THE first confirmed Earth-like planet will be found next year, astronomers predict.
More than 800 planets have been discovered orbiting stars since the first was found in 1995.
Few have been identified as sitting inside the "Goldilocks Zone", an orbital sweet spot - not too cold, not too hot - which allows water to exist in its liquid state and support life as we know it.
Only nine planets have been flagged as having the potential to sustain life.
But none have yet been oficially declared "Earth-like" - either because of their excessive size, high speed or simply a lack of available information.
The vast bulk of discoveries so far have been Jupiter-like gas giants.
"I'm very positive that the first Earth twin will be discovered next year," Astronomer Abel Mendez, from the Planetary Habitability Lab at the University of Puerto Rico, told Mashable today.
He and other astronomers say new instrumentation and observational techniques are making it easier to detect small planets at greater distances - as well as get greater information on planets at smaller distances.
The first planet with a measured size, orbit and incident stellar flux that is suitable for life is likely to be announced in 2013," Kepler team member Geoff Marcy said.
Two planets recently found orbiting two of our closest neighbours, Tau Cetiand Alpha Centauri, are likely to be among the first to receive careful attention.
One of the best candidates so far, a "Goldilocks" planet some 2.4 times bigger than Earth known as Kepler-22b, was found by the Kepler Space Telescope in December last year.
Based on current data, astronomers estimate there are some 200 billion stars in our galaxy, with at least 50 billion planets orbiting them.
Scientists estimate roughly 1 in 10,000 are similar to Earth. This could give us five million Earth's in our galaxy alone.
China has launched its own satellite navigation network Beidou in a bid to compete with GPS.
CHINA has launched commercial and public services across the Asia-Pacific region on its domestic satellite navigation network built to rival the US global positioning system.
The Beidou, or Compass, system started providing services to civilians in the region on Thursday and is expected to provide global coverage by 2020, state media reported.
Ran Chengqi, spokesman for the China Satellite Navigation Office, said the system's performance was "comparable" to GPS, the China Daily said.
"Signals from Beidou can be received in countries such as Australia," he said.
It is the latest accomplishment in space technology for China, which aims to build a space station by the end of the decade and eventually send a manned mission to the moon.
China sees the multi-billion-dollar program as a symbol of its rising global stature, growing technical expertise, and the Communist Party's success in turning around the fortunes of the once poverty-stricken nation.
The Beidou system comprises 16 navigation satellites and four experimental satellites, the paper said. Mr Ran added that the system would ultimately provide global navigation, positioning and timing services.
The start of commercial services comes a year after Beidou - which literally means the Big Dipper in Chinese - began a limited positioning service for China and adjacent areas.
China began building the network in 2000 to avoid relying on GPS.
"Having a satellite navigation system is of great strategic significance," the Global Times newspaper, which has links to the Communist Party, said in an editorial.
"China has a large market, where the Beidou system can benefit both the military and civilians," the paper said.
"With increases in profit, the Beidou system will be able to eventually develop into a global navigation satellite system which can compete with GPS."
In a separate report, the paper said satellite navigation was seen as one of China's "strategic emerging industries".
Sun Jiadong, the system's chief engineer, told the 21st century Business Herald newspaper that as Beidou matures it will erode GPS's current 95 per cent market share in China, the Global Times said.
Morris Jones, an independent space analyst based in Sydney, Australia, said that making significant inroads into that dominance anywhere outside China is unlikely.
"GPS is freely available, highly accessed and is well-known and trusted by the world at large," he said.
"It has brand recognition and has successfully fought off other challenges."
Mr Morris described any commercial benefits China gains as "icing on the cake" and that the main reason for developing Beidou is to protect its own national security given the possibility US-controlled GPS could be cut off.
"It's that possibility, that they could be denied access to GPS, that inspires other nations to develop their own system that would be free of control by the United States," he said.
"At a time of war you do not want to be denied" access, he said.
The Global Times editorial, while trumpeting Beidou as "not a second-class product or a carbon-copy of GPS" still appeared to recognise its limitations, at least in the early stages.
"Some problems may be found in its operation because Beidou is a new system. Chinese consumers should... show tolerance toward the Beidou system," it said.
The Apple iPhone 4s, left, is displayed next to the Samsung Galaxy S III.
APPLE has agreed to drop its patent claims against Samsung's Galaxy S III Mini after the South Korean rival said it would not sell the gadget in the United States, a court filing shows.
The announcement is the latest twist in a patent battle between the two tech titans.
Last month, Apple asked that a series of Samsung products - including the Galaxy S III - be added to the patent infringement suit between the mobile giants.
"Apple will agree to withdraw without prejudice its request to include the Galaxy S III Mini in this case given Samsung's representation that it is not making, using, selling, offering to sell or importing that product into the United States," the company said in its latest federal court filing in San Jose, California.
Samsung, the world's top mobile and smartphone maker, was ordered by a US jury in August to pay Apple $1.02 billion in damages for illegally copying iPhone and iPad features for its flagship Galaxy S smartphones.
It has appealed the ruling, depicting the verdict as "a loss" for consumers and contending that Apple had "manipulated" the patent system.
Since then, two separate rulings by courts in Japan and the Netherlands have dismissed Apple's claims of patent infringement.
Welsh Gold by Alun Davies taken at Nash Point, Glamorgan Heritage Coast, Wales
MOST Aussies think of the UK as cold and damp but these stunning landscapes show it can be spectacular and inspiring.
These pictures, taken by amateur and professional photographers, have been recognized as the best by the judges of the sixth annual Landscape Photographer of the Year competition.
SYDNEYSIDERS, you're too fussy, desperate and rude. You're turning dates into job interviews. Your "shopping list" is shallow, pedantic and wouldn't make you happy, even if it was realistic.
Women, you've forgotten how to flirt, and men, you need to man up. And you've all lost the art of romance.
That's the diagnosis of matchmakers as they survey the bloody battlefield of Sydney dating, where men, wary of gold-diggers, "sperm hunters" and "shopping list" writers, face off against the women they're supposed to be wooing, who are worn out by the deception, the harassment and the disrespect they've suffered from men.
In the 30- to 45-year-old age group, in which two-thirds of daters are searching for a long-term relationship that leads to marriage and children, the casualties are worst. Bars across Sydney are littered with broken hearts and suspicious minds.
"If you have lots of break-ups, they all take their toll," sex therapist Bettina Arndt says. "No one comes through unscathed."
Got a dating horror story? Leave your comment below
But it doesn't have to be this way. A growing number of psychologists, matchmakers and sex therapists are turning into dating coaches, showing singles where they're going wrong and how to fix it.
One of the biggest problems on the Sydney dating scene is extreme fussiness, with daters more likely to be on the hunt for superficial attributes such as wealth, beauty and status than for qualities such as honesty, compassion and kindness, which would make a good partner and parent, say the matchmakers.
One woman arrives at the date with a checklist, and proceeds to walk her date through the questions, ticking boxes as she goes (which, one matchmaker points out, is hardly alluring for the bloke at the other end). One man says a woman told him on the first date she wanted her partner-to-be to have a house in Woollahra and a Volvo. Another has been asked how much he earned within 10 minutes of sitting down.
Others are adamant they will not date a redhead, a blue-collar worker or a vegetarian. Yvonne Allen, who has run an introduction agency since the 1970s, says one client refused to go out with a man because he was 10cm taller than her - too short.
Arndt, who has become a dating coach, has similar reports from her clients.
"I was talking to a guy with a nice Japanese car," she says. "He said one woman refused to get into it because it was Japanese. Women can also be scathing about dating renters."
Matchmaker Trudy Gilbert from Elite Introductions says Sydneysiders are looking for the wrong things; they are chasing superficial attributes rather than fundamental qualities.
"I do believe women are still judging men today with 1950s values, meaning an eligible man is a breadwinner, he's successful, he has status, and they don't look at things that are more important, such as his values of honesty, integrity, being a potentially great father," she says.
Allen says daters should take their fussy ways and flip them, asking what they have to offer a potential partner.
For example, a fortysomething man who has been holding out for a blonde, shapely 25-year old model may learn the hard way he has nothing to offer her. It's easier to find a kind, loving woman if there are fewer restrictions on the form she comes in.
"It's one thing to have a wish list, but it's another thing to actually attract that wish list, and often the wish list has nothing to do with a great relationship," Allen says.
New Year's love resolution? Tell us what you'll change in 2013
This shopping-list mentality, coupled with the relentless opportunity for new dates online, is turning dates into job interviews, the matchmakers warn.
"It's like a recruitment exercise," Allen says. "I heard of a guy who goes to the same place every time, and interviews four women." Another woman would go to the same bar every Wednesday to meet a new date, wearing the same outfit as a scientific control.
These days, dating can be a lot like work, and it's not helped by daters arriving straight from the office in their work suits, firing questions as they would in meetings, and assessing their date as they might a job applicant.
