Fever mounts as stunning statues found at ancient Greek tomb

Fever mounts as stunning statues found at ancient Greek tomb - Two stunning caryatid statues have been unearthed holding up the entrance to the biggest ancient tomb ever found in Greece, archaeologists said.

The two female figures in long-sleeved tunics were found standing guard at the opening to the mysterious Alexander The Great-era tomb near Amphipolis in the Macedonia region of northern Greece.

"The left arm of one and the right arm of the other are raised in a symbolic gesture to refuse entry to the tomb," a statement from the culture ministry said Saturday.

This picture released by the Greek Ministry of Culture on September 7, 2014 shows one of the two statues of a Caryatid inside the Kasta Tumulus in ancient Amphipolis, northern Greece (AFP Photo/)                         

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Speculation is mounting that the tomb, which dates from Alexander's lifetime (356-323BC), may be untouched, with its treasures intact.

Previous evacuations of Macedonian tombs have uncovered amazing troves of gold jewellery and sculptures.

A five-metre tall marble lion, currently standing on a nearby roadside, originally topped the 500 metre-long funeral mound, which is ringed by a marble wall.

This picture released by the Greek Ministry of Culture on September 7, 2014 shows one of the two statues of a Caryatid inside the Kasta Tumulus in ancient Amphipolis, northern Greece (AFP Photo/)                         

Two headless stone Sphinx statues flanked the outer entrance, officials said, who said that "removing earth from the second entrance wall revealed the excellent marble caryatids".

Photographs released by the ministry show the sculptures -- which hold up a lintel -- uncovered to mid-bust, their curly hair falling onto their shoulders.

Archaeologists have been digging at the site, which Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras called a "very important find", since mid-August.

The ministry said the lay-out of "the second entrance with the caryatids gives us an important clue that it is a monument of particular importance".

Expectation had already begun to build given the quality of the sculpted column capitals and delicately coloured floor mosaic already discovered at the site.

Theories abound about who could be buried in the tumulus tomb, ranging from Alexander's Bactrian wife Roxane, to his mother Olympias or one of his generals.

Experts say the chances of Alexander himself being buried there are small, however. 

After his death at 32 in Babylon, the most celebrated conquerer of the ancient world is believed to have been buried in Alexandria, the Egyptian city he founded -- although no grave has ever been found there. ( AFP )

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600-Year-Old Chinese Coin Found in Kenya

600-Year-Old Chinese Coin Found in Kenya - A Chinese coin about 600 years old was recently unearthed on an island just off the coast of Kenya. If it proves to be authentic, the coin could show that the Chinese explorer Zheng He — like a Christopher Columbus of the East — came to this part of east Africa.

"This finding is significant. We know Africa has always been connected to the rest of the world, but this coin opens a discussion about the relationship between China and Indian Ocean nations," archaeologist Chapurukha M. Kusimba of The Field Museum in Chicago said in a statement.

This Chinese coin, issued between 1403 and 1425, was found during excavations at the island of Manda in Kenya.

The copper and silver disk has a square hole in the center, possibly to be worn on a belt. Kusimba told LiveScience it was found on the first day of excavations at Manda, an island that hugs Kenya's coast about 200 miles (320 kilometers) northeast of Mombasa. A joint expedition, led by Kusimba and Sloan R. Williams of the University of Illinois at Chicago, spent this past December through February studying the site.

The coin was issued from 1403 to 1425, and it bears the name of Emperor Yongle, leader of the Ming Dynasty who started building China's Forbidden City. At that time, Manda was nearing the end of its reign as a trading post. In 1430, the island was abandoned and never inhabited again. 

Kusimba believes the coin could prove the island was visited by Zheng He, a court eunuch who rose to commander of the Chinese Navy. Emperor Yongle sent Zheng He on several ambitious voyages to explore the lands bordering the Indian Ocean and expand Chinese trade and political influence.

"Zheng He was, in many ways, the Christopher Columbus of China," Kusimba said. "It's wonderful to have a coin that may ultimately prove he came to Kenya."

