The Mirror of Her Dreams by Stephen R. Donaldson

The Mirror of Her Dreams by Stephen R. Donaldson
Another Much Needed Original Contribution to Fantasy By Donaldson

In the sea of mediocrity that is the fantasy genre, it’s great to have Donaldson around. Like the Covenant series, Mordant’s Need is that rarest of things in the genre; a bonafide original premise. Unlike the last few fantasy tales I read before this one (by other authors), I did not feel the imposing influence of Tolkien in “The Mirror of Her Dreams.” What’s more, it’s not a quest plot, has no immediately recognizable Dark Lord, stars an anti-hero female, and is more of a mystery than an epic. The innovative premise is the magic called Imagery, which is really the only thing that places the book in the fantasy genre; without it the story would be more akin to historical fiction because the world in which Mordant is located is very similar to our own Dark Ages. Imagery is an entirely new take on magic which fans of the truly imaginative will appreciate fully.

Donaldson proves with this one that he is as capable of intertwining plots, foreshadowing, and suspense as the bestsellers in the mystery and thriller genres. This is truly a rarity in the fantasy genre, where plots are often regurgitated excuses for action, elves, dragons, and orcs.
Donaldson does a great job of describing Terisa’s battle against her attraction for the bad boy, Eremis, and gets the reader invested in the book superbly by having her always on the brink of falling into his trap. In a sense her supposed naivette is what makes her somewhat of an anti-hero (not as extreme as Covenant of course but still an anti-hero, at least in the beginning), but it is also her inability to take action and responsibility (due to her sheltered upbringing). But unlike Covenant, Terisa is much more acceptable to the sensibilities of most people and the changes in character she undergoes are much more profound and recognizeable.

I have read in other reviews that Donaldson’s overuse of obscure/complex words made this book burdonsome, but I couldn’t disagree more; in this one Donaldson strikes a perfect balance, being a bit more challenging than your average rot but not as challenging as the somewhat cumbersome Covenant series. If you think this one is too verbose, you missed too many spelling lessons or have a stronger than average aversion to dictionaries. Sure it’s got some new words, but not too many, and we NEED to learn new words every once and a while. What I don’t like so much about this book is that Donaldson seems to have taken on more of the slick, commercial style that most fantasy and popular fiction writers swear by today-i.e.- pacing is EVERYTHING, overuse the humor, pile on the romance, overdo the character development. The Covenant series FELT older, more arcane, but wasn’t a carbon copy of Tolkien’s style. I missed that in this book, because I’m still yearning for fantasy books that make themselves FEEL authentic by not dripping with modern style.

Like The Covenant series, this one does start out slow. But here the pay-off is excellent. The background and set-up create a wonderful suspension of disbelief which sets the writing high above the heads of other bestselling fantasy novelists. The build-up creates a page-turning obsession once it’s gotten a grip on you, and you are delightful wondering what’s going on through the majority of the book. It’s good to see post-modernism being applied to sword and sorcery.

The Mirror of Her Dreams by Stephen R. Donaldson

Scientist Recreate Submerged World

Here is how the land now submerged by the English Channel looked until around 8000 years ago, excellently capture in this animated video by scientists and graphic artists.
Is this what Middle Earth and Hyborea REALLY looked like?



Thanks so much to the guys at Wessex Archeology for bringing this amazing video to the public.

Scientist Recreate Submerged World

Carnivorous Cave Bears?

Our ancestors had lots of predators and competitors to worry about — saber-toothed cats, dire wolves and even giant man-eating birds of prey.

Now you can add cave bears to that list. These prehistoric giants were roughly a third larger than modern grizzly bears.



Previously, scientists thought cave bears were just vegetarians, evoking an image of gentle giants that fed solely on berries and roots.

Now bones from the Carpathians — the mountains where Dracula supposedly dwelt — suggest cave bears could have also been carnivores, and possibly even cannibals.

Bad to the bone

Cave bears (Ursus spelaeus) are named after the places where their bones are commonly found — caves across Europe. They died out roughly 20,000 years ago, when ice dominated the Northern Hemisphere.

For the past 30 years, studies of their skulls, jaws and teeth suggested cave bears might have been largely herbivorous.

RelatedStories
Scientists: Biting Insects May Have Killed Off Dinosaurs Frozen Calf May Explain Mammoths' Extinction Geology May Have Created Perfect 'Cradle of Humanity' Missing Link Between Whales, Land Animals Possibly Found Ancient Oversized Armadillo-Like Species Discovered In addition, the bones of central and western European cave bears matched those of vegetarians in having low levels of nitrogen-15, whose atomic nucleus has one more neutron than common nitrogen-14 does.

Animals accumulate nitrogen-15 in their bodies, and animals that eat animals — that is, carnivores — build up more nitrogen-15 than herbivores do.

Still, black bears and brown bears are omnivores. This suggested that although some cave bears were largely vegetarian, others might have been more carnivorous.

