Category: WORLD

Researchers discovered the footprints, which were left by both adults and children, in ancient estuary mud at Happisburgh in Norfolk, eastern England.

The only older footprints found so far are at Laetoli in Tanzania, at about 3.5 million years old, and at Ileret and Koobi Fora in Kenya at about 1.5 million years, they added.

“This is an extraordinarily rare discovery,” said Nick Ashton of the British Museum, who led the research team, which also involved the National History Museum and Queen Mary University London.

The discovery came at an archaeological site that has yielded several previous discoveries of stone tools and fossil bones, including mammoth remains.

The researchers found the prints at low tide when waves washed away much of the beach sand to expose the silt below.

“At first we weren’t sure what we were seeing but as we removed any remaining beach sand and sponged off the seawater, it was clear that the hollows resembled prints, perhaps human footprints, and that we needed to record the surface as quickly as possible before the sea eroded it away,” Ashton said.

The group of early humans that left the footprints appeared to have consisted of at least one male and several smaller people believed to be females and youngsters, the researchers said.

“They are clearly a family group rather than a hunting party,” said Ashton.

The footprints were dated at 800,000 years old partly on the basis of the site’s geological position beneath glacial deposits, but also because the fossils there come from now-extinct types of mammoth and horse and early forms of vole that were alive at that time.

A team from the British Museum, the Natural History Museum and the University of London uncovered imprints from up to five individuals in ancient estuary mud at Happisburgh on the country’s east coast.

British Museum scientist Nick Ashton says the prints are “a tangible link to our earliest human relatives.”

The scientists say the humans who left the footprints may have been related to Homo antecessor, or “pioneer man,” whose fossilised remains have been found in Spain and who died out 800,000 years ago.

The find was announced Friday, and published in the journal PLOS ONE.

It might look like something out of a James Cameron dream but this 190ft tall floating behemoth is taking to open water as the world’s first non-stop exploration vessel, complete with submarine drones, underwater living quarters and space training simulator.

Oceanographer Jacques Rougerie is the mastermind behind the SeaOrbiter – a creation he’s been designing for over a decade – and secured the final 30 per cent of the A$53 million build cost from crowdfunding site KissKissBankBank.

Constantly roaming the oceans and with over half of the 190ft ship under the water’s surface the SeaOrbiter offers an alternative exploration proposition to current research projects. Missions have been mapped out when it sets sail to get an in-depth look at seabeds, search for lost civilisations, find mythical deep sea creatures and find new life forms.

With 90 per cent of the world’s oceans still unexplored it’s estimated that there are millions more species not yet recorded or observed and Rougerie aims to scan the planet’s abysses to find them.

 

So if you’re going to discover new forms of life, why not do it in style. This mega craft looks to blow all other research vessels out the water being decked out in some high-tech tech kit including being built from Sealium – a recyclable aluminium designed for marine environments – and powered through a ‘solar skin’ which will let it sail in silence.

On-board there’s a hive of high-tech devices from which large numbers of subsea exploration devices leave daily like sub-aquatic bees to gather data and return at the end of each trip.

With ten accommodation levels there is room for 22 permanent inhabitants, including four above the water for sea bird and surface observation and six decks below the water that will let residents continuously peek out into the big blue. Pressurised hyperbaric quarters are also found below, which are intended to save deep sea divers the bother of having to go through the decompression process.

Work will begin later this year and when fully operational it will spend its time scanning the Mediterranean. There are plans to eventually have a fleet of floating SeaOrbiters. Watch out Nessie!

 

SeaOrbiter specs:

• Solar powered and can roam the seas in silence

• Wind turbine for extra power

• 190ft high (100ft below water)

• On-board laboratory

• Ten accommodation levels (four above, six below water level) for 22 permanent residents

• Hyperbaric laboratory to carry out unrestricted dives at depths of between 10m and 100m without the inconvenience of decompression stops. Aquanauts stay in a pressurised chamber which keeps them at the same pressure as the surrounding underwater environment. They can then stay on extended dives among the marine creatures, especially during the night, a critical period when unknown animals rise to the surface from the deep.

• Remote-operated underwater vehicle which can film and take samples up to 1000m

• Has an autonomous drone submarine that will plunge to 6000m

• Has an on-board space simulator thanks that mimics the conditions in space so astronauts can train for future expeditions including preparations for Mars

So how does it all connect? Through undersea cables, of course. This map created by TeleGeography shows where every cable comes from and where it connects.