The researchers got permission from the Kenyan government to export the coin to Chicago, where it is undergoing chemical analysis at The Field Museum. "We just want to be sure that it's an original government issue rather than a counterfeit," Kusimba told LiveScience.

The team will head back to Manda this coming December for another digging season; they plan to publish their findings in a peer-reviewed academic journal.

"This is one of the oldest sites in Sub-Saharan Africa and I think it's going to inform us a lot about the early relationship Africa had with Europe and Asia," Kusimba said. ( LiveScience.com )

Blog : Contents Of Human Life | 600-Year-Old Chinese Coin Found in Kenya

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Will De-Extinction Become Reality?

Reviving the Woolly Mammoth : Will De-Extinction Become Reality? - Biologists briefly brought the extinct Pyrenean ibex back to life in 2003 by creating a clone from a frozen tissue sample harvested before the goat's entire population vanished in 2000. The clone survived just seven minutes after birth, but it gave scientists hope that "de-extinction," once a pipedream, could become a reality.

Ten years later, a group of researchers and conservationists gathered in Washington, D.C., today (March 15) for a forum called TEDxDeExtinction, hosted by the National Geographic Society, to talk about how to revive extinct animals, from the Tasmanian tiger and the saber-toothed tiger to the woolly mammoth and the North American passenger pigeon.

Though scientists don't expect a real-life "Jurassic Park" will ever be on the horizon, a species that died a few tens of thousands of years ago could be resurrected as long as it has enough intact ancient DNA.

Gastric brooding frogs come in two species: Rheobatrachus vitellinus and R. silus (pictured above and last seen in 1985). These frogs had a unique mode of reproduction: The female swallowed fertilized eggs, turned its stomach into a uterus and

Some have their hopes set on the woolly mammoth, a relative of modern elephants that went extinct 3,000 to 10,000 years ago and left behind some extraordinarily well preserved carcasses in Siberian permafrost. Scientists in Russia and South Korea have embarked on an ambitious project to try to create a living specimen using the DNA-storing nucleus of a mammoth cell and an Asian elephant egg — a challenging prospect, as no one has ever been able to harvest eggs from an elephant.

But DNA from extinct species doesn't need to be preserved in Arctic conditions to be useful to scientists — researchers have been able to start putting together the genomes of extinct species from museum specimens that have been sitting on shelves for a century. If de-extinction research has done anything for science, it's forced researchers to look at the quality of the DNA in dead animals, said science journalist Carl Zimmer, whose article on de-extinction featured on the cover of the April issue of National Geographic magazine.

"It's not that good but you can come up with techniques to retrieve it," Zimmer told LiveScience.

For instance, a team that includes Harvard genetics expert George Church is trying to bring back the passenger pigeon — a bird that once filled eastern North America's skies. They have been able to piece together roughly 1 billion letters (Each of four amino acids make up DNA has a letter designation) in the bird's genome based on DNA from a 100-year-old taxidermied museum specimen. They hope to incorporate those genes responsible for certain traits into the genome of a common rock pigeon to bring back the passenger pigeon, or at least create something that looks like it.

A few years ago, another group of researchers isolated DNA from a 100-year-old specimen of a young thylacine, also known as Tasmanian tiger. The pup had been preserved in alcohol at Museum Victoria in Melbourne. Its genetic material was inserted into mouse embryos, which proved functional in live mice.

Should we?

Now that de-extinction looms as a possibility, it presents some thorny questions: Should we bring back these species? And what would we do them?

Stuart Pimm of Duke University argued in an opinion piece in National Geographic that these efforts would be a "colossal waste" if scientists don't know where to put revived species that had been driven off the planet because their habitats became unsafe.

"A resurrected Pyrenean ibex will need a safe home," Pimm wrote. "Those of us who attempt to reintroduce zoo-bred species that have gone extinct in the wild have one question at the top of our list: Where do we put them? Hunters ate this wild goat to extinction. Reintroduce a resurrected ibex to the area where it belongs and it will become the most expensive cabrito ever eaten."

Pimm also worries that de-extinction could create a false impression that science can save endangered species, turning the focus away from conservation. But others argue that bringing back iconic, charismatic creatures could stir support for species preservation.