In work mode, none of us are the flirty, charming, attractive person we might become on a Saturday night when we are out with our friends.
"It's so tough out there, many of us are defensive when we go on a first date," Allen says. She recommends daters go home before the date, shower and change their outfit to "shake off the day".
"We seem to have lost the art of flirting ," she says. "I tell women to look into people's eyes and smile, and they say, 'oh I can't do that'."
Daters are also caught up in a Hollywood view of the way romance should work, the matchmakers say; they believe prince or princess perfect will come along, sparks will fly and they'll fall in love straight away.
"I had a guy come to me who'd been on 300 first dates and never a second," Allen says. "He believed he would 'know her when he saw her'. That's the stuff of fantasy."
Another couple went on an arranged date, agreed there was no chemistry, but decided to share season tickets to the opera as friends. Over a year of music, they fell in love. "The heavy expectations weren't there," Allen says.
Another problem is guys who don't make an effort. Men need to lift their game, say the matchmakers, as they have forgotten the traditional courtesies of courtship.
Few bother to call a woman to ask her on a date; it's easier to text. They don't dress up, plan the date, or offer to pick her up. In a particularly cowardly act, some don't even tell a woman they no longer want see her; they just stop communicating, even after dating her for two months or maybe more.
"There are very few gentlemen left in Sydney," one prolific dater says.
Even men admit this. "There are more genuine women online than there are men," one male dater said. "Men are less well-behaved, just in terms of how they come across and their expectations. A lot of guys pretend to want relationships but just want to hook up. And to a certain extent, women get burned out."
And Sydney men can be lazy, Gilbert says.
"I don't think they actively hunt or pursue like they used to. They are not as chivalrous or forthcoming as they should be. Maybe the word's not lazy, maybe it's gutless," she says. "They need to be courageous again and actually pursue and make that known, rather than sending mixed messages and playing games and leading women on without asking them out. Don't play games."
Women can also find internet dating tougher than men because they are less used to rejection, Arndt says.
She says men spend most of their adult life being rejected romantically; women haven't developed the same resilience, but a thicker hide would help.
"Men will send out 50 'kisses' (RSVP's version of a Facebook 'poke')," she says. "Women do this enormously careful searching; they make an emotional investment in the process, and then feel a much greater sense of rejection or failure."
Another common mistake by both sexes is portraying desperation.
"I see a lot of thirtysomethings who are single," psychologist John Aiken says. "They are frustrated, they are anxious and they have developed a negative mindset. They're thinking, 'there are no good ones left, there's a man drought, you can't trust anyone these days'. They end up sabotaging themselves."
When singles become too desperate, "they become too clingy," he says. "They put so much pressure on themselves, that when they meet a half-decent guy, they cling too much, they want to talk about feelings, they ring too much, it becomes too intense and they become too desperate to make it work. These are common mistakes people are making, but most of them are unaware of it."
Matchmakers say if daters relaxed, forgot the pressure of a ticking clock and made an effort, they might enjoy dating a little more. They may even find love.
Chilly New Zealand is a hot destination for your bucket list in 2013.
YANMAR, Marseille and New Zealand are all on the travel radar for 2013 thanks to new tours and events. But the best pitch for travel in the new year might just be coming from Ireland, which is running ads "calling all Flynns, O'Malleys and Schweizenbergs" to the Emerald Isle for a unique grassroots homecoming called The Gathering.
Here are details on these and other places, events and travel trends for 2013:
IRELAND'S THE GATHERING "It's a citizen-led initiative to attract people who are Irish-born, Irish-bred or Irish in spirit to join us in 2013," said Bernard McMullan of Tourism Ireland. "It's almost become a competition where one county, town or village tries to have as quirky a gathering as the next."
More than 2000 events are already planned, including events for redheads and left-handers as well as reunions based on family names and clans.
Arabella Bowen, executive editorial director of Fodor's Travel, is one of more than 44 million Americans (including President Obama) with an Irish ancestor in the family tree.
"There are Irish people all over the world," she said. "It will be great fun being able to connect with others going back for this event. It's like an entire year of St Patrick's Day parties."
MYANMAR President Barack Obama's historic recent visit to Myanmar (formerly Burma) - the first ever by a sitting US president - is adding to already heated-up interest in the country, which has only fully opened to tourism in the last few years. Fodor's Bowen says it's especially attractive to people who are already well travelled and seeking that next unknown destination.
Many tour companies are adding Myanmar trips due to demand and the US Tour Operators Association's active members named Myanmar No.1 on a list of "off-the-beaten path" countries they foresee becoming popular in 2013.
NEW ZEALAND New Zealand received a huge boost in tourism from fans of The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, and the release of the new movie The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is focusing attention on the destination once again. All four of the movies were filmed in New Zealand.
MARSEILLE The French port city Marseille is one of two European capitals of culture in 2013, along with the Slovakian city of Kosice. Fodor's Bowen says Marseille "has been overlooked in the past" by a lot of travellers heading to the lavender fields and wineries of Provence, but she believes it's ripe for a "renaissance" with new hotels, art galleries and culinary hotspots.
THEME PARKS Next northern summer will see the popular 3D ride based on the Transformers movies opening at Universal's theme park in Orlando. Transformers: The Ride - 3D previously opened this past May at Universal Studios Hollywood in Los Angeles.
At Disneyland in California, spring will herald the opening of Fantasy Faire, located at Fantasyland and dedicated to Disney heroes and heroines. At Disney World near Orlando, Florida, a new attraction called Princess Fairytale Hall, where guests can meet Disney princesses, is also scheduled to open in 2013. Princess Fairytale Hall will be located at the Magic Kingdom's New Fantasyland, which opened in early December, doubling the size of the original Fantasyland. Both parks are offering weekly surprises for guests as part of a yearlong 2013 program called Limited Time Magic.
Citizens of Ibi, Spain annually celebrate the Els Enfarinats festival with a battle using flour, eggs and firecrackers. The battle takes place between two groups, a group of married men called 'Els Enfarinats' which take the control of the village for one day, pronouncing ridiculous laws and fining the citizens that infringe them, and a group called 'La Oposicio' which try to restore order. At the end of the day the money collected from the fines is donated to charitable causes in the village. The festival has been celebrated since 1981 after the town of Ibi recovered the 200-year-old tradition.
Nothing like getting away from it all for the holidays.
Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt and their six children took off for the Caribbean last Friday and spent their Christmas vacation on Parrot Cay, a private resort island and noted celebrity haunt that's part of Turks and Caicos, E! News confirms.
What they got up to once they touched down in paradise is anybody's guess—hence the key word, private—but knowing the Jolie-Pitts, mom, pop and kids are enjoying the posh outdoors.
The New York post reports that the family was bunking at Donna Karan's beachfront villa, located on a stretch of real estate where the figurative names on the mailboxes include Bruce Willis, Christie Brinkley and Keith Richards.
n this case, however, it may be more like a private sandy zoo! According to the Post, there were 22 people (not counting staff) in the Jolie-Pitt party, including Pitt's parents, his brother and sister, and their spouses and children.
Vlad Yudin was on Fox News promoting 'Generation Iron.' Fox News commentators loved 'Pumping Iron' and see Generation Iron as a remake.
Russian-born filmmaker Vlad Yudin is getting ready to release “Generation Iron.” The new film, slated for release in early 2013, delves deep into the competitive bodybuilding industry – beneath the blood, sweat, tears and tanned muscles and into the private lives of several Mr. Olympia hopefuls.
“This basically picks up where ‘Pumping Iron’ left off thirty years ago,” Yudin told FOX411’s Pop Tarts column.
“I’m a really big fan of ‘Pumping Iron,’ which was produced by Jerome Gary. He and I had a conversation about the film and we decided we would like to tackle modern day bodybuilding. Bodybuilding is an interesting sport because it is not really talked about in the mainstream world.”
On that note, Yudin also hopes to clear up some common misconceptions that plague the bodybuilding business.
American Media Inc. has partnered with writer/director Vlad Yudin and producing partner Edwin Mejia of the Vladar Company to produce and direct a bodybuilding docudrama titled, Generation Iron. They will follow the world’s top seven bodybuilders as they fight to bring home the 2012 Mr. Olympia title.
Yudin is slated to direct and co-produce the film with Mejia, along with executive producer Jerome Gary (who produced Pumping Iron), executive producer Damon Bingham (Tyson), executive producer David J. Pecker, Chairman and CEO of American Media, Inc., and executive producer Jim Manion, NPC President and IFBB Pro League Chairman.
This film will take an unflinching look into the widely misunderstood world of bodybuilding. Filming was slated to take place in mid-July and the cameras will travel from Brooklyn, NY to Gold’s Gym in Venice Beach, CA, to document the lives of each athlete as they prepare for the “Super Bowl” of bodybuilding. The docudrama will star bodybuilding legends Phil Heath, Kai Greene, Branch Warren and Dennis Wolf and will follow the lives of the athletes as they push their bodies to the limit while preparing for the Mr. Olympia stage at Orleans Arena in Las Vegas.