Interestingly, every cable in Australia comes into Sydney or Western Australia, while if you take a look at Southern Asia and Europe, it looks like a complete jumble of cables going and coming from every direction. Australia also feeds New Zealand two out of three internet cables.

If you really love your maps, you can even order a print for $US250 to hang in the office.

So it shows that supplying the world with a digital connection actually involves a lot of complicated infrastructure. Take a moment to look at this interactive map and truly appreciate the marvel of your tweet travelling along those cables for the world to see in a split second.

But what collectors often find most entrancing about maps are how they provide portals into history.

The rise and fall of cities, the charting of war and adventure, the promise of riches through trade … history continues to be rewritten according to scholars’ reinterpretations of ancient cartography.

John Selden’s 17th-century map of China made a huge splash recently as the stimulus for two new books analysing London’s rise as an economic hub (the city’s success is inextricably linked to trade with China, as the Selden map illustrates).

According to some experts, the current unprecedented volume of global travel is also contributing to a burgeoning interest in map collecting.

“I believe that as people travel more, migrate more and speak more languages, and as business becomes more globalised, the appeal of two types of attachment to the idea of ‘place’ increases,” says Daniel Crouch, a London based specialist of antique maps and atlases.

Russell Crowe: “I’m a map geek”.

“One, as an identification with, or memory of, a place or homeland left behind, and the other as a statement of a new ‘home’ or adopted country, or fondness for a land visited.”

Crouch reveals some fascinating map facts gathered from a lifetime of collecting and selling antique maps, and shares favourites from his most recent exhibition in Hong Kong featuring maps of China.

Here are seven things to know about maps:

1. It’s still possible to have your own world-class map collection

Even the wealthiest collectors of old master or impressionist paintings, Chinese ceramics or modern art can never hope to have collections of a quality to match the likes of the Louvre, the British Museum or the MET.

However, that’s not true of maps.

The savvy collector can still buy maps or atlases as good as, and sometimes better than, those found in the world’s major libraries and museums.

“We have several items in our gallery that are at least as good, if not better, than the equivalent examples in, say, the Bibliotheque Nationale, the British Library or Library of Congress,” says Crouch, whose gallery keeps approximately 250 maps and 50 atlases in stock at any one time.

2. “BRIC” nations are hot right now

Antique maps featuring the world’s biggest developing countries have seen a recent spike in prices.

According to Crouch this heightened interest can be linked to the recently increased inbound and outbound travel from these countries.

“Maps of B.R.I.C. nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China) have seen the fastest growing markets (and prices) in recent years,” says Crouch.

“I have also noticed an increased interest in ‘thematic’ and 19th and even early 20th century mapping,” he says.

3. The first “modern” map was printed more than 500 years ago

While the earliest maps were rudimentary diagrams drawn in caves in prehistoric times, the first proper manuscript maps appeared in the 12th century.

The map of the Holy Land printed in the “Rudimentum Novitiorum,” an encyclopedia of world history published in 1475, is considered the first modern printed map.

A sample of the Rudimentum Novitiorum was sold for Pound500,000 ($937,000) in 2013.

4. Mapmakers included fake towns to catch forgers

Ever been to the town of Agloe in New York State? Whitewall in California? Or Relescent in Florida?

While these towns are clearly marked on a number of antique maps of the United States, they don’t actually exist.

“Paper towns” were fake places added to maps by early mapmakers in order to dupe forgers into copying them, thereby exposing themselves to charges of copyright infringement.

5 . The world’s best map collection is in Paris

“The best collection in the world, in my opinion, is that of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Paris, followed by the Library of Congress in the United States and the British Library,” says Crouch.

“Many of what we now regard as the major institutional collections of cartography were actually put together by individuals in the 17th and 18th centuries. In the United Kingdom, the best collection of such material was made by King George III.”

The latter collection is known as the “K. Top,” and can be found in the British Library.

6. The most expensive map was the first to name America

The US Library of Congress paid a record $10 million for German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller’s Universalis Cosmographia, a wall map of the world printed in 1507.

It’s the only surviving copy of the map, which was the first to use the name “America”.

In 2007, Crouch brokered the sale of the most expensive atlas ever sold – the 1477 Bologna Ptolemy, the first printed atlas – for Pound1.9 million ($3.5 million).

7. The best place to shop for maps is in the Netherlands

The annual European Fine Art and Antiques Fair in Masstricht, Netherlands is often considered the world’s best place to shop for antique maps, classic and modern art and jewellery.

