Samson Mosaic Uncovered in Ancient Jewish Synagogue

From The Jewish Press (online):

Ancient Mosaic Depicting Samson Uncovered in a Galilee Synagogue
By Rachel Avraham
Published July 4, 2013

Excavations in a late Roman era synagogue at Huqoq in Israel’s eastern lower Galilee have uncovered a new mosaic depicting the biblical hero and judge, Samson. Jodi Magness of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who has been conducting archaeological excavations at Huqoq since 2011, notes that while scenes from the Bible are not uncommon in ancient synagogues, mosaics featuring Samson are. Last summer (2012), excavations in the Huqoq synagogue brought to light a scene depicting Samson and the foxes (Judges 15:4). This summer, another section of the mosaic floor was discovered which shows Samson carrying the gate of Gaza (Judges 16:1-3).

[Okay - Google Blogger is being pissy today and will not allow me to upload photographs all of a sudden -- tried several times during this post and the prior post done this evening and NADA.  Assholes!  So, where the image SHOULD  BE, there is THIS, instead. When will I finally run out of patience and move this blog to Wordpress...]

Wadi Hamam is the only other ancient synagogue in Israel which has a mosaic with a scene of Samson, while outside of Israel only one ancient building in Turkey which may be a synagogue has a Samson mosaic. However, the Samson mosaics are not the only unusual aspect about the excavations at Huqoq. Magness states, “In most ancient synagogues in Israel with a decorated floor featuring figured designs such as people and animals, the figured decoration is in the center of the synagogue and the aisles have geometric patterns.” However, at Huqoq, there are mosaics with figured scenes in the aisles.”

Magness is puzzled by why mosaics depicting Samson are found at Huqoq, as it was not in the tribal area of Dan. Furthermore, many rabbis of the Talmudic period were not fond of Samson because of his attraction to non-Jewish women. While Magness stated that some positive depictions of Samson survive in rabbinic literature, these traditions are preserved mainly in the Babylonian Talmud, not in the Jerusalem Talmud. Thus, the glorification of Samson in a synagogue mosaic in Galilee goes against the generally negative view of Samson held by many rabbis at that time.

According to Magness, the surviving rabbinic traditions that depict Samson positively “suggest that some Jews considered Samson as a prototype or forerunner of the messiah. He had the potential to be the messiah but wasn’t. The popularity of Samson is connected with those traditions, with traditions that viewed Samson as a deliver and redeemer of Israel. In the area of Mount Arbel and Tiberias, these traditions were popular. This may be why the Samson scenes appear here.”

Interestingly, the mosaics of Samson depict him as a giant figure, even though Samson was not described as such in the Tanakh. However, Magness notes that some rabbinic literature describes Samson as a giant. She emphasized, “By the time of the Mishna and Talmud, there were all sorts of traditions about different figures in the Bible.” Depicting Samson as a giant accords with traditions that considered Samson as a redeemer of the Jewish people!

Adjacent to Samson carrying the gates of Gaza on his shoulders are riders with horses, who apparently represent Philistines. According to Magness, “In the Bible, they have chariots; they are not riding horses. In later Aramaic translations (Targumim), there are descriptions of Philistines riding horses. It is a reflection again of something that doesn’t occur in the biblical account, but in later traditions.”

DEMISE OF THE HUQOQ JEWISH COMMUNITY

Magness is unsure how the Huqoq synagogue met its demise. In front of the synagogue’s bema, there was a pile of stones mixed with ash that was found elsewhere in the synagogue, apparently from the later robbing-out of the bema. Above the synagogue, a medieval structure was built. There are no signs that the synagogue suffered a violent or sudden destruction. Although the synagogue was built in the 5th century, Huqoq is mentioned in the Tanakh in connection with the settlement of the tribes of Asher and Naphtali, and it was a Jewish village in the late Second Temple period and in the time of the Mishna and Talmud. Ishtori Haparchi (1280-1355) mentions a synagogue in Huqoq in his time, perhaps referring to the medieval building above the late Roman synagogue. By the Ottoman period, Huqoq was a Muslim village.

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On a whim, I checked "Samson" in Barbara G. Walker's The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, and lo and behold, here is what I found:

Samson

Hebrew version of the sun god called Shams-On in Arabia, Shamash in Babylon, identical with Egypt's Ra-Harakhti and Greece's Heracles, Samson's lion-killing, pillar-carrying, and oher feats were copied from the Labors of Heracles, signifying the sun's progress through the zodiac.  Samson's "mill" was the same as Omphale's wheel, to which Heracles was bound.  His loss of hair meant the cutting of the sun god's rays, in the season when he became weak.

As Heracles was controlled by Omphale, and Ra was "made weak" by Isis, so Samson was deprived of his strength in due season by Delilah, "She Who Makes Weak."  Another interpretation of her name was Lily of the Yoni, that is, the female principle that deprived the phallic god of strength by drawing his "rays" or energy into herself.  Hair-cutting was a common mythic symbol of castration, since phallic power was supposed to reside in a man's hair, according to ancient eastern beliefs. (1)  The castrating priestess Delilah was a Semitic copy of Heracle's deadly consort Deianira [note the DEI - means goddess/god], the instrument of his destruction.  Blinding, also, meant putting out the "phallic eye."

Talmudic tradition viewed Samson's "grinding" in Philistia as a symbol of fornitication - suggesting a sacred-king cult in which a strongman assumed the role of the sun hereo, deflowered all the virgins until his strength was gone, then faced castration and sacrifice.(2) [In other words, another version of ancient king sacrifice.]  It has been supposed that Sampson's wrecking of the Philistine temple stood for the sun's power to dry and crumble a structure made of mud and bricks. [Nah.  I think it's a rather more recent gloss added by archivists who didn't want to see an old, traditiuonal hero made so wimpy due to a female's power, while at the same time demonstrating the strength of their phony patriarchal god, Yawheh/Jehovah.]

Notes: 

(1)  Rawson, E.A., 25.
(2)  Legman, 520; Silberer, 97.

Lettuce and the Ancient Egyptian God Min

Min - a creator god.  You may not know the name but you may recognize the sillouhette:

You know, the mummy with the erection...

Turns out the dude luuuuvvvveeeeedddd lettuce - so much so that it was coveted by the ancient Egyptians as an aphrodisiac (wonder if today's Egyptians still believe the same thing, hmmm.....)

Read all about it, tres cool!

From the Smithsonian online, see also story at the Daily Mail online.

July 16, 2013

When Lettuce Was a Sacred Sex Symbol

Lettuce has been harvested for millenia—it was depicted by ancient Egyptians on the walls of tombs dating back to at least 2,700 B.C. The earliest version of the greens resembled two modern lettuces: romaine, from the French word “romaine” (from Rome), and cos lettuce, believed to have been found on the island of Kos, located along the coast of modern day Turkey. 

 

But in Ancient Egypt around 2,000 B.C., lettuce was not a popular appetizer, it was an aphrodisiac, a phallic symbol that represented the celebrated food of the Egyptian god of fertility, Min. (It is unclear whether the lettuce’s development in Egypt predates its appearance on the island of Kos.) The god, often pictured with an erect penis in wall paintings and reliefs was also known as the “great of love” as he is called in a text from Edfu Temple. The plant was believed to help the god “perform the sexual act untiringly.”

 

Salima Ikram, Professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo who specializes in Ancient Egyptian food explains Min’s part in lettuce history. “Over 3,000 years, [Min's] role did change, but he was constantly associated with lettuce,” she says.

