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A retaining pier wall, four shrines and an unusual circular structure dating to over 1000 years old, have recently been found by archaeologists of the National Institute of anthropology and history (INAH) in the pre-Hispanic site of Tabuco in Veracruz... Tabuco is located on the southern bank of the Tuxpan River 5 km from the sea, on a narrow strip of land between the river and to the south are the mangroves of Tumilco. This Huastec site was explored in the 1940s by Gordon Ekholm, who carried out some initial investigations and determined the dates for occupation at between the...

Bye Bye, Beringia Anthropology and Archaeology of The Americas by Bill Jones One might think that Archeology sites throughout the World have produced many datable human remains. Nothing could be further from the truth. Ancient human remains have so rarely been found that these singular findings could not be connected to others to form chronologies about human evolution. The scarcity of human remains to be analyzed has prevented the sciences of Anthropology and Archaeology from forming conclusions about the cultural levels of ancient humans. We try to measure the culture of a people in terms of the totality of their...

A new study of insect pests found in an ancient storage jar on the Greek island of Santorini suggests the major volcanic eruption that took place there around 1600 B.C. -- and which may have inspired the legend of Atlantis -- happened in early summer. The "Atlantis" eruption was one of the most significant volcanic eruptions in human history. The blast is credited for not only ending the Minoan civilization, but also for affecting ancient Egypt and other communities around the eastern Mediterranean, explained Eva Panagiotakopulu, a palaeoecologist and fossil-insect expert at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Based on...

Over the course of his 30-year journey, Thompson has written five books, all self-published, detailing what he believes to be conclusive evidence that, long before 1492, the Americas were explored repeatedly -- by the ancient Chinese, Venetians, Egyptians, Romans, Vikings, Irish, English and who-knows-who-else. He argues, for example, that a Chinese admiral named Zheng He, commanding a fleet of Chinese junks in the early 1400s, explored the coasts of the Americas. He believes that Marco Polo sailed with the Chinese into the Strait of Juan de Fuca and perhaps into Puget Sound in the 13th century. He is convinced that...

Chinese map collecter has found a copy of an ancient map he claims proves controversial theories that famed Chinese mariner Zheng He was the first person to discover America and circumnavigate the world. Liu Gang said the map supports the recent theories that Chinese discovered America before Christopher Columbus and charted parts of the world such as Antartica and northern Canada long before Western explorers. "The map shows us that Chinese discovered the world 70 years before Columbus," Liu said in a public unveiling of the chart. "The map tells us that Zheng He discovered the world." The map is...

Is Gavin Menzies Right or Wrong? By Timothy Furnish Mr. Furnish, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor, World History, Georgia Perimeter College. Every college world history textbook discusses the early 15th c. CE Chinese naval expeditions, commissioned by the Ming Emperor Zhu Di and commanded by the legendary admiral Zheng He, that sailed as far as East Africa and the Red Sea. Indeed, one of the favorite themes of the history subgenre known as alternative history is: why didn't these Chinese flotillas beat the Portuguese and Spanish to the New World--and what if they had? Gavin Menzies, a former British Royal Navy...

Critics say new book is all junk A British author claims the Chinese, not Columbus, found America first.By Ted Bell -- Bee Staff Writer Published 2:15 a.m. PST Tuesday, January 7, 2003 British author Gavin Menzies' controversial book "1421 -- The Year China Discovered America", which goes on sale in the United States this week, claims that America was discovered by Chinese explorers 70 years before Columbus arrived. Part of the alleged proof behind Menzies' theory -- which is being heatedly contested by more traditional historians -- purportedly rests beneath about 40 feet of Glenn County mud in the form...

In the autumn of 2010, local amateur archaeologists discovered a large harbor, dating from around 1000-1200 AD, in Ahvenkoski village, at the mouth of western branch of the Kymijoki River in Finland. The findings included a smithy, a iron smelting furnace, forceps, as well as hundreds of iron objects such as boat rivets, similar to those found at Viking settlements in different parts of the Baltic, Scandinavia, Scotland and Iceland. More recently, in August of 2012 and in the same area, a 2 x 3 meter wide late Viking Age or Crusade period cremation grave was uncovered. Artifacts included a...

Artifacts included a battle axe, a knife, and a bronze buckle, all associated with burned human bones, initially thought to be dated to around 1000 - 1200 CE before analysis. Similar objects have been discovered in the Baltic Sea area and in Ladoga Karelia. Identical cape buckles have also been found in Gotland. But based on the University of Helsinki analysis, the cremation grave finds date to a time that is significantly earlier -- during the Viking Age between 775-980 CE, based on their application of AMS (Accelerator Mass Spectrometry) techniques... ...in the area between the towns of Loviisa and...