New data from the Pestera cu Oase ("Cave with Bones") in the southwestern tip of the Carpathian mountains in Romania now hints most of its cave bears were significantly carnivorous, due to their high nitrogen-15 levels.

Hidden caves

Retrieving the bones was not easy.

"It is a pretty inaccessible cave that you need to go underwater to get to," said researcher Michael Richards, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology at Leipzig, Germany.

The cave entrances the bears once used collapsed long ago, so one had to reach the bones through a lower level, going through an active spring and an underground river.

To reach the Pestera cu Oase, which was discovered by inquisitive Romanian cavers, scuba equipment and climbing gear are necessary.

"On a daily basis, you can imagine that it meant a lot of very hard work for my small excavation team, and also that it was not exempt of some risk," said researcher Joao Zilhao, a Paleolithic archaeologist at the University of Bristol in England.

Bears vs. humans

The findings suggest these cave bears could have struggled over meat with humans and the other carnivores of the time — hyenas, wolves and cave lions — as well as omnivores such as brown bears.

"It would be interesting to measure more cave bears from other sites in this region to see if we find other carnivorous cave bears," Richards said. "It would also be interesting trying to determine why these bears were carnivores when other cave bears weren't."

The researchers suggest the cave bears might have eaten fish, but another possibility is "some degree of bear-bear cannibalism," said University of Arizona zooarchaeologist Mary Stiner, who did not participate in this study.

In brown bears, "cannibalism and eliminating rivals and young go hand in hand, as in lions. This behavior is also clear from very large cave bear tooth marks on young cave bear skulls in Yarimburgaz Cave in western Turkey."

These results might also shed light on cave bear bones that humans and Neanderthals apparently placed in these caves in ancient times.

These actions "are often interpreted as some sort of ritual or symbolic behavior, and I wonder if cave bears were particularly compelling for humans if they were also a competitor," Richards told LiveScience.

The international team of researchers detailed its findings online Jan. 7 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.


Cave Bears on Fox News

Carnivorous Cave Bears?

The smears may just be weathered graffiti or the first cave painting

The smears may just be weathered graffiti or the first cave painting
found in Florida.

orlandosentinel.com/news/local/state/orl-
panhandlesearch0608jan06,0,1046554.story
OrlandoSentinel.com
Panhandle park holds treasures for archaeologists
A survey team unearths artifacts and what may be a cave painting in
Falling Waters State Park.


Jeremy Morrison


Panama City News Herald


January 6, 2008


CHIPLEY
Click here to find out more!


Kristy Mickwee is in a hole. But she is in no hurry to climb out; this
hole has yielded treasure. "Most of it came from this lighter area,"
she said, pointing out the different layers of earth with her spade.


Mickwee is part of a University of West Florida archaeology team
surveying 168 acres of the Falling Waters State Park in Chipley.
During the past few weeks, the team has dug the park full of "shovel
tests" in search of Native-American artifacts. Fieldwork was extended
because of the bountiful findings.


"I think I would have had problems prying them out of here," said John
Phillips, an archaeologist with the UWF Archaeology Institute.


Phillips was excited about the opportunity to dig in Chipley. He said
he thinks the inland areas of Florida, particularly in the Panhandle,
have not received the attention they deserve compared with more
archaeologically popular coastal sites.


"The Piney Woods area of Florida needs a little bit of attention," he
said. "There's a story to tell here."


Clues to the past


Part of that story was spread over a park picnic table: precious
antiquities stashed in plastic bags, each meticulously labeled,
holding clues to the past.


"When we get these counted, I guarantee it's gonna be 300," said Chris
Mickwee, Kristy's husband and the UWF graduate student overseeing the
Falling Waters fieldwork.


Inside the plastic bags are bits of ceramic pottery and arrowheads, ho-
hum items each passing century has deemed increasingly precious.
Perhaps indistinguishable to the untrained eye, these artifacts help
archaeologists map history.


"Prehistoric ceramic styles change like Detroit changes car styles,"
Phillips said.


He holds up various pieces, each hailing from a different stratum of
time. The artifacts range from 1,000 to 1,500 years old.


The people who crafted these finds are not too different from modern-
day man. For example, they enjoy the same camping spots; many of the
artifacts were in what currently are state park campsites.


"I like to establish continuity from the past to the present,"
Phillips said, adding that the park's namesake, a 100-foot waterfall,
probably was as big an attraction centuries ago as it is today. "It's
an ideal spot for people to come."


The archaeology survey also turned up some more recent relics: a Civil
War-era grist mill, the remnants of an oil well from 1919 and "Barry's
Wine Shop," left over from the 1890s railroading days.


"What do you do when you work on the railroad? You probably play
cards, have a drink and beat somebody up," said Scott Sweeney, a park-
service specialist at Falling Waters. "It was called Barry's Wine, but
it was probably more like what you'd find out in the woods."


