Free Republic

Those pale button mushrooms in your supermarket hardly do justice to the diversity of fungi. The world hosts an incredible array of these important organisms—and mycologists are discovering more than 2000 new species a year, including ones that live on driftwood, bat guano, and even an oil painting. That’s according to a new report, titled State of the World’s Fungi, from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, a botanical research institution in Richmond, U.K. The lavishly illustrated overview covers the usefulness of fungi (think beer, bread, and penicillin, for starters) as well as the serious threats that some fungi pose to...

A replica of the Argo, the ship that according to legend carried Jason and the 50 Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece, sailed Saturday from the central Greek city of Volos on a two-month journey to Venice in Italy. Turkey's refusal to guarantee the 93.5-foot (28.5-meter) wooden ship safe passage through the Bosporus Strait meant that the ship will not reach its ancient predecessor's destination of Colchis, in what is modern-day Georgia, at the eastern end of the Black Sea. Its route, instead, will retrace part of the Argonauts' return trip... The ship's crew comprises 50 oarsmen with another...

Foca will be linked to Marselle in a special project to revisit the history: A Turkish crew will travel the route from the Izmir district to the French city in the next two months, just as their ancestors did centuries ago. Building a replica of an ancient vessel, the group is set to sail to Marseille in as conditions as true to those in 600 B.C. as possible. The replica of an ancient vessel is retracing the historic route from Foca off the coast of Turkey to Marseille off France some 2,600 years later. The project "A Journey into History:...

It turns out the oldest seafaring ships ever found actually work An archaeologist who examined remnants of the oldest-known seafaring ships has now put ancient Egyptian technology to the test. She teamed up with a naval architect, modern shipwrights and an on-site Egyptian archaeologist to build a replica 3,800-year-old ship for a Red Sea trial run this past December. The voyage was meant to retrace an ancient voyage that the female pharaoh Hatsheput sponsored to a place which ancient Egyptians called God's land, or Punt. Ship planks and oar blades discovered in 2006 at the caves of Wadi Gawasis provided...

Shipbuilders with handmade tools and methods used long ago are re-creating the Argo, the legendary vessel of Jason and the Argonauts. "It's extremely laborious work," said builder Stelios Kalafatidis in the small port of Volos. "We don't have large, proper, modern tools, only our hands and wooden mallets and chisels." ...The Naudomos Institute, a group of shipbuilders and historians heading the project, is using ancient Greek tools and techniques to build the new Argo. Once the ship is ready, they plan to retrace the mythical journey. The team had to ignore everything they knew about modern boatbuilding and use the...

On the ancient Syrian island of Arwad, which was settled by the Phoenicians in about 2000 BCE, men are hard at work hammering wooden pegs into the hull of a ship. But this vessel will not be taking fishermen on their daily trip up and down the coast. It is destined for a greater adventure – one that could solve a mystery which has baffled archaeologists for centuries. The adventure begins not in Arwad but in Dorset, where an Englishman has taken it upon himself to try to prove that the Phoenicians circumnavigated Africa thousands of years before any Europeans...

The Uluburun II, which is on display in Bodrum and sponsored by the Bodrum Peninsula Promotion Foundation started to be built in 2004 using late Bronze Age techniques and was launched in 2005... The [original] Uluburun sank in the 14th century 8.5 kilometers southeast of Kafl in Uluburun Bay while carrying copper and tin from Alexandria to Crete. It was discovered in 1982 by a diver. The remains of the shipwreck were unearthed by an excavation team consisting of archaeologists and divers and the process has lasted over 20 years. Considered to be one of the most significant archaeological finds...

Archaeologists have found what they believe to be the world’s oldest intact shipwreck at the bottom of the Black Sea where it appears to have lain undisturbed for more than 2,400 years. The 23-metre (75ft) vessel, thought to be ancient Greek, was discovered with its mast, rudders and rowing benches all present and correct just over a mile below the surface. A lack of oxygen at that depth preserved it, the researchers said. “A ship surviving intact from the classical world, lying in over 2km of water, is something I would never have believed possible,” said Professor Jon Adams, the...

Some 3,500 years ago, there was already a brisk trade in fish on the shores of the southeastern Mediterranean Sea. This conclusion follows from the analysis of 100 fish teeth that were found at various archeological sites in what is now Israel. The saltwater fish from which these teeth originated is the gilthead sea bream, which is also known as the dorade. It was caught in the Bardawil lagoon on the northern Sinai coast and then transported from Egypt to sites in the southern Levant. This fish transport persisted for about 2,000 years, beginning in the Late Bronze Age and...

Greek and Roman writers record the use of a substance called miltos as a decoration, a medicine - and a handy way to repair a boat. Now scientists have worked out why. Andrew Masterson reports. From ancient Greek and Roman source texts it is possible to conclude that in the classical world a mineral, a powder known as miltos, was something of a wonder substance. Miltos - referred to in the works of writers such as Theophrastus, Dioscorides and Pliny - was red, fine-grained, and made up mostly of iron-oxide. By the time Theophrastus, a Greek philosopher and proto-botanist, wrote...