On this stick from the 1200s found in Bergen, two men named Sigurd and Lavran have written their names both in code and with regular runes. This helped runologist Jonas Nordby to solve the Jötunvillur code. For the first time, the Jötunvillur runic code is cracked. It can help to solve the mystery of the Vikings’ secret codes. Why did the Vikings use codes when they wrote runes? Was it a secret message or other reasons that they encrypted runic texts? This, we still know little about. But runologist Jonas Nordby think he may be one step closer to the...

...A 10th century Arab Muslim writer named Ahmad ibn Fadlan produced a description of a funeral of a Scandinavian, Swedish, chieftain who was on an expedition on the eastern route. The account is a unique source on the ceremonies surrounding the Viking funeral, of a chieftain. The dead chieftain was put in a temporary grave which was covered for ten days until they had sewn new clothes for him. One of his thrall women volunteered to join him in the afterlife and she was guarded day and night, being given a great amount of intoxicating drinks while she sang happily......

A cross discovered by an amateur Danish archaeologist may "change history" according to an expert, who believes the cross may date from before Christianity is thought to have reached Denmark. An amateur archaeologist on the island of Funen made a startling discovery last week – a necklace resembling Jesus on the cross. But after posting a picture of the discovery on Facebook, Dennis Fabricius Holm quickly found that the item may have a lot more significance than he had initially thought. “I finished work early last Friday, so I decided to spend a couple of hours searching with my metal...

Ancient Navigators Could Have Measured Longitude -- in Egypt in 232 B.C. !by Rick Sanders Around the year 232 B.C., Captain Rata and Navigator Maui set out with a flotilla of ships from Egypt in an attempt to circumnavigate the Earth. On the night of August 6-7, 2001, between the hours of 11 PM and 3 AM, this writer, and fellow amateur astronomer Bert Cooper, proved in principle that Captain Rata and Navigator Maui could have known and charted their location, by longitude, most of the time during that voyage. The Maui expedition was under the guidance of Eratosthenes, the...

Voyage to prove pharaohs traded cocaine By Tom Leonard in New York Last Updated: 2:21am BST 30/05/2007 An adventurer who believes that ancient man regularly crossed the Atlantic Ocean 14,000 years ago plans to recreate such a voyage in a 41ft raft made of reeds and eucalyptus tree branches. Basing his theory on the thinnest of historical evidence, Dominique Gorlitz believes that the discovery of traces of tobacco and cocaine in the tomb of the pharaoh Rameses II proves that there was trade between the Old and New Worlds. He also claims that 14,000-year-old cave paintings in Spain show that,...

American Drugs in Egyptian MummiesS. A. Wells www.colostate.edu Abstract: The recent findings of cocaine, nicotine, and hashishin Egyptian mummies by Balabanova et. al. have been criticized on grounds that: contamination of the mummies may have occurred, improper techniques may have been used, chemical decomposition may have produced the compounds in question, recent mummies of drug users were mistakenly evaluated, that no similar cases are known of such compounds in long-dead bodies, and especially that pre-Columbian transoceanic voyages are highly speculative. These criticisms are each discussed in turn. Balabanova et. al. are shown to have used and confirmed their findings with...

For in Manchester, the mummies under the care of Rosalie David, the Egyptologist [Keeper of Egyptology, Manchester Museum] once so sure that Balabanova had made a mistake, produced some odd results of their own... "We've received results back from the tests on our mummy tissue samples and two of the samples and the one hair sample both have evidence of nicotine in them. I'm really very surprised at this."

Mummy Hair Reveals Drinking Habits By Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News Sept. 23, 2004 Mummy hair has revealed the first direct evidence of alcohol consumption in ancient populations, according to new forensic research.The study, still in its preliminary stage, examined hair samples from spontaneously mummified remains discovered in one of the most arid regions of the world, the Atacama Desert of northern Chile and southern Peru. The research was presented at the 5th World Congress on Mummy Studies in Turin, Italy, this month. “ In modern human hair the levels would generally be in the ranges of social drinking, but we...

This is the mummified body of a German adventurer who was found dead drifting on his abandoned yacht at the weekend off the coast of southern Philippines. Manfred Fritz Bajorat, 59, was discovered by two fishermen aboard his yacht in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Barobo town in Surigao del Sur. His body was sitting near to the radio telephone as if he was trying one last desperate Mayday call to save himself when he died.

A mummified adventurer found floating aboard a ghost yacht had penned a tragic final message to his dead wife. Manfred Fritz Bajorat, 59, was found by two fishermen at the weekend off the coast of the Philippines

Scientists worked with aboriginal Australian communities to explore heritage... Modern humans arrived in Australia about 50 thousand years ago, forming the ancestors of present-day Aboriginal Australians. They were amongst the earliest settlers outside Africa. They arrived in an ancient continent made up of today's Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea, called Sahul, probably thousands of years before modern humans arrived in Europe. Five thousand years ago, dingos, the native dogs, somehow arrived in Australia, and changes in stone tool use and language around the same time raised the question of whether there were also associated genetic changes in the Australian Aboriginal...