The first of these depictions appeared around 1970-80 B.C. in the The White Chapel of Senusret I, though there may be earlier examples, Ikram says.

This relief, from the funerary temple of Ramses III at Medinet Habu, for example, depicts Min’s harvest festival. At the center is a statue of Min. Behind him, a procession of priests holds a small garden of lettuce. Min is also sometimes depicted wearing a long, red ribbon around his forehead that some say represents sexual energy.

“One of the reasons why [the Egyptians] associated the lettuce with Min was because it grows straight and tall—an obvious phallic symbol,” Ikram says. “But if you broke off a leaf it oozed a sort of white-ish, milky substance—basically it looked like semen.”
When the butt of modern Romaine lettuce is cut off, a similar substance oozes from the plant and gives it a bitter flavor. Lettuce’s scientific classification lactuca sativa, is derived from the Latin word for milk and shares the same root as lactose, the sugar enzyme found in dairy products. (Ed. — corrected thanks to feedback from reader joelfinkle) (While we’re talking etymology, raw lettuce dishes known as herba salata (“salted greens”) gave rise to the English word “salad.”) Jane Grigson’s Vegetable Book provides further options for what the lettuce milk of the “ithyphallic god of increase” may represent:

Lettuce was sacred to him because of the “straight vertical surge” of their growth, milky juice they exude which could be taken as a symbol of mothers milk or semen.

Ancient Egyptians used the lettuce differently than those who would come later. The leaves had a greenish blue color and were often removed from the plant due to their bitter taste. Instead of being part of a meal, the seeds from the bud of the flowers were harvested and pressed for their natural oils which were used for cooking, medication—even mummification. Lettuce oil was a standard in the Egyptian materia medica and even today is used as a traditional remedy for hair regrowth.

The Greeks and Romans later popularized the leafy veggie as an appetizer during the 81-96 A.D. reign of Domitian. When they first introduced a set order of courses, the meal included a salad at the beginning to stimulate the appetite and also at the end to encourage digestion, according to author Gil Marks. It was still considered a medicinal goldmine by the Greeks and Romans, but for a different reason than the Egyptians—they believed it helped people sleep. Under Domitian’s reign, as the story goes, the ruler would force his guests to eat lettuce before the meal so as to make them struggle to remain awake for the remainder of the visit.

Another interesting lettuce-related story in Ancient Egypt, not for the faint-of-stomach: In Egyptian history there are many battles between the Egyptian deity Horus and Set, the god of the desert. Though the argument was usually over which of the two had the rightful claim to rule Egypt, one rather odd battle involves lettuce. According to Papyrus Chester-Beatty I, as interpreted by Ikram, Set at one point tries to overpower Horus by seducing him and then having intercourse with him. Horus places his hand between his legs, catches Set’s semen and throws it into the river. “Horus [then] tricks Set by basically spurting his sperm and throwing it into a lettuce plant, ” Ikram says. Because Set eats the semen-covered lettuce, in the eyes of the gods, Horus was dominant—at least until the next battle.

Got to love me a little Min, darlings :)

What's Happening at the World Chess Hall of Fame

Hola Darlings!

I have been on hiatus and may be so (although on good days I will be here) for the foreseeable future.  I have been dealing with health issues, which is an absolute fricking bummer, let me tell you!  I have experienced a set-back and at the present time, I do not know if things will get better. This sucks, big time!  But I'm here tonight, at least for a short time -- nope, I haven't croaked yet, Thank Goddess.  I'll do what I can, when I can.   

Received this email today from the World Chess Hall of Fame and Museum in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, and it's really cool, about all the goings-on in St. Louis.  Enjoy!  Some day, Goddess willing, I will travel there again.  It's only about a 30 minute jet ride from Milwaukee.  Would love once again to visit the World Chess Museum and the Scholastic Center and Chess Club right across the street from it, and walk the surrounding neighborhood.  It is a beautiful area.  I posted tons of photographs during my visit  - when the hell was that?  September, 2011?  Don't take my word for it. The heart meds I'm on causes "fuzzy brain" syndrome, unfortunately.  Ach!  If you're interested in reading about the Chess Collectors International Regional Meeting that took place in St. Louis, MO that coincided with the Kings Versus Queens Chess Tournament hosted by the St. Louis Scholastic Center and Chess Club, please do a word search on this blog.  Without further ado, here's the email:

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July was a great month here at the World Chess Hall of Fame! We received some exciting press coverage in the Wall Street Journal and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for our upcoming exhibition A Queen Within: Adorned Archetypes, Fashion and Chess, celebrated International Chess Day on July 20, and hosted Jon Crumiller, who led a fantastic guided tour and discussion of Prized and Played. Looking ahead, we're excited to see what the rest of summer and fall will bring!

Due to upcoming exhibition needs, please note that Bill Smith: Beyond the Humanities has a new closing date of August 25. From September 4 - 15, we will host a small exhibition in our first floor gallery highlighting the Piatagorsky Cup, a series of high-profile chess tournaments during the 1960s sponsored by chess benefactor Jacqueline Piatagorsky. This exhibition will coincide with the groundbreaking Sinquefield Cup tournament taking place at the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Saint Louis and serve as a preview to Jacqueline Piatagorsky: Patron, Player, Pioneer, appearing on our third floor October 25, 2013 - April 18, 2014.

Following the closing of Prized and Played: Highlights from the Jon Crumiller Collection on September 15, we will be closed to the public September 16 - October 18 for the installation of A Queen Within. But even though our exhibitions will be in transition, we will be keeping busy behind the scenes! In addition to preparing our upcoming shows, we are thrilled to host two concerts on September 18 and 25, in coordination with the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis and the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra respectively. Stay tuned for more information on these special events!

Whether your plans this month involve vacations, back-to-school errands, or just staying in the air conditioning, we at the WCHOF wish you a safe and happy August, and hope you will make time to visit us soon!

Checkmate,

Susan Barrett, Director

The Mother of All Carved Lionesses? 40,000 Years Old!

Just about fell off my chair reading this article!  This lioness is an incredibly beautiful work of art -- and 40,000 years old.  Best of all is the re-uniting of the head with the body after so many years.

I've featured many carved lions and lionesses at this blog since it's founding back in April 2007.  I believe this one is the oldest thus far discovered. 

Ice Age Figurine's Head Found: Archaeologists Put New and Old Finds Together to Reassemble Ancient Work of Art

July 18, 2013 — Researchers from the University of Tübingen have successfully re-attached the newly discovered head of a prehistoric mammoth-ivory figurine discovered in 1931. The head was found during renewed excavations at Vogelherd Cave, site of the original dig in 1931. The recent excavations, between 2005 and 2012, have yielded a number of important finds. The discovery of this ivory head helps to complete a figurine which now can be recognized as a lion -- and demonstrates that it is possible to reassemble often fragmentary figurines from the earlier excavation.

The new discovery is presented in the 2013 edition of the journal Archäologische Ausgrabungen in Baden-Württemberg.

Vogelherd Cave is located in the Lone Valley of southwestern Germany and is by far the richest of the four caves in the region that have produced examples of the earliest figurative art, dating as far back as 40,000 years ago. Overall, Vogelherd Cave has yielded more than two dozen figurines and fragments of figurines. While the work of fitting together thousands of small fragments of mammoth ivory from Vogelherd is just beginning, the remarkable lion figurine, now with its head, forms an important part of the display of the earliest art at the Museum of the University of Tübingen (MUT) in Hohentübingen Castle.

Professor Nicholas Conard and his excavation assistant Mohsen Zeidi today presented the new discovery and discussed its scientific importance, after which the find rejoined the permanent exhibit at MUT.

