL-1. These results indicate that the acquisition of germline characteristics by the somatic cells of C. elegans mutants with increased longevity contributes to their increased health and survival.Wade, N., In Worms Genetic Clues to Extending Longevity, The New York Times, Jun 2009
People die, but one part of them, at least in principle, is immortal. In the germline cells that produce eggs or sperm, biological time stands still. This is why babies are all born with the same age, the clock set to zero, regardless of the age of their parents.McGreevy, S., Researchers Learn How Mutations Extend Life Span, Harvard Science, Jun 2009
A little piece of the germline’s immortality, it now seems, can be acquired by the ordinary cells of the body, and used to give the organism extra longevity.
This is the conclusion of a research group at the Massachusetts General Hospital led by Sean P. Curran and Gary Ruvkun. Their studies were carried out in the laboratory round worm, C. elegans, but many of the discoveries later turned out to apply to people, too.
The finding may provide an explanation for the many recent experiments in which biologists have made laboratory organisms live longer by manipulating their genes. Most of these genes lie in what is known as the insulin-signaling pathway, which influences the body’s metabolism of fat and glucose.
When the pathway is disturbed, by deactivating one of its genes, the animal generally lives longer. The effect seems similar to the extension of life span enjoyed by laboratory mice when they are kept on a diet very low in calories.
Now, in a dramatic finding, researchers from the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Department of Molecular Biology have found that certain genetic mutations known to extend the life span of the C. elegans roundworm induce “mortal” somatic cells to express some of the genes that allow the “immortality” of reproductive germline cells. Their report will appear in the journal Nature and is receiving advance online release.
No one would mistake the Stone Age ivory carving for a Venus de Milo. The voluptuous woman depicted is, to say the least, earthier, with huge, projecting breasts and sexually explicit genitals.
Nicholas J. Conard, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen, in Germany, who found the small carving in a cave last year, said it was at least 35,000 years old, “one of the oldest known examples of figurative art” in the world. It is about 5,000 years older than some other so-called Venus artifacts made by early populations of Homo sapiens in Europe.
Another archaeologist, Paul Mellars of the University of Cambridge, in England, agreed and went on to remark on the obvious. By modern standards, he said, the figurine’s blatant sexuality “could be seen as bordering on the pornographic.”
ScienceDaily (Nov. 27, 2009) — Years of scientific debate over the extinction of ancient species in North America have yielded many theories. However, new findings from J. Tyler Faith, GW Ph.D. candidate in the hominid paleobiology doctoral program, and Todd Surovell, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Wyoming, reveal that a mass extinction occurred in a geological instant.A "geological instant" doesn't sound "slow and gradual" to me: Catastrophism 1-Uniformitarianism 0.
A carbon-rich black layer, dating to ≈12.9 ka, has been previously identified at ≈50 Clovis-age sites across North America and appears contemporaneous with the abrupt onset of Younger Dryas (YD) cooling. The in situ bones of extinct Pleistocene megafauna, along with Clovis tool assemblages, occur below this black layer but not within or above it. Causes for the extinctions, YD cooling, and termination of Clovis culture have long been controversial. In this paper, we provide evidence for an extraterrestrial (ET) impact event at ≅12.9 ka, which we hypothesize caused abrupt environmental changes that contributed to YD cooling, major ecological reorganization, broad-scale extinctions, and rapid human behavioral shifts at the end of the Clovis Period. Clovis-age sites in North American are overlain by a thin, discrete layer with varying peak abundances of (i) magnetic grains with iridium, (ii) magnetic microspherules, (iii) charcoal, (iv) soot, (v) carbon spherules, (vi) glass-like carbon containing nanodiamonds, and (vii) fullerenes with ET helium, all of which are evidence for an ET impact and associated biomass burning at ≈12.9 ka.New Scientist (May 07): Firestorm from space wiped out prehistoric Americans.
THE Clovis people of North America, flourishing some 13,000 years ago, had a mastery of stone weaponry that stood them in good stead against the constant threat of large carnivores, such as American lions and giant short-faced bears. It's unlikely, however, that they thought death would come from the sky.New Scientist (Dec 07): Ancient flood brought Gulf Stream to a halt .