"Some people feel that watching scientists bring back the great auk and putting it back on a breeding colony would be very inspiring," Zimmer told LiveScience. The great auk was the Northern Hemisphere's version of the penguin. The large flightless birds went extinct in the mid-19th century.

Other species disappeared before scientists had a chance to study their remarkable biological abilities — like the gastric brooding frog, which vanished from Australia in the mid-1980s, likely due to timber harvesting and the chytrid fungus.

"This was not just any frog," Mike Archer, a paleontologist at the University of New South Wales, said during his talk at TEDxDeExtinction, which was broadcast via livestream. These frogs had a unique mode of reproduction: The female swallowed fertilized eggs, turned its stomach into a uterus and gave birth to froglets through the mouth.

"No animal, let alone a frog, has been known to do this – change one organ in the body into another," Archer said. He's using cloning methods to put gastric brooding frog nuclei into eggs of living Australian marsh frogs. Archer announced today that his team has already created early-stage embryos of the extinct species forming hundreds of cells.

"I think we're gonna have this frog hopping glad to be back in the world again," he said. ( LiveScience.com )

Blog : Contents Of Human Life | Reviving the Woolly Mammoth: Will De-Extinction Become Reality?

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5-Million-Year-Old Saber-Toothed Cat Fossil Discovered

5-Million-Year-Old Saber-Toothed Cat Fossil Discovered - A new genus and species of extinct saber-toothed cat has been found in Polk County, Fla., scientists say.

The fossil, which is 5 million years old, is related to the well-known carnivorous predator Smilodon fatalis from the La Brea Tar Pits of Los Angeles. The group of saber-toothed cats called Smilodontini was thought to have originated in the Old World and later migrated to North America, but the new species' age suggests the group evolved in North America, researchers reported March 13 in the journal PLOS ONE.

Although Smilodon appears in the fossil record about 2.5 million years ago, there weren't many intermediate forms to tell scientists where it originated, according to study co-author Richard Hulbert Jr., vertebrate paleontology collections manager at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

Lower jaw fossils of a 5-million-year-old saber-toothed cat (Rhizosmilodon fiteae), a smaller relative of the Smilodon species, have been found in Florida.

"The new species shows that the most famous saber-toothed cat, Smilodon, had a New World origin, and it and its ancestors lived in the southeastern U.S. for at least 5 million years before their extinction about 11,000 years ago," Hulbert said in a statement. 

"Compared to what we knew about these earlier saber-toothed cats 20 or 30 years ago, we now have a much better understanding of this group."

Hulbert and colleagues discovered the fossils of the new cat, Rhizosmilodon fiteae, during the excavation of a phosphate mine in 1990. The species was named for Barbara Fite of Lutz, Fla., who donated a fossil of the species from her collection that had a very well-preserved lower jaw with all three chewing teeth. The name Rhizosmilodon means "root of Smilodon," because researchers believe the creature could be the direct ancestor of Smilodon, which went extinct 11,000 years ago.

The researchers did a comparative analysis of saber-toothed cat anatomy to determine its biological grouping. The animal's lower jaw and teeth were smaller than Smilodon's, about the size of a modern Florida panther, the results showed. 

When alive, the panther-size cat would've lived alongside rhinos, tapirs, three-toed horses, peccaries, llamas and deer in a coastal forest. There, the researchers suspect, Rhizosmilodontook advantage of its small size to climb trees and hide captured prey from larger meat-eaters including packs of hyena-dogs and an extinct bear larger than today's grizzly.

The new cat was originally misidentified from a partial lower jaw fossil in the early 1980s as a member of the genus Megantereon. The cat is actually a sister species to Megantereon and Smilodon, but is older than either group. All three are called saber-toothed cats because of their long canine teeth.

"When people think of saber-toothed cats, they think of it as just one thing," Hulbert said, "when in fact, it was an almost worldwide radiation of cats that lasted over 10 million years and probably had a total of about 20 valid species."

The finding helps settle the debate over where saber-toothed cats first arose — in North America, rather than Eurasia. ( LiveScience.com )

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New Flat-Faced Human Species Possibly Discovered

New Flat-Faced Human Species Possibly Discovered – New fossils from the dawn of the human lineage suggest our ancestors may have lived alongside a diversity of extinct human species, researchers say.