Research Reveals World's First Calendar from 10,000 Years Ago

I would add the caveat -- that we have thus far uncovered...  This is really really cool!

Found after 10,000 years: the world’s first calendar

David Keys

Monday 15 July 2013

 

Humans had a sophisticated calendrical system thousands of years earlier than previously thought, according to new research.

The discovery is based on a detailed analysis of data from an archaeological site in northern Scotland – a row of ancient pits which archaeologists believe is the world’s oldest calendar. It is almost five thousand years older than its nearest rival – an ancient calendar from Bronze Age Mesopotamia.
Created by Stone Age Britons some 10,000 years ago, archaeologists believe that the complex of pits was designed to represent the months of the year and the lunar phases of the month. They believe it also allowed the observation of the mid-winter sunrise – in effect the birth of the new year – so that the lunar calendar could be annually re-calibrated to bring it back into line with the solar year.
Remarkably the monument was in use for some 4,000 years – from around 8,000BC (the early Mesolithic period) to around 4,000BC (the early Neolithic).

The pits were periodically re-cut – probably dozens of times, possibly hundreds of times – over those four millennia. It is therefore impossible to know whether or not they originally held timber posts or standing stones after they were first dug 10,000 years ago. However variations in the depths of the pits suggest that the arc had a complex design - with each lunar month potentially divided into three roughly ten day ‘weeks’ – representing the waxing moon, the gibbous/full moon and the waning moon.

The 50 metre long row of 12 main pits was arranged as an arc facing a v-shaped dip in the horizon out of which the sun rose on mid-winter’s day. There are 12.37 lunar cycles (lunar months) in a solar year – and the archaeologists believe that each pit represented a particular month, with the entire arc representing a year.

The 12 pits may also have played a second role by representing the lunar month. Mirroring the phases of the moon, the waxing and the waning of which takes 29 and half days, the succession of pits, arranged in a shallow arc (perhaps symbolizing the movement of the moon across the sky), starts small and shallow at one end, grows in diameter and depth towards the middle of the arc and then wanes in size at the other end.

In its role as an annual calendar (covering 12 months – one for each pit), a pattern of alternating pit depths suggests that adjacent months may have been paired in some way, potentially reflecting some sort of dualistic cosmological belief system – known in the ethnographic and historical record in many parts of the world, but not previously detected archaeologically from the Stone Age.

Keeping track of time would have been of immense economic and spiritual use to the hunter gatherer communities of the Mesolithic period. Their calendar would have helped them to pinpoint the precise time that animal herds could be expected to migrate or the most likely time that salmon might begin to run.

But Stone Age communal leaders – potentially including Shamans – may also have used the calendar to give themselves the appearance of being able to predict or control the seasons or the behaviour of the moon and the sun.

The site – at Warren Field, Crathes, Aberdeenshire – was excavated in 2004 by the National Trust for Scotland, but the data was only analysed in detail over the past six months using the specially written software which permitted an interactive exploration of the relationship between the 12 pits, the local topography and the movements of the moon and the sun.

The analysis has been carried out by a team of specialists led by Professor Vincent Gaffney of the University of Birmingham.

“The research demonstrates that Stone Age society 10,000 years ago was much more sophisticated than we had previously suspected. The site has implications for the way we understand how Mesolithic society developed in economic, social and cosmological terms, ” said Professor Gaffney.

“The evidence suggests that hunter-gatherer societies in Scotland had both the need and sophistication to track time across the years, to correct for seasonal drift of the lunar year and that this occurred nearly 5000 years before the first formal calendars known in the Near East. In doing so, this illustrates one important step towards the formal construction of time and therefore history itself,” he said.

More On the Controversy Surrounding Claim of Oldest Chinese Inscriptions Uncovered

Ooooh, it just makes me tingle all over when the experts get all bitchy with each other :)  Prior post.

From Art Daily, July 14-15, 2013

Experts row over 'earliest' Chinese inscriptions find at the Zhuangqiaofen archaeological site

BEIJING (AFP).- Fierce debate has erupted among experts in China over the discovery of 5,000-year-old inscriptions that some believe represent the earliest record of Chinese characters.

Pottery pieces and stone vessels unearthed at the Zhuangqiaofen archaeological site in the eastern province of Zhejiang push "the origin of the written language back 1,000 years", the state-run Global Times newspaper reported.

The inscriptions predate the oracles, writings on turtle shells dating back to the Shang Dynasty (C.1600-1046BC), which are commonly believed to be the origin of the written Chinese language system.

Some of the inscriptions were written together in what some experts believe resembles a short sentence.

Li Boqian, an archaeology professor from Peking University, said the symbols reveal the ancient Liangzhu civilisation -- which existed in Zhejiang and neighbouring Jiangsu in the Neolithic Age -- had already developed the basic structure of sentences from independent words, the Global Times said earlier this week.

Other specialists dismissed the significance of such a find. Xu Hong, an archaeology researcher from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, expressed scepticism on links between the inscriptions and the development of Chinese script.

"Even if those signs on the stones were characters, they were simply from a long dead east Asian country before the Middle Kingdom existed," he said on Sina Weibo, China's version of the social network Twitter.

"Many signs and character lookalikes earlier than the oracles have been found in east Asia."

Xia Jingchun, a professor of Chinese language from Beijing Technology and Business University, also wrote on Weibo: "It's long been believed by experts that there were more ancient characters than the oracles, because the oracles were too mature, and older languages are supposed to be less developed."

The inscriptions were found among artefacts unearthed between 2003 and 2006, state media said.



© 1994-2013 Agence France-Presse     

Chess Femme News

Unless otherwise noted, information from The Week in Chess.

Judit Polgar sighting!  She surprised me by coming out of retirement to play in this event.  She cut her eye teeth playing rapid and blitz chess, as did 12th Women's World Chess Champion GM Alexandra Kosteniuk, who also played in this event.  It was evident Polgar was rusty.

Geneva Chess Masters 2013 (Geneva SUI) Mon 24th Jun 2013 - Sun 30th Jun 2013 -Official Site - Live

Geneva Masters GpA (4 players 3 Rds DRR Indiv TC:25m+10spm) - Games in PGN: GpA Games

Geneva Masters GpB (4 players 3 Rds DRR Indiv TC:25m+10spm) - Games in PGN: GpB Games

Geneva Masters KO (4 players 2 Rds KO Indiv TC:25m+10spm) - Games in PGN: KO Games

Geneva Open A 2013 (43 players 9 Rds Swiss Indiv ) - Games in PGN: Open A

Geneva Masters GpA Geneva SUI Mon 24th Jun 2013 - Sun 30th Jun 2013 Leading Final Round 3 Standings:
Rk	Name	Rtg	1	2	3	4	Pts	TB1
1	Mamedyarov, Shakhriyar	2753	*	1	1	1	3	8
2	Kramnik, Vladimir	2803	0	*	1	1	2	5
2	Pelletier, Yannick	2574	0	0	*	1	1	4
4	Polgar, Judit	2696	0	0	0	*	0	1
4 players Geneva Masters GpB Geneva SUI Mon 24th Jun 2013 - Sun 30th Jun 2013 Leading Final Round 3 Standings: Rk Name Rtg 1 2 3 4 Pts TB1 1 Nakamura, Hikaru 2784 * 1 1 1 3 8 2 Bacrot, Etienne 2725 0 * 1 1 2 6 3 Kosteniuk, Alexandra 2489 0 0 * 1 1 3 4 Edouard, Romain 2666 0 0 0 * 0 1 4 players  In the Open, two chess femmes finished in the top 10: Geneva Open A 2013 Geneva SUI Mon 24th Jun 2013 - Sun 30th Jun 2013 Leading Final Round 9 Standings: Rk Name Ti FED Rtg Pts TB1 TB2 TB3 1 Cornette Matthieu GM FRA 2578 8.0 42.0 55.5 2724 2 Bauer Christian GM FRA 2637 8.0 39.0 54.5 2730 3 Hambleton Aman IM CAN 2461 6.5 35.0 53.5 2455 4 Cherniaev Alexander GM RUS 2447 6.0 33.5 51.5 2427 5 Manea Alexandru IM ROU 2389 6.0 30.0 48.5 2423 6 Mamedjarova Turkan WGM AZE 2249 6.0 29.0 49.0 2339 7 Le Roux Jean-Pierre GM FRA 2576 5.5 33.0 55.5 2468 8 Bondar Yevgen SUI 2307 5.5 31.0 53.0 2417 9 Mamedjarova Zeinab WGM AZE 2264 5.5 30.0 51.5 2340