More than 70,000 people visited the TEFAF Maastricht in 2013 to browse the 260 booths from 20 countries.

“It’s simply the biggest and best fine art fair in the world,” says Crouch.

This year’s fair dates are March 14-23.

This story originally appeared on CNN.

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

• Parts of two previously unknown poems by the Greek lyric poet Sappho have been discovered on an ancient papyrus. An anonymous collector happened to show the papyrus to the Oxford University classicist Dirk Obbink, who realized its significance.

  Most of Sappho’s work has been lost, and only one of her poems has survived in its entirety. The first of the two new poems mentions “Charaxos” and “Larichos,” the names given to Sappho’s brothers in the ancient tradition, though never mentioned in any of the poet’s surviving work. The second, more fragmentary poem, seems to be a love poem.

  In a preliminary version of a paper to be published in the journal Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, Obbink writes that the “metre, language and dialect” as well as the subject matter “point indubitably to a poem by Sappho.”

  In an email to NPR, Margaret Williamson, a classics expert at Dartmouth College and the author of Sappho’s Immortal Daughters, agreed: “I don’t see much room for doubt that these are fragments of Sappho poems. They certainly sound very like her: they’re in the right meter and the right dialect, and they are prayer-hymns of a kind she often wrote, addressed to Hera and Aphrodite, goddesses worshipped on Lesbos whom she appeals to in other poems.”

  Williamson added that the first poem, which mentions Sappho’s brothers, is especially remarkable. “It’s very exciting to have a new Sappho poem that isn’t about erotic love or beauty,” she writes. “Here, for a change, is a poem that seems to refer to other relationships. … We’ve had far fewer poems of this type up till now, and as a result it’s been too easy to interpret her poems as the lone cry of a woman in love, rather than looking at the cultural context these quite sophisticated poems grew out of.”

• In the most dramatic Russian literary killing since last year, a man allegedly stabbed an acquaintance for preferring prose to poetry. RIA Novosti has this report: “A former teacher was detained in Russia’s Urals after being accused of stabbing an acquaintance to death in a dispute about literary genres, investigators said Wednesday. The 67-year-old victim insisted that ‘the only real literature is prose,’ the Sverdlovsk Region’s branch of the Investigative Committee said. The victim’s assertion outraged the 53-year-old suspect, who favored poetry, and the dispute ended with the ex-teacher stabbing his friend to death, investigators said.”

• : “Writing is like childbirth: I can never remember writing a book after it’s written, and I think I’ll never do it again. I guess there is a certain propulsive quality to them, but it takes a lot to make them come off. I always write like I’m being chased, because I fucked up most of my life, and didn’t publish a book until I was forty — so I always had a sense of time. And plus, I had a disease and they kept telling me I was dying, for like twenty years. I always had that ticking clock sensation in my head when it came to writing.”

Spread around in every direction, great jumbled blocks of granite rise from the ground to create spectacular rock formations, their fantastical shapes fashioned by centuries of wind and rain, of heat and cold. Stacked upon one another, such boulders are scattered haphazardly across the southern African country – Zimbabwe is indeed home to one of Africa’s most breathtaking landscapes.

Living here among the boulders, in the hills of Masvingo province, the Zimbabwean people are largely Shona. Sometimes known as Bantu, they form three quarters of the country’s population.

Shona people first settled in the region more than 1,000 years ago and for centuries flourished in the region’s lush green savanna plains. Central to their prosperity was the ancient town of Great Zimbabwe, the capital of a booming trading empire that flourished between the 11th and 15th centuries, extending over the gold-rich plateau in southern Africa.

Located some 30 kilometres from the modern Zimbabwean town of Masvingo, the stone ruins of Great Zimbabwe are today one of the continent’s most impressive monuments, linking the present with the past.

A UNESCO World Heritage site since 1986, the archaeological remains contain the largest ancient structure in sub-Saharan Africa.

According to UNESCO, the method of construction in Great Zimbabwe is unique in the continent’s architecture and although there are cases of similar work elsewhere, none are as exceptional and imposing as here.

The first thing that draws the visitor’s eye is the high level of craftsmanship that went into the construction of the site. Skilful stonemasons built massive dry-stone walls, incorporating large natural boulders into some of the structures. Walls extend between rocky outcrops and massive rocks, forming a maze of narrow passageways and the enclosures.

