Shanidar Cave and the flowers that grow beside it today. Credit: Photo courtesy of Dlshad Marf Zamua View
Posted on 01/05/2016 10:53:29 AM PST by presidio9
As the terrorist group ISIS is pushed out of northern Iraq, archaeologists are resuming work in the region, making new discoveries and figuring out how to conserve archaeological sites and reclaim looted antiquities.
Several discoveries, including new Neanderthal skeletal remains, have been made at Shanidar Cave, a site in Iraqi Kurdistan that was inhabited by Neanderthals more than 40,000 years ago.
Additionally, though ISIS did destroy and loot a great number of sites, there are several ways for archaeologists, scientific institutions, governments and law enforcement agencies in North America and Europe to help save the region's heritage, said Dlshad Marf Zamua, a Kurdish archaeologist and doctoral student at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
He criticized antiquity dealers who are benefiting financially from ISIS' looting and destruction, calling on authorities in North America and Europe to prevent those dealers from selling northern Iraq's heritage. "It was said that war was created for selling weapons, but in the situation of our area, the war was created for selling weapons, oil and antiquity objects," Marf Zamua said.
Before ISIS moved into Iraq in the summer of 2014, scientists with 45 foreign missions from 16 countries were conducting archaeological excavations and surveys in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq, said Marf Zamua.
Over the past few months, Kurdish forces have gone on the offensive and, with support from allied air strikes, are pushing ISIS out of the region. And archaeologists are returning to the area, including at Shanidar Cave. This cave was originally excavated between 1952 and 1960 by a team led by archaeologist Ralph Solecki from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. The archaeologists at that time found several Neanderthal skeletons and pollen remains suggesting that the Neanderthals placed flowers in graves before burial.
In an article recently published in -SNIP-
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
Shanidar Cave and the flowers that grow beside it today. Credit: Photo courtesy of Dlshad Marf Zamua View
Good news, pass it on.
Neanderthals must be like the Seven Year Locust.
They return to the same location, once every 40,000 years.
Hopefully at least some of the buyers were only doing so to try to preserve the items so they could be hidden away from the barbarians.
Isis has only been around for, what, 5 years? And already so much of antiquity has been lost from that region as a result of their ignorance and dull-wittedness.
Perhaps you should be giving the Neanderthals a little more credit than you are. Everyone except sub-Saharan Africans have about 4% of their blood in our veins.
Archaeologists Return to Neanderthal Cave as Neanderthals Pushed from Iraq
there fixed it
The truth is no archaeological sites or any artifacts from the past or any modern day buildings, churches etc are safe in the fanatic Muslim world. Even the ancient Egyptian sites were ignored and uncared for for centuries. The fact is most of the Muslim world doesn’t care about history -— particularly any history they disagree with. It’s better that the artifacts from the ancient Middle East be taken from these countries and housed in museums in the West. And besides, the Arabs/Muslims didn’t create these ancient monuments and artifacts in the first place.
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Former site of two Jewish temples, a temple of Jupiter, a Byzantine Church that became a Mosque, that became the headquarters of the Templars that became an Ottoman Mosque, that was partially torn down and rebuilt by the Islamic Higher Council in the 1920's.
The location is not mentioned in the Quran, and the there are multiple locations of have been suggested as the destination of Mohammed's "Night Journey" (which never happened anyway).
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