You know, it’s probably
Proteus Syndrome or something but this is pretty wild.

I’ve been too busy to post for the last several weeks but get ready for the mother of all updates. First out of the grab bag-

Underground Network Freak Out Scientists

Until recently, the secret caves were explored only by amateur archeologists. The pioneer of Erdstall exploration, Lambert Karner (1841 to 1909), was a priest. According to his records, he crawled through 400 vaults, lit only by flickering candlelight, with “strange winding passages” through which “one can often only force oneself like a worm.”

The tunnels later became the realm of local historians armed with vivid imaginations. They speculated that the caves were used as “winter quarters by the Teutonic tribes” or as dungeons for the disabled. Some of today’s more esoteric souls interpret them as “spaces of nonbeing.”

Now Ahlborn wants to finally apply the more precise tools of science to the vaults. Under his leadership, the Erdstall working group has developed into a serious and effective group of experts. It includes cave researchers, geography teachers and engineers like Nikolaus Arndt, who has built subways in India and pipelines for fossil groundwater through the Libyan deserts for Gadhafi.

At their annual meeting, the amateur explorers combine shoptalk with bold subterranean expeditions. To avoid suffocating, says one member of the group, they recently blew air into a tunnel with a “reversible vacuum cleaner.”

Again.

No reader of Gonzo Science should be surprised by this - everything happened “much earlier than previously thought”. Take it to the bank.

Visionary, crank, or an unholy hybrid of the two?

“Despite my occasional harsh criticism of Fell’s treatment of individual inscriptions, it should be recognized that without Fell’s work there would be no [North American] ogham problem to perplex us. We need to ask not only what Fell has done wrong in his epigraphy, but also where we have gone wrong as archaeologists in not recognizing such an extensive European presence in the New World.” -David Kelley, contributing editor to The Review of Archaeology

Holy diffusionism, Batman!

Prosecutorial zeal and the market for stolen antiquities has upended some career curators, not always justly.

Your human lineage in action. Terrifying

A scrap of one anyway, 6000 years old. Same site has produced world’s oldest shoe.
Clearly the site of a paleolithic shopping mall.

Related: World’s Oldest Door.

TEOTIHUACAN, Mexico — A long-sealed tunnel has been found under the ruins of Teotihuacan, and chambers that seem to branch off it may hold the tombs of some of the ancient city’s early rulers.

ScienceDaily (May 12, 2010) — A flyover of Belize’s thick jungles has revolutionized archaeology worldwide and vividly illustrated the complex urban centers developed by one of the most-studied ancient civilizations — the Maya.

Until now, Maya archeologists have been limited in exploring large sites and understanding the full nature of ancient Maya landscape modifications because most of those features are hidden within heavily forested and hilly terrain and are difficult to record. LiDAR effectively removes these obstacles.

..”It’s very exciting,” said Arlen Chase. “The images not only reveal topography and built features, but also demonstrate the integration of residential groups, monumental architecture, roadways and agricultural terraces, vividly illustrating a complete communication, transportation and subsistence system.”

Here’s the punch at the end of the article-

The team’s results also give him a snapshot of forest vegetation in that part of the world and how it was influenced by land-use practices 1,000 years ago. This may help scientists understand past human-environment interactions and changes that should be made today.

Identified via two-million-year-old fossils, a new human ancestor dubbed Australopithecus sediba may be the “key transitional species” between the apelike australopithecines—and the first Homo, or human, species, according to a new study.

Dude has this to say-

…that [Australopithecus sediba] may very well be the Rosetta stone that unlocks our understanding of the genus Homo.

New discoveries just keep barreling in. Is this earth-shattering or ho-hum? I’m not sure any more.

In honor of Homo erectus, recently accepted as the first seafarer in the human lineage of hominids and other assorted cavemen.

National Geographic brings the science in this episode of NatGeo Explorer. 

We are published regularly on dead trees in Duluth’s own Zenith City Weekly. This issue: “Cavemen of the Sea”. I’m on a boat, bitch!

Choice quote-

“I was flabbergasted,” said Boston University archaeologist and stone-tool expert Curtis Runnels. “The idea of finding tools from this very early time period on Crete was about as believable as finding an iPod in King Tut’s tomb.”

And another-

Moreover, the discovery could spark a host of other scientific debates.

If ancient humans were crossing the Mediterranean, Runnels said, then they certainly could have crossed other water barriers, such as the Red Sea or the Gulf of Aden. “And that means that the assumptions that we have had—that the peopling of Eurasia was done by early hominins moving overland through the Near East, into India and down—will have to be revisited.” Hominins, or hominids, are members of humankind’s ancestral lineage.

Time just gets deeper and deeper…

Circa 1925, Percy Harrison Fawcett said he’d found evidence of ancient cities in the Amazon jungle:

…he reported finding large earth mounds filled with ancient and brittle pottery. Buried under the jungle floor, he claimed, were also traces of causeways and roadways. Based on this and other evidence, he insisted that the Amazon once contained large populations and at least one, if not more, advanced civilizations. Despite being dismissed and ridiculed as a crank, he set off in 1925 to find the place, which he christened the “City of Z.” He and his party, including his twenty-one-year-old son, Jack, then vanished forever—a fate that seemed to confirm the madness of such a quest.

Over the past several years, however, there has been mounting evidence that nearly everything that was once generally believed about the Amazon and its people was wrong, and that Fawcett was in fact prescient. When I followed Fawcett’s trail into the Xingu area of the Brazilian Amazon, in 2005, I met up with the archeologist Michael Heckenberger. In the very area where Fawcett believed he would find the City of Z, Heckenberger and his team of researchers had discovered more than twenty pre-Columbian settlements. These settlements, which were occupied roughly between 800 and 1600 A.D., included houses and moats and palisade walls. There were geometrically-aligned causeways and roads, and plazas laid out along cardinal points, from east to west. According to Heckenberger, each cluster of settlements contained anywhere from two thousand to five thousand people, which means that the larger communities were the size of many medieval European cities.