An excavagation in a 3,000-year-old city yields evidence of an ancient religion.
The excavation of a shrine in the 3,000-year-old city of Khirbet Qeiyafa near Jerusalem.
THE GIST The shrines themselves reflect an architectural style dating back as early as the time of King David. Some of the features and styles of the structures appear analogous to those described in the Bible. The new finds don't conclusively prove the site was inhabited by Israelites.
For the first time, archaeologists have uncovered shrines from the time of the early Biblical kings in the Holy Land, providing the earliest evidence of a cult, they say.
Excavation within the remains of the roughly 3,000-year-old fortified city of Khirbet Qeiyafa, located about 19 miles (30 kilometers) southwest of Jerusalem, have revealed three large rooms used as shrines, along with artifacts, including tools, pottery and objects, such as alters associated with worship.
The three shrines were part of larger building complexes, and the artifacts included five standing stones, two basalt altars, two pottery libation vessels and two portable shrines, one made of pottery, the other of stone. The portable shrines are boxes shaped like temples.
The shrines themselves reflect an architectural style dating back as early as the time of King, providing the first physical evidence of a cult in the time og King David, according to an announcement by Yosef Garfinkel, an archaeologist at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The research is presented in the book, "Footsteps of King David in the Valley of Elah" (Yedioth Ahronoth, 2012).
Radiocarbon dating on burnt olive pits found in the ancient city of Khirbet Qeiyafa indicate it existed between 1020 B.C. and 980 B.C., before being violently destroyed.
According to Biblical tradition, the ancient Israelite belief in one God and their ban on human and animal figures set them apart from their neighbors. However, it hasn't been clear when these distinct practices arose.
The discoveries offer a clue to the timing, since they contain none of the human or animal figurines common at other sites. No bones from pigs showed up here or elsewhere in the city.
"This suggests that the population of Khirbet Qeiyafa observed two Biblical bans — on pork and on graven images — and thus practiced a different cult than that of the Canaanites or the Philistines," Garfinkel said in a press release issued by the university. The discoveries also offer support for the Biblical depiction of King David, he said.
Garfinkel suggests some of the features and styles of the structures appear analogous to those described in the Bible. For instance, one of the shrines, the clay one, is decorated with an elaborate façade that includes two guardian lions, two pillars, folded textile and three birds standing on the roof. The two pillars are suggestive, he said, of Yachin and Boaz described in the Bible as belonging to Solomon's Temple.
The announcement was met with some skepticism from scientists such as Aren Maeir of Bar-Ilan University, who has studied the ruins of the nearby Philistine city of Gath. Maeir told the Times of Israel the new finds don't conclusively prove the site was inhabited by Israelites, and that the images of lions and birds also undercut that no animal or human figures were found.
"There's no question that this is a very important site, but what exactly it was — there is still disagreement about that," Maeir said in the Times of Israel, adding that the finding doesn't add dramatic new evidence to the broader debate over whether the Bible is an historical record of events, largely mythical or a mix between fact and fiction.
The new species, called Crocodylus thorbjarnarsoni, resembled its living cousin, the Nile crocodile as seen here, but was more massive.
THE GIST The largest known true crocodile, measuring over 27 feet in length, lived 2-4 million years ago. The crocodile was at the top of the food chain and would have preyed upon our human ancestors. Remains of early australopithecines and other hominids were found near the crocodile.
The largest known crocodile was big enough to swallow a human being and likely terrorized our ancestors two to four million years ago.
Remains of the enormous horned croc, namedCrocodylus thorbjarnarsoni, were unearthed in East Africa. The impressive aquatic reptile exceeded 27 feet long and is described in the latest Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
The croc was the dominant predator of its ecosystem, so there is little doubt that it preyed upon our distant ancestors, especially since remains of Australopithecus(a now-extinct genus of hominids) were found nearby.
These relatively tiny individuals would have had no choice but to enter the crocodile's territory for much needed water.
"Humans might have eaten food along a lakeside or riverbank, but more importantly, they would have needed water to drink," lead author Christopher Brochu told Discovery News. "This would have brought them right to where the crocodiles might have been living."
"Crocodiles today like to creep up on animals at the water's edge and grab them before the crocodile is detected," added Brochu, an associate professor of geoscience at the University of Iowa.
He and colleague Glenn Storrs, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Cincinnati Museum Center, recognized the new species from fossils stored at the National Museum of Kenya in Nairobi. The human remains also found nearby show that our ancestors then only stood about 4 feet tall, so the crocodile could have easily swallowed one whole.
The animal looked similar to a modern Nile crocodile, except with a large snout and a pair of horn-like protuberances behind its eyes.
Storrs also said the croc had a "powerful tail that propelled the animal forward in a desperate 'all or nothing' lunge."
Given the anatomical similarities to today's Nile crocs, Brochu said this prehistoric species would have had a "lifestyle that was probably similar to that of their living counterparts -- semi-aquatic ambush predators that would stealthily approach prey. Anything in the shallow water or close to the waterline would have been in range."
Even in its present de-fleshed state, the crocodile is something to behold. It requires four men just to lift the animal's skull. The species was named after famed crocodile expert John Thorbjarnarson, who worked with Brochu before contracting malaria in the field and dying from the disease.
Brochu and his colleagues previously discovered another man-eating horned crocodile from Tanzania namedCrocodylus anthropophagus. This animal was related to C. thorbjarnarsoni, with both distantly but not directly related to today's Nile crocodile.
Evon Hekkala, a crocodile expert who is an assistant professor of biological sciences at Fordham University, told Discovery News that she agrees with the new findings.
The discoveries remind that our human relatives often functioned as prey as well as predators.
In addition to probably being worried about crocodile attacks, these individuals "would have needed to be equally as wary of large carnivorous mammals, such as lion-like felids," Storrs said.
Kenya was a hot spot for early human evolution. Aside from the australopithecine hominids, Storrs said several early species of homo sapiens are known from fossils that are contemporaneous to those of the big and mighty new crocodile.
A 2,700-year-old seal bearing a name similar to Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been unearthed near the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the Israel Antiquities Authority said.
Found within the remains of a building dating to the First Temple period –- between the end of the eighth century B.C. and 586 B.C. -- the seal is made of a semiprecious stone.
According to the ancient Hebrew inscription, it belonged to Matanyahu, who was the son of a man whose name started with the letters "Ho" : "Lematanyahu Ben Ho … " (meaning: "Belonging to Matanyahu Ben Ho …"). Unfortunately, the rest of the inscription is erased.
"The name Matanyahu, like the name Netanyahu, means giving to God. These names are mentioned several times in the Bible. They are typical of the names in the Kingdom of Judah in the latter part of the First Temple period," Eli Shukron, director of excavation for the IAA, said.
Less than 1 inch in diameter, the personal seal was set in a ring and used for signing letters.
"To find a seal from the First Temple period at the foot of the Temple Mount walls is rare and very exciting. This is a tangible greeting of sorts from a man named Matanyahu who lived here more than 2,700 years ago," Shukron said.
His body showed telltale signs that he suffered from Hand-Schuller-Christian disease.
Researchers examined a 2,900-year-old mummy using X-rays, CT and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans.
THE GIST Until now, scientists had assumed a female mummy was inside the Egyptian coffin The disease left a terrible toll on the ancient man's body, with images revealing it destroyed parts of his skeleton. The scans showed what looks like a giant hole in his skull's frontal-parietal bone.
Around 2,900 years ago, an ancient Egyptian man, likely in his 20s, passed away after suffering from a rare, cancerlike disease that may also have left him with a type of diabetes.
When he died he was mummified, following the procedure of the time. The embalmers removed his brain (through the nose it appears), poured resin-like fluid into his head and pelvis, took out some of his organs and inserted four linen “packets” into his body. At some point the mummy was transferred to the 2,300 year-old sarcophagus of a woman named Kareset, an artifact that is now in the Archaeological Museum in Zagreb, Croatia.
The mummy transfer may have been the work of 19th-century antiquity traders keen on selling Kareset's coffin but wanting to have a mummy inside to raise the price.
Until now, scientists had assumed a female mummy was inside the Egyptian coffin. The new research reveals not only that the body does not belong to Kareset, but the male mummy inside was sick. His body showed telltale signs that he suffered from Hand-Schuller-Christian disease, an enigmatic condition in which Langerhans cells, a type of immune cell found in the skin, multiply rapidly.
"They tend to replace normal structure of the bone and all other soft tissues," Dr. Mislav ?avka, a medical doctor at the University of Zagreb who is one of the study's leaders, said in an interview with LiveScience. "We could say it is one sort of cancer."
Scientists still aren't sure what causes the disease, but it is very rare, affecting about one in 560,000 young adults, more often males. "In ancient times it was lethal, always," said ?avka, who added that today it can be treated.
avkaand colleagues examined the mummy using X-rays, a CT scan and a newly developed technique for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans.