According to results presented by a team of 25 researchers this week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Acapulco, Mexico, that's where the Clovis people's doom came from. Citing several lines of evidence, the team suggests that a wayward comet hurtled into Earth's atmosphere around 12,900 years ago, fractured into pieces and exploded in giant fireballs. Debris seems to have settled as far afield as Europe.
Jim Kennett, an oceanographer at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and one of the team's three principal investigators, claims immense wildfires scorched North America in the aftermath, killing large populations of mammals
It was the biggest climate event of the last 10,000 years and caused the most dramatic change in the weather since humans began farming. And it may yet hold important lessons about climate change in the 21st century.Science (Jan 09): Nanodiamonds in the Younger Dryas Boundary Sediment Layer.
Just over 8000 years ago, a huge glacial lake in Canada burst, and an estimated 100,000 cubic kilometres of fresh water rushed into the North Atlantic. Researchers now say they know for sure that this catastrophic event shut down the Gulf Stream and cooled parts of the northern hemisphere by several degrees for more than a hundred years.
They say the findings show modelling studies are right to suggest that something similar could happen with equal abruptness
We report abundant nanodiamonds in sediments dating to 12.9 ± 0.1 thousand calendar years before the present at multiple locations across North America. Selected area electron diffraction patterns reveal two diamond allotropes in this boundary layer but not above or below that interval. Cubic diamonds form under high temperature-pressure regimes, and n-diamonds also require extraordinary conditions, well outside the range of Earth's typical surficial processes but common to cosmic impacts. N-diamond concentrations range from 10 to 3700 parts per billion by weight, comparable to amounts found in known impact layers. These diamonds provide strong evidence for Earth's collision with a rare swarm of carbonaceous chondrites or comets at the onset of the Younger Dryas cool interval, producing multiple airbursts and possible surface impacts, with severe repercussions for plants, animals, and humans in North America.National Geographic (Jan 09): Diamonds Link Comets to Killer Freeze 13,000 Years Ago.
Diamond dust found in 12,900-year-old sediments at six North American sites boosts evidence of Earth's impact with a swarm of comets at that time, researchers reported today.Washington Post (Jan 09): Gems Point to Comet as Answer to Ancient Riddle.
The discovery supports the theory that an impact with an extraterrestrial object may have contributed to the disappearance of large mammals and the Clovis culture of prehistoric humans, the scientists say.
Scientists proposed in 2007 that a cosmic impact, possibly by multiple airbursts of comets, set off a 1,300-year-long cold spell known as the Younger Dryas, fragmented the prehistoric Clovis culture and led to the extinction of a large range of animals, including mammoths, across North America.
In today's issue of the journal Science, a team led by the University of Oregon's Douglas J. Kennett, a member of the 2007 research team, reports finding billions of microscopic-size diamonds in sediments in the six locations (see map below) during digs funded by the National Science Foundation.
"The nanodiamonds that we found at all six locations exist only in sediments associated with the Younger Dryas Boundary layers, not above it or below it," said Kennett, a University of Oregon archaeologist, in a university press release.
Kennett and colleagues say the only obvious explanation for the concentration of nanodiamonds (seen in the image on the left) is that they were created in the high-energy environment of an impact by a comet or other extraterrestrial object.
"These discoveries provide strong evidence for a cosmic impact event at approximately 12,900 years ago that would have had enormous environmental consequences for plants, animals and humans across North America."
Something dramatic happened about 12,900 years ago, and the continent of North America was never the same. A thriving culture of Paleo-Americans, known as the Clovis people, vanished seemingly overnight. Gone, too, were most of the largest animals: horses, camels, lions, mammoths, mastodons, saber-toothed cats, ground sloths and giant armadillos.
Scientists have long blamed climate change for the extinctions, for it was 12,900 years ago that the planet's emergence from the Ice Age came to a halt, reverting to glacial conditions for 1,500 years, an epoch known as the Younger Dryas.
In just the last few years, there has arisen a controversial scientific hypothesis to explain this chain of events, and it involves an extraterrestrial calamity: a comet, broken into fragments, turning the sky ablaze, sending a shock wave across the landscape and scorching forests, creatures, people and anything exposed to the heavenly fire.