The Greek Culture Ministry announced that five additional vessels have been discovered in the ship graveyard off the coast of the Fourni Islands, bringing the total number of ships found there to 58, according to an Associated Press report. The area in the Aegean Sea, at the junction of two main shipping routes, is known for its treacherous waters, and contains wrecks dating from the fourth century B.C. through the nineteenth century A.D. The newly discovered ships rest in shallow waters and show signs of damage from fishing nets and plunderers, but the archaeological team, assisted by local fishermen, found...

NEW HAVEN, Conn. - The latest scientific analysis of a disputed map of the medieval New World supports the theory that it was made 50 years before Christopher Columbus set sail. The study examined the ink used to draw the Vinland Map, which belongs to Yale University. The map is valued at $20 million — if it is real and not a clever, modern-day forgery. A study last summer said the ink on the parchment map was made in the 20th century. But chemist Jacqueline Olin, a retired researcher with the Smithsonian Institution (news - web sites) in Washington, said...

In AD 1499 England launched its very first English-led expedition to "Terra Nova" (New World) and now researchers studying a 16th century scroll have found King Henry VII awarded William Weston, one the explorers, with... the payment of 30 British pounds sterling... equivalent of a laborers salary for six years... The information was discovered on a huge parchment dating back more than 500 years and ultraviolet light was required to reveal the hidden text said study co-researcher Evan Jones, a senior lecturer in economic and social history at the University of Bristol in a report in Live Science. In 2009,...

The world's largest ancient Roman rubbish dump is revealing intriguing details about the extent and sophistication of trade in the Mediterranean 2,000 years ago. Monte Testaccio is an artificial hill in the centre of Rome that is made up of an estimated 25 million shards of broken amphorae, many from as far afield as Spain and North Africa. The amphorae, containing wine and olive oil, were broken up and dumped on the spoil heap after being unloaded from a nearby port on the River Tiber. They could not be reused because wine and oil residue seeped into the clay, turning...

Published: April 2014Roman Boat Romans in France An ancient wreck tells the tale of Romans in France. By Robert Kunzig Photograph by Rémi Bénali The Romans had a serious trash problem, though by our standards it was good-looking trash. Their problem was amphorae. They needed millions of the curvy clay jars to ship wine, olive oil, and fish sauce around the empire, and often they didn’t recycle their empties. Sometimes they didn’t even bother to pop the cork—it was quicker to saber the neck or the pointy base, drain the thing, then chuck it. In Rome there’s a five-acre,...

In the middle of Rome's trendiest neighborhood, surrounded by sushi restaurants and nightclubs with names like Rodeo Steakhouse and Love Story, sits the ancient world's biggest garbage dump--a 150-foot-tall mountain of discarded Roman amphorae, the shipping drums of the ancient world. It takes about 20 minutes to walk around Monte Testaccio, from the Latin testa and Italian cocci, both meaning "potsherd." But despite its size--almost a mile in circumference--it's easy to walk by and not really notice unless you are headed for some excellent pizza at Velavevodetto, a restaurant literally stuck into the mountain's side. Most local residents don't know...

Archaeologists using radar scans have detected a Viking ship buried beneath a cemetery in Norway. The Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (NIKU) said that the archaeologists discovered the anomaly using radar scans of an area in Østfold County. The ship seems to be about 66 feet (20 meters) long and buried about 1.6 feet (50 centimeters) beneath the ground, they said in a statement.

The third chapter of Donald Yates’ history of the Cherokee (Old World Roots of the Cherokee, McFarland 2012) contains the genetic story of the Cherokee Indians based on DNA Consultants’ 2009 study “Anomalous Mitochondrial DNA in the Cherokee,” but it is no easy read, being written for an academic audience. Earlier this year Yates published a condensation of his work in the series Cherokee Chapbooks, called Old Souls in a New World: The Secret History of the Cherokee Indians (Panther’s Lodge). This publication has no footnotes, bibliography or pictures; those must be sought in Old World Roots and scholarly articles...

The process of coastal groundwater discharge makes it possible for humans to collect drinkable freshwater directly where it emerges at the coast of the island... "The porous volcanic soils quickly absorb rain, resulting in a lack of streams and rivers," Lipo said. "Fortunately, water beneath the ground flows downhill and ultimately exits the ground directly at the point at which the porous subterranean rock meets the ocean. When tides are low, this results in the flow of freshwater directly into the sea. Humans can thus take advantage of these sources of freshwater by capturing the water at these points." ...He...

Divers have discovered the wreck a Chinese warship a century after it was lost to the depths of the Yellow sea. Researchers had been hunting for several years before they found the incredible 'time capsule' of a wreck. It was identified thanks to a gold-gilded wooden plaque with Jingyuan written on it. It went down in the Yellow sea during the first Sino-Japanese war in September 1894, with only seven out of 270 crewmen surviving. Experts managed to pinpoint the site by looking through historical documents and photographs taken by a a Japanese sailor before it sank.