"Strange carvings greeted early West Virginia explorers" West Virginia Explorer (USA)
"When pioneers and other explorers first ventured into what would become West Virginia, they encountered artifacts of a much earlier age - carvings, burial mounds, and stone walls, the origins of which natives could not explain with certainty.
Petroglyphs inscribed in rock and featuring human and animal figures were perhaps the most striking and inexplicable finds.
Mounds and earthworks could be practically accounted for as defensive or monumental - but carvings? They were certainly communications.
With whom were the creators attempting to communicate and why? Were the carvings inspired by ritual or sheerly as human expression?
Archaeologists can only speculate. Without written records, we may never know with certainty."
[Read The Full Story]
[A brilliant story in the West Virginia Explorer! The petroglyphs were 'obviously' created to communicate something. and it is such a great pity that the stone itself is now drowned in the Ohio River so that further exploration is difficult if not impossible.
This means we may never know what they represent, but the fact that local indigenous peoples also have no idea who created them suggests there were peoples in that area long before current archaeological paradigms have even suspected.
It will be worth local people monitoring developments.
We highly recommend reading the full story and seeing the images of the petroglyphs - Ed.]
When he was carefully sweeping off dust from layers of earth around the tomb, he noticed coal dust.
In the same tomb, he saw terra-cotta chips that date back to the Bronze Age, according to Guangming Daily.
'According to historical records, people in the Han Dynasty had been making use of coal for production and in their daily life. But it was incredible to see coal at a Bronze Age site', Wang recalled to the newspaper.
As the excavation continued, coal dust, cinder and a coal pile were discovered. Carbon-14 dating showed the site is 3,600 years old."
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[An excellent story reported in Global Times! It would be surprising if ancient peoples had not noticed the properties of coal when lightning strikes set it ablaze, so it is unsurprising that its use is now confirmed much earlier than previously believed.
In this cave, stalagmites and stalactites are growing slowly over millennia and preserve in them clues about past climate events.
Changes in stalagmite chemistry from this cave have now linked the collapse of the Akkadian Empire to climate changes more than 4,000 years ago.
Akkadia was the world's first empire.
It was established in Mesopotamia around 4,300 years ago after its ruler, Sargon of Akkad, united a series of independent city states."
[Read The Full Story]
[Of the 30+ carvings they found most were of 'recurring geometric patterns' and others of 'monstrous faces'. These are recurring themes in the petroglyphs of many ancient cultures worldwide, all clustered within the same period 3,500 - 1500 BC, and would seem to represent celestial phenomena witnessed globally by those ancient peoples.
Well worth a visit to read the full story, and follow the links embedded in it. The original paper published in PNAS is listed immediately below - Ed.]
"China’s beastly bronze designs found in stone carvings at prehistoric settlement" South China Morning Post (Hong Kong)
"The distinctive, often beastly, patterns found on classical Chinese bronzeware may be thousands of years older than first thought, archaeologists said after finding similar designs carved into the stone walls of a prehistoric settlement in the country's northwest.
A team working at the Shimao archaeological site in Shaanxi province made the discovery during a recent excavation of the city's Neolithic ruins, which are thought to date back to about 2,000BC, state broadcaster CCTV reported on Monday.
'The beast-face patterns found in Shimao might have had a significant influence on the motifs of China's Bronze Age', Sun Zhouyong, president of the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology, said in the report."
[Read The Full Story]
[Of the 30+ carvings they found most were of 'recurring geometric patterns' and others of 'monstrous faces'. These are recurring themes in the petroglyphs of many ancient cultures worldwide, all clustered within the same period 3,500 - 1500 BC, and would seem to represent celestial phenomena witnessed globally by those ancient peoples.
It's well worth a visit to read the full story - Ed.]
"The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project" Cardiff/Athens Universites (Cymru/Greece)
[In October 1900, Captain Dimitrious Kondos was leading a team of sponge divers near the the island of Antikythera off the coast of Greece. They noticed a shipwreck about 180 feet below the surface and began to investigate. Amongst the artifacts that they brought up was a coral-encrusted piece of metal that later archaeologists found was some sort of gear wheel.
The rest of the artifacts, along with the shape of the boat, suggested a date around 2000 years ago, which made the find one of the most anomalous that had ever been recovered from the Greek seas. It became known as The Antikythera Mechanism.
In 2006 the journal "Nature" published a letter, and another paper about the mechanism was published in 2008, detailing the findings of Prof. Mike G. Edmunds of Cardiff University. Using high-resolution X-ray tomography to study the fragments of the anomalous Antikythera Mechanism, they found that it was in fact a bronze mechanical analog computer that could be used to calculate the astronomical positions and various cycles of the Moon - as seen from the Earth: - Ed]
"In this provocative collaboration from two Egyptology outsiders, Robert M. Schoch, Ph.D., and Robert Bauval combine their decades of research to show how the Sphinx is thousands of years older than the conventional Egyptological timeline and was built by a long forgotten pre-Pharaonic civilization.
They examine the known history of the Sphinx, contrasting what Egyptologists claim with prominent historical accounts and new research, including updates to Schoch’s geological water weathering research and reanalysis of seismic studies.
Building on Bauval’s Orion Correlation Theory, they investigate the archaeoastronomical alignments of the monuments of the Giza Plateau and reveal how the pyramids and Sphinx were built to align with the constellations of Orion and Leo.
Analyzing the evidence for a significantly older construction phase at Giza and the restoration and recarving of the Sphinx during the Old Kingdom era, they assert that the Sphinx was first built by an advanced pre-Pharaonic civilization that existed circa 12,000 years ago on the Giza Plateau, contemporaneous with the sophisticated Göbekli Tepe complex."
