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Super-eruption: no problem?Tools found before and after a massive eruption hint at a hardy population. Katharine Sanderson Massive eruptions make it tough for life living under the ash cloud. A stash of ancient tools in India hints that life carried on as usual for humans living in the fall-out of a massive volcanic eruption 74,000 years ago. Michael Petraglia, from the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues found the stone tools at a site called Jwalapuram, in Andhra Pradesh, southern India, above and below a thick layer of ash from the eruption of the Toba volcano in Indonesia —...

Why Toba Matters What can a volcanic eruption that occurred almost 75,000 years ago teach us about today's world of air pollution, global warming, and climate change? Heaps, says Dr. Drew Shindell, a climatologist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. For starters, knowing what the massive upheaval of Indonesia's Toba supervolcano did to the planet's climate (it might have cooled global temperatures enough to kill vegetation for years on end and perhaps hasten an ice age) offers sobering insight into what pumping billions of tons of chemicals into the atmosphere as we're now doing could result...

The devastating Tusnami was precursor to what is coming in 2012. Toba in Sumatra can explode 100 times more violently than what happened 74,000 years back. The last supervolcano to erupt was Toba 74,000 years ago in Sumatra. Ten thousand times bigger than Mt St Helens, it created a global catastrophe dramatically affecting life on Earth. Scientists now find through extrapolation cycle study that the 74,000 years back super volcano in Toba, Sumatra was the warm up for what may be coming in 2012. Around Toba, increasing harmonic tremors have started after the Tsunami two years back. It would devastate...

Professor Stanley H. Ambrose Department of Anthropology, University Of Illinois, Urbana, USA Extract from "Journey of Human Evolution" [1998] 34, 623-651 The last glacial period was preceded by 1000 years of the coldest temperatures of the Late Pleistocene, apparently caused by the eruption of the Mount Toba volcano. The six year long volcanic winter and 1000-year-long instant Ice Age that followed Mount Toba's eruption may have decimated Modern Man's entire population. Genetic evidence suggests that Human population size fell to about 10,000 adults between 50 and 100 thousand years ago. The survivors from this global catastrophy would have found refuge...

This is the result of a DNA study done by Professor Stephen Oppenheimer and funded by The Bradshaw Foundation. As you go on the journey, here are some things I would like you to make note of and I would appreciate your comments:1. 135-115,000 years ago, notice that the first human excursion out of Africa failed/Died out.2. 74,000 years ago Toba exploded and reduced the worldwide human population to 2-10,000. Note the (about) 10,000 year absence of humans in India, Pakistan and parts of SE Asia. Also, there are two populations of 'out of Africa' humans that are seperated from...

Just in time for Easter, from The New York Daily News: Two historians claim the search for the Holy Grail is over.The famous cup used by Jesus Christ during the Last Supper was identified in a book written by Margarita Torres Jose Manuel Ortega del Rio, titled “Kings of the Grail” and published last week, as the jewel-encrusted goblet on display at the San Isidro Basilica in the northwestern Spanish city of Leon.News of the discovery caused masses of people to flock to the historic church to view the precious chalice – forcing the operators of the museum to pull...

Spanish historians say they have discovered what Monty Python could not – the Holy Grail, the legendary cup Jesus supposedly drank from at the Last Supper. The Spaniards – Margarita Torres and José Ortega del Río – believe the 2,000-year-old vessel is in a church in León in northern Spain. The pair spent three years studying the history of the chalice and last week published a book, “The Kings of the Grail,” making their case. The onyx chalice, they explained, was concealed within another antique vessel known as the Chalice of Doña Urruca, which is located in León’s basilica of...

Spanish historians claim they’ve discovered the 2,000-year-old Holy Chalice, the biblical cup that Jesus Christ used during the Last Supper. Margarita Torres, a medieval history lecturer at León University and Jose Ortiza del Rio, an art historian, penned a new book claiming that years of research has led them to conclude that Christ’s chalice is somehow inside a medieval goblet that has been on display in Spain for 1,000 years, Daily Mail reported. Residing inside the Basilica of San Isidoro, a church in Spain that is located on the site of an ancient Roman temple, the goblet — known as...

An Australian anthropologist has used forensic facial reconstruction techniques to show, for the first time, how the mysterious Flores 'hobbit' might have once looked. Homo floresiensis, as the hobbit is officially known, caused a storm of controversy when it was discovered in Flores, Indonesia in 2003. Some argued the hobbit was an entirely new species, while others suggested it may have simply been a diseased specimen of an existing human species. Using techniques she has previously applied to help police solve crimes, Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Wollongong and specialist facial anthropologist, Dr Susan Hayes, moulded muscle...