The disease seems to have taken a terrible toll on the ancient man's body, with images revealing it destroyed parts of his skeleton, leaving lytic lesions throughout his spine and skull. The scans also showed what looks like a giant hole in his skull's frontal-parietal bone, and destruction of a section of one of his eye sockets, known as the "orbital wall."
The mummy embalming procedure may have worsened some of the disease-caused damage, ?avka said.
Even so,the effects of the disease would have been "very, very painful," and would have affected the man's appearance, particularly in the final stage, ?avka told LiveScience.
In addition, it may have led him to suffer from a form of diabetes. The scans show that his sella turcica, part of the skull that holds the pituitary gland, is shallow, which suggests that this gland was also affected by the disease.
"That could have lead to diabetes insipidus," the researchers write in their paper. The condition would have made it difficult for his kidneys to conserve water, something that would have worsened the man's predicament. "Probably he was all the time thirsty, hungry and had to urinate," ?avka said.
Perhaps cold comfort for him now, but his death does offer clues to the ancient world. Scientists have long debated whether or not cancer was common in ancient times.
Some believe that with lower life expectancies and fewer pollutants cancer's prevalence was very low. On the other hand, some scholars believe cancer was more common than thought, but simply very hard to detect in ancient remains.
Cleopatra's twin babies now have a face. An Italian Egyptologist has rediscovered a sculpture of Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene, the offspring of Mark Antony and Cleopatra VII, at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
Discovered in 1918 near the temple of Dendera on the west bank of the Nile, the sandstone statue was acquired by the Egyptian Museum but has remained largely overlooked.
The back of the 33-foot sculpture, catalogued as JE 46278 at the museum, features some engraved stars -- likely indicating that the stone was originally part of a ceiling. Overall, the rest of the statue appears to be quite unusual.
"It shows two naked children, one male and one female, of identical size standing within the coils of two snakes. Each figure has an arm over the other’s shoulder, while the other hand grasps a serpent," Giuseppina Capriotti, an Egyptologist at Italy's National Research Council, told Discovery News.
The researcher identified the children as Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene, Antony and Cleopatra's twins, following a detailed stylistic and iconographic analysis published by the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Warsaw.
Capriotti noticed that the boy has a sun-disc on his head, while the girl boasts a crescent and a lunar disc. The serpents, perhaps two cobras, would also be different forms of sun and moon, she said. Both discs are decorated with the udjat-eye, also called the eye of Horus, a common symbol in Egyptian art.
"Unfortunately the faces are not well preserved, but we can see that the boy has curly hair and a braid on the right side of the head, typical of Egyptian children. The girl's hair is arranged in a way similar to the so-called melonenfrisur (melon coiffure ), an elaborate hairstyle often associated with the Ptolemaic dynasty, and Cleopatra particularly," said Capriotti.
The researcher compared the group statue with another Ptolemaic sculpture, the statue of Pakhom, governor of Dendera, now on display at the Detroit Institute of Arts.
"Stylistically, the statues have several features in common. For example, the figures have round faces, little chins and big eyes," Capriotti said.
Since the statue of Pakhom was dated to 50-30 B.C., she concluded that the twin sculpture was produced by an Egyptian artist at the end of the Ptolemaic period, after Roman triumvir Mark Antony recognized his twins in 37 B.C.
The babies weren't the firsts for Cleopatra. The Queen of Egypt had already given birth in 47 B.C., when she bore Julius Caesar a child, Caesarion. In 36 B.C. she presented Antony with another son, Ptolemy Philadelphus.
At the time of their birth in 40 B.C., the twins were simply named Cleopatra and Alexander. When they were officially recognized by their father three years later, as Antony returned to Antioch, in present Turkey, and Cleopatra joined him, they were named Alexander Helios (Sun) and Cleopatra Selene (Moon).
"Antony's recognition of the children was marked by an eclipsys. Probably for this reason, and to mythologize their twin birth, the children were added those celestial names. Although in Egypt the moon was a male deity, in the sculpture the genders were reversed according to the Greek tradition," Capriotti said.
Little is known of the children Cleopatra and Mark Antony left behind after their suicides in 30 B.C. following defeat in battle.
While Caesarion was murdered under Octavian's orders, the lives of the three offspring of Cleopatra and Antony were spared.
Cleopatra Selene and Alexander Helios, then aged 10, and Ptolemy Philadelphus, then aged 4, were moved to Rome and put under the care of Octavian's sister, Octavia, whom Antony was married to.
Some years later, Alexander Helios and Ptolemy Philadelphus would disappear without a trace.
Only Cleopatra Selene survived. Married to King Juba II of Mauretania, she had at least one child, Ptolemy Philadelphus, likely named in honor of her little brother.
Her image was minted on coins along with Juba's, suggesting that she ruled as an equal partner.
"Now we have her portrayed as a child with her twin brother. Blending Egyptian myths and Greek culture, this sculpture fully represents Egypt at Cleopatra's time," Capriotti said.
After robotic cameras read the ossuaries, experts began debating what the engravings mean.
Museum preproduction of the ossuary with the Jonah and the Fish image on the left front panel
THE GIST This ancient artifact was found in 1981 and was believed to be over 1900 years old. The debate is over an engraving on the ossuary. One expert read the name as 'Jonah' while another read 'Zolah.' The artifacts could mark the first evidence of faith in Jesus' resurrection.
Long-unrecognized lettering confirms that first-century artifacts found within an ancient Jerusalem tomb are the earliest representations of Christianity ever found, researchers say.
Two Hebrew scholars who examined photographs showing the inside of the tomb agree that markings on an ossuary — a box made to hold human remains -- are stylized letters that spell out the name of Jonah, the researchers said Thursday (April 19). Jonah was the Old Testament prophet whose story of being swallowed by a great fish was embraced by the early followers of Jesus.
The tomb, located 6.5 feet (2 meters) below an apartment building in the East Talpiot neighborhood of Jerusalem, was discovered in 1981 but resealed after Orthodox jewish groups opposed its excavation. Two decades later, the group got license to enter the tomb, which has been dated to before A.D. 70.
Researchers led by James Tabor of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte did not enter the tomb themselves but instead used a remote camera to explore it. Their analysis of the images was reported Feb. 28 in the journal The Bible and Interpretation.
The Hebrew scholars' translation of the stylized letters on the ossuary have yet to be published.
Troubled tomb
On one of the ossuaries was an inscription depicting "divine Jehovah," and a second had a picture that appeared to be a fish with a stick figure in its mouth, said to represent Jonah. If they fully understand these drawings, the researchers said, then they have found the oldest christian artifacts, the earliest Christian art and the first evidence of faith in Jesus' resurrection. Similar depiction of Jonah were used by later Christian groups and became an important expression of the faith in later centuries.
When the tomb and its contents were first disclosed, many biblical scholars offered alternate interpretations of the iconography and disputed the tomb's connections to Christianity. They said the image is more likely a funerary monument and not a fish at all.
Hebrew hint
After the initial announcement, the team continued to examine the images from their robot scout. Strange markings inside the fish head stood out to the researchers, and they called upon James Charlesworth, a Hebrew script scholar from the Princeton Theological Seminary.
The researchers said Charlesworth confirmed their interpretation of the marks: The lines that make up what they thought was a stick figure could also be viewed as four Hebrew letters. The script is similar to that from the Dead Sea Scrolls and seems to spell out "YONAH," the Hebrew name of Jonah.
"This discovery by Professor Charlesworth is quite remarkable and had been overlooked in our initial analysis," Tabor said in a statement. "The engraver has apparently rather ingeniously combined what we took to be the stick figure of Jonah with the four Hebrew letters spelling out his name."
Could this megalithic structure, known as Ales Stenar, be much older than we thought?
THE GIST An ancient stone structure in Sweden may be 1,500 years older than previously thought. New analysis suggests the stones represent an ancient astronomical calendar. Some researchers argue the stones were placed with the same underlying geometry of Stonehenge.
Ancient Scandinavians dragged 59 boulders to a seaside cliff near what is now the Swedish fishing village of Kåseberga. They carefully arranged the massive stones -- each weighing up to 4,000 pounds (1,800 kilograms) -- in the outline of a 220-foot-long (67-meter) ship overlooking the Baltic Sea.
Archaeologists generally agree this megalithic structure, known as Ales Stenar ("Ale's Stones"), was assembled about 1,000 years ago, near the end of the Iron Age, as a burial monument. But a team of researchers now argues it's really 2,500 years old, dating from the Scandinavian Bronze Age, and was built as an Astronomical calender with the same underlying geometry as England's Stonehenge.
"We can now say Stonehenge has a younger sister, but she's so much more beautiful," said Nils-Axel Mörner, a retired geologist from Stockholm University who co-authored the paper on the interpretation, published in March in the International Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics.
Other researchers familiar with the site are skeptical. Among other arguments, they cite the results of carbon dating to reject Mörner's interpretation.