WGM Deysi Cori and her brother both played in the 21st Montacado Open (101 players):

21st Montcada Open Montcada i Reixac ESP Tue 25th Jun 2013 - Wed 3rd Jul 2013 Leading Final Round 9 Standings:
Rk	Name	Ti	FED	Rtg	Pts	TB1	TB2	TB3
1	Flores Rios Mauricio	GM	CHI	2492	7.5	40.5	0.0	40.0
2	Cabrera Alexis	GM	ESP	2525	7.0	36.5	0.0	37.0
3	Cori Jorge	GM	PER	2549	7.0	35.5	0.0	38.5
4	Gleizerov Evgeny	GM	RUS	2553	7.0	34.0	0.0	35.5
5	Burmakin Vladimir	GM	RUS	2575	6.5	36.0	0.0	42.0
6	Nisipeanu Liviu-Dieter	GM	ROU	2667	6.5	34.0	0.0	39.5
7	Cuartas Jaime Alexander	GM	COL	2484	6.5	33.5	0.0	37.0
8	Guerra Mendez Jose Angel	IM	CUB	2505	6.5	30.5	0.0	34.0
9	Saptarshi Roy	IM	IND	2447	6.5	29.0	0.0	34.5
10	Ortiz Suarez Isan Reynaldo	GM	CUB	2612	6.0	35.0	0.0	42.5
11	Ulibin Mikhail	GM	RUS	2523	6.0	30.5	0.0	35.0
12	Fluvia Poyatos Jordi	IM	ESP	2445	6.0	29.0	0.0	33.0
13	Anurag Mhamal	FM	IND	2401	6.0	27.5	0.0	30.5
14	Cruz Cristhian	GM	PER	2499	5.5	31.5	0.0	36.5
15	Cori T. Deysi	WGM	PER	2437	5.5	31.0	0.0	36.0

If I were the organizers, I would consider coming up with a somewhat different name for this tournament (45 players).  Okay, it's probably just in American English that "Lazy" is lazy (meaning something similar to no-account slothfulness) - sorry, I couldn't resist!

9th Lazy Open 2013 Lazy POL Sat 29th Jun 2013 - Mon 8th Jul 2013 Leading Final Round 9 Standings:
Rk	Name	Ti	FED	Rtg	+	Pts	TB1	TB2
1	SHISHKIN, Vadim	GM	UKR	2502	4	6.5	39.50	50.00
2	WARAKOMSKI, Tomasz	IM	POL	2488	5	6.5	38.50	46.50
3	MAJDAN-GAJEWSKA, Joanna	WGM	POL	2375	5	6.5	36.00	46.00
4	SIECIECHOWICZ, Marcin	IM	POL	2462	3	6.0	40.00	50.00
5	WEICHHOLD, Pawel	k+	POL	2382	5	6.0	39.00	49.50
6	URBAN, Klaudiusz	IM	POL	2462	4	6.0	39.00	48.50
7	ALIAVDIN, Nikolai	IM	BLR	2349	4	6.0	35.50	45.00
8	KANAREK, Marcel	IM	POL	2478	4	6.0	35.00	43.00
9	BUGALSKI, Michal	k	POL	2161	5	5.5	36.50	45.50
10	EGGINK, Ryszard	I++	POL	2121	5	5.5	35.50	46.00

WGM Joanna Majdan-Gajewska -- I'm not familiar with her but she finished plus 5 and in 3rd place overall.  Now if I could ever achieve a result like this I'd next run for President of the United States.  Holy Hathor! 


The top finishing female in the 41st World Open  took place 29th June to 7th July 2013) was IM Irina Krush. There was a 10 way tie on 6/9. Varuzhan Akobian drew with black in an Armageddon game vs Yuniesky Quesada to win the event. (113 players)

41st Annual World Op Arlington USA Sat 29th Jun 2013 - Sun 7th Jul 2013 Leading Final Round 9 Standings:
Rk	Name	Ti	Rtg	Pts
1	Akobian, Varuzhan	GM	2612	6
2	Yuniesky, Quesada	GM	2639	6
3	Bruzon Batista, Lazaro	GM	2689	6
3	Laznicka, Viktor	GM	2684	6
3	Negi, Parimarjan	GM	2634	6
3	Erenburg, Sergey	GM	2615	6
3	Gelashvili, Tamaz	GM	2572	6
3	Holt, Conrad	GM	2531	6
9	Milov, Vadim	GM	2643	5.5
10	Shankland, Sam	GM	2601	5.5
11	Panchanathan, Magesh	GM	2583	5.5
12	Ramirez, Alejandro	GM	2583	5.5
13	Mikhalevski, Victo	GM	2552	5.5
14	Shulman, Yury	GM	2542	5.5
15	Arnold, Marc Tyler	GM	2525	5.5
16	Fishbein, Alexander	GM	2504	5.5
17	Robson, Ray	GM	2628	5
18	Kacheishvili, Giorgi	GM	2588	5
19	Izoria, Zviad	GM	2574	5
20	Shabalov, Alex	GM	2553	5
21	Lenderman, Aleksandr	GM	2548	5
22	Molner, Mackenzie S	IM	2501	5
23	Yang, Darwin	IM	2485	5
24	Krush, Irina	IM	2480	5
25	Vioreanu, Bogdan	IM	2404	5
26	Neimer, Vitaly	IM	2393	5
27	Harmon-Vellotti, Luke C	FM	2368	5

2013 Netherlands Women's Chess Championship

The Dutch Championships took place 5th to 11th July 2013.  Final standings:

ch-NED w 2013 Amsterdam NED Fri 5th Jul 2013 - Thu 11th Jul 2013 Leading Final Round 7 Standings:
Rk	Name	Ti	Rtg	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	Pts	TPR
1	Schut, Lisa	WIM	2277	½	1	1	1	1	½	1	6.0	2559
2	Haast, Anne	WIM	2277	½	0	1	0	1	½	1	4.0	2300
3	Lanchava, Tea	IM	2287	½	1	0	½	0	1	1	4.0	2299
4	Peng, Zhaoqin	GM	2389	½	0	0	1	1	0	1	3.5	2234
5	Bensdorp, Marlies	WIM	2263	½	0	0	½	1	1	0	3.0	2202
6	Van Weersel, Arlette	WIM	2176	½	1	1	½	0	0	0	3.0	2214
7	Paulet, Iozefina	WGM	2228	½	1	1	0	0	0	0	2.5	2155
8	Middelveld, Martine		2130	½	0	0	½	0	1	0	2.0	2113
8 players More news at Alexandra Kosteniuk's Chessblog.