Sweeney was the catalyst for this survey. The park specialist
contacted UWF 15 months ago. More than $45,000 in state grants
followed.


"Part of our job is to interpret the state park," Sweeney said. "If we
don't know what's here, it's kind of hard to interpret."


The findings of this survey will be used to learn more about the
area's early inhabitants. That information will be used to create
interpretive displays in the park.


"It's going to allow us to understand a little bit more about why
people were here and what they were doing," Phillips said of the
survey. "People are crying for information about their past."


Surprise find


But the team saw something at Falling Waters, a mystery no one
involved with the archaeological survey has been able to wrap their
heads around.


"The cave drawing is up in the air," Phillips said hesitantly.


"What we have is some amorphous things; I'm not ready to say it's cave
painting. It may be; we certainly haven't ruled that out."


Off the beaten path, requiring one to climb, crawl and squeeze, are
the questionable amorphous smears of red. If it is weathered graffiti,
it's disappointing on several levels, but if it is a cave painting,
it's amazing on just as many, the team said. No other cave paintings
have been found in Florida.


"One of our rangers happened upon that a couple of months ago and
said, 'Oh, by the way, there's something on one of the walls down
there,' " Sweeney recalled.


The UWF team went to investigate but was unable to draw any concrete
conclusions. Samples are being studied.


"Whatever it is," said Chris Mickwee, "there's nothing else like it
down there."

The smears may just be weathered graffiti or the first cave painting

Evolution and Religion Reconciled

By CORNELIA DEAN
Published: January 4, 2008


In 1984 and again in 1999, the National Academy of Sciences, the
nation’s most eminent scientific organization, produced books on the
evidence supporting the theory of evolution and arguing against the
introduction of creationism or other religious alternatives in public
school science classes.


On Thursday, it produced a third. But this volume is unusual, people
who worked on it say, because it is intended specifically for the lay
public and because it devotes much of its space to explaining the
differences between science and religion, and asserting that
acceptance of evolution does not require abandoning belief in God.


“We wanted to produce a report that would be valuable and accessible
to school board members and teachers and clergy,” said Barbara A.
Schaal, a vice president of the academy, an evolutionary biologist at
Washington University and a member of the panel that produced the
book.


The panel, convened by the academy and the Institute of Medicine, its
medical arm, was headed by Francisco Ayala, a biologist at the
University of California, Irvine, and a former Dominican priest.


The 70-page book, “Science, Evolution and Creationism,” says, among
other things, that “attempts to pit science and religion against each
other create controversy where none needs to exist.” And it offers
statements from several eminent biologists and members of the clergy
to support the view.


In the book, which will be available on the Web site of the National
Academies (www.nas.edu), the panel reports that evidence for the
theory of evolution is overwhelming and growing. It cites findings
from DNA research, fossil discoveries and the observations scientists
have made about emerging diseases, like SARS, or severe acute
respiratory syndrome.


The book also denounces the arguments for a form of creationism called
intelligent design, calling them devoid of evidence, “disproven” or
“simply false.”

SourceRead it for free Here

Evolution and Religion Reconciled

Indigenous Christmas Origins

> Indigenous Christmas Origins
> Pagan and Sami Roots of Today's Santa Claus Myths

> (c) Tyson Yunkaporta


> Dec 11, 2007
> fly agaric, the original xmas gift, mwrop
> Flying reindeer, Santa coming down the chimney, elves with pointy hats, mistletoe - all
> these Christmas myths originate from Aboriginal cultures.
> European Pagan Origins of Xmas


> The pagan festival of the invisible sun at the winter solstice is a European tribal
> tradition celebrated for the last ten thousand years at the shortest day and longest night
> of the year. European native peoples since ancient times have held ceremonies for the
> recovery of the sun god at this time, a time which later became known as "Christmas".


> Indigenous traditions from many native peoples have been borrowed for modern Christmas
> celebrations, such as mistletoe from Celtic fertility rites and holly (originally to ward
> off evil) from the Druidic tradition. Originally Santa Claus was not red and white, but
> was first depicted like this due to a seasonal link to native spiritual traditions
> involving hallucinogenic red and white mushrooms known as fly agaric. Later the Coca Cola
> company would patent these colours and popularise the now universally accepted colours of
> Santa's costume.


> Sami Ceremony and Entheogenic Mushrooms


> The red and white fly agaric mushrooms also played a part in the aboriginal origins of the
> flying reindeer image that is now popularly associated with Christmas. These mushrooms, or
> plant teachers, have always been used in rituals involving the sacred reindeer by the
> shamans of the Sami tribal peoples, who are still practicing traditional lifestyles as
> nomadic reindeer herders in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia today. The Koryak shamans
> of Siberian tribes gained notoriety in the grand western narrative of discovery when their
> winter solstice rituals involving the fly agaric were observed and recorded by
> anthropologists/adventurers, giving rise to several modern Christmas myths.