Inspired by Stonehenge?
Mörner says his team observed that the sun rises and sets at specific points around Ales Stenar at the summer and winter solstices, hinting that an ancient culture could have built it as an astronomical calendar to time things like annual religious ceremonies or planting and harvesting crops.
They also observed that certain aspects of the stone ship's geometry matched those of Stonehenge, a Bronze Age monument that some enthusiasts believe was used as a calendar. (Those claims are contentious, and there are many other theories of Stonehenge's original purpose.)
The similarities led Mörner to propose the mysterious stone structure of Sweden was a Stonehenge-inspired astronomical calendar constructed by a Bronze Age Scandinavian community that regularly traveled and traded throughout Europe and the Mediterranean.
"The first thing is to see that, yes, it's a calendar," Mörner told LiveScience. "But Ale's Stones also tells us a lot more than we knew before about trading and travel in the Bronze Age among Scandinavia, England and Greece."
Beowulf, not the Bronze Age
Other researchers are not convinced.
"The idea that the stone ship might have been an astronomical calender has no supporters among academic archaeologists," said Swedish archaeologist Martin Rundkvist, managing editor of the archaeology journal Fornvännen.
Rather, Ales Stenar was probably an ornate grave marker, he said.
The Swedish countryside is home to many similar megalithic structures, which are generally known as stone ships. Most of them date back to Sweden's Late Iron Age (approximately A.D. 500-1000), and they serve as burial monuments, Rundkvist said.
Archaeologists using radiocarbon dating have calculated that Ales Stenar was built about 1,400 years ago, near the end of Scandinavia's Iron Age -- long after the construction date estimated by Mörner's team.
Ales Stenar was built by members of a war-like community of seafarers who used oxen, slaves, rope, sleds, wooden spades and simple steel tools to collect and raise the huge boulders, Rundkvist said.
"This was the world of Beowulf," Rundkvist said, referring to the epic poem set in Iron Age Scandinavia.
Ships were an important part of life in this nautical culture, which may have inspired communities to mark the graves of important people with stone ships, some scholars say.
Rundkvist believes there's no evidence for anything beyond that -- including Mörner's Stonehenge theory.
Cattle aren't known for their intelligence. Perhaps it's because their family tree has a very skinny trunk.
Genetic evidence suggests all "taurine" cattle (the most commonly recognized breed) descend from only about 80 females and came from a single region in what is now Iran about 10,500 years ago. A study in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution traced the modern global herd's heritage back to its ancestral home on the range. The study compared mitochondrial DNA extracted from 15 preserved ancient cattle's bones to modern cattle and found little variation. Little variation meant the founding population didn't have many different versions of the mitochondrial genes to start with.
Earlier research published in PloS ONE suggested that taurine cattle may have later received a small genetic boost from European aurochs. Aurochs were the super-sized ancestors of our modern hamburger on the hoof.
The size and nasty disposition of the wild auroch (Bos primigenius) would have made it a formidable beast to tame for the ancient Iranians. That difficulty is possibly why domestication only occurred with a small number of animals. The authors of the paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution suggested that only humans who had settled down into villages would have had the ability to domesticate the auroch.
"Importantly, the two sites showing the earliest signs of the wild auroch's domestication -- Dja´de and Çayönü -- are less than 250 kilometers (155 miles) apart," wrote the multinational group of authors led by Ruth Bollongino of the University of Mainz, Germany.
"Interestingly, archaeological signs of sedentism during the 9th millennium B.C. are restricted to the same region," according to the paper. "It is conceivable that the management of wild cattle was too challenging for the mobile population of the surrounding mountainous areas where goat was the preferred domestic species."
But not all the world's mooing milk-makers have the same mom. Only the taurine cattle were domesticated in the Middle East.
Taurine cattle (Bos taurus) are the docile cows and raging bulls common to Wild West films. Humped cattle (Bos indicus), or zebu, which roam India, are thought to have arisen from a separate domestication of an auroch subspecies in what is now Pakistan or India.
Aurochs went extinct due to habitat loss, hunting and other pressures. The last individual died in the Jaktorów Forest of Poland in 1627.
One of the largest collections of Roman coins -- over 30,000 silver pieces -- has been recovered in England from the building site of a new hotel in Bath, just 450 feet from the historic Roman Baths.
Known as the Beau Street Hoard, from the street where they have been unearthed, the coins date to 270 A.D., a time of great upheaval when the western Roman empire was threatened by civil war and barbarian invasion.
Aware of the difficult times, the owner might have just decided to hide away the treasure.
"In the crisis of the third century, Rome had 25 emperors in 50 years. It was a time of great unrest especially on the continent as the Empire came near to collapse," Stephen Clews, manager of the Roman Baths and Pump Room, told Discovery News.
"Britain was part of a breakaway western empire and although it seems to have been relatively peaceful, this hoard may reflect events unfolding in those troubled times," Clews said.
The archaeologists found thousands of coins fused together in a large block. This makes identification and counting the exact number very difficult.
"Conservators at the British Museum are taking a whole year to do the work. There are believed to be more than 30,000 coins, making this one of the fifth largest hoards ever found in Britain and the largest from a Roman town," Clews said.
The coins are also the largest hoard ever found by a professional archaeologist -- Hazel O'Neill of Cotswold Archaeology.
An amateur using a metal detector actually discovered the largest collection of Roman coinage ever found in a single container -- 52,503 coins dating between 253 A.D. and 293 A.D.
Scientists have unveiled a new technique for mapping early human settlements in Mesopotamia, the so-called "cradle of civilization" comprised of modern-day Iraq, northeast Syria, southeast Turkey and southwest Iran.
A pair of Harvard University anthropologists developed a way to measure mounds of athrosol, a type of soil formed by long-term human activity, in multi-wavelength satellite images.
Anthrosols are finer, lighter-colored, and richer in organic material than surrounding soil.
"Soil discoloration is one of the characteristics of archaeological sites in this part of the world (alongside surface artifact density and mounding)," Harvard University anthropologist Jason Ur wrote in an email to Discovery News.
Scientists have been using anthrosols to locate settlement sites for 10 years, but were limited to ground observations and declassified black-and-white spy satellite imagery.
"Multi-spectral imagery opens up new possibilities for identifying ancient places because now we can look for these distinctive soil discolorations not only in the visible part of the spectrum (what the human eye seems as red, green, and blue) but also beyond the abilities of our eyes (the near-infrared and even larger wavelengths)," Ur said.
"The mounds that we find are entirely artificial creations on an otherwise relatively flat plain," he added.
Until the development of cement, building material was limited to mud bricks, which don't last forever.
Eventually, the structures become unstable and must be leveled and rebuilt.
"If this process continues for centuries or millennia, settlements grow vertically," Ur said, leading to massive buildups of decayed mud brick.
For example, the largest site, Tell Brak in northern Syria, contains about 8 million cubic meters of decayed mud brick and rises about 40 meters (131 feet) above ground.
"The sites are essentially large piles of anthrosols," Ur said.
He and colleague Bjoern Menze, a computer scientist by training, used imagery from a sensor on NASA's Terra satellite to detect the telltale sediments and a global digital terrain map made from radar imagery taken during a 2000 space shuttle mission to model the height and volume of mounded sites.
In all, the scientists mapped more than 14,000 sites, spanning 8,000 years of human settlement in northeast Syria. Some 9,500 of those sites showed significant elevations, a mass accumulation of 700 million cubic meters of collapsed architecture and settlement debris.
“We've documented small areas of northern Mesopotamia at great cost in time and effort in the past," Ur said. "This method finds a similar density of archaeological sites, just at a much faster rate and over the entire region."
Ur and Menze say the technique can be used to build a comprehensive map of human settlements in northern Mesopotamia and beyond.
The research appears in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The "James ossuary," an inscribed limestone box purported to have contained the bones of Jesus’ brother James, is still a mystery -- at least according to a Jerusalem court.
Delivered at the end of a seven-year fraud trial, the ruling admitted that it was not possible to determine whether the ossuary and other objects presented in the trial were genuine or had been forged.
The verdict acquitted an Israeli antiquities collector of forgery and fraud charges on the basis of reasonable doubt.
The story began 10 years ago when André Lemaire, professor of Hebrew and Aramaic philology and epigraphy at the Sorbonne University in Paris, announced a sensational discovery: the first archaeological evidence of Jesus' existence.
"Amazing as it may sound, a limestone bone box, called an ossuary, has surfaced in Israel that may once have contained the bones of James, the brother of Jesus," Lemaire wrote in Biblical Archaeology Review.
"We know this because an extraordinary inscription incised on one side of the ossuary reads in clear Aramaic letters: 'James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus,'" he added.
Believed to have been stoned to death in A.D. 62, "James the Just" is mentioned in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew as Jesus' brother. However, the Roman Catholic Church believes Jesus had no siblings.