I'm An American Dog, Woof Woof!

From the Alpha Galileo Foundation

An Alaskan Husky

Hairless and long-coat Chihuahua dogs of Mexico

Carolina "Yaller" dog

They may look different from each other but, just like us, they're all the same underneath the skin.

Asian origins of native American dogs confirmed

10 July 2013 KTH The Royal Institute of Technology

Once thought to have been extinct, native American dogs are on the contrary thriving, according to a recent study that links these breeds to ancient Asia.

The arrival of Europeans in the Americas has generally been assumed to have led to the extinction of indigenous dog breeds; but a comprehensive genetic study has found that the original population of native American dogs has been almost completely preserved, says Peter Savolainen, a researcher in evolutionary genetics at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

In fact, American dog breeds trace their ancestry to ancient Asia, Savolainen says. These native breeds have 30 percent or less modern replacement by European dogs, he says.

“Our results confirm that American dogs are a remaining part of the indigenous American culture, which underscores the importance of preserving these populations,” he says.

Savolainen's research group, in cooperation with colleagues in Portugal, compared mitochondrial DNA from Asian and European dogs, ancient American archaeological samples, and American dog breeds, including Chihuahuas, Peruvian hairless dogs and Arctic sled dogs.  They traced the American dogs’ ancestry back to East Asian and Siberian dogs, and also found direct relations between ancient American dogs and modern breeds.

“It was especially exciting to find that the Mexican breed, Chihuahua, shared a DNA type uniquely with Mexican pre-Columbian samples,” he says. “This gives conclusive evidence for the Mexican ancestry of the Chihuahua.”

The team also analysed stray dogs, confirming them generally to be runaway European dogs; but in Mexico and Bolivia they identified populations with high proportions of indigenous ancestry.
Savolainen says that the data also suggests that the Carolina Dog, a stray dog population in the U.S., may have an indigenous American origin.

Savolainen works at the Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab www.scilifelab.se), a collaboration involving KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm University, the Karolinska Institutet and Uppsala University.

Off With Their Heads (Literally!)

A stake through the heart isn't enough to kill Polish vampires, evidently...

Vampire graveyard found in Poland?

PR dla Zagranicy

Nick Hodge 12.07.2013 09:21

Archaeologists in Gliwice, southern Poland have discovered a burial ground where the dead were laid to rest in accordance with practices for alleged vampires.

Four skeletons were found at the site, where mandatory digs were being carried out prior to the construction of a ring road. In each case, the deceased had been buried with the head between the legs.

According to folk beliefs, this prevented a possible vampire from finding his or her way back to the land of the living. There was no trace at the burial ground of any earthly possessions, such as jewellery, belts or buckles.

“It's very difficult to tell when these burials were carried out,” archaeologist Dr Jacek Pierzak told the Dziennik Zachodni newspaper. However, it is believed that they took place in the early modern period. [So what is the time frame for the early modern period???]  Tests are due to me [be] made, so as to determine exact dates.

Archaeologists believe that the burials may have been done in such a fashion so as to protect locals from vampire attacks. Another theory is that the skeletons were the victims of cholera epidemic. [So it was a custom to cut off the heads of cholera victims???]  

Further research will be undertaken.

The last recorded instance of a vampire burial within current Polish borders was in the village of Stare Mierzwice, Masovia, in 1914. A corpse was dug up in the village, and the head was cut off and placed between the person's legs. (nh) [Good Grief!  1914 -- the 20th century, and people were still going around chopping the heads off of "vampires."  Amazing, just amazing.  But then, people can behave really stupidly.  Just watch the summer replacement television series "The Dome" and you'll see in the story line that is frightening because it rings so true just how ridiculous human beings can be.  Pathetic - and lethal to anyone who becomes "suspect."  Beware group think!] 

Oldest Chinese Symbols (Writing?) Discovered to Date

Fascinating story - and open about the ongoing debate as to what constitutes writing and what merely constitutes "symbols."  My question is - if a specific drawing of a symbol means something to the creator and to those who see it, isn't this writing?  After all, isn't writing merely a tool to convey meaning apart from the spoken word and gestures?

This is the photo of the ax head from the article -- would have preferred to see a line drawing of the markings:

A stone axe from near the Zhuangqiao relics site, in east China, shows a newly discovered form of primitive writing, archaeologists say. Photograph: AP

Story at The Guardian

Inscriptions found in Shanghai pre-date 'oldest Chinese language by 1,400 years'

Markings on artefacts from Zhuangqiao relics site date to 5,000 years ago and include string of words, says archaeologist

 

Associated Press in Beijing

guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 10 July 2013 14.16 EDT

 

Primitive inscriptions dating back about 5,000 years – and believed to be 1,400 years older than the most ancient written Chinese language – have been discovered in Shanghai, archaeologists report.
Chinese scholars are divided over whether the markings, found on artefacts at the Zhuangqiao relics site south of the modern city, are words or something simpler. But they believe the discovery will shed light on the origins of Chinese language and culture.

The oldest writing in the world is believed to be from Mesopotamia (now Iraq), dating back slightly more than 5,000 years. Chinese characters are believed to have been developed independently. [I wonder what the consensus will be 100 years from now?  What if there is a missing link of writing akin to the missing link in human evolution?]

The Chinese inscriptions were found on more than 200 pieces dug out from the neolithic Liangzhu relics site. The pieces are among thousands of fragments of ceramic, stone, jade, wood, ivory and bone excavated from the site between 2003 and 2006, Xu Xinmin, the lead archaeologist, said.

Chinese scholars, of archaeology and ancient writing, who met last weekend in Zhejiang province to discuss the finding, thought the inscriptions did not indicate a developed writing system. However Xu said there was evidence of words on two pieces of stone axes.

One of the pieces has six word-like shapes strung together and resembles a short sentence.

"They are different from the symbols we have seen in the past on artefacts," Xu said. "The shapes, and the fact that they are in a sentence-like pattern, indicate they are expressions of some meaning."
The six characters are arranged in a line, and three resemble the modern Chinese character for human beings. Each shape has two to five strokes.

"If five to six of them are strung together like a sentence, they are no longer symbols but words," said Cao Jinyan, a scholar of ancient writing at Zhejiang University. He said the markings should be regarded as hieroglyphics.

He said there were also stand-alone shapes with more strokes. "If you look at the composition, you will see they are more than symbols."

But Liu Zhao, an archaeologist at Fudan University, Shanghai, suggested there was not sufficient material for a conclusion. "I don't think they should be considered writing by the strictest definition. We do not have enough material to pin down the stage of those markings in the history of ancient writings."

For now the Chinese scholars are calling the markings primitive writing, a vague term that suggests they are somewhere between symbols and words. The oldest known Chinese writing has been found on animal bones (known as oracle bones) dating to 3,600 years ago, at the time of the Shang dynasty.

Analysis of an Ancient War Wound (and the Soldier Survived, Too)

From Live Science

Well, I'm not sure how the formatting is going to turn out on this article, I hope it is readable!  It sure is interesting.  

How X-Rays Demystified a 2,500-Year-Old Battle Wound (Op-Ed)

Dr. Helise Coopersmith, North Shore-LIJ Health System

Date: 02 July 2013 Time: 06:58 PM ET

 

Dr. Helise Coopersmith is a musculoskeletal and body imaging radiologist for the North Shore-LIJ Health System, assistant professor of radiology at the Hofstra North Shore-LIJ School of Medicine and a member of the Hofstra medical school's admissions committee. She contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

 

I have worked as a musculoskeletal radiologist for many years and have seen a wide range of bone injuries. But recently, I found myself for the first time using my X-ray table to look at a 2,500-year-old bone and a piece of an ancient arrow.