Although modern humans, Homo sapiens, are the only human species alive today, the world has seen a number of human species come and go. Other members perhaps include the recently discovered "hobbit" Homo floresiensis.

The human lineage, Homo, evolved in Africa about 2.5 million years ago, coinciding with the first evidence of stone tools. For the first half of the last century, conventional wisdom was that the most primitive member of our lineage was Homo erectus, the direct ancestor of our species. However, just over 50 years ago, scientists discovered an even more primitive species of Homo at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania they dubbed Homo habilis, which had a smaller brain and a more apelike skeleton.

Now fossils between 1.78 million and 1.95 million years old discovered in 2007 and 2009 in northern Kenya suggest that early Homo were quite a diverse bunch, with at least one other extinct human species living at the same time as H. erectus and H. habilis.

"Two species of the genus Homo, our own genus, lived alongside our direct ancestor, Homo erectus, nearly 2 million years ago," researcher Meave Leakey at the Turkana Basin Institute in Nairobi, Kenya, told LiveScience.

A skull known as KNM-ER 1470, found in 1972 in Kenya, was at the center of the debate over the number of species of early Homo living nearly 2 million years ago. It had a larger brain and a flatter face than H. habilis, leading some researchers to declare it a distinct species they dubbed Homo rudolfensis.

However, making comparisons between these fossils was difficult, because no single purported H. rudolfensis specimen contained both the face and the lower jaw, details needed to see if it was indeed separate from H. habilis. Any supposed differences between H. habilis and H. rudolfensis might, for instance, have been due to variations between the sexes of a single species.

The newly discovered face and lower-jaw fossils, uncovered within a radius of just more than 6 miles (10 kilometers) from where KNM-ER 1470 was unearthed, now suggest that KNM-ER 1470 and the novel finds are indeed members of a distinct species of early Homo that stands out from others with its uniquely built face.

"It had very flat facial features — you could draw a straight line from its eye socket to where its incisor teeth would be," researcher Fred Spoor at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, told LiveScience. "This shows east Africa about 2 million years ago was quite a crowded place with many diverse species of early Homo," Spoor said.

The environment was more verdant back then than it is today, with a larger lake. "There was plenty of opportunities ecologically to accommodate more than one hominid species," Spoor said.

Other researchers suggest these new fossils are not enough evidence of a new human species. However, "these are really distinctive shape profiles — it really shows something completely different," Leakey said. "I feel pretty confident that we're not just dealing with variation in one species."

In principle, researchers might be able to reconstruct what this new species might have eaten by looking at its teeth and jaws. "The incisors are really rather small compared to what you'd find in other early Homo," Spoor said. "In the back of the mouth, the teeth are large, telling us a lot of food processing was going on there ... it may be possible it ate more tough, plantlike foods than meat."

Other extinct human fossils discovered in that area are thought to belong to H. habilis. As such, at least two different species once lived in that site in northern Kenya. However, it remains possible these other fossils do not belong to H. habilis, suggesting yet another species lived there at the same time, paleoanthropologist Bernard Wood at George Washington University at Washington, D.C., who did not take part in this research, said in a review of this work. ( LiveScience.com )

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Mind-boggling discovery: Perfectly preserved brain of Iron Age man unearthed in York

Mind-boggling discovery: Perfectly preserved brain of Iron Age man unearthed in York - Archaeologists believe they have discovered one of the world's oldest brains that once belonged to a man in Iron Age Britain who was sacrificed in a ritual killing.

Scientists found the cranium in a muddy pit when they were excavating a site before a new campus was to be built at the University of York. When a researcher reached inside the skull, she was stunned to discover the soft tissue of the 2,500-year-old brain still preserved.

Fractures and marks on the bones suggest the man, who was aged between 26 and 45, died most probably from hanging, after which he was carefully decapitated and his head was then buried on its own.

Grey matter: The 2,500-year-old preserved brain has baffled scientists after it was found during an excavation at the University of York

Scientists have been baffled by how the brain tissue - which usually rots after a couple at years - managed to remain intact for so long.