The site extends over about 800 hectares and it can be divided into three main architectural zones. The Hill Complex is generally considered a royal site, and the Valley Ruins are a series of living spaces. But most impressive is the Great Enclosure, a spectacular circular monument made of cut granite blocks that was entirely built in curves. Its outer wall extends some 250 meters and it has a maximum height of 11 meters, making it the largest single pre-colonial structure in Africa south of the Sahara.

While trade kept the community prosperous, religious life was also rich at Great Zimbabwe, which had an estimated population of about 18,000 people in its heyday.

Although the stone city was largely abandoned around the 1450s, its cultural and historical significance didn’t wane with the passing of centuries.

In fact, Great Zimbabwe became such an important part of the national identity that the country itself was named for this ancient city — “Zimbabwe” derives from the Shona name for the historic town – meaning “big houses of stone.”

This article first appeared on CNN.

The Herald took a call yesterday from a dad who had stumbled across the tree with his children, who were enthralled to find a door secreted into the base of the tree.

Inside through a small window is a light-up figurine of Lord of the Rings character Gollum.

While Scarborough might seem like a long way from Middle Earth, businesses along Landsborough Avenue were pleased with the touch of whimsy it had brought to the seaside strip.

Century 21 Scarborough personal assistant Brent Marshall said he had noticed the lights twinkling in the tree one morning and decided to have a closer look.

“I hope council don’t get rid of it,” he said.

“It’s definitely a good tourist attraction … I just saw it and thought it looked really cool.”

Shoes on Scarborough’s Lorraine Harrison said she hadn’t seen the quirky hidey-hole yet, but was keen to shut up shop for five minutes to check it out.

“How beautiful,” she said.

“It’s wonderful, I just love all the series and it’ll be a great tourist attraction.”

Floatin’ Fun business owner Daniel Green, who operates from Scarborough Beach every weekend, said his children had found the tree and thought it was a bit of fun.

“It looks really good,” he said.

“The kids love it.”

While everyone who discovers the hidden literary foe loves it, no-one knows who put it there.

Was it a guerilla marketing move by director Peter Jackson promoting the latest Hobbit movie, or a clever installation piece by a local artist?

Someone is stealing the flesh and blood of Catholic saints – the questions are who, and why?

This week’s theft of a tiny piece of cloth bearing Pope John Paul II’s blood, from a tiny mountaintop church, is just the most recent event in a chain of thefts stretching back millennia.

They ususally involve the taking of relics believed to be saints’ remains, with one of the most notable – and bizarre – occuring in 1983 when a relic said to be Christ’s foreskin was stolen.

Just why would anyone want to steal pieces of Catholic saints and even the messiah himself?

Theories range from secret societies in the vein of The Da Vinci Code to cloning schemes as featured in Hitler horror The Boys From Brazil. Subversive Satanists and “fringe Catholics” have also come under suspiscion.

But beneath it all may lurk a sinister black market supplying “stolen to order” artefacts to secretive cashed-up collectors.

The latest theft involves a tiny piece of cloth which was a part of the vestments worn by the Polish pope when he was shot by Mehmet Ali Agca in St Peters square in 1981. It had been donated to one of John Paul II’s favourite churches – the tiny San Pietro della Ienca on the mountain trails of Abruzzo, Italy – in 2011.

The strange part is, in these days of growing religious indifference, it is the precious gold and gems surrounding the otherwise valueless and suspect human remains which are often discarded.

Pope John Paul II is due to be declared a saint in April. Would a tuft of cloth containing a saint’s blood be far more valuable than one containing that of a mere pope …?

Perhaps the answer is contained within the stories of some of these holy keepsakes themselves.

 

JUST WHAT IS A RELIC ANYWAY?

From hearts and heads, feet and fingers, hair and hands … religious relics are everywhere. Particularly in Italy. Since the Middle Ages it has been a requirement that all Italian Catholic? churches have at least one object of particular reverence.

Perhaps the most well-known relic is the Shroud of Turin, said to the burial cloth that wrapped Jesus when he was placed in his tomb after crucifixion.

Not only are they items of memorabilia. They are supposed to be infused with the power of God as a result of the miracles enacted by these saints – events which are subjected to Vatican investigations before being accepted by the church.

Such objects have always been objects of desire. And relics have always been a “monetised” item.

Possession of a piece of a big-name saint would guarantee a church or monastery a steady stream of pious pilgrims – all willing to pay for the experience of getting close to their superheroes. During the Middle Ages, something of a “relic-race” developed, with ever escalating claims of evermore holy discoveries. This ranged from finger bones of local religious heroes through to slithers of the “true cross” upon which Christ was crucified.