Medici philosopher's mystery death is solved By Malcolm Moore, Rome Correspondent Last Updated: 2:35am GMT 07/02/2008 After 500 years, one of Renaissance Italy's most enduring murder mysteries has been solved by forensic scientists. Ever since Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, a mystical and mercurial philosopher at the court of Lorenzo de' Medici, suddenly became sick and died in 1494, it has been rumoured that foul play was involved. Scientists display the bones of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola Pico's fame has faded, but he was a celebrated figure at the Medici court. He gained notoriety when, at the age of 23, he...

1,800-year old painted coffin discovered in north China Chinese archaeologists have discovered an ancient coffin painted with colored drawings dating back to the Eastern Han Dynasty (A.D. 25-220) in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. The funeral objects had already been robbed when the coffin was discovered from a tomb in Siziwang Banner. The coffin, in delicate appearance, was well preserved during excavation of the tomb. "The color drawings, painted at inner sides of the coffin, feature daily life and hunting activities," said Wang Dafang, an official with the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Regional Cultural Relic Bureau The most valuable painting on...

LONDON: Sections of the King's Table, a symbol of royal power until it was smashed by Oliver Cromwell, have been found beneath the floor of the Palace of Westminster. The elaborately carved stone table was used by kings and queens from the 13th century for coronation feasts and state banquets but disappeared under Puritan rule. It represented the power and authority of the monarch in the same way as the King's Bench, a court, and the King's Privy Wardrobe, or Jewel Tower. A new table was made in the 17th century after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 but...

A survey of British skulls from the early part of the New Stone Age, or Neolithic, shows societies then were more violent than was supposed. Early Neolithic Britons had a one in 20 chance of suffering a skull fracture at the hands of someone else and a one in 50 chance of dying from their injuries. Details were presented at a meeting of the Society for American Archaeology and reported in New Scientist magazine. Blunt instruments such as clubs were responsible for most of the traumas. This is not the first time human-induced injuries have been identified in Neolithic...

FLOAT out beyond the Crusader city walls, Roman aqueduct and 19th-century mosque. Then descend through a cloud of quicksilver bubbles 20ft and 2,000 years to Herod The Great’s sunken harbour. Here, just off Caesarea port, a unique underwater archaeological park opened yesterday, showcasing 80,000sq m of a sunken harbour built by the biblical king of the Jews for Caesar Augustus. It is no ordinary “museum” — no chattering schoolchildren, no queues, no headphones, and the only sound that of boat propellers passing above your head as you swim around the “exhibits”. “I am excited. I think anyone in the field...

One day in a spring, an elderly man walked alone on a stone road lined by young willows in Xuzhou in East China's Jiangsu Province. At the end of the road was a museum that few people have heard of. A Chinese theology professor says the first Christmas is depicted in the stone relief from the Eastern Han Dynasty (AD 25-220). In the picture above a woman and a man are sitting around what looks like a manger, with allegedly "the three wise men" approaching from the left side, holding gifts, "the shepherd" following them, and "the assassins" queued...

We stand today at an unprecedented turning point in human history. In recent years two versions of ancient history have formed. One, we shall call ‘alternative’ history, the other we shall refer to as ‘official’ history. The former ponders over a variety of anomalies and tries to make sense out of the corpus of evidence, i.e., the pyramids and timelines, why they were built, by whom and when. The latter conducts digs, catalogues pottery shards, and tries to defend its proposal there are no enigmas, and virtually everything is explained. At one point perhaps as late as fifteen years ago...

A sixteenth-century altar in one of Germany's most historically important cathedrals has been saved from woodworm not by the application of chemicals, but by a swarm of wasps. The Cranach altar in the Erfurt Cathedral was being destroyed by the wood-eating insects, but officials delayed taking action because they feared that chemical treatments might damage its 11 painted panels. Instead they adopted a pioneering technique which may now be emulated in historic buildings across Europe: releasing 3,000 parasitic wasps, which feed on woodworm larvae. The towering wooden altar, riddled with holes, and the large painting above it which also showed...

February 17, 2005 4:30 AM Alpine iceman reveals Stone Age secrets By Sophie Hardach BOLZANO, Italy (Reuters) - Some 5,300 years after his violent death, a Stone Age man found frozen in the Alps is slowly revealing his secrets to a global team of scientists. But despite more than a decade of high-tech efforts by geneticists, botanists and engineers many questions about his life and death remain unsolved. And rumours of a deadly curse on those who found him continue to swirl. German amateur mountaineer Helmut Simon and his wife spotted Oetzi, as he became known, in the mountains between...

Archaeological argument breaks out over Indonesian sunken treasure Thu Nov 18,10:36 PM ET Science - AFP JAKARTA (AFP) - In the blue waters of the Java Sea, a drama is unfolding around an ancient cargo of sunken treasure, but with corruption and bureaucracy never far from the surface in Indonesia, the tale owes more to Franz Kafka than Indiana Jones. A team of divers, including two Australians, two Britons, two French, a Belgian and a German, has been working for months to excavate a vessel laden with rare ceramics which sank more than 1,000 years ago off Indonesia's shores. Their...