'The survival of brain remains where no other soft tissues are preserved is extremely rare,' said Sonia O'Connor, research fellow in archaeological sciences at the University of Bradford.

'This brain is particularly exciting because it is very well preserved, even though it is the oldest recorded find of this type in the UK, and one of the earliest worldwide.'

Philip Duffey, a neurologist at York Hospital who scanned the skull, said: 'I'm amazed and excited that scanning has shown structures which appear to be unequivocally of brain origin.'

Baffled: Dr Sonia O Connor, from the University of Bradford, examines the remains of the brain

'I think that it will be very important to establish how these structures have survived, whether there are traces of biological material within them and, if not, what is their composition.'

Experts from York Archaeological Trust were commissioned by the university to carry out the exploratory dig last year before building work on the £750million campus expansion started.

They discovered the solitary skull face-down in the pit in dark brown organic rich, soft sandy clay.

The university put together a team of scientists, archaeologists, chemists, bio-archaeologists and neurologists, to establish how the man’s brain, could have survived when all the other soft tissue had decayed leaving only the bone.

Remains: Archaeologists sift through the muddy pit at the site near the University of York where the brain was found

The team is also investigating details of the man’s death and burial that may have contributed to the survival of what is normally highly vulnerable soft tissue.

The research, which was funded by the University of York and English Heritage, is published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

Since the discovery, the brain and skull have been kept in strictly controlled conditions, but scientists have examined samples using a range of sophisticated equipment, including a CT scanner at York Hospital and mass spectrometers at the University of York.

Samples of brain material had a DNA sequence that matched sequences found only in a few individuals from Tuscany and the Near East. Carbon dating suggests the remains date from between 673-482BC.

Fractures on the second neck vertebrae point to some kind of trauma before the man died and and a cluster of about nine horizontal fine cut-marks made by a thin-bladed instrument, such as a knife, can be seen on the front of the brain.

Preserved: Brain material shows as dark folded matter at the top of the head in this computer-generated view of the skull

Clean: Scientists said there was no trace on the brain of the usual preservation methods such as embalming or smoking

Scientists are now investigating how lipids and proteins found in the brain preserved the brain and what happened between the man dying and his burial.

Dr O’Connor said: 'It is rare to be able to suggest the cause of death for skeletonised human remains of archaeological origin. The preservation of the brain in otherwise skeletonised remains is even more astonishing but not unique.

'This is the most thorough investigation ever undertaken of a brain found in a buried skeleton and has allowed us to begin to really understand why a brain can survive thousands of years after all the other soft tissues have decayed.'

Despite the place that ‘trophy heads’ appear to have played in Iron Age societies and evidence for the preservation of human remains in the Bronze Age, the researchers say there is no evidence for that in this case. They found no marks indicating deliberate preservation by embalming or smoking.

Dr O’Connor added: 'The hydrated state of the brain and the lack of evidence for putrefaction suggests that burial, in the fine-grained, anoxic sediments of the pit, occurred very rapidly after death. This is a distinctive and unusual sequence of events, and could be taken as an explanation for the exceptional brain preservation.' ( dailymail.co.uk )

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Mammoths roasted in prehistoric barbecue pit

Mammoths roasted in prehistoric barbecue pit. Archaeologists have just uncovered a 29,000 B.C. well-equipped kitchen. Central Europe's prehistoric people would likely have been amused by today's hand-sized hamburgers and hot dogs, since archaeologists have just uncovered a 29,000 B.C. well-equipped kitchen where roasted gigantic mammoth was one of the last meals served.

The site, called Pavlov VI in the Czech Republic near the Austrian and Slovak Republic borders, provides a homespun look at the rich culture of some of Europe's first anatomically modern humans.

Jiri Svoboda and Antiquity

Archaeologists have uncovered a 29,000 B.C. well-equipped "kitchen" where roasted gigantic mammoth was one of the last meals served. Here, some remains of the prehistoric BBQ — a mammoth bone — is excavated.