> At this ceremonial time, the Koryak tribespeople would work ritually with the mushrooms in
> their family tents. Their shamans would also work with the mushrooms to reach a
> non-ordinary state of reality that allowed them to do spirit-walking. (Note - the western
> interpretation of this is that it was an hallucination, but written here from an
> Indigenous viewpoint it is framed differently. For Aboriginal peoples, supernatural
> abilities like spirit-walking are as much a part of concrete reality as Christmas trees
> and the presents under them. So in this article, the spirit walking is fact rather than
> belief.)
> Spirit Walkers Bringing Gifts


> Koryak spirit walkers would visit the tents of their fellow tribesmen on their flying
> reindeer, the reindeer being a sacred totemic being for Sami tribal peoples. Once there,
> they would enter the tent through the smoke hole in the roof and distribute more mushrooms
> as gifts. Then they would exit through the chimney hole and fly away on their reindeer
> beings once again. It has been suggested that the egg-nog Christmas tradition was even
> grounded in these rituals, based on the practice of tribesmen drinking the agaric-spiked
> urine of the shamans who had ingested the mushrooms, perhaps mixed with egg and spices to
> disguise the taste. (Makes you think twice about mulled wine, for that matter!)


> On a more sober note, traditional Sami reindeer herders wear red suits and long felt hats,
> which is where the modern Christmas myth of Santa's elf helpers comes from.


> Clearly, the origins of many western Christmas traditions such as Santa's elves, Santa
> coming down the chimney, gift-giving, Santa's colours, Santa's home base in the Arctic
> North, and mistletoe can all be linked to time-honoured indigenous tribal ceremonies and
> customary practices.
> Aboriginal Christmas Reflections


> Christmas is as good a time as any to acknowledge the contributions of indigenous peoples
> around the planet to the formation of global knowledge, culture and innovations since the
> "age of discovery". So much of the technology, food, textiles, traditions and even
> mathematics that formed the basis for modern western civilisation was borrowed, or
> synthesised, or developed in conjunction with native peoples. And that is one hell of a
> Christmas gift.


> So spare a thought for the planet's fourth-world (indigenous) peoples at Christmas time,
> most of whom are excluded from the bounty of first-world colonies built on stolen native
> lands, resources and knowledge. So many Aboriginal people are even excluded from basic
> rights like education. Bear in mind that in America every year people spend more money on
> Christmas presents for their pets than it would cost to educate every third-world and
> fourth-world person on earth who is currently denied schooling.


> Ho, ho, ho.


> http://european-indigenous-peoples.suite101.com/article.cfm/indigenou...


> --
> Said American [Indian] Chieftain Acuera in reply to
> the invader de Soto's demand for submission to
> the king and the church so as to 'enjoy the benefits
> of 'civilization' and service:


> "I have long since learned who you [European Christians] are,
> through others of you who came years ago to my land;
> and I already know very well what your customs and
> behavior are like. To me you are professional
> vagabonds who wander from place to place,
> gaining your livelihood by robbing, sacking and
> murdering people who have given you no offense.
> ... Accordingly, I and all of my people have vowed
> to die a hundred deaths to maintain the freedom
> of our land. This is our answer, both
> for the present and forevermore."
> -- "Florida of the Inca" (1591)
> by El Inca [aka Garcilaso de la Vega]
> - First American Author to be published.

Indigenous Christmas Origins

Cooking Up Bigger Brains

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=cooking-up-bigger-brains
Scientific American Magazine - January, 2008
Cooking Up Bigger Brains
Our hominid ancestors could never have eaten enough raw food to support our
large, calorie-hungry brains, Richard Wrangham claims. The secret to our
evolution, he says, is cooking


Richard Wrangham has tasted chimp food, and he doesn’t like it. "The typical
fruit is very unpleasant," the Harvard University biological anthropologist says
of the hard, strangely shaped fruits endemic to the chimp diet, some of which
look like cherries, others like cocktail sausages. "Fibrous, quite bitter. Not
a tremendous amount of sugar. Some make your stomach heave." After a few tastings
in western Uganda, where he works part of the year on his 20-year-old project
studying wild chimpanzees, Wrangham came to the conclusion that no human could
survive long on such a diet. Besides the unpalatable taste, our weak jaws, tiny
teeth and small guts would never be able to chomp and process enough calories from
the fruits to support our large bodies.


