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Flood made Britain into an island 'in 24 hours' By Tim Hall (Filed: 25/09/2006) Britain may have become an island after a Biblical-style flood split it from Europe in less than 24 hours, according to new geological research. The flood would have taken place between 400,000 and 200,000 years ago, sweeping away hills between Britain and what is now France. The theory could rewrite British prehistory, as current text-books teach that Britain - once a peninsula of continental Europe - split from the great land mass after a long process of erosion and rises in sea levels. However, surveys of...

SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Scientists say they have found the trigger of a sharp cooling 13,000 years ago that plunged Europe into a mini ice age. Mark Bateman from the University of Sheffield in England said a catastrophic flood unleashed from a giant North American lake dumped large amounts of freshwater into the Arctic Ocean. This led to the shutting down of the Gulf Stream ocean circulation pattern that brings warmth to Europe. "We're talking about a lake the size of the UK emptying very quickly," Bateman told Reuters by telephone. "We don't know the exact period of time but we're...

Tuesday November 13 08:37 AM EST Comets, Meteors & Myth: New Evidence for Toppled Civilizations and Biblical Tales Comets, Meteors & Myth: New Evidence for Toppled Civilizations and Biblical Tales By Robert Roy BrittSenior Science Writer, SPACE.com "...and the seven judges of hell ... raised their torches, lighting the land with their livid flame. A stupor of despair went up to heaven when the god of the storm turned daylight into darkness, when he smashed the land like a cup." -- An account of the Deluge from the Epic of Gilgamesh, circa 2200 B.C. If you are fortunate enough to ...

Brian Godawa has been writing a fascinating fantasy series that takes place in the ancient Near East. It began with Noah Primeval which was rooted in the question, “What was going on in the world that was so horrible that mankind needed destroyed?” The series continued with Enoch Primordial (actually a prequel), which centered around the enigmatic Enoch. A man barely mentioned in the biblical accounts, but because he never died, and the other books attributed to him recount many a strange event, he has long been a person of high speculation. Godawa now steps out from filling in between...

Epic HeroHow a self-taught British genius rediscovered the Mesopotamian saga of Gilgamesh—after 2,500 years By David Damrosch In November 1872, George Smith was working at the British Museum in a second-floor room overlooking the bare plane trees in Russell Square. On a long table were pieces of clay tablets, among the hundreds of thousands that archaeologists had shipped back to London from Nineveh, in present-day Iraq, a quarter-century before. Many of the fragments bore cuneiform hieroglyphs, and over the years scholars had managed to reassemble parts of some tablets, deciphering for the first time these records of daily life in...

Surveying the Walls of Uruk Can Technology Discover the Ancient City of Gilgamesh? German archaeologists working at the ancient site of Uruk (modern Warka, just east of the Euphrates River in southern Iraq) have begun mapping the canals, walls and building foundations of the sprawling, buried city—without even lifting a spade. Over the past two winters, a team headed by Margarete van Ess of Berlin’s German Archaeology Institute has laid out a grid system over the site and begun to map the buried ruins with a magnetometer an instrument that measures differences in the strength of the earth’s magnetic field...

Gilgamesh tomb believed found Archaeologists in Iraq believe they may have found the lost tomb of King Gilgamesh - the subject of the oldest book in history. The Epic Of Gilgamesh - written by a Middle Eastern scholar 2,500 years before the birth of Christ - commemorated the life of the ruler of the city of Uruk, from which Iraq gets its name. Now a German-led expedition has discovered what is thought to be the entire city of Uruk - including, where the Euphrates once flowed, the last resting place of its famous King. "I don't want to say...

Gilgamesh tomb believed found Archaeologists in Iraq believe they may have found the lost tomb of King Gilgamesh - the subject of the oldest "book" in history. The Epic Of Gilgamesh - written by a Middle Eastern scholar 2,500 years before the birth of Christ - commemorated the life of the ruler of the city of Uruk, from which Iraq gets its name. Now, a German-led expedition has discovered what is thought to be the entire city of Uruk - including, where the Euphrates once flowed, the last resting place of its famous King. "I don't want to say...

Gilgamesh Tomb Believed Found Posted 01-25-2005 10:02:40 (GMT 1-25-2005 (BBC) -- Archaeologists in Iraq believe they may have found the lost tomb of King Gilgamesh - the subject of the oldest "book" in history. The Epic Of Gilgamesh - written by a Middle Eastern scholar 2,500 years before the birth of Christ - commemorated the life of the ruler of the city of Uruk, from which Iraq gets its name. Now, a German-led expedition has discovered what is thought to be the entire city of Uruk - including, where the Euphrates once flowed, the last resting place of its famous...

Skeletal collections with trauma found from the Neolithic period in Anatolia suggest that injury was caused by daily activities and lifestyle, rather than systematic violence. However, shortly after this period there is an increase in trauma associated with violence that may suggest an increase in stress within and between populations in this area... The human remains come from the site of Titris Hoyuk, dating to 2900-2100 BCE. The site grew very quickly in this period from a small farming community to an urban centre within a large mud-brick fortification wall built over a stone foundation. Within one of the house...

