Abydos

New evidence shows that human sacrifice helped populate the royal city of the dead.


King Aha, "The Fighter," was not killed while unifying the Nile's two warring kingdoms, nor while building the capital of Memphis. No, one legend has it that the first ruler of a united Egypt was killed in a hunting accident after a reign of 62 years, unceremoniously trampled to death by a rampaging hippopotamus. News of his demise brought a separate, special terror to his staff. For many, the honor of serving the king in life would lead to the more dubious distinction of serving the king in death.

On the day of Aha's burial a solemn procession made its way through the sacred precincts of Abydos, royal necropolis of Egypt's first kings. Led by priests in flowing white gowns, the funeral retinue included the royal family, vizier, treasurer, administrators, trade and tax officers, and Aha's successor, Djer. Just beyond the town's gates the procession stopped at a monumental structure with imposing brick walls surrounding an open plaza. Inside the walls the priests waded through a cloud of incense to a small chapel, where they performed cryptic rites to seal Aha's immortality.

Outside, situated around the enclosure's walls, were six open graves. In a final act of devotion, or coercion, six people were poisoned and buried along with wine and food to take into the afterlife. One was a child of just four or five, perhaps the king's beloved son or daughter, who was expensively furnished with ivory bracelets and tiny lapis beads.

The procession then walked westward into the setting sun, crossing sand dunes and moving up a dry riverbed to a remote cemetery at the base of a high desert plateau. Here Aha's three-chambered tomb was stockpiled with provisions for a lavish life in eternity. There were large cuts of ox meat, freshly killed waterbirds, loaves of bread, cheese, dried figs, jars of beer, and dozens of wine vessels, each bearing Aha's official seal. Beside his tomb more than 30 graves were laid out in three neat rows. As the ceremony climaxed, several lions were slain and placed in a separate burial pit. As Aha's body was lowered into a brick-lined burial chamber, a select group of loyal courtiers and servants also took poison and joined their king in the next world.

Is this how a pharaoh's funeral in 2900 b.c. actually unfolded? It's a plausible scenario, experts say. Archaeologists have been sifting through the dry sands of Abydos for more than a century. Now they have found compelling evidence that ancient Egyptians indeed engaged in human sacrifice, shedding new—and not always welcome—light on one of the ancient world's great civilizations.

"Yellah! Yellah! Yellah!" barks Ibrahim Mohammed Ali, the Egyptian crew boss, spurring his workers to move it, move it, move it. "You are big fat water buffalo! You are dung!" The mostly teenage boys hauling buckets of sand giggle nervously but pick up the pace while keeping an eye on their still ranting foreman. "You chatter worse than a bunch of women!" Standing tall in a loose, flowing galabia and white head wrap, Ibrahim looks somehow wizardly, maybe capable of vaporizing slackers with a cast from the long, intimidating stick-wand he keeps clutched behind his back. Ibrahim's 125-person crew is working with a team of archaeologists to uncover part of the immense royal burial center at Abydos, located 260 miles (420 kilometers) up the Nile from Cairo. As a line of workers use hoe-like tureyas to scrape away the sand, the so-named bucket boys haul away clanking pails of dirt and pour it like water into the laps of sifters. Excavators are on the ground with trowels in hand, surveyors are plotting the coordinates of artifacts, a photographer is documenting each new find, and illustrators are pencil-drawing an ancient coffin and an infant skeleton.

Kneeling on one knee in the center of this swarm is Matthew Adams, associate director of a multiyear project sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania Museum, Yale University, and New York University's Institute of Fine Arts. Adams is brushing sand away to reveal a smooth, ancient mud floor. "If this is from the time of Aha," he says in a raspy voice dried out from months in the desert, "then it's the oldest funerary enclosure ever found in Egypt. We're talking about the beginning of Egyptian history. Not one trowel has been laid here before now."

Abydos is the source of many of Egypt's most ancient artifacts. In 1988 Günter Dreyer, a German archaeologist, unearthed small bone and ivory tags intricately inscribed with one of the world's earliest forms of writing—crude hieroglyphs developed at about the same time as Mesopotamian cuneiform. In 1991 Adams's mentor and the project's director, David O'Connor, uncovered an eerie fleet of wooden boats buried in enormous brick-lined graves.