According to Robert Eisenman, author of "James, Brother of Jesus," the true successor to the movement we now call Christianity was indeed James and not Peter.
As the ossuary finding was announced, it immediately stirred a scientific controversy. Eisenman, professor of biblical archaeology at California State University, Long Beach, was the first expert to doubt its authenticity, in a Discovery News interview.
"Several things cast suspicion: The line of custody is insecure, and the inscription is too perfect. They would have never written 'brother of Jesus' in the first century," he told me.
The ossuary was first displayed to the public at the Royal Ontario Museum in 2002, where it was viewed by almost half a million visitors.
Around the same time, another unique finding resurfaced. Known as the "Jehoash Inscription," the stone tablet was presented as a building inscription describing, in ancient Hebrew script, the renovation work done on the first biblical temple by King Jehoash nearly 3,000 years ago.
It was supposedly the only surviving item of the First Temple ever, constituting evidence of its existence and authentication of the biblical text appearing in the Book of Chronicles.
"The appearance of the two items in late 2002 and early 2003 fired the imaginations of millions of Christians around the world, who received tangible proof of Jesus’ family, and of thousands of Jews who ostensibly now had physical evidence from the First Temple and archaeological verification of the biblical stories," the Israel Antiquities Authority said in a statement.
After consulting with experts, the IAA concluded that the items were forged "for the purpose of damaging archaeological research, and creating a false impression of the historical evidence, which influenced the belief of millions of people throughout the world -– and all of it was done capriciously, in order to achieve financial gain."
A complaint was filed with the Israel police, the principal suspect being Oded Golan, who was in possession of the two objects.
The trial stretched over more than 100 hearings.
"It is not every day that a court hears a case involving as many topics as this one: archaeology, history, Bible, chemistry, geology, linguistics and more. Testimony was heard on subjects never before discussed or ruled on in court," Judge Aharon Farkash wrote in his ruling.
At the end, "the prosecution failed to prove beyond all reasonable doubt what was stated in the indictment: that the ossuary is a forgery and that Mr. Golan or someone acting on his behalf forged it," the verdict said.
However, the judge did emphasize that it was not possible to determine that the finds presented in the trial –- including the ossuary and the "Jehoash inscription" –- are not forgeries.
"We can expect this matter to continue to be researched in the archaeological and scientific worlds and only the future will tell. Moreover, it has not been proved in any way that the words ‘brother of Jesus’ definitely refer to the Jesus who appears in Christian writings," the 475-pages-long ruling said.
"Courts can't determine these things, especially in view of contradictory evidence from so-called experts," Eisenman told Discovery News.
"Anyhow, they can't evaluate 'internal evidence.' No one would have even thought about a 'Jesus' being important at that point. Only people nowadays would think that," he said.
The venison-loving Red Deer Cave People had an unusual mix of primitive and modern features.
An artist's reconstruction of a member of the newly found Red Deer Cave People.
THE GIST Fossils from two China caves have revealed a previously unknown Stone Age people. The mysterious humans, called the Red Deer Cave people, had a mix of primitive and modern features. The Red Deer Cave people may represent a new hominid species.
A newly found Stone Age people featured darker skin, an unusual mix of primitive and modern features and had a strong taste for venison.
Remains of possibly four individuals of the so-called "Red Deer Cave People" were unearthed in southwest China and may represent a new species of human.
The fossils from two caves, date to just 14,500 to 11,500 years ago. Until now, no hominid remains younger than 100,000 years old have been found in mainland East Asia resembling any other species than our own.
"We have discovered a new population of prehistoric humans whose skulls are an unusual mosaic of primitive, modern and unique features -- like nothing we've seen before," said Darren Curnoe, associate professor in the School of Biological, Earth & Environmental Sciences at the University of New South Wales and lead author of a study about the find in the journal PLoS One.
"They have rounded brain cases with prominent brow ridges, flat but short faces with a broad nose, jutting jaws that lack a human chin, their brains are moderate in size with modern-looking frontal lobes but primitive short parietal lobes, and they have large molar teeth," added Curnoe .
Since the prehistoric humans lived in areas with a lot of sunlight and ultraviolet radiation, they were likely dark-skinned.
Ji Xueping of the Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, Curnoe and their colleagues studied the fossils, which represent the remains of at least three individuals.
For now, the mysterious humans are being called the "Red Deer Cave people," since one of the caves where they were found is Maludong (meaning Red Deer Cave) and these individuals loved that animal.
"They clearly had a taste for venison, with evidence they hunted and cooked these large deer in the cave," Curnoe explained.
These people may represent an entirely new evolutionary line on the human family tree.
"First, their skulls are anatomically unique," he said. "They look very different to all modern humans, whether alive today or in Africa 150,000 years ago. And second, the very fact they persisted until almost 11,000 years ago when we know that very modern-looking people lived at the same time immediately to the east and south suggests they must have been isolated from them."
The isolation suggests that if the Red Deer Cave people did interbreed, they did so in a limited way. The nearby modern humans at this time were the last hunter-gatherers known to this region. They had just begun to make pottery for food storage and to gather rice. Both activities mark the first steps toward full-blown farming.
It is possible that the mysterious Stone Age people might represent a very early and previously unknown migration of modern humans out of Africa. This population may not have contributed genetically to living people.
"What the discovery shows is just how complicated, how interesting, human evolutionary history was in Asia right at the end of the Ice Age," Curnoe said.
"We had multiple populations living the area, probably representing different evolutionary lines: the Red Deer Cave people on the East Asian continent, Homo floresiensis (aka the "Hobbit" human) on the island of Flores in western Indonesia, and modern humans widely dispersed from northeast Asia to Australia.
He added, "This paints an amazing picture of diversity, one we had no clue about until the last decade. It's probably the tip of the iceberg of diversity, the opening of a new chapter in recent human evolution: the East Asian chapter."
Colin Groves, a professor in the School of Archaeology & Anthropology at the Australian National University, told Discovery News that the new humans "are clearly related to Homo sapiens in general, but if they differ absolutely, then by definition they are a different species."
"In the present case, one can envisage the stem that eventually gave rise to Homo sapiens emerging from Africa and spreading over much of tropical and subtropical Asia, perhaps never very numerous or widespread, and becoming divided into several isolated or semi-isolated populations; and when Homo sapiens later spread out of Africa, these earlier sapiens-like species disappeared, being out-competed with some interbreeding with Homo sapiens," Groves continued.
The people may be linked to the Skhul/Qafzeh people out of Israel and/or the equally mysterious Denisova people from Altai, Groves said. Curnoe and his team are now attempting to recover DNA from the samples, which could answer these and other questions.
The search for a Leonardo Da Vinci masterpiece reveals intriguing traces of paint that was also used in the Mona Lisa.
Peter Paul Rubens' copy of Leonardo's "The Battle of Anghiari."
THE GIST Art experts have drilled a hole through a 14th-century frescoed wall and recovered traces of a paint once used by Da Vinci in the Mona Lisa. The researchers believe this may be evidence that a long lost Da Vinci masterpiece has been hidden behind the wall. The work is a painting called the "Battle of Anghiari" and its recovery would be a huge discovery.
Researchers struggling to solve a longstanding Leonardo da Vinci mystery -- the fate of a lost masterpiece known as the "Battle of Anghiari -- have found intriguing traces of paint hidden behind a 5-inch-thick frescoed wall in Palazzo Vecchio, Florence's 14th-century city hall.
The color is consistent with that used by the Renaissance creator of the Mona Lisa, suggesting that Leonardo's artwork has remained hidden behind that frescoed wall for more than 500 years.
Known as the "Battle of Marciano," the mural was painted by the renowned 15th-century painter, architect and writer Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) in the imposing Hall of the Five Hundred. The hall was a room built at the end of the 15th century to accommodate the meetings of the Florentine Council.
Right behind that wall could lie one of the biggest discoveries in the history of art, according to art diagnostic expert Maurizio Seracini, director of the Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology at the University of California, San Diego, who has been searching for the lost masterpiece since the 1970s.
Three months ago Seracini's team drilled six tiny holes into Vasari's fresco, inserted a 0.15-inch-wide probe and micro-cameras and collected samples of red, white, orange and black material.
Analysis with a scanning electron microscope revealed the black material had an unusual chemical makeup of manganese and iron.
The compound corresponds to the "black pigment found in brown glazes on Leonardo's 'Mona Lisa' and 'St John the Baptist,'" Seracini said on Monday at a press conference in the Hall of Five Hundred.
Red material, most likely red lacquer, was also found. The researchers said that this kind of material is unlikely to be present in an ordinary plastered wall. High definition endoscopic images also revealed a beige material which "could only have been applied by a paint brush," the researcher said.
"Evidence suggests we are searching in the right place," Seracini said.
"The Battle of Anghiari" has a mysterious history. It was conceived in 1503, when Leonardo and Michelangelo received twin commissions to paint on opposite walls of the Palazzo Vecchio.