While contemporaneous populations near this region seemed to prefer reindeer meat, the Gravettian residents of this living complex, described in the latest issue of the journal Antiquity, appeared to seek out more super-sized fare.

"It seems that, in contrast to other Upper Paleolithic societies in Moravia, these people depended heavily on mammoths," project leader Jiri Svoboda told Discovery News.

Svoboda, a professor at the University of Brno and director of its Institute of Archaeology, and colleagues recently excavated Pavlov VI, where they found the remains of a female mammoth and one mammoth calf near a 4-foot-wide roasting pit. Arctic fox, wolverine, bear and hare remains were also found, along with a few horse and reindeer bones.

The meats were cooked luau-style underground. Svoboda said, "We found the heating stones still within the pit and around."

Boiling pits existed near the middle roaster. He thinks "the whole situation — central roasting pit and the circle of boiling pits — was sheltered by a teepee or yurt-like structure."

It's unclear if seafood was added to create a surf-and-turf meal, but multiple decorated shells were unearthed. Many showed signs of cut marks, along with red and black coloration. The scientists additionally found numerous stone tools, such as spatulas, blades and saws, which they suggest were good for carving mammoths.

Perforated, decorative pebbles, ceramic pieces and fragments of fired clay were also excavated. The living unit's occupants left their fingerprints on some of the clay pieces, which they decorated with impressions made from reindeer hair and textiles.

Some items might have held "magical" or ritualistic significance, according to the scientists. One such artifact looks to be the head of a lion.

"This carnivore head was first modeled of wet clay, then an incision was made with a sharp tool, and finally the piece was heated in the fire, turned into some kind of ceramic," Svoboda explained. "We hypothesize that this may be sympathetic magic."

"Sympathetic magic" often involves the use of effigies or fetishes, resembling individuals or objects, and is meant to affect the environment or the practitioners themselves.

Archaeologist Erik Trinkaus of Washington University supports the new study, saying the site was "excavated meticulously" by Svoboda and his team.

"This is one more example, in this case from modern detailed excavation and analysis, of the incredibly rich human behavior from this time period," Trinkaus told Discovery News. ( Discovery Channel )

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Mammoth skeleton unearthed in Serbia

Mammoth skeleton unearthed in Serbia. Well-preserved bones is believed to be about one million years old - A well-preserved skeleton of a mammoth that is believed to be about one million years old has been unearthed in eastern Serbia, archaeologists said Thursday.

The discovery was made during excavation two days ago at an open-pit coal mine near Kostolac power plant, said Miomir Korac, from Serbia's Archaeology Institute.

Srdjan Ilic / AP

An archeologist works on a recently unearthed skeleton of a mammoth at the open pit coal mine.

The skeleton was found 89 feet below ground, he said. The mammoth was more than 13 feet high, 16 feet long and weighed more than 10 tons.

"It is very well-preserved with only slight damage to the skull and the tusks," Korac told the AP. "There have been practically no major tectonic disruptions here for at least a million years."

Korac said the mammoth was a so-called southern mammoth, or mammuthus meridionalis, originating from northern Africa. Experts will continue research to find out more about the environment it lived in.

Another mammoth skeleton, from a much later period, was discovered at a factory in Serbia in 1996 and was named Kika. ( Associated Press )

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Prehistoric mammoth site in Waco opens

Prehistoric mammoth site in Waco opens. The bones, over 68,000 years old, were officially unveiled to the public - A site where dozens of prehistoric mammoths died in a landslide and flooding some 68,000 years ago has opened to the public in Waco, Texas.

The fossils were discovered in 1978 by two men hunting for snakes. They took one of the bones to a Baylor University museum official who identified it, triggering an archaeological dig.

Rod Aydelotte / AP

Baylor Univeristy Mayborn museum collection manager Anita Benedict talks about the discovery of the largest known collection of rare prehistoric Columbian mammoths bones.

Baylor and the city preserved the remains for two decades and, following a community fundraising effort, a permanent pavilion was built over the site, which opened to the public for the first time Saturday.

Visitors can observe the mammoth remains from walkways above the dirt where the fossils remain encased.

Legislation is pending to make the site a national monument and part of the National Park Service ( Associated Press )

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