Then, one cool fall evening in 1997, while gazing into his fireplace in
Cambridge, Mass., and contemplating a completely different question — "What
stimulated human evolution?" — he remembered the chimp food. "I realized what a
ridiculously large difference cooking would make," Wrangham says. Cooking could
have made the fibrous fruits, along with the tubers and tough, raw meat that chimps
also eat, much more easily digestible, he thought—they could be consumed quickly
and digested with less energy. This innovation could have enabled our chimp­like
ancestors’ gut size to shrink over evolutionary time; the energy that would have
gone to support a larger gut might have instead sparked the evolution of our
bigger-brained, larger-bodied, humanlike forebears.
...
Wrangham, who first encountered chimps as a student of Jane Goodall’s in 1970,
began his career looking at the way ecological pressures, especially food
distribution, affect chimp society. He famously conducted research into chimp
violence, leading to his 1996 book Demonic Males. But ever since staring into
that fire 10 years ago, he has been plagued with thoughts of how humans evolved.
"I tend to think about human evolution through the lens of chimps," he remarks.
"What would it take to convert a chimpanzeelike ancestor into a human?" Fire to
cook food, he reasoned, which led to bigger bodies and brains.


And that is exactly what he found in Homo erectus, our ancestor that first appeared
1.6 million to 1.9 million years ago. H. erectus’s brain was 50 percent larger than
that of its predecessor, H. habilis, and it experienced the biggest drop in tooth
size in human evolution. "There’s no other time that satisfies expectations that we
would have for changes in the body that would be accompanied by cooking," Wrangham
says.
...
So Wrangham did more research. He examined groups of modern hunter-gatherers all over
the world and found that no human group currently eats all their food raw. Humans
seem
to be well adapted to eating cooked food: modern humans need a lot of high-quality
calories (brain tissue requires 22 times the energy of skeletal muscle); tough,
fibrous fruits and tubers cannot provide enough. Wrangham and his colleagues
calculated
that H. erectus (which was in H. sapiens’s size range) would have to eat roughly 12
pounds of raw plant food a day, or six pounds of raw plants plus raw meat, to get
enough calories to survive. Studies on modern women show that those on a raw
vegetarian
diet often miss their menstrual periods because of lack of energy. Adding high-energy
raw meat does not help much, either—Wrangham found data showing that even at chimps’
chewing rate, which can deliver them 400 food calories per hour, H. erectus would
have
needed to chew raw meat for 5.7 to 6.2 hours a day to fulfill its daily energy needs.
When it was not gathering food, it would literally be chewing that food for the rest
of the day.
...
Wrangham’s theory would fit together nicely if not for that pesky problem of
controlled
fire. Wrangham points to some data of early fires that may indicate that H. erectus
did
indeed tame fire. At Koobi Fora in Kenya, anthropologist Ralph Rowlett of the
University
of Missouri–Columbia has found evidence of scorched earth from 1.6 million years ago
that contains a mixture of burned wood types, indicating purposely made fire and no
signs of roots having burned underground (a tree struck by lightning would show only
one wood type and burned roots). The discoveries are consistent with human-controlled
fire. Rowlett plans next to study the starch granules found in the area to see if
food
could have been cooked there.

Cooking Up Bigger Brains

14000 year old Natufian Toolkit

December 27, 2007


ABOUT 14,000 years ago the owner of an
ancient tool kit plonked it down near the
wall inside a small hut in what is now
Jordan.
It contained everything that could come in
handy on a trip to gather food: a sickle to
cut wild wheat, spearheads to hunt gazelle,
and even bead-making materials to while away
a few hours waiting for more prey to appear.


But it lay there, forgotten, for thousands of
years, until now. The collection of 36
objects has been unearthed and studied by
Australian archaeologist Phillip Edwards,
providing a rare insight into life for
prehistoric hunter-gatherers.


Dr Edwards, of La Trobe University, said the
implements had probably been carried in a
shoulder bag made of animal hide or twined
fibres.


"The most plausible explanation is that it
served as a tool kit for use on foraging
excursions," he said. But it was not known
whether the owner was male or female.


The ancient people of this region were known
as Natufians and built their earthen-floored
huts near sources of water, gathering wild
barley to eat as well as wheat.


The sickle in the tool kit was made of two
pieces of animal horn and 10 small stone
blades, which had been placed in two rows
according to their colour. This showed the
hunter-gatherers were interested in
appearance, not just utility, said Dr
Edwards, whose research is published in the
latest issue of the journal Antiquity.


The more than 20 sharp pieces of flint in the
tool kit could have been used to make spears
or arrows to kill the many animals in this
lush area of the Jordan Valley. The large
number of spares in the tool kit might have
allowed a lone hunter to re-arm while
pursuing an animal.


Other possible weapons in the tool kit
included a clutch of smooth pebbles. "The
smaller stones may have been used as
slingshot projectiles," Dr Edwards said.


But there may also have been some time for
handicrafts. The kit also contained five toe
bones from gazelles, which the Natufians used
to turn into beads by drilling holes in them
and cutting them to the same shape.

14000 year old Natufian Toolkit

Natufian Toolkit Discovered

14,000 year old tool kit found in Jordan, unique sickle in two
carefully grooved horn pieces is a marvel of form and function.