 

The bone, discovered in Northern Greece, was brought to me by Anagnostis Agelarakis, a professor and chair of anthropology at Adelphi University. It was a section of the ulna bone, which is the inner of two forearm bones.  

 

My initial impression was surprise. Although the outer region of bone, the cortex, was thinned by time, and the inner region, the medullary cavity, had long since disintegrated, the girth and contours of the bone were quite similar to a human bone one would see today.

 

But, most notably, there was a turquoise-colored object jutting out from the bone, and according to Agelarakis, this was one of four sides of a bronze arrowhead. He proposed that this piece of the arrowhead was never removed by the field surgeons of the time because a barbed component anchoring it into the bone would have damaged the superficial soft tissues if removal were attempted.

Beside my X-ray table, I had a photograph of the re-assembled skull that was found with the ulna bone and a sketch by scientific illustrator Argie Agelarakis (Anagnostis's wife) of what the soldier's face may have looked like around the time of his eventual death, presumably at about 58 to 62 years of age.

My team and I took three X-rays of the ulna bone, and we found that indeed the films confirmed what Anagnostis Agelarakis had suspected.

There was a barbed component to the arrowhead that could not be seen with the naked eye. The full extent of the remaining arrowhead could now be seen and was seated superficially within the bone, located only within the cortex, or outer shell. This supported Agelarakis's notion that the arrowhead could have been removed if not for its barbed component.

There was a large bony (osseous) spur adjacent to the arrowhead, which make sense as the human body can form extra bone material in response to trauma. Such spurs take many months to fully mature, which implies that the soldier lived for a long time after the injury. Also, there was no bony erosion adjacent to the arrowhead, confirming that the arrowhead did not cause life-threatening infection.

We also noted that the arrowhead and the osseous spur were in the region of the flexor digitorum profundus muscle, which means the injury would have made it difficult for the soldier to flex his fingers and grasp objects.

There was a story behind the objects we were seeing, the story of an ancient Greek warrior who was an injured veteran, like many who are celebrated today and served by the hospital I work in.
It is amazing to think that the same X-ray technology that we use to diagnose conditions for our patients can answer age-old questions and help solve historical mysteries.

 

 

Farming Invented at Least Twice -- Once on the Persian Plateau

Absolutely fascinating.  I've long believed that if there is some truth, however mangled, in the old biblical accounts, then maybe, just maybe, the biblical traditionalists are looking for the remains of Noah's ark in the wrong area (Ararat in Turkey).  To my train of thought, it follows that when Noah and his family eventually disembarked the ark (har!), it wasn't too long thereafter that the first evidences of agriculture appeared in our archaeological record, including the first evidence of deliberate grape-growing (called "vineyards" but methinks they weren't anything like the vineyards of today).  Just imagine...

From sciencemag.org

Farming was so Nice, It was Invented at Least Twice

by Michael Balter on 4 July 2013, 2:15 PM

 

The invention of farming some 10,000 years ago set the stage for the rise of civilizations in the Near East. Yet archaeologists disagree about how it happened. Some say it arose in a single spot near the Mediterranean, and spread from there. Others argue it had multiple independent origins, a view that is getting new credence, thanks to findings from an early farming site in Iran.

 

Whether farming arose once or a hundred times, it happened first in the Fertile Crescent, a broad region stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to Iran. Most research over the past decades has focused on the western stretches of the Fertile Crescent—including modern-day Israel, Palestine, Syria, Jordan and Turkey—in large part because those were the easiest areas to work in, both logistically and politically. Recent excavations in those areas have suggested that hunter-gatherers first began to gather and plant seeds from wild cereals and legumes, such as wheat, barley, and lentils, as early as 13,000 years ago. Over a few thousand years of such cultivation, the wild forms of these plants mutated into new, domesticated species that were easier to manage and harvest, making farming more productive and efficient.

 

Until recently, the oldest known farming villages had been found at sites in Palestine, Syria, and eastern Turkey, where archaeologists radiocarbon dated the earliest domesticated plant species to about 10,500 years ago. Only a few sites were known as far east as Iran, and most of them had been excavated in the 1960s and 1970s, before that country's 1979 Islamic Revolution made it nearly impossible for Western archaeologists to work there—and also before the advent of modern archaeobotanical techniques that make it much easier for researchers to recover tell-tale plant remains.

 

About five years ago, archaeologist Nicholas Conard and archaeobotanist Simone Riehl of the University of Tübingen in Germany hooked up with researchers at the Iranian Center for Archaeological Research (ICAR) in Tehran, and particularly Mohsen Zeidi, an experienced ICAR excavator, to begin work at the early farming village of Chogha Golan, in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains in western Iran. Iranian archaeologists had discovered the village about 15 years earlier, but never fully excavated it. While digging in 2009 and 2010, the team uncovered extensive evidence for the processing of plants in the village, including mortars, pestles, and grinding stones. The dig also yielded a huge quantity—more than 21,000 individual pieces—of charred plant remains, which Riehl analyzed for a report online today in Science.

 

Radiocarbon dating of the archaeological deposits, some 8 meters in depth, showed that Chogha Golan had been occupied continuously between about 12,000 and 9,700 years ago or even later . That allowed Riehl and her colleagues to trace the use of plants over that entire period of time. They found that the people of Chogha Golan apparently began cultivating wild barley, wheat, and lentils more than 11,500 years ago, and that domesticated forms of wheat appeared about 9,800 years ago, nearly as early as at sites to the west. The team concludes that the advent of farming at Chogha Golan, and in the eastern Fertile Crescent, was an independent event that paralleled developments much farther west. This suggests, researchers say, that farming was more or less inevitable once the Ice Age had ended and climatic and environmental conditions were right for it, rather than being a fluke that arose in just one location.

 

"These results do support the idea of multiple origins of agriculture," says Roger Matthews, an archaeologist at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. He adds that the findings are consistent with recent DNA studies that also suggest multiple origins for both domesticated plants and animals. They also echo work that he, along with other British and Iranian archaeologists, has carried out at another Iranian site called Sheikh-e Abad, where it appears that wild goats were herded and penned, "a transitional stage between wild and domesticated that matches well with the transitional stages in plant use" found at Chogha Golan.

 

George Willcox, an archaeobotanist affiliated with the University of Lyon in France, agrees that the geographical distance of the Zagros Mountains from the western Fertile Crescent could suggest an independent origin for crop cultivation. But he cautions that "it is too early to argue one way or the other" whether the actual domestication of cereals, as opposed to cultivation of wild forms, was an independent event. It is still possible, Willcox says, that the domesticated wheat found at Chogha Golan, which at 9800 years was several hundred years younger than the earliest known domesticated species, was introduced from further west.

Part of Old Kingdom Sphinx Uncovered in Tel Hazor (Northern Israel)

From phys.org.news

Unique Egyptian sphinx unearthed in north Israel (Update)

Jul 09, 2013 by Jonah Mandel

Part of an ancient Egyptian king's unique sphinx was unveiled at a dig in northern Israel on Tuesday, with researchers struggling to understand just how the unexpected find ended up there.

 

An Australian excavation volunteer on July 9, 2013, displays part of an ancient Egyptian king's unique sphinx with a hieroglyphic inscription dating circa 3rd century BCE, found during excavation at the northern Israeli site of ancient Tel Hazor. The sphinx was unveiled with researchers struggling to understand just how the unexpected find ended up there.