In your face!!

That coffin is getting all nailed up. The discovery of a real ”Jesus-era” burial shroud is just the tip of the iceberg in this fruitful discovery:

Assuming the new shroud typifies those used in Jerusalem during the time of Jesus, the researchers maintain that the Shroud of Turin could not have originated in the city.

…. “There have now been only two cases of textiles discovered in Jewish burials from this period,” said archaeologist Amos Kloner of Bar Ilan University. And both appear to contradict the idea that the Shroud of Turin is from Jesus-era Jerusalem.

The human remains in this new shroud have also provided the earliest known case of leprosy, and so this post gets the coveted “Revised Timelines” tag.

Ancient white folks not very nice.

Now can we just move on and find Bigfoot please?

Article contains this tasty smackdown of the Hobbit skeptics:

“Attempts to dismiss the hobbits as pathological people have failed repeatedly because the medical diagnoses of dwarfing syndromes and microcephaly bear no resemblance to the unique anatomy of Homo floresiensis,” noted Dr. Baab.

Oh snap!

New Scientist: 110,000-year-old human or half-human jawbone found in China - upsets current theory that humans didn’t leave Africa until 70,000 years ago.

The comments over there are full of speculation that it’s a hoax, and otherwise upset about the implications. Somebody get some warm milk and baby bottles.

Anglo-saxon treasure found by some guy with a metal detector.

A sealed entrance is all that remains between archeology and a rare find - tomb of an Aztec king: 

That the seals are unbroken suggests that the potential tomb has not been looted.

Indiana Jones wouldn’t wait to open it, but…

Despite rising expectations, the archaeologist said he and his team must be patient.

Only by working slowly and methodically will the team be able to reconstruct the funerary customs and other artifacts that could shed light on the Aztec economy, political system, and religion as it existed before the arrival of the Spanish in the 1500s.

That is such bullshit!!!! What if there’s alien artifacts???!!! Kidding. Still, an unlooted tomb could contain surprises… Here’s hoping for evidence of transoceanic pre-Columbian contact. 

Another sexist assumption of “man’s” past bites the dust.

His findings suggest women’s role in prehistoric culture may have been greater than previously thought.

More accurate to say “…greater than previously thought by the scientific gate keepers,” perhaps.

…which is to say, I didn’t see this coming exactly, but come on, in general these days it’s a safe scientific assumption to make that women’s role in prehistoric culture was greater than previously believed.

And from this we got Jethro Tull.

Knock around a thousand years off of humanity’s first known use of pottery:

…the specimens were found to be 17,500 to 18,300 years old….The previous oldest-known example of pottery was found in Japan, dated to an age between 16,000 and 17,000 years ago…

Some controversy here however:

…the accuracy of radiocarbon dates in the limestone area has been under debate for many years.

Radiocarbon dates are fallible? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Humans made jewelery at least 110,00 years ago, smashing a timeline that had already just been smashed.

The point of tracking revised timelines being: everything is older than previously believed possible. That seems to be the trend.

Now that we know hobbits were alive until at least 8,000 years ago, and the evolution editor of the incredibly conservative “Nature” is admitting that this is making him reconsider whether or not Bigfoot is just folklore, I thought I’d revisit the most scientific Bigfoot material on the web: the work of Jeff Meldrum (now linked to in our sidebar under Cryptozoology). Additionally, here is “Scientific American” evaluating the Meldrum situation, from December 2007 (after the hobbits were discovered, but before they were generally accepted as a real human species - an acceptance that has seemingly rapidly dawned just this year in the face of multiple studies).

The point: the discovery of hobbits has strengthened the case for Bigfoot. The evolution editor of “Nature” said it, not me.

…looks like Loren Coleman (”America’s Greatest Living Cryptozoologist”) and his Cryptomundo site have been on this story for a while. Here’s the search results for “hobbit” at Cryptomundo.

On video at this link. I was just gonna say it myself: you mean to tell me we have Hobbit bones from only 8,000 years ago, but there’s NO WAY there’s Bigfoots around?

Freaking evolution editor of “Nature” thinks so too!

Here is a link to an exchange of letters in the Zenith City Weekly about a column we have not released here, but it was essentially a review of the revised timelines of the past year, and you can get a feel for the flavor of it if you click “Revised Timelines” under Categories.

The exchange concerns a recent find of a skeleton in Mexico that until very very recently would have been considered Too Old To Be There.

Not sure how long this link will remain active, although it may do so.

Looks like the “hobbits were real” camp may have trumped the “they had microencephaly” crew in two new studies:

He speculates that the hobbit’s closest relative is a species of human more ancient than H. erectus, with a smaller brain – perhaps H. habilis.

Robert Martin, a palaeontologist at Chicago’s Field Museum not involved in either study, says Jungers’ explanation is more satisfying than the idea of a H. erectus, dwarfed by island-life. “That could explain the small brain without requiring any major reduction,” he says. But adds that there is no indication in the fossil record that any human species older than H. erectus travelled beyond Africa.

Except these fucking hobbits.

Just to prove a point I found yet another example of why the great museums of the world need to be treated like archaeological digs and excavated - what will be found next, the Ark of the Covenant?

200,000 years older than previously believed.

Is there anything in archaeology or paleontology that is younger than previously believed? The only headlines I ever see in the science media in this regard indicate that science has been on a bender for about fifty years a hundred years of ascribing way-too-young dates to things.