Now the proponents of this apocalyptic scenario say they have found a new line of evidence: nanodiamonds. They say they have found these tiny structures across North America in sediments from 12,900 years ago, and they argue that the diamonds had to have been formed by a high-temperature, high-pressure event, such as a cometary impact.
ScienceDaily (Nov. 24, 2009) — Leaf-cutter ants, which cultivate fungus for food, have many remarkable qualities.The New York Times: Fossil Shows Ants Evolved Much Earlier Than Thought
Here's a new one to add to the list: the ant farmers, like their human counterparts, depend on nitrogen-fixing bacteria to make their gardens grow. The finding, reported Nov. 20 in the journal Science, documents a previously unknown symbiosis between ants and bacteria and provides insight into how leaf-cutter ants have come to dominate the American tropics and subtropics.
What's more, the work, conducted by a team led by University of Wisconsin-Madison bacteriologist Cameron Currie, identifies what is likely the primary source of terrestrial nitrogen in the tropics, a setting where nutrients are otherwise scarce.
"Nitrogen is a limiting resource," says Garret Suen, a UW-Madison postdoctoral fellow and a co-author of the new study. "If you don't have it, you can't survive."
Indeed, the partnership between ant and microbe permits leaf-cutters to be amazingly successful. Their underground nests, some the size of small houses, can harbor millions of inhabitants. In the Amazon forest they comprise four times more biomass than do all land animals combined.
Researchers have found seven ants in amber that are among the oldest ever found, making it clear that what may be the world's most populous terrestrial creatures were underfoot and already diversifying when dinosaurs trod the earth.
A team from the American Museum of Natural History, led by Dr. David Grimaldi, curator of entomology, found seven ants that were about 92 million years old when they excavated a muddy site in New Jersey that is rich in amber, the researchers reported today in the journal Nature. The ants are of four species.
LONDON (Nov. 23) -- East Africa's albinos have long suffered because of the color of their skin. Some are abandoned as babies by parents who regard their lack of pigment as a curse. Many more are subjected to taunts of "zeru" (Swahili for ghost) in school and on the street. But now Tanzania and Burundi's 8,000 albinos face a more horrible threat, fueled by a macabre combination of superstition and economics.
Over the past two years -- according to a new report from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies -- at least 56 albinos in the two countries have been murdered, and their body parts used by witch doctors to make charms and potions. The last known killing took place on Oct. 21, when albino hunters attacked 10-year-old Gasper Elikana in northern Tanzania. A gang of men hacked the boy to death in front of his family and neighbors -- who were wounded trying to protect the child -- before fleeing with his severed leg.
ScienceDaily (Nov. 22, 2009) — Solar wind generated by the sun is probably driven by a process involving powerful magnetic fields, according to a new study led by UCL (University College London) researchers based on the latest observations from the Hinode satellite.
Scientists have long speculated on the source of solar winds. The Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrometer (EIS), on board the Japanese-UK-US Hinode satellite, is now generating unprecedented observations enabling scientists to provide a new perspective on the 50-year old question of how solar wind is driven. The collaborative study, published in this month's issue of Astrophysical Journal, suggests that a process called slipping reconnection may drive these winds.
Deb Baker, lead author from UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory, says: "Solar wind is an outflow of million-degree gas and magnetic field that engulfs the Earth and other planets. It fills the entire solar system and links with the magnetic fields of the Earth and other planets. Changes in the Sun's million-mile-per-hour wind can induce disturbances within near-Earth space and our upper atmosphere and yet we still don't know what drives these outflows.
From: Phil JonesBelow: Global Warming In Australia (May 2009)
To: ray bradley ,mann@xxxxx.xxx, mhughes@xxxx.xxx
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@xxx.xx.xx,t.osborn@xxxx.xxx
Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or
first thing tomorrow.
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual
land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land
N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999
for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with
data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.