The broken granite sphinx statue—including the paws and some of the mythical creature's forearms—displayed at Tel Hazor archaeological site in Israel's Galilee, is the first such find in the region.

 

Its discovery also marks the first time ever that researchers have found a statue dedicated to Egyptian ruler Mycerinus who ruled circa 2,500 BC and was builder of one of the three Giza pyramids, an expert said.

"This is the only monumental Egyptian statue ever found in the Levant - today's Israel, Lebanon, Syria," Amnon Ben-Tor, an archaeology professor at the Hebrew University in charge of the Tel Hazor dig, told AFP.  It is also the only sphinx of this particular king known, not even in Egypt was a sphinx of that particular king found."

Ben-Tor said that besides Mycerinus's name, carved in hieroglyphics between the forearms, there are symbols reading "beloved by the divine souls of Heliopolis".  "This is the temple in which the sphinx was originally placed," Ben-Tor said of Heliopolis, an ancient city which lies north of today's Cairo.

Tel Hazor, which Ben-Tor calls "the most important archaeological site in this country," was the capital of southern Canaan, founded circa 2,700 BC and at its peak covering approximately 200 acres and home to some 20,000 Canaanites. It was destroyed in the 13th century BC.

 

"Following a gap of some 150 years, it was resettled in the 11th century BC by the Israelites, who continuously occupied it until 732 BC," when it was destroyed by the Asyrians, Ben-Tor said.

He said the find was approximately 50 centimetres (20 inches) long, and estimated the entire statue was 150 centimetres (60 inches) long and half a metre (20 inches) high".

How, when and why it reached Tel Hazor remains a mystery.  "That it arrived in the days of Mycerinus himself is unlikely, since there were absolutely no relations between Egypt and this part of the world then," said Ben-Tor.

"Egypt maintained relations with Lebanon, especially via the ancient port of Byblos, to import cedar wood via the Mediterranean, so they skipped" today's northern Israel, he said.

 

Another option is that the statue was part of the plunders of the Canaanites, who in the late 17th and early 16th century BC ruled lower Egypt, the expert said.  "Egyptian records tell us that those foreign rulers... plundered and desecrated the local temples and did all kinds of terrible things, and it is possible that some of this looting included a statue like this one".

But to Ben-Tor the most likely way the sphinx reached Tel Hazor is in the form of a gift sent by a later Egyptian ruler.

 

"The third option is that it arrived in Hazor some time after the New Kingdom started in 1,550 BC, during which Egypt ruled Canaan, and maintained close relations with the local rulers, who were left on their thrones," he said.  "In such a case it's possible the statue was sent by the Egyptian ruler to king of Hazor, the most important ruler in this region."

Shlomit Blecher, who manages the Selz Foundation Hazor Excavations in Memory of Yigael Yadin, was the archaeologist who actually unearthed the finding in August 2012.  The statue's incrustation was meticulously removed over a period of many months by the excavation's restorer, before the intricate carvings and hieroglyphics were fully visible.

"It was the last hour of the last day of the dig," she told AFP of the moment of the find. "We all leapt with joy and happiness, everyone was thrilled."

 

"We hope the other pieces are here and that we find them in the near days," she said. [So do I!]

Ben-Dor said the statue was most likely deliberately broken by new occupiers at Tel Hazor in an act of defiance to the old rule.  Finding the sphinx was "unexpected," said Ben-Tor, "but fits" archaeological facts and findings. "When you're in a bank, you find money," he said.

To Ben-Tor, however, the true coveted find would be archives buried somewhere on Tel Hazor that could serve as an inventory to the ancient city's content.  "I know there are two archives," he said. "We already have 18 documents from two periods, the 17th and 14th century BC. If I found those archives, people would come running here."

Big News: Untouched Wari Tomb Discovered in Peru

Lots of news stories about this find -- THREE QUEENS!

Heather Pringle

for National Geographic

Published June 27, 2013

First Unlooted Royal Tomb of Its Kind Unearthed in Peru
Three queens were buried with golden treasures, human sacrifices.

June 27, 2013 4:25 pm
Smithsonian.com
Smart News

Unlooted Royal Tomb Found in Peru

 

Archaeologists Keep Wari Tomb Discovery Secret to Prevent Looting

June 28, 2013 by Andean Air Mail & PERUVIAN TIMES

And more:

A pile of Wari mummies in a pre-Inca royal tomb:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2350600/Treasures-Peruvian-royal-tombs-A\
rchaeologists-unlooted-tomb-ancient-Wari-civilisation-queens-buried-alongside-go\
lden-jewellery-human-sacrifices.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-23092825
http://phys.org/news/2013-06-dozens-mummies-pre-inca-royal-tomb.html

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-peru-wari-tomb-royal-in\
ca-20130627,0,4860913.story
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/06/pictures/130627-peru-archaeology\
-wari-south-america-human-sacrifice-royal-ancient-world-photos/#/

Buried With Flowers

Hola darlings!  I took a brief respite and when I was ready to come back, I was confronted with internet connectivity problems, ACHHHH!  Anyway, connectivity issues have FINALLY been resolved.  So now I'm going to try and play catch-up with some of the fascinating stories that have come and gone.

A very interesting story about definitive evidence of flowers having been buried with two bodies some 12,000 years ago. Amazingly, the only grave with evidence of flowers being buried with the body is a 70,000 year old Neanderthal burial -- which is controversial. 

Here's the story from National Geographic:

Mysterious Pair Buried With Flowers—Oldest Example Yet

Aromatic sage and mint lined graves found on Israel's Mount Carmel.

Ker Than

for National Geographic

Published July 1, 2013

Imprints of stems and blossoms stamped into the dirt of ancient graves are the oldest definitive proof of flowers decorating graves—a common practice around the world today—a new study says.

 

Scented flowering plants, such as mint and sage, were imprinted in soft mud after they decomposed some 12,000 years ago in the graves, which are located in a cave on northern Israel's Mount Carmel.

Ancient mourners lined four graves with the flowers, most notably one that holds the bodies of two people.

The pair—an adult male and an adolescent of undetermined sex—belonged to the primitive Natufian culture, which flourished between 15,000 and 11,600 years ago in an area that is now Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.

 

The Natufian society was one of the first—possibly the first—to transition from a roaming hunter-gatherer lifestyle to permanent settlements, and was also the first to establish true graveyards, said study leader Daniel Nadel, an archaeologist at the University of Haifa in Israel.

 

"There are examples of groups living in a camp for a few years, but some of the [Natufian] sites we know about were used for thousands of years," Nadel said.

 

So what's new?

 

The new discovery indicates that the Natufians were also among the first to use flowers to honor their dead.

 

The only potentially older instance of funerary flowers is a dusting of pollen found at the site of an approximately 70,000-year-old grave of a Neanderthal dubbed Shanidar IV in Iraq. However, some scientists have argued that holes found at that site were made by burrowing rodents that stored seeds and flowers in the grave.

 

"From [the Neanderthal] example until the Natufians"—a period spanning some 50,000 years—"there is not one example [of flowers decorating graves]," said Nadel, whose study appears this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

 

He noted, however, that this doesn't necessarily mean that people weren't using flowers at graves during that entire time. More likely, the flowers decayed over time.

 

"Finding such flowers is very difficult," Nadel said. "Asking for such preservation is asking for a lot."

 

Why is it important?

 

The evidence suggests the pair's grave was prepared with great care. First, a pit was dug, and then a thin veneer of mud was used to cover the sides. The bottom of the grave was lined with the plants—which bloom in pink and lavender—before the bodies were placed inside.