Now O'Connor and Adams are digging down into the beginning of Egypt's 1st dynasty, a pivotal period when kings laid down the roots of religion, government, and architecture that would last for the next 3,000 years. Unlike the colossal pyramids of later pharaohs, the more modest burial complexes of the Abydos kings consisted of two separate structures—a tomb and a ceremonial enclosure. The large, walled enclosures where mortuary rituals were performed were situated on the edge of town, while the underground tombs were located more than a mile away on the threshold of the desolate Western Desert, a place known to ancient Egyptians as the land of the dead.

All of the 1st-dynasty tombs and most of the enclosures excavated so far are accompanied by subsidiary graves—hundreds in some cases—containing the remains of elite officials and courtiers. Egyptologists have long speculated that these graves might hold victims of sacrifice but also acknowledged that they could simply be graves reserved for the king's staff, ready to use as each person died naturally.

The question of whether ancient Egyptians practiced human sacrifice has intrigued archaeologists since the late 1800s. Frenchman Émile Amélineau and his English rival Sir Flinders Petrie excavated all the 1st-dynasty desert tombs by 1902. Each had been heavily looted in antiquity, and no royal remains were found except a single bejeweled arm. Still, there was much yet to discover. In Aha's tomb were the remains of dozens of wine vessels, tools, some jewelry, and signs of food. Beside the tomb Petrie discovered 35 subsidiary graves, which he called the Great Cemetery of the Domestics. While he didn't dwell on it in his published papers, he hinted at human sacrifice. Later, in the 1980s, German archaeologists uncovered the remains of at least seven young lions.

The only funerary enclosure standing during Petrie's time was the massive 4,600-year-old Shunet el-Zebib, built by the 2nd-dynasty king Khasekhemwy. The towering shuneh (storehouse), with its three-story walls enclosing nearly two acres of space, still dominates the landscape. Two of Petrie's associates discovered another 2nd-dynasty enclosure, built by King Peribsen, and Petrie returned in the 1920s and found hundreds of subsidiary graves. The graves surrounded three 1st-dynasty enclosures, but curi-ously, Petrie located only one of them. These discoveries led archaeologists to speculate that they had found only half the puzzle of Abydos, and that for each tomb they had uncovered out in the desert, there should be a corresponding enclosure still hidden on the city's edge.
In 1967 David O'Connor came to Abydos to search for, among other things, the funerary enclosures that had eluded Petrie. Almost 20 years later, while digging in the shadow of the shuneh, he made a totally unexpected discovery.

"I opened an excavation pit, and poking into one corner of it was this intrusion," O'Connor recalls. "I knew it was something from the earliest dynasty, I just didn't know what." To O'Connor's amazement, the "intrusion" turned out to be one of 14 ancient boats, each buried in its own brick-lined tomb adjacent to the enclosure of a still unknown king. The boats, which measured up to 75 feet (23 meters) long, were expertly crafted and had been fully functional when buried. They proved to be the world's oldest surviving boats built of planks (as opposed to those made of reeds or hollowed-out logs).

"The boats are like the servants who were buried at Abydos," says O'Connor. "The king intended to use t hem in the afterlife in the same manner that he used them before his death." In life the boats enabled the king to travel rapidly up and down the Nile in a powerful display of wealth and military might. As the Egyptian kings also expected to be kings in the afterlife, the boats would be useful tools.

News of the boats'discovery rippled through the Egyptology world and also energized O'Connor's hunt for the lost enclosures of the first kings. To help focus the search, O'Connor and Adams sought out Tomasz Herbich, a Polish archaeologist who specializes in finding buried ruins with a device called a fluxgate gradiometer, a type of magnetometer. It measures slight variations in the Earth's magnetic field caused by certain types of iron oxides beneath the surface. "These oxides are present in Nile mud," explains Herbich. "And what's the main material used by ancient Egyptian builders? Sun-dried bricks made of Nile mud!"