"There was a sickle for harvesting wild wheat or barley, a cluster of
flint spearheads, a flint core for making more spearheads, some smooth
stones (maybe slingshots), a large stone (maybe for striking flint
pieces off the flint core), a cluster of gazelle toe bones which were
used to make beads, and part of a second bone tool," he said.


Ancient Toolkit Gives Glimpse of Prehistoric Life
Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News


Dec. 13, 2007 -- Before the end of the last ice age, a hunter-gatherer
left a bag of tools near the wall of a roundhouse residence, where
archaeologists have now found the collection 14,000 years later.


The tool set -- one of the most complete and well preserved of its
kind -- provides an intriguing glimpse of the daily life of a
prehistoric hunter-gatherer.


The contents, as described to Discovery News by Phillip Edwards, a
senior lecturer in the Archaeology Program at Melbourne's La Trobe
University, show the owner of the bag was well equipped for obtaining
meat and edible plants in the wild.


"There was a sickle for harvesting wild wheat or barley, a cluster of
flint spearheads, a flint core for making more spearheads, some smooth
stones (maybe slingshots), a large stone (maybe for striking flint
pieces off the flint core), a cluster of gazelle toe bones which were
used to make beads, and part of a second bone tool," he said.


Edwards outlines the finds, attributed to the Natufian culture from a
site called Wadi Hammeh 27 in Jordan, in the latest issue of
Antiquity.


He believes the tools were enclosed in a hide or wickerwork bag with a
strap that would have been worn over the shoulder. Such bags rarely
had compartments, so the owner probably protected valuable items by
wrapping them in rolls of bark or leather before placing them at the
bottom of the bag.


The sickle, constructed out of two carefully grooved horn pieces, was
fitted with color-matched tan and grey bladelets. It would have been a
marvel of form and function for its day and is the only tool of its
kind ever linked to the Natufian people.


The rest of the items were designed to immobilize and then kill game
such as aurochs, red deer, hares, storks, partridges, owls, tortoises
and the major source of meat -- gazelles.


"A lone hunter or a group of hunters might wait for gazelles to cross
their path while waiting behind a low 'hide' made of twigs and brush,"
Edwards explained.


"They might have worked on making bone beads to wile away the time.
Then a hunter could get off a shot while the animals were off their
guard. A first shot might wound, but not kill, and then a hunter or a
group of them will track the wounded animal."


He added, "We don't know if Natufian hunters had the bow and arrow, or
just spears."


The mountain gazelles targeted by the Near Eastern hunters probably
weighed between 39 and 55 pounds, so a strong adult "could carry an
entire carcass over his shoulders without much trouble."


But the bag's owner wasn't necessarily a man; women are thought to
have been in charge of plant gathering. The tools, therefore, either
belonged to a woman hunter-gatherer, or work activities were more
gender-blind than thought during prehistoric times, Edwards theorized.


Francois Valla, director of the French Research Center in Jerusalem
and a noted archaeologist, told Discovery News that similar ancient
clusters of tools have been excavated, but this latest one is "the
most spectacular of them all."


"The clustering of these items is due to a decision made by some
Natufian individual," Valla said. "As such, it is a rare testimony of
the behavior of a person 14,000 years ago."


The toolkit's showpiece item, its double-bladed sickle, is now on
display in the museum of the Faculty of Archaeology & Anthropology at
Jordan's Yarmouk University.
Source Article

Natufian Toolkit Discovered

Jade Empire

Ancient jade study sheds light on sea trade
Mon Nov 19, 2007 10:07pm GMT


By Tan Ee Lyn


HONG KONG (Reuters) - Over 100 ancient jade artifacts in museums across southeast Asia have been traced back to Taiwan, shedding new light on sea trade patterns dating back 5,000 years, researchers said.


Using X-ray spectrometers, the international team of scientists analyzed 144 jade ornaments dating from 3,000 BC to 500 AD and found that at least 116 originated from Fengtian in eastern Taiwan.


"The chemical composition of jade reveals its origin and ... their analysis determined the relative amounts of iron, magnesium, and silicon in the jade," the scientists wrote in a paper published in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.


"Based on elemental composition, 116 artifacts were identified as originating in Fengtian. The source of the others remains unknown."


Fengtian jade has a distinctive translucent green hue and black spots.


The 144 artifacts were unearthed in archaeological excavations in Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Thailand.


ANCIENT FACTORIES


Odds and ends of Fengtian jade were found at several sites in the Philippines, Thailand and southern Vietnam, which the lead researcher Hung Hsiao-chun said may have been workshops.


"Fengtian jade was shipped to these workshops in southeast Asia, which dated from 500 BC to 100 AD. They were very small and they churned out these ornaments that were then exported to other places," said Hung, of the Australian National University in Canberra.


"What's really interesting is their products (from different countries) were very similar," she told Reuters in a telephone interview.