Cheers
Phil
Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) xxxxx
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) xxxx
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@xxxx.xxx
NR4 7TJ
UK
Temperature of the sun’s corona: 1–2 million kelvin
Temperature of the sun’s photosphere: 6,000 kelvin
Temperature of the Earths mantle, more than “2 kilometers or so down”: between 500 °C to 900 °C (773 to 1173 kelvin)
Watching Gore make a complete scientific idiot of himself on national TV: priceless
ScienceDaily (Nov. 19, 2009) — Researchers from Stony Brook University Medical Center in New York have confirmed that Homo floresiensis is a genuine ancient human species and not a descendant of healthy humans dwarfed by disease. Using statistical analysis on skeletal remains of a well-preserved female specimen, researchers determined the "hobbit" to be a distinct species and not a genetically flawed version of modern humans.
ScienceDaily (Nov. 6, 2009) — Scientists in Washington, D.C. are reporting laboratory evidence supporting the possibility that some of Earth's oil and natural gas may have formed in a way much different than the traditional process described in science textbooks.
ScienceDaily (Nov. 17, 2009) — Hardening of the arteries has been detected in Egyptian mummies, some as old as 3,500 years, suggesting that the factors causing heart attack and stroke are not only modern ones; they afflicted ancient people, too.This is isn't really that shocking coming from an ancient nation of smokers and cocaine addicts.
Study results are appearing in the Nov. 18 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and are being presented Nov. 17 at the Scientific Session of the American Heart Association at Orlando, Fla.
ScienceDaily (Nov. 17, 2009) — Using ESO's Very Large Telescope and its ability to obtain images as sharp as if taken from space, astronomers have made the first time-lapse movie of a rather unusual shell ejected by a "vampire star," which in November 2000 underwent an outburst after gulping down part of its companion's matter.Unusual so-called "shell"? Really?
ScienceDaily (Nov. 15, 2009) — Penguins that died 44,000 years ago in Antarctica [Atlantis] have provided extraordinary frozen DNA samples that challenge the accuracy of traditional genetic aging measurements, and suggest those approaches have been routinely underestimating the age of many specimens by 200 to 600 percent.
In other words, a biological specimen determined by traditional DNA testing to be 100,000 years old may actually be 200,000 to 600,000 years old, researchers suggest in a new report in Trends in Genetics, a professional journal.
The findings raise doubts about the accuracy of many evolutionary rates based on conventional types of genetic analysis.
"Some earlier work based on small amounts of DNA indicated this same problem, but now we have more conclusive evidence based on the study of almost an entire mitochondrial genome," said Dee Denver, an evolutionary biologist with the Center for Genome Research and Biocomputing at Oregon State University.
A report of human footprints preserved in 40,000-year-old volcanic ash near Puebla, Mexico (http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/exhibit.asp?id=3616&tip=1), was the subject of a press conference that stirred international media attention. If the claims (http://www.mexicanfootprints.co.uk) of Gonzalez et al. are valid, prevailing theories about the timing of human migration into the Americas would need significant revision. Here we show by 40Ar/39Ar dating and corroborating palaeomagnetic data that the basaltic tuff on which the purported footprints are found is 1.30 +/- 0.03 million years old.Feinberg, J.M., et al., Age Constraints On Alleged "Footprints" Preserved In the Xalnene Tuff Near Puebla Mexico, Geology, Volume 37, Number 3, Pages 267-270, Mar 2009
Impressions in a basaltic tuff located around Valsequillo Reservoir near Puebla, Mexico, have been interpreted as human and animal footprints along an ancient lakeshore, and are cited as evidence of the presence of humans in North America at 40 ka B.P. In this paper, we present new data that challenge this interpretation. Paleomagnetic analyses of the Xalnene Tuff, and lavas from the volcano from which it erupted, yield fully reversed magnetic polarities, indicating that the tuff was deposited prior to the last geomagnetic reversal (the Brunhes-Matuyama ca. 790 ka). 40Ar/39Ar dating of Xalnene lapilli and lava from the source volcano yields indistinguishable ages of ~1.3 Ma, consistent with a period of reversed magnetic polarity (C1r.2r).
The enormous energy released by the catastrophe at 12,500 yr B.P. could have heated the atmosphere to over 1000°C over Michigan, and the neutron flux at more northern locations would have melted considerable glacial ice. Radiation effects on plants and animals exposed to the cosmic rays would have been lethal, comparable to being irradiated in a 5-megawatt reactor more than 100 seconds.