For nearly a week in 2001 Herbich's assistant walked more than ten miles (16 kilometers) a day over a numbing grid, taking over 80,000 measurements. The survey turned up several small funerary chapels but no enclosures. Then, during Herbich's last hour in the field, his magnetic divining rod finally found royal mud. He downloaded the data onto his laptop, and as the digital map came into focus, he called out, "We have an enclosure!"

Adams and a small crew went to work uncovering part of the enclosure, but the field season was ending, and they had to rebury it and return home. In 2002 O'Connor again asked Adams to go to Abydos, this time to undertake a massive excavation of the new discovery.

After a month of tediously peeling back layers of sand, Adams uncovered jars and wine stoppers bearing Aha's name, confirming that his lost funerary enclosure was at last found.

Once the crew reached the enclosure's floor, they discovered six surrounding graves. Three contained the bodies of adult women, one held the remains of a man, and one held a young child with 25 ivory bracelets embellished with tiny lapis beads. The sixth grave remains unexcavated. In each case the archaeological evidence pointed to a sacrificial death.

"The graves were dug and lined with bricks, then roofed with wood and capped with mud-brick masonry," says Adams. "Above that masonry cap, a plaster floor extends out from the enclosure and covers all the graves." The floor extension is seamless-an important clue, for it would have been impossible to entomb people under the floor except all at the same time.

It's unlikely that 41 people-the six at Aha's enclosure plus 35 at his tomb-would have died of natural causes at the same time. Another possibility is that they died randomly over time and were then stockpiled and reburied en masse. But for O'Connor and Adams, the evidence strongly suggests they were sacrificed.

How were they killed? Petrie believed that he saw signs of post-burial movement in the tomb graves, suggesting that people were alive or semiconscious when buried. Brenda Baker, a physical anthropologist from Arizona State University, examined all the skeletons from Aha's enclosure and found no signs of trauma. "The method of their demise is still a mystery," says Adams. "My guess is that they were drugged."

Or strangled, suggests Nancy Lovell, a physical anthropologist at the University of Alberta. Lovell studied skulls from Aha's tomb and found telltale stains inside the victims' teeth. "When someone is strangled," she explains, "increased blood pressure can cause blood cells inside the teeth to rupture and stain the dentin, the part of the tooth just under the enamel."

It now seems clear that human sacrifice was practiced in early Egypt-as was true in other parts of the ancient world. Sir Leonard Woolley's excavation during the 1920s and '30s at Ur in modern-day Iraq revealed hundreds of sacrificial graves dating back to 2500 b.c. and related to the burial of Mesopotamian kings and queens. Evidence for sacrifice has also been seen in Nubian, Mesoamerican, and several other ancient cultures.

In Egypt enthusiasm for the grim practice seems to have waned quickly. Aha's subsidiary graves are the earliest to be found, and his successor, Djer, embraced the practice with fervor-more than 300 graves flank his tomb, and another 269 surround his mortuary enclosure. But Qaa, the last ruler of the 1st dynasty, had fewer than 30 sacrificial graves beside his tomb, although his enclosure remains lost. And by the 2nd dynasty the practice simply stopped.

O'Connor thinks it ended because the royal staff rebelled. "People tend to say that the Egyptians were becoming more civilized and that's why it stopped, but I think that reflects our own prejudices. These graves included relatively high-ranking people, and the reason it stopped might be more political than ethical." Perhaps it was an honor to serve the king in the afterlife, but it was an honor that could wait.

By the 3rd dynasty Egypt's pharaohs began building their tombs more than 250 miles (400 kilometers) downstream at Saqqara. There, a new tradition arose: The separate tomb and enclosure were combined into a single complex that included a colossal pyramid tomb bounded by the walls of a ceremonial enclosure. The royal necropolis at Abydos lay abandoned for the next 700 years.