Both murals were to represent historic Florentine victories, and the commissions reinforced the intense rivalry between the two artists.
While Michelangelo never got past a sketch of his "Battle of Cascina," Leonardo began to paint the "Battle of Anghiari" on June 6, 1505, when he was 53. The mural would celebrate the Florentines' victory over Milanese troops in 1440.
In his 1550 book "Lives of the Artists," Vasari said that Leonardo painted only a portion of the 12- by 15-foot fresco. It was a battle known as the "Fight for the Standard," which represented "the rage and fury both of the men and the horses," Vasari wrote.
He also said that Leonardo abandoned the project because of technical problems arising from his experimental mixing of oil paint and fresco.
Historians, however, have questioned Vasari's conclusion. Some speculated that he made up the story, and that the fresco actually was completed.
Hailed by Leonardo's contemporaries as his finest work, the "Battle of Anghiari" now survives in several preparatory drawings and sketches by the master himself and in a Rubens drawing which was inspired by an anonymous copy of the fresco.
Ten years after writing his account of the "Battle of Anghiari," Vasari was hired to modify the council room into the Hall of Five Hundred, a hall dedicated to the ruling Medici family.
In the course of this work, Leonardo's mural disappeared.
It wasn't the only artwork to dissolve. Working on the city-wide renovation plan devised by Duke Cosimo I to celebrate the Medici family, Vasari had to sacrifice masterpieces such as Masaccio's Trinity in the church of Santa Maria Novella.
Yet he did not destroy the work; he just bricked it over and added his own fresco, the "Madonna of the Rosary."
Masaccio's work remained obscured until 1861, when Vasari's wall was removed.
In 2000, at a da Vinci conference, leading scholar Carlo Pedretti proposed that Vasari saved Leonardo's masterpiece just as he had Masaccio's.
The conference prompted Seracini to carry out sophisticated tests that involved the use of laser scanners, X-ray machines, and thermographic and radar equipment.
The only nonfictional living character mentioned in "The Da Vinci Code," Seracini found a Dan Brown-like clue in the wall housing the "Battle of Marciano."
There, on a tiny painted green flag, Vasari wrote: "Cerca, trova -- seek and you shall find."
A radar survey carried out last year revealed the presence of a hollow space between Vasari's "Battle of Marciano" and the original stone wall.
The existence of the air gap was confirmed by the team's probe, strongly pointing to the bricked-up theory. "No other gaps exist in the Hall of Five Hundred," the researchers said.
Matteo Renzi, the mayor of Florence, said he had asked the Italian government for permission to carry out further drilling in over a dozen areas where the Vasari's fresco no longer exists.
"We need to know how much is left of the painting. We are not some crazy art vandals. We are curious people who are not afraid of solving one of art history's greatest mysteries," Renzi said.
A 2,600-year-old bronze helmet is found in the waters of Haifa Bay, in Israel.
THE GIST A Greek bronze helmet was found in the waters of Haifa Bay in Israel. The helmet is about 2,600 years old and likely belonged to a wealthy Greek mercenary.
A Greek bronze helmet, covered with gold leaf and decorated with snakes, lions and a peacock's tail (or palmate , has been discovered in the waters of Haifa Bay in Israel. But how this helmet ended up at the bottom of the bay is a mystery.
The helmet dates back around 2,600 years and likely belonged to a wealthy Greek mercenary who took part in a series of wars, immortalized in the Bible, which ravaged the region at that time. Archaeologists believe that he likely fought for an Egyptian pharaoh named Necho II.
Dredging discovery
The helmet was discovered accidentally in 2007 during commercial dredging operations in the harbor. After it was discovered, conservators with the Israel Antiquities Authority went to work cleaning it and archaeologists began to analyze it.
They discovered that it is very similar to another helmet found in the 1950's near the Italian island of Giglio, about 1,500 miles (2,300 kilometers) away. That helmet has been dated to around 2,600 years ago, something which helped the researchers arrive at a date for the Haifa Bay helmet.
"The gilding and figurative ornaments make this one of the most ornate pieces of early Greek armor discovered," writes Jacob Sharvit, director of the Marine Archaeology Unit with the Israel Antiquities Authority, and John Hale, a professor at the University of Louisville, in a summary of their research being presented at the meeting.
This Greek warrior likely would have been a very wealthy individual, as few soldiers could afford such an ornate helmet. The researchers aren't sure where the helmet was made, though they suspect the warrior could be from one of the Greek colonies in Ionia, on the west coast of modern-day Turkey.
Greek warrior loses helmet
At the time the helmet was made, circa 600 B.C., Greek colonies dotted the Mediterranean coast, stretching from the Black Sea to southern France. Even so, there is no evidence of Greek colonies in Israel, indicating the warrior who ventured into Haifa Bay was likely the leader of a group of Greek mercenaries.
This warrior was likely one of Egyptian pharaoh Necho II's troops, which he sent through Israel accompanied by a fleet of ancient ships. The pharaoh was heavily involved in military campaigns in the region for nearly a decade, operations in which this warrior and his group likely were involved.
"They were not fighting for the Greeks, they were fighting for Egypt," Sharvit told Live-science in an interview.
The series of wars engulfed Egypt, Judah (a Jewish kingdom), Assyria and Babylon, with Necho II of Egypt intervening on the side of Assyria.
The end result of these conflicts was the conquest of Judah and the rise of a resurgent Babylon led by King Nebuchadnezzar II. These events would be immortalized in the Torah (the Christian Old Testament).
At some point, a midst all this history, the elite Greek warrior's helmet ended up at the bottom of Haifa Bay.
Bottom of the harbor
The simplest (albeit most embarrassing) explanation is as to how the helmet ended up at the bottom of Haifa Bay is that somebody dropped it while the warrior's ship was sailing into the harbor.
Another possibility is that the ship carrying the warrior sank, suggesting an ancient shipwreck awaits discovery. "We are planning to go back to the same site and to try to locate other (archaeological) material there," Sharvit said.
Yet another possibility (again, an embarrassing one for the warrior) is that the helmet was lost during a retreat after Necho II's armies were defeated by the Babylonians.
The results of the researchers' work were presented in January at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America. The helmet itself is now on display at the National Maritime Museum in Haifa.
The 5,300-year-old ice mummy from the Alps appears to have had the oldest known case of Lyme disease.
THE GIST Genetic analysis reveals the Iceman mummy may have had Lyme disease. Scientists found genetic material from the bacterium responsible for the disease, which is spread by ticks.
The 5,300-year-old ice mummy dubbed Ötzi, discovered in the Eastern Alps about 20 years ago, appears to have had the oldest known case of Lyme disease, new genetic analysis has revealed.
As part of work on the Iceman's genome — his complete genetic blueprint — scientists found genetic material from the bacterium responsible for the disease, which is spread by ticks and causes a rash and flu-like symptoms and can lead to joint, heart and nervous system problems.
The new analysis also indicates the Iceman was lactose intolerant, predisposed to cardiovascular disease, and most likely had brown eyes and blood type O.
To sequence the Iceman's genome, researchers took a sample from his hip bone. In it, they looked for not only human DNA — the chemical code that makes up genes — but also for that of other organisms. While they found evidence of other microbes, the Lyme disease bacterium, called Borrelia burgdorferi, was the only one known to cause disease, said Albert Zink, a study researcher and head of the European Institute for Mummies and the Iceman at the European Academy of Bozen/Bolzano (EURAC) in Italy.
"Our data point to the earliest documented case of a B. burgdorferi infection in mankind. To our knowledge, no other case report about borreliosis [Lyme disease] is available for ancient or historic specimens," Zink and colleagues write in an article published on Tuesday (Feb. 28) in the journal Nature Communications.
Discovering evidence of Borrelia is an "intriguing investigative lead," said Dr. Steven Schutzer, an immunologist at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey-New Jersey Medical School.
Schutzer is a lead investigator on a National Institutes of Health-funded project that has sequenced at least 17 strains of the modern bacterium, and has published 13 of those so far.
The discovery of the traces of Borrelia within the sample taken from the Iceman still needs to be confirmed, he said. "Now we know what we want to look for, now that we know there is a possibility of that being here, we can do a very targeted approach that looks for Borrelia," Schutzer said.
Lyme disease is transmitted by ticks in North America and Eurasia. It was first found in the United States in Connecticut in the mid-1970s; a similar disorder had been identified in Europe earlier in the 20th century.
Schutzer said he is discussing follow-up studies with Zink.
Previous work had examined genetic material within the Iceman's mitochondria -- the energy-producing centers in cells. His mitochondrial DNA,which is inherited through the maternal line, did not reveal any living relatives.
In this new project, researchers decoded the DNA found within the nuclei of the Iceman's cells, which is inherited from both parents. They found the Iceman belonged to a lineage that is now rare,but still present in some places.
"This means his ancestors came from Europe originally from the East and spread over most or part of Europe," Zink said. "This original population was somehow replaced by other populations, but they remained quite stable in remote areas like Sardinia and Corsica."