Jade earrings, beads, bracelets and pendants, some depicting two- headed animals, were popular in southeast Asia during the early Iron Age between 500 BC and 500 AD.


Prior to this period, however, Taiwan's jade ornaments were likely to have been crafted back home in Fengtian.


"There was a very huge workshop in Fengtian, dating back to 3,000 BC," Hung said, adding that one of the earliest pieces of Fengtian jade found in the Philippines dates back to 2,000 BC.


"Before, researchers thought all the jade in the Philippines was from China or Vietnam. With our analysis ... we found that most of the ornamental jade in the Philippines was from Taiwan."


The findings of Hung and her team revealed one of the largest prehistoric trades in semiprecious stone.


"Their seafaring methods must have been very superior, even back then," Hung said.


"What we know now is the origin of the jade. We need to find out who these craftsmen were and what tools they used. We know very little about their manufacturing process."
Full Article Here

Jade Empire

Night of the Killer Comet

The serpent’s tails coil together menacingly. A horn juts sharply from its head. The creature looks as if it might be swimming through a sea of stars. Or is it making its way up a sheer basalt cliff? For Bruce Masse, an environmental archaeologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, there is no confusion as he looks at this ancient
petroglyph, scratched into a rock by a Native American shaman. “You can’t tell me that isn’t a comet,” he says.


In Masse’s interpretation, the petroglyph commemorates a comet that streaked across the sky just a few years before Europeans came to this area of New Mexico. But that event is a minor blip compared to what he is really after. Masse believes that he has uncovered evidence that a gigantic comet crashed into the Indian Ocean several thousand years ago and nearly wiped out all life on the planet. What’s more, he
thinks that clues about the catastrophe are hiding in plain sight, embedded in the creation stories of cultural groups around the world.
His hypothesis depends on a major reinterpretation of many different mythologies and raises questions about how frequently major asteroid impacts occur. What scientists know about such collisions is based mainly on a limited survey of craters around the world and on the moon. Only 185 craters on Earth have been identified, and almost all are on dry land, leaving largely unexamined the 70 percent of the planet covered by water. Even among those on dry land, many of the craters have been recognized only recently. It is possible that Earth has been a target of more meteors and comets than scientists have suspected.


Masse’s epiphany came while poring over Hawaiian oral histories regarding the goddess Pele and wondering what they might reveal about the lava flows that episodically destroy human settlements and create new tracts of land. He reasoned that even though the stories are often clouded by exaggerations and mystical explanations, many may refer to actual incidents. He tested his hypothesis by cross-checking carbon-14 ages for the lava flows against dates included in royal Hawaiian
genealogies. The result: Several flows matched up with the specific reigns associated with them in the oral histories. Other myths, Masse theorizes, hold similar clues.


Masse’s biggest idea is that some 5,000 years ago, a 3-mile-wide ball of rock and ice swung around the sun and smashed into the ocean off the coast of Madagascar. The ensuing cataclysm sent a series of 600-foot-high tsunamis crashing against the world’s coastlines and injected plumes of superheated water vapor and aerosol particulates into the atmosphere. Within hours, the infusion of heat and moisture
blasted its way into jet streams and spawned superhurricanes that pummeled the other side of the planet. For about a week, material ejected into the atmosphere plunged the world into darkness. All told, up to 80 percent of the world’s population may have perished, making it the single most lethal event in history.


Why, then, don’t we know about it? Masse contends that we do. Almost every culture has a legend about a great flood, and—with a little reading between the lines—many of them mention something like a comet on a collision course with Earth just before the disaster. The Bible describes a deluge for 40 days and 40 nights that created a flood so great that Noah was stuck in his ark for two weeks until the water
subsided. In the Gilgamesh Epic, the hero of Mesopotamia saw a pillar of black smoke on the horizon before the sky went dark for a week. Afterward, a cyclone pummeled the Fertile Crescent and caused a massive flood. Myths recounted in indigenous South American cultures also tell of a great flood.


“These stories are all exactly what you would expect from the survivors of acelestial impact,” Masse says, leafing through 2,000-year-old drawings by Chinese astronomers that show comets of all shapes and sizes. “When a comet rounds the sun, oftentimes its tail is still being blown forward by the solar winds so that it actually precedes it. That is why so many descriptions of comets in mythology
mention that they are wearing horns.” In India, he notes, a celestial fish described as “bright as a moonbeam,” with a horn on its head, warned of an epic flood that brought on a new age of man.


Among 175 flood myths, Masse found two of particular interest. A Hindu myth describes an alignment of the five bright planets that has happened only once in the last 5,000 years, according to computer simulations, and a Chinese story mentions that the great flood occurred at the end of the reign of Empress Nu Wa. Cross-checking historical records with astronomical data, Masse came up with a date
for his event: May 10, 2807 B.C.


On its own, the mythological evidence is weak, as even Masse recognizes. “Mythology can help us hypothesize about events that might have occurred,” he says, “but to prove the reality of them, we have to go beyond myths and search for physical evidence.”