Then during the Middle Kingdom the cult of Osiris became a major force in Egyptian religion. Legend held that Osiris, lord of the afterlife, was also Egypt's first king, and so pharaohs dispatched priests to Abydos on a kind of archaeological expedition to locate Osiris's tomb. They excavated several of the 1st-dynasty tombs and ultimately decided that Djer's belonged to Osiris. In so doing they turned Abydos into the mecca of ancient Egypt. Over the next 2,000 years several pharaohs, including Senusret III and Ramses II, built great monuments and temples at Abydos to honor Osiris. Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians, farmers and pharaohs alike, made the pilgrimage to take part in an annual celebration of Osiris's resurrection. The festival culminated in an elaborate parade that wound from the town past a series of small chapels built to honor the god-king, then up a dry riverbed to the ancient desert cemetery.

Arriving at Osiris's tomb, the pilgrims had no inkling that hundreds of their ancestors-royal staff members sacrificed more than a thousand years earlier-lay buried beneath their feet. Seeking Osiris's blessing for their own passage to the afterlife, the worshippers brought millions of small clay offering pots filled with fruit and smoldering incense. You can still see the potsherds today, piled high like so many hopes that in the wake of death comes eternal life.

Damaged Egyptian "Mecca" To Be Restored

Andrew Bossone in Cairo

A development boom near Egypt's Abydos archaeological site is damaging one of the most sacred gathering places for ancient pilgrims, experts say.

Millions of Egyptians crossed the desert surrounding Abydos from 664 B.C. to A.D. 395 to pay homage to the god of the dead, Osiris. Many of Egypt's earliest pharaohs were buried at the site.

Modern pressures in the form of new farms and buildings have taken their toll on the 3.1-mile (5-kilometer) wide area, sometimes called the Mecca of ancient Egypt.

The temples and tombs are also home to the earliest known Egyptian hieroglyphics.

But now, an international team of archaeologists are rallying to protect Abydos from future harm.

This month, a government-run project to renovate Abydos will begin, according to archaeologists and architects involved in the effort.

"It is the site where we learn the most about the origins of [pharaohs in] Egyptian culture," said Günter Dreyer, director of the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo.

"Imagine a road running though this."

Balancing Act

The Abydos site has been nicknamed Omm El Qaab, or Mother of Pots in Arabic, because pilgrims left millions of pieces of pottery in the desert around several cemeteries and temples built by Seti I, Ramses I, Ramses II, and Ramses IV.

Ancient pharaohs built in the desert partly to avoid damage from the annual floods and farming practices in the Nile Valley.

But arable land comes at a premium in Egypt, where desert makes up the majority of the country. Today most of the country's population are clustered around the Nile River.

"In Egypt, because there are so many monuments, the area for living is restricted by nature," Dreyer said.

As a result, local farmers have begun to reclaim land in the Abydos desert up to the walls of ancient temples.

(Read how Egyptian farmers are "greening" the desert.)

Of course the living have their rights, Dreyer pointed out.

"We can't say we'll make all of Egypt a museum for ancient culture and living people starve or die."

Special Importance

Despite the recent growth in farms, much of the damage to the structures happened decades ago. Rapid population growth in towns near Abydos has led to construction around the region's monuments, ruining some of them.

In the 1970s the government moved all the inhabitants within the archaeological zone and compensated them. Their empty homes, however, are still standing.

For example, only the stump of a pillar from the temple of Ramses I remains today—and it stands inside the living room of a vacant house.

As part of the new effort, however, architects will remove the empty houses, clean up rubble, landscape the area, and build a new visitors' center. Archaeologists will create a plan on how to protect the monuments.

"There are certain sites—and Abydos is one of them—where one must be really careful because of the special importance that is the cultural heritage of mankind and of Egypt," Dreyer said.

Original Design

Architects on the project say their plans respect the site's original design.

The edge of Abydos formed a clear demarcation between the town for the living and sacred structures for the dead, said architect Tarek Waly.

"The line between life and death, the Nile Valley, and the desert—you can see it," Waly said.

He believes the sacred line that divided the farmland and the tombs dissolved when townspeople moved into the site in the past, and he hopes to restore it.

"If you cross the line you enter into the other life. This has to be clear on our minds."

Mystery Deepens Over Unseen Antarctic "Alps"

Antarctica Interactive Map
For one, the range is situated in the middle of the continent instead of on the edge—at the plate-tectonic boundaries—like most other mountains. (See a high-resolution map of Antarctica.)