Their theft is a well-established part of the process. Poverty-stricken remote monasteries would go to extraordinary lengths to get themselves a piece of the action. More political figures would lust after the righteous authority and recruiting power of their armies if a holy object stood at the head of their men.

In both cases, if they didn’t launch raids on competing establishments to steal the objects under the guise of righteous indignation (such as in Conques, France, in 866), some would take the simpler course of action and simply make their own relics up (for example, there have been enough pieces of the True Cross to build a decent-sized boat).

It’s a tradition of relocation that appears to remain alive and well.

Relic thefts have happened all over the globe, from Los Angeles to the little Italian town of Calcata.

Here are a few objects of particularly significant reverence that have been swiped in recent times.

 

CHRIST’S FORESKIN: The Christian messiah was born a Jew. So it follows that he would have been circumcised. What would be a bigger crowd-drawer than the leftovers of Jesus’ bris? At least a dozen churches eventually claimed to possess this intimate piece of history. Most have since been lost to the passage of time. But the Italian congregation of Calcata managed to keep hold of its piece of skin to parade through the streets every January 1 until 1983. This is when the jewelled case and its contents vanished.

 

POPE JOHN PAUL II’S BLOOD BOOK: Yes, the recetn clothing incident is actually the second hit on this particular pope’s holy blood. A crystal vial inlaid in a religious tome was pinched from a priest’s backpack as he travelled by train to deliver the precious object to its new home – a church north of Rome. It eventually turned up in the backpack which had been dumped in a field.

 

ST LAURENCE O’TOOLE’S HEART: Born about 1128 to a minor Irish noble family, he was taken hostage as a child but later allowed to enter a monastic school. He was noted as being a particularly humble man who helped ease the suffering after England invaded Ireland in 1172. His remains were stolen from a Dublin cathedral in 2012. The iron cage which protected it was pried open and the more expensive items about it left untouched.

ST ANTHONY, PATRON SAINT OF LOST CAUSES: Yes, even this saint has had his relics stolen. In 2011, a Long Beach parish in California reported its prized possession – in a 780-year-old gold-and-silver case – was missing. Unusually, and perhaps because of his particular powers, this object was found by police a few days later.

 

WHO IS TAKING THEM?

The mystic-religious background of these objects has inspired fertile minds for centuries – and petty theft sounds so ordinary when the object is Christ’s foreskin or a pontiff’s blood.

So, theories abound.

Catholic news organisations are leaping to blame Satanism for such diabolic sacrilege.

The most fanciful explanations pick up where Jurassic Park left off – and speculate that the preserved DNA within these expensive cases offer the opportunity to clone people proven by the church to have had mystical powers.

Here are some of the explanations circulating at the moment.

CLONING: This conspiracy theory is nothing new. Several book postulate that the Calcata relic was stolen by the Vatican itself out of fear someone may want to clone Christ himself. Internet chat groups such as Reddit and Inagist have embraced the concept – warning of impending armies of cloned “antichrists” cooked up from the blood of Christ, popes and saints.

SATANIC CEREMONY: When it comes to the recent Pope John Paul II incident, a Catholic anti-cult organisation insists the blood was stolen for Satanic rituals. The Satanic “new year” begins February 1, they say. “This sort of sacrilege often takes place at this time of the year,” a spokesman said. It’s an idea embraced by the catholic.org website, arguing it is just the latest act of an increasingly intense “spiritual war” being raged for our souls.

EXTREMIST CATHOLICS: Not all Catholics buy the Satanic ceremony line. Instead, some fear these thefts represent the actions of marginal groups within their own church to steal holy objects to furnish their own secret “underground” churches.

HOLY-BAY? Yes, Italy’s eBay outlet has a section dedicated to the sale of religious relics. And supply of these tightly-held objects is limited – particularly because the Vatican has forbidden their sale or trade. So the opportunity to swipe a relic, particularly one that has not been officially recognised by the church, could be seen as an opportunity for fast cash. But it’s more the presence of such sale sites that demonstrates the value such objects hold in the minds of many.

BLACK MARKET: There is plenty of reason to believe that among Europe’s super rich is a clique of collectors gathering as many historic and religious relics as they can. Driving a black market reaching from the forgotten temples amid the forests of South America through to Chinese burial mounds, some of these collections have come to light. For example, in 1991 an Italian crime boss had his home raided and the missing chin of Saint Antonio was recovered.

It also ties into the idea of secret societies among the super-rich and influential, such as the Da Vinci Code-style theory that the Knights Templar still exist.