 

The scented flowers were likely chosen as much for their aromas as their appearance.

 

"There are hundreds of flowers on Mount Carmel during the spring, but only a small group provide very strong fragrances. It's impossible that the Natufians didn't recognize the smell" when they chose them for the graves, Nadel said.

 

What does this mean?

 

Based on items found in other graves at the cave cemetery—such as animal bones—Nadel thinks the pair was buried with great pomp and circumstance.

 

"They didn't just place the bodies inside the graves and leave," he said. "We have to envision a colorful ceremony that maybe included dancing, singing, and eating. They may have hunted a few animals and had a big meal around the graves and then threw bones or meat inside."

 

If Natufian burial practices were anything like those of modern cultures, the grave flowers were intended not only for the dead, but also for the living, Nadel said.

 

"We create ceremonies and make a big fuss to show our respect for the dead," Nadel said.

 

What's next?

 

Nadel and his team are currently working to identify the age, gender, and relationship of the individuals in the flower-lined graves.

 

For example, in the case of the double burial, "are they relatives?" he said. "Are they parent and child? Are they brothers? Or friends? Did they die together? And how come they were buried together? We don't know."

Daniel Nadel's research was funded in part by the National Geographic Committee for Research and Exploration.

700,000 Year Old Horse's DNA Sequenced

A horse is still recognized as a horse, from DNA 700,000 years old.

From Scientific American Online:

Horse Fossil Yields Astonishingly Old Genome—Are Similarly Ancient Human Genomes Next?

By Kate Wong | June 26, 2013|

 

Researchers have recovered DNA from a nearly 700,000-year-old horse fossil and assembled a draft of the animal’s genome from it. It is the oldest complete genome to date by a long shot–hundreds of thousands of years older than the previous record holder, which came from an archaic human that lived around 80,000 years ago. The genome elucidates the evolution of modern horses and their relatives, and raises the question of whether scientists might someday be able to obtain similarly ancient genomes of human ancestors.

Ludovic Orlando of the University of Copenhagen and his colleagues extracted the DNA from a foot bone found at the site of Thistle Creek in Canada’s Yukon Territory in permafrost dating to between 560,000 and 780,000 years ago, which falls within the so-called early Middle Pleistocene time period. They then mapped the fragments of DNA they obtained against the genome of a modern horse to piece together a draft of the ancient horse’s genome.

Comparing that sequence to the genomes of a 43,000-year-old horse, a donkey, five modern domestic horses and a modern Przewalski’s horse (a type of wild horse native to Mongolia), the researchers were able to gain insights into some key aspects of horse evolution. Their findings indicate that the last common ancestor of the members of the genus Equus—which includes modern horses, donkeys, asses and zebras, along with their extinct relatives–lived some 4 million to 4.5 million years ago, double the estimate suggested by the oldest unequivocal Equus fossils. The results also allowed the team to chart the demographic history of horses over the past two million years, revealing how the population waxed and waned as climate shifted and grasslands expanded and contracted. In addition, the researchers identified several genome regions in modern horses that seem to have been targeted by natural selection acting to promote advantageous gene variants related to immunity and olfaction, as well as a number of genome regions that may have undergone selection related to domestication. A report detailing the study will be published in the June 27 Nature. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)

This is a pretty exciting development (so exciting, in fact, that I’m interrupting my vacation to write about it). And I can’t help but think back, as I do whenever a new ancient DNA story breaks, to the first time I ever reported on DNA from deep time. The year was 1997. Researchers had just announced that they had sequenced DNA from a 40,000-year-old Neandertal fossil. Specifically they had sequenced DNA from mitochondria—the cell’s energy-producing organelles, which contain their own DNA that is passed on along the maternal line.

The Neandertal mitochondrial genome was a huge breakthrough—and it seemed to settle a long-running debate over Neandertals and the origin of anatomically modern Homo sapiens. But mitochondrial DNA represents only a tiny fraction of an individual’s genetic information; the real action is in the DNA that resides in the cell’s nucleus—the nuclear genome. The scientists I spoke to back then—geneticists and paleontologists—longed for a nuclear genome from a Neandertal. But they were quite certain that they would never ever get one. Mitochondrial DNA is far more abundant than nuclear DNA, because a cell can contain hundreds of mitochondria, whereas it has just one nucleus. Thus the chances of finding nuclear DNA that has survived the ravages of time is far, far lower than those of obtaining mitochondrial DNA—itself a rarity.

And yet. Fast forward to 2010 and the impossible dream was realized: a draft sequence of a nuclear genome of a Neandertal. More recently the sequencing of nuclear DNA retrieved from an enigmatic finger bone from Denisova Cave in Siberia has revealed a previously unknown kind of human. And scientists have obtained an astonishingly complete Neandertal genome from the same cave site. These ancient nuclear genomes paint a rather different picture of archaic-modern human relations than the early mitochondrial DNA work did, and are providing a wealth of fascinating insights into our own evolution and that of our relatively recently extinct cousins.

This fantastically old horse genome got me thinking about the possibility of recovering DNA from comparably ancient human relatives—ones who roamed the earth long before the Neandertals and the Denisovans. If scientists had such data, what would they try to learn from it? When I asked paleoanthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin this question, he had this to say:
“Right now the Denisovan and Neandertal genomes have raised a new scenario of population structure for Middle Pleistocene people. They show us that earlier hominins in Eurasia were largely supplanted, possibly with some mixture, by a dispersal of Neandertal and Denisovan ancestors. What was that pre-Neandertal population like? Did it have its own unique events shaping its evolution? How many times did large-scale dispersals of human populations sweep across the Old World? And what happened to African ancestors during this key Middle Pleistocene time period?”

Now, lest we get ahead of ourselves, it must be noted that the horse fossil was found in permafrost, which no doubt contributed to the preservation of the DNA. So will scientists have to find a Middle Pleistocene human on ice (or ice-cold soil) to have any hope of getting a genome out of it? Not necessarily. The Denisova specimens weren’t preserved in permafrost and their ancient DNA is first class. Still, they are far younger than the horse fossil. But according to ancient DNA expert Hendrik Poinar of McMaster University in Canada, the key to DNA preservation is dry conditions. “While cold and dry is best, warm and dry will still work,” he explains.

Poinar additionally noted that he is certain that researchers will eventually recover genomes even older than this 700,000-year-old (give or take) one. Which brings me to my final thought. When I learned of the horse genome, the first thing I thought was: what does this mean for Australopithecus sediba, the two million-year-old fossil species unearthed in at the site of Malapa in South Africa a few years ago. It has been held up as a candidate for the long-sought ancestor of our genus, Homo. These fossils are exquisitely preserved and may even contain organic material. Some of the remains are completely encased in rock, visible only with computed tomography and other imaging techniques. Might scientist be able to extract DNA from these fossils—and might that DNA be sufficiently well preserved to yield a genome? “I think DNA from Malapa is very possible and an exciting prospect,” Poinar says.

In fact, efforts are already under way to recover DNA from the A. sediba fossils, “We are in the process of looking and there are specimens presently being investigated,” says paleoanthropologist Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand, who is leading the recovery and analysis of the fossils from Malapa. “It is of course unlikely in a [two million-year-old] fossil,” he notes, “nevertheless, Malapa has as good a chance as anywhere if the impossible is going to prove possible.”

I’m going to resume my vacation now. But I’ll be daydreaming about genomes from our long-vanished cousins. The future of ancient DNA research has never looked brighter.