Rebecca Carroll
The existence of a massive Antarctic mountain range buried under miles of ice has become an even deeper mystery, a new study says.

The little-researched Gamburtsev Mountains seem to challenge geologic patterns seen in other mountain ranges on Earth.

The range's high peaks reach an elevation of about 10,000 feet (more than 3,000 meters)—heights typical of relatively young mountain ranges, such as the spiky Rockies and the European Alps.

New findings based on river sediments, which suggest the range is more than 500 million years old, are intriguing, experts say.

Older mountains, such as the Appalachian range in the eastern U.S., are thought to be shorter and less rugged after hundreds of millions of years of erosion.

Because the Gamburtsev range is tall, some scientists have argued it must have formed relatively recently—within the last 60 million years or so.

And because it's not near a tectonic boundary, some have suggested the range rose up as the result of magma buildup around a theoretical volcanic hot spot.

(Related: "Under-Ice Volcano Eruption Spewed Ash Over Antarctica" [January 21, 2008].)

"The hypothesis that the mountains are derived from young volcanic activity is hard to reconcile with our data," said study lead author Tina van de Flierdt of the Imperial College London.

Hard to Reconcile

Scientists examined sediments collected from a coastal area that would have been a vast delta about 35 million years ago, when Antarctica's rivers carried flowing water instead of glacier ice.

The frozen features of the coldest place on Earth have come into their sharpest focus ever, thanks to recent satellite technology.

A thousand images from NASA's Landsat satellite data, taken mostly between 1999 and 2001, were pieced together to create a first true-color map with ten times greater resolution than previous images of Antarctica.

The map is so detailed it includes features that are as small as half the size of a basketball court.

In the above sample image of the region around McMurdo Station in southern Antarctica, ice shelves, mountains, and glaciers can be seen in unprecedented detail.

"This innovation is like watching high-definition TV in living color versus watching the picture on a grainy black-and-white television," Robert Bindschadler, chief scientist of the Hydrospheric and Biospheric Sciences Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement.

The new map is more than a pretty picture—for one, it will help researchers plan better scientific expeditions to the remote landscape.

Scientists will also rely on the high-resolution data to study changes in land elevation and to map various rock formations.

Even the public can explore the polar region via a public-access Web portal found at http://lima.usgs.gov.

The Landsat satellite program, which has captured images of Antarctica since 1972, represents the longest continuous record of the continent.

If the mountains were made of relatively recent volcanic material, some of it should have been in the sediment as Gamburtsev runoff passed through the delta.

Instead, all mineral grains the researchers dated—such as zircon and hornblende—were more than 500 million years old.

"Volcanic activity of the extent to form a mountain range bigger than the European Alps would leave a 'geochemical fingerprint' in the preglacial to present-day sediments—we simply can't see this fingerprint," van de Flierdt said.

The study, which is based in part on van de Flierdt's work at Columbia University, was published online this week by Geophysical Research Letters.

Missing Erosion

A remaining mystery, according to study co-author Sidney Hemming, is why the mountains have not eroded more.

"The new data we're collecting makes it look like the erosion rates are so extremely low," said the Columbia University geochemist.

Hemming cautioned that researchers can't be certain the sediments are from the mountain.

It's possible, she added, that the ice has helped keep the rocks in place, but that does not explain the lack of erosion from ancient periods when the ice was not there.

"We can say that they're either not hot spot volcanic [mountains] or that they formed after the ice basically capped them off," Hemming said.

But, she said, later formation is highly unlikely: "It would be hard to imagine that it wouldn't leave some evidence in the ice or sediments."

Not Volcanic

The study makes a good case for the theory that the mountains were not formed by recent volcanic activity, said University of Arizona geochemist Peter Reiners, who was not involved with the research.

"If the mountains themselves are anywhere close to the same age as the rocks, then the Gamburtsevs are trying to tell us something about how really old topography can persist for hundreds of millions of years without being worn down by water, wind, and glaciers," said Reiners, who also studies the range.

Norm Sleep, a Stanford University geophysicist who also studies the