Last Updated: Friday, 19 March, 2004, 11:06 GMT Did Noah really build an ark? By Jeremy Bowen Presenter, Noah's Ark In the Bible, God tells Noah he has to build an ark and load a pair of every kind of animal before a great flood engulfs the world. It is widely regarded as a myth, but could it actually be true? The story of Noah and his ark is one which sticks in the minds of children and never gets forgotten. God warned Noah - the only good man left in a world full of corruption and violence - to...

Global warming five million years ago may have caused parts of Antarctica's large ice sheets to melt and sea levels to rise by approximately 20 metres, scientists report today in the journal Nature Geoscience. The researchers, from Imperial College London, and their academic partners studied mud samples to learn about ancient melting of the East Antarctic ice sheet. They discovered that melting took place repeatedly between five and three million years ago, during a geological period called Pliocene Epoch, which may have caused sea levels to rise approximately ten metres.

Once dismissed, myths are winning new attention from geologists who find that they may encode valuable data about earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, and other stirrings of the earth SEATTLE, WASHINGTON--James Rasmussen, owner of a funky used-record store called Bud's Jazz, and Ruth Ludwin, a seismologist at the University of Washington, Seattle, make an unlikely professional team. Late last year, they were walking down the beach near the bustling Fauntleroy ferry dock, searching for a reddish sandstone boulder. Native American legends-Rasmussen belongs to the local Duwamish people-say the boulder is haunted by a'yahos, a spirit with the body of a serpent and...

Oldest Swords Found in Turkey By Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News March 25, 2003 — The most ancient swords ever found were forged 5,000 years ago in what is today Turkey, according to Italian archaeologists who announced the results of chemical analysis at a recent meeting in Florence. Digging at Arslantepe, a site in the Taurus mountains of southeast Anatolia, Marcella Frangipane, professor at the department of historical science, archaeology and anthropology of antiquities of Rome University, found nine swords dating back to about 3,300 B.C. Blade and hilt were cast in one piece; moreover, three swords were beautifully inlaid with...

Ever since British jurist Sir William Jones noted in 1786 that there are marked similarities between diverse languages such as Greek, Sanskrit, and Celtic, linguists have assumed that most of the languages of Europe and the Indian subcontinent derive from a single ancient tongue. But researchers have fiercely debated just when and where this mother tongue was first spoken. Now a bold new study asserts that the common root of the 144 so-called Indo-European languages, which also include English and all the Germanic, Slavic, and Romance languages, is very ancient indeed. In this week's issue of Nature, evolutionary biologist Russell...

Italian Archeologist: Anatolia - Home to First Civilization on Earth Prof. Dr. Marcella Frangipane is trying to convince scientists that Anatolia is the source of civilization on earth, and not Mesopotamia, as historians have claimed. 20/06/2003 13:20 After 13 years of work in the Aslantepe Mound Orduzu, Malatya, Frangipane says the archefacts she uncovered prove that the first civilization was established in Anatolia. According to Frangipane, the swords he found in Aslantepe and the palace, are the oldest in the world. These findings contradict everything in history books. Frangipane held a seminar, accompanied by a slide show, entitled 'Anatolia and...

Tsunami or melting glaciers: What caused ancient Atlit to sink? By Ofri Ilani At the bottom of the sea, some 300 meters west of the Atlit fortress, lies one of the greatest archaeological mysteries of the Mediterranean basin. About 20 years ago, archaeologists discovered a complex of ancient buildings and ancient graves with dozens of skeletons at the underwater site of Atlit-Yam. The team of marine archaeologists that excavated the site, headed by Dr. Ehud Galili of the Israel Antiquities Authority, came to the consclusion that an ancient settlement once existed there, but sank beneath the surface of the sea...

MOSCOW. (Andrei Kislyakov, scientific commentator, for RIA Novosti) - The world geological community is warning that today's seismic activity on our planet is nothing compared with what's to come. Over the past three years, Pakistan, for example, has been hit by dozens of earthquakes. In March 2005, 80,000 people died under the rubble there. On October 30, the last time nature went on the rampage, there were hundreds of victims. Tens of thousands of people drowned during an overwhelming Asian tsunami at the end of 2004. China and Afghanistan have been rocked by quakes again more recently. These natural disasters,...

As they map Germany's changing coastline, members of a research team called SINCOS are learning about settlements that were covered by water 6000 to 8000 years ago On a warm afternoon in September, archaeologist Harald Lübke looked out from the pilot house of the Goor, a bright red dive boat moored 200 meters off Germany's Baltic seacoast. Three meters below the water's glassy surface, divers in bulky drysuits were excavating a prehistoric hunting camp. A deafening motor mounted on the Goor's deck powered a pressure pump, which they were using to suck sediment from the sea bottom into mesh bags....

Archaeologists uncover Ayrshire village ancient history A village in Ayrshire has discovered that it could be the oldest continuously-occupied settlement in Scotland, dating back 5,500. Archaeologists have uncovered the remains of stone age houses in the middle of Dreghorn near Irvine. They are having to re-write their local history in Dreghorn. Archaeologists have discovered that people may have been living here since 3500 BC - and it might make the village unique. They found evidence of occupation dating back to the Stone Age, through the Bronze Age to the medieval period. Archaeologist Tom Addyman said: "People have always lived here,...