The find confirms that board games likely originated and spread from the Fertile Crescent regions and Egypt more than 5 ka ago (Senet from predynastic Egypt is considered the world’s oldest game board). The tokens were accompanied by badly preserved wooden pieces or sticks. Sağlamtimur hopes they’ll provide some hints on the rules and logic behind the game.
Tag: archaeology
Solving really cold cases
i find crime shows to be some of the biggest snoozefests around, but i’d watch this:
paleopathology practitioners worldwide are making startling discoveries. In December 2012, a team of scientists published results from an examination of the mummy of Pharaoh Ramses III, showing that he had died from having his throat slit, likely murdered in the so-called “harem conspiracy” of 1155 B.C.
Freshkills Park
Fresh kills has been called the most important archaeological site of our civilization, far more important than the pyramids. Let’s hope the rising water levels don’t destroy it for future generations.
2014-09-28: The biggest landfill in the world is being remade into Freshkills Park.
26 ka Portrait
26 ka ago in the Czech Republic, one of our ice-age ancestors selected a hunk of mammoth ivory and carved this enigmatic portrait of a woman – the oldest ever found.
i like the hairdo. our depiction of neolithic people is always hunched over and unkempt, most likely wrong. it’s just that most of their beauty products didn’t survive.
Brain Preservation
The Brain Preservation Foundation announces a prize for the first team to demonstrate a technique capable of inexpensively and completely preserving an entire human brain for long-term (>100 years) storage with such fidelity that the structure of every neuronal process and every synaptic connection remains intact and traceable.
2012-12-07: Eternal Brain. This is fascinating. It doesn’t really matter that much whether we’ll be able to reconstruct a brain from a 3D scan, brain plastination seems a much more appealing memento mori than the alternatives. Would I want my dear friends in the ground vs a urn vs a pretty paper weight? Definitely the paper weight.
2013-08-02: The real postmortem.
In the near future, a neurologist and 2 homicide detectives use experimental brain taping technology to question a murder victim about his final moments.
2014-10-09: Brain death after heart death
The largest scientific study of “life after death” and near death experiences in cardiac arrest patients (who were resuscitated) suggests that some people may sustain several minutes of awareness after the heart stops. Conscious awareness appears to have continued for up to 3 minutes into the period when the heart wasn’t beating, even though the brain typically shuts down within 20-30 seconds after the heart has stopped.”
2020-01-07: 2.5 ka brain scans
It was just amazing to think that a brain of someone who had died so many 1000s of years ago could persist just in wet ground. the first organ to really deteriorate and to basically go to liquid is the brain because of its high fat content. Axel Petzold had spent years researching 2 types of filaments in the brain – neurofilaments and glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) – which act like scaffolds to hold brain matter together. He found both of these were still present in the Heslington brain, suggesting they played a key role in keeping the brain matter together
2 ka Silk Road
As early as 1.9 ka BP, the complex of trading networks on sea and land that are known today as the Silk Road ran from Europe, Africa, Arabia, Persia, India, China, Korea, Japan and back again. Traders did local legs of the massive voyage, stopping at market cities to sell their goods which would then be traded again a little further away and so on, until silk from China wound up adorning Roman emperors and Roman gold-flecked glassware jewels ended up the prized possession of a 1.5 ka BP Japanese nobleman.
77 ka Mattresses
the bed bugs problem was taken care of by burning the place to the ground, for 44 ka.
A team of archaeologists has discovered 40 ka worth of mattresses stacked in South Africa’s Sibudu cave, 40 km north of Durban. Our Stone Age ancestors made bedding from leaves, seeds and stems of local rushes and grasses on the floor of the cave starting 77 ka ago. For the next 44 ka, nomadic Homo sapiens hunted and gathered in the area using Sibudu as their crash pad, compacting the plant material to create sleeping mats.
Walking Cactus
There was a wild period — roughly 520 ma ago — when life, for no obvious reason, burst into a crazy display of weird new fantastic forms — producing creatures in shapes never seen before or since. Consider this animal, the newest fossil discovery from Jianni Liu in China. She calls it “the walking cactus.”
The battle of Towton
dig confirms: the middle ages were bloody.
On the run from the battle, with Yorkist soldiers in pursuit (some of them doubtless on horseback), the men would have soon overheated. They may have removed their helmets as a result. Overhauled—perhaps in the vicinity of Towton Hall, which some think may then have been a Lancastrian billet—and disorientated, tired and outnumbered, their enemies would have had time to indulge in revenge. Even at this distance the violence is shocking. It’s almost as if they were trying to remove their opponents’ identities.
Lost Ships of NYC
An 18th-century ship has been discovered deep in briny muck “flecked with oyster shells” at the bottom of a World Trade Center construction site. “A wood-hulled vessel had been discovered 6-9m below street level on the World Trade Center site, the first such large-scale archaeological find along the Manhattan waterfront since 1982, when an 18th-century cargo ship came to light at 175 Water Street.”
Gregor J. Rothfuss 