The overall pattern of the catastrophe matches the pattern of mass extinction before Holocene times. The Western Hemisphere was more affected than the Eastern, North America more than South America, and eastern North America more than western North America. Extinction in the Great Lakes area was more rapid and pronounced than elsewhere. Larger animals were more affected than smaller ones, a pattern that conforms to the expectation that radiation exposure affects large bodies more than smaller ones. Sharp fluctuations of 14 C in the Icelandic marine sediments at each geomagnetic excursion are interesting; because global carbon deposits in the ocean sediments at a rate of only about 0.0005 percent a year, a sudden increase in sediment 14 C may reflect the rapid die-off of organisms that incorporated radiocarbon shortly after bombardment.
Massive radiation would be expected to cause major mutations in plant life. Maize probably evolved by macro-mutation at that time [except that it's 80,000 years old], and plant domestication of possibly mutated forms appears worldwide after the Late Glacial period. For example, there was a rapid transition from wild to domesticated grains in the Near East after the catastrophe. ...
Much of what we assume about the Paleoindian period and the peopling of the Americas has been inferred from conventional radiocarbon chronology, which often conflicts with archaeological evidence. This work mandates that conventional radio-carbon dates be reinterpreted in light of hard terrestrial evidence of exposure of the radiocarbon samples to a cosmological catastrophe that affected vast areas of North America and beyond. A nuclear catastrophe can reset a group of unrelated artifacts to a common younger date, creating gaps and false episodes in the fossil record.
Voluminous geological literature confirms the fact of existence of long-living fresh-water lakes in various periods of the Quaternary and Lower Pleistocene to the Holocene. These lakes were distributed in territories adjacent to the Nile. The absolute mark of the upper large erosion hollow of the Sphinx corresponds to the level of water surface which took place in the Early Pleistocene. The Great Egyptian Sphinx had already stood on the Giza Plateau by that geological (historical) time.
Don't worry that the Oklo phenomenon might occur today on the earth's surface. The concentration of fissionable U-235 has fallen considerably in the last 2 billion years due to its radioactive decay.In other words, uniformitarianism is only valid when it supports mythology but when uniformitarianism contradicts mythology then it is invalid.
Whilst the copper ores were the main objectives of the ancient mining, numerous other toxic metals are present in significant quantities, including minerals such as thorium and uranium
At Nevali Cori, a Neolithic village 40 miles northwest of Schmidt's site, archaeologists found seeds of domesticated einkorn wheat dating from 9000 BCE.However domesticated barley has been dated to 23,000 B.C. and some say this is also true of wheat.
When the water level in the Sea of Galilee dropped in 1989, archaeologists rushed to excavate Ohalo II, an ancient human settlement. On the floor of one hut they found a large, flat, basaltic stone. The stone's uneven surface yielded starch grains of grass seeds, mostly from wild barley and possibly also from wheat. This evidence presented in the journal Nature (August 5, 2004), pushes back the date for the processing of close wild relatives of domesticated wheat and barley, a key step in cultural development, to 23,000 years before the present era. "Ten thousand years before people were cultivating cereals, they were processing wild barley: starch grain analysis establishes a clear link between an intensive exploitation of wild cereals and the subsequent development of plant cultivation and domestication in the region " explains Dolores Piperno, lead author.Piperno, D.R., et al., Processing of Wild Cereal Grains in the Upper Palaeolithic Revealed by Starch Grain Analysis, Nature, 430, Pages 670-673, Aug 2004
Barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) and wheat (Triticum monococcum L. and Triticum turgidum L.) were among the principal 'founder crops' of southwest Asian agriculture. Two issues that were central to the cultural transition from foraging to food production are poorly understood. They are the dates at which human groups began to routinely exploit wild varieties of wheat and barley, and when foragers first utilized technologies to pound and grind the hard, fibrous seeds of these and other plants to turn them into easily digestible foodstuffs. Here we report the earliest direct evidence for human processing of grass seeds, including barley and possibly wheat, in the form of starch grains recovered from a ground stone artefact from the Upper Palaeolithic site of Ohalo II in Israel. Associated evidence for an oven-like hearth was also found at this site, suggesting that dough made from grain flour was baked. Our data indicate that routine processing of a selected group of wild cereals, combined with effective methods of cooking ground seeds, were practiced at least 12,000 years before their domestication in southwest Asia.It is obvious that corn is over 80,000 years old.