The analysis also indicates the Iceman was lactose intolerant. This isn't surprising, according to Zink. At the time the Iceman lived and died, people were beginning to settle down and become farmers, and the ability for adults to digest milk became an advantage.
The team also found he had a genetic predisposition for cardiovascular disease, supporting earlier scans showing the buildup of deposits within his arteries. In spite of the health problems from which the roughly 45-year-old Iceman suffered, he appears to have died a violent death. Researchers believe a flint arrowhead, shot into his left shoulder most likely killed him.
nvestigators have found what could be the earliest evidence of a Christian iconography in Jerusalem.
A CGI-enhanced image of "Jonah and the Whale," an engraving that has led some Biblical scholars to conclude that a tomb in Jerusalem is the last resting place of the prophet Jonah.
THE GIST The findings and their interpretation are likely to be controversial, since most scholars are skeptical of any Christian archaeological remains from so early a period. The tomb containing the new discoveries is a modest sized, carefully carved rock cut cave tomb typical of Jerusalem in the period from 20 BCE until 70 CE.
The researchers behind a 2007 documentary detailing “The Lost Tomb of Jesus” have uncovered evidence that a first-century Israeli tomb once belonged to the Biblical prophet Jonah, who was famously swallowed whole by a whale in the Book of Jonah.
The prime evidence comes from an ossuary, a box or chest built to contain human remains that was examined in the tomb in Jerusalem by a robotic arm and a “snake camera.” It has a four-line Greek inscription that refers to God “raising up” someone. A carved image found on an adjacent ossuary shows what appears to be a large fish with a human stick figure in its mouth -- interpreted by the excavation team to be an image evoking the biblical story of Jonah.
"If anyone had claimed to find either a statement about resurrection or a Jonah image in a Jewish tomb of this period I would have said impossible -- until now," said James D. Tabor, professor and chair of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. "Our team was in a kind of ecstatic disbelief, but the evidence was clearly before our eyes, causing us to revise our prior assumptions."
Tabor collaborated with filmmaker/professor Simcha Jacobovici to study the tomb, which lies in close proximity to the Jesus family tomb, the subject of a wildly popular and highly controversial Discovery Channel documentary of the same name.
The new findings will be detailed online at www.bibleinterp.com on Feb. 28, 2012.
They will also be published in a book by Simon & Schuster entitled "The Jesus Discovery: The New Archaeological Find That Reveals the Birth of Christianity" and detailed in a fresh documentary to be aired by the Discovery Channel in spring 2012.
The findings and their interpretation are likely to be controversial, since most scholars are skeptical of any Christian archaeological remains from so early a period.
"Context is everything in archaeology," Tabor pointed out. "These two tombs, less than 200 feet apart, were part of an ancient estate, likely related to a rich family of the time. We chose to investigate this tomb because of its proximity to the so-called 'Jesus tomb,' not knowing if it would yield anything unusual."
An ossuary expert debunked the 2007 documentary, telling the Associated Press at the time that the documentary fudged some of the facts.
"James Cameron is a great guru of science fiction, and he's taking it to a new level with Simcha Jacobovici. You take a little bit of science, spin a good yarn out of it and you get another 'Terminator' or 'Life of Brian,'" said Stephen Pfann, a textual scholar and paleographer at the University of the Holy Land in Jerusalem who briefly appeared as an ossuary expert in that documentary.
The tomb containing the new discoveries is a modest sized, carefully carved rock cut cave tomb typical of Jerusalem in the period from 20 BCE until 70 CE.
It was exposed in 1981 by builders and is currently several meters under the basement level of a modern condominium building in East Talpiot, a neighborhood of Jerusalem less than two miles south of the Old City.
Archaeologists entered the tomb at the time, were able to briefly examine it and its ossuaries, take preliminary photographs, and remove one pot and an ossuary, before they were forced to leave by Orthodox religious groups who oppose excavation of Jewish tombs.
In 2009 and 2010, Tabor and Rami Arav, professor of archaeology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, working together with Jacobovici, obtained a license to excavate the current tomb from the Israel Antiquities Authority under the academic sponsorship of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, excavations funded by the Discovery Channel.
Among the approximately 2000 ossuaries that have been recovered by the Israel Antiquities Authority, only 650 have any inscriptions on them, and none have inscriptions comparable to those on ossuaries 5 and 6.
Less than a dozen ossuaries from the period have epitaphs but, according to Tabor, these inscribed messages usually have to do with warnings not to disturb the bones of the dead. In contrast, the four-line Greek inscription contains some kind of statement of resurrection faith.
Tabor noted that the epitaph's complete and final translation is uncertain. The first three lines are clear, but the last line, consisting of three Greek letters, is less sure, yielding several possible translations: "O Divine Jehovah, raise up, raise up," or "The Divine Jehovah raises up to the Holy Place," or "The Divine Jehovah raises up from [the dead]."
"This inscription has something to do with resurrection of the dead, either of the deceased in the ossuary, or perhaps, given the Jonah image nearby, an expression of faith in Jesus' resurrection," Tabor said.
The ossuary with the image that Tabor and his team understand to be representing Jonah also has other interesting engravings. These also may be connected to resurrection, Tabor notes. On one side is the tail of a fish disappearing off the edge of the box, as if it is diving into the water. There are small fish images around its border on the front facing, and on the other side is the image of a cross-like gate or entrance—which Tabor interprets as the notion of entering the "bars" of death, which are mentioned in the Jonah story in the Bible.
"This Jonah ossuary is most fascinating, " Tabor remarked. "It seems to represent a pictorial story with the fish diving under the water on one end, the bars or gates of death, the bones inside, and the image of the great fish spitting out a man representing, based on the words of Jesus, the 'sign of Jonah' – the 'sign' that he would escape the bonds of death."
A fabulous sunken treasure recovered from a Spanish wreck in the Atlantic Ocean is flying back home from the United States, ending a five-year legal battle.The treasure was put aboard two Spanish military C-130 planes. They took off Friday from a Florida Air Force base with 595,000 silver coins and other gold aboard. They are expected to land in Madrid's Torrejon Air Base after a 24-hour flight with two stops on the way -- New Jersey and the Azores. "Today a journey that began 200 years ago is finally ending. We are recovering a historical legacy and a treasure. This is not money. This is historical heritage," Spain's ambassador to the United States, Jorge Dezcallar de Mazarredo, was reported as saying as the planes took off.Consisting of 18th-century silver coins weighing more than 17 tons, hundreds of gold coins, worked gold and other artifacts, the treasure has been at the center of an acrimonious international legal battle ever since it was discovered in 2007 by underwater robots from Odyssey Marine Exploration, a Florida-based treasure-hunting company. Valued at as much as $500 million -- the richest shipwreck haul in history -- the trove was handled by Odyssey and shipped straight to the United States.The company, which, according to earnings statements, spent $2.6 million to retrieve, transport, store and conserve the precious cargo, has been unable to remove the silver and gold coins from warehouses at the Numismatic Guaranty Corporation in Sarasota, Fla.Immediately after the treasure was recovered, Spain filed a claim arguing that the treasure originated from theNuestra Senora de las Mercedes. The 36-gun Spanish frigate sank off the coast of Portugal in 1804 with 200 people aboard following a battle with four British navy ships.According to an international maritime law known as the doctrine of sovereign immunity, active-duty naval vessels on a noncommercial mission remain the property of the countries that commissioned them. Spain thus claimed the exclusive property of the wreck and its cargo.Odyssey argued there was not enough evidence to prove the wreck, which they code-named "Black Swan," was the Mercedes and even if that were the case, the ship’s last voyage, from Montevideo to Cadiz, was commercial in nature. The majority of coins onboard were owned by private merchants, not by Spain, Odyssey insisted.After a five-year court battle, and staggering revelations from WikiLeaks documents, a U.S. federal judge established that the United States had no jurisdiction in the case and ordered the treasure returned to Spain by Friday.For days, a team of Spanish numismatic experts examined the precious coins, overseeing their packing into the same white plastic containers in which the coins were brought to the U.S. in 2007. The cargo planes took off with the treasure despite an emergency appeal made by Peru to the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday.It was claimed that the gold and silver coins were mined, refined and minted in Peru while the country was part of the Spanish empire.The Supreme Court did not say when or if it would respond. However, U.S. courts had previously rejected similar claims by descendants of the Peruvian merchants who had owned the sunken coins.Spain has ruled out the idea of the treasure being sold to ease its worrying national debt.Instead, the coins will be divided and exhibited in several national museums. Recently, Odyssey has struck a deal with the British Maritime Heritage Foundation to retrieve an even richer treasure from the depths of the English Channel. Belonging to the legendary HMS Victory, a warship that sank in 1744 with more than 1,000 men and a secret cargo of gold coins, the shipwreck could produce the world’s richest shipwreck trove, worth $1 billion.