In 2004, at a conference of geologists, astronomers, and archaeologists, Masse outlined his evidence for a world-ravaging impact in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Ted Bryant, a geomorphologist at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales,
Australia, was intrigued and enlisted the help of Dallas Abbott, an assistant professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University. In 2005, they formed the Holocene Impact Working Group (referring to the geological period covering the last 11,000 years) to seek out the geological signatures of a megatsunami. If a 600-foot-high wave ravages a coastline, it should leave a lot of
debris behind. In the case of waves generated by asteroid impacts, the debris they leave in their wake is believed to form gigantic, wedge-shaped sandy structures—known as chevrons—that are sometimes packed with deep-oceanic microfossils dredged up by the tsunami.


When Abbott began searching satellite images on Google Earth, she saw dozens of chevrons along shorelines and inland in Africa and Asia. The shape and size of these chevrons suggest that they might have been formed by waves emanating from the impact of a comet slamming into the deep ocean off Madagascar. “The chevrons in Madagascar associated with the crater were filled with melted microfossils from the bottom of the ocean. There is no explanation for their presence other than a cosmic impact,” she says. “People are going to have to start taking this theory a lot more seriously.” The next step is to perform carbon-14 dating on the fossils to see if they are indeed 5,000 years old.


Meanwhile, Bryant contends that chevrons found (pdf) 4 miles inland from the shore of Madagascar were formed by a wave that traveled 25 miles along the coast, moving almost parallel to the shoreline. “Neither erosion nor any other terrestrial process could have caused these formations. The biggest marine landslide ever recorded happened 7,200 years ago off the coast of Norway, and there was a tsunami, but
it was a far cry from leaving deposits 200 meters above sea level,” Bryant says.


Not everyone is convinced, to say the least. “I don’t believe the evidence of a crater off Madagascar, and the impetus is on Abbott to prove it,” says Jay Melosh, an impact expert at the University of Arizona and an outspoken critic of the theory. To make a case for the impact, Melosh says, Abbott “should be finding layers of glassy droplets and fused rock in sea-core samples, the sorts of things we find at all other similar impact sites.”


On the other hand, a lot remains unknown about impacts. As recently as 60 years ago, some geologists believed that the Barringer Meteor Crater in Arizona—now considered the prototypical impact scar—was caused by a volcanic explosion, and they regarded impacts as a minor if not inconsequential influence on Earth’s history. Just 25 years ago, Luis and Walter Alvarez raised eyebrows with their idea that an asteroid collision helped kill off the dinosaurs. So Abbott continues to hunt for evidence that will clinch the idea that Noah’s flood was yet another example of extraterrestrial meddling. “It is still up to us to prove it, but if we have unequivocal impact ejecta,” she says, Melosh “is going to have to eat his words.”
Check it out on Discover Magazine

Night of the Killer Comet

Stone Age Camp Found In Germany

Stone Age Camp Found In Germany
Archaeologists have discovered the remains of a 120,000-year-old Stone Age hunting camp in a coal mine in Germany. It is a find of great European importance, researchers say.

Open-cast coal mines may get a bad press, but in Germany they're still big business -- the country is the world's largest producer of lignite, or brown coal. Now another advantage of open-cast mines has been discovered -- they can conceal a rich seam of archaeological sites.


DPA
Archaeologists have discovered over 600 stone tools at the 120,000-year-old site.
Archaeologists have found the remains of a 120,000-year-old Stone Age hunting camp in an open-cast lignite mine near Inden in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

"We'll never find such a camp ever again," archaeologist Jürgen Thissen from the Rhineland Commission for Historical Sites said in Bonn Monday. "There isn't another one in the whole of Germany."

He added that the find was the first of its kind in the region, and was of European importance.

Thissen and his assistants came across postholes of three shelters in the open-cast mine last August. Two fireplaces with traces of fires were also found, as were over 600 stone tools and the stone chips left over from their production. Among the stone tools found were a stone knife, serrated blades, and so-called "blanks" (pieces of stone ready to be shaped into tools).


A hand ax was discovered in the mine in December 2005, prompting a full excavation. The team of archaeologists used the mine's mechanical shovel to remove 30,000 tons of soil, laying bare 3,000 square meters of ground that had last been exposed during the Eemian or Sangamon interglacial era which lasted from 128,000 to 117,000 B.C.E. approximately.

According to Thissen, the camp would have been used temporarily by one or more groups of hunters and gatherers during a summer hunting expedition. The climate in northern Germany at the time would have been similar to the Mediterranean today.

News of the sensational new find comes just a week after the announcement that a prehistoric village had been found (more...) near Stonehenge in southern England. That village dates back only to 2,600 B.C.E., however -- practically newly built in comparison to the Stone Age camp.

Stone Age Camp Found In Germany