Saturn is a source of intense radio emissions, which have been monitored by the Cassini spacecraft. The radio waves are closely related to the auroras near the poles of the planet. These auroras are similar to Earth's northern and southern lights. This is an audio file of Saturn's radio emissions."In the same city [Cyzicus] also, there is a stone, known as the 'Fugitive Stone;' the Argonautæ, who used it for the purposes of an anchor, having left it there. This stone having repeatedly taken flight from the Prytanæum, the place so called where it is kept, it has been fastened down with lead." -- Pliny the Elder, historian, 77
The Cassini spacecraft began detecting these radio emissions in April 2002, when Cassini was 374 million kilometers (234 million miles) from the planet, using the Cassini radio and plasma wave science instrument.
"This place is a supernova," said Schmidt, standing under a lone tree on a windswept hilltop 35 miles north of Turkey's border with Syria. "Within a minute of first seeing it I knew I had two choices: go away and tell nobody, or spend the rest of my life working here." ...By studying the Egyptian Edfu texts, Andrew Collins, the author of Gods of Eden: Egypt's Lost Legacy and the Genesis of Civilization, wrote, "faceless forms were said to have been the seed of their own creation at the time when the rest of the world had not yet come into being."
"I think here we are face to face with the earliest representation of gods," said Schmidt, patting one of the biggest stones. "They have no eyes, no mouths, no faces. But they have arms and they have hands. They are makers.
"In my opinion, the people who carved them were asking themselves the biggest questions of all. What is this universe? Why are we here?" ...
"Look at this", he said, pointing at a photo of an exquisitely carved sculpture showing an animal, half-human, half-lion. "It's a sphinx, thousands of years before Egypt. South-eastern Turkey, northern Syria - this region saw the wedding night of our civilisation."Daily Mail (March 2009): Do These Mysterious Stones Mark the Site of the Garden of Eden?
Archaeologists worldwide are in rare agreement on the site's importance. 'Gobekli Tepe changes everything,' says Ian Hodder, at Stanford University.
David Lewis-Williams, professor of archaeology at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, says: 'Gobekli Tepe is the most important archaeological site in the world.'
Some go even further and say the site and its implications are incredible. As Reading University professor Steve Mithen says: 'Gobekli Tepe is too extraordinary for my mind to understand.'
We report the discovery of megalithic alignments and stone circles next to locations of Middle and Late Neolithic communities at Nabta, which suggest the early development of a complex society. The southward shift of the monsoons in the Late Neolithic age rendered the area once again hyperarid and uninhabitable some 4,800 radiocarbon years before the present (years bp). This well-determined date establishes that the ceremonial complex of Nabta, which has alignments to cardinal and solstitial directions, was a very early megalithic expression of ideology and astronomy.Wendorf, F., and Schild, R., Late Neolithic Megalithic Structures at Nabta Playa, Comparative Archaeology, Mar 1998
... the gates on the other two pairs form a line at 700 east of north, which aligns with the calculated position of sunrise at the summer solstice 6000 years ago. ... Charcoal from one of the numerous hearths around the "calendar" dated around 6800 years ago (6000 bp +- 60 years, CAMS - 17287).
The satellite images allow refinement, often significant, of the reported locations of the megaliths. The report that the primary megalithic alignment was constructed to point to the bright star Sirius, circa 4,820 BC, is reconsidered in light of the satellite data, new field data, radiocarbon, lithostratigraphic and geochronologic data, and the playa sedimentation history. Other possible archaeoastronomical interpretations are considered for that alignment, including the three stars of Orion's Belt circa 6,270 BC that are also implicated in the small Nabta Playa `calendar circle'.Brophy, T.G., and Rosen, P.A., Satellite Imagery Measures of the Astonomically Aligned Megaliths at Nabta Playa, Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry, Volume 5, Number 1, Pages 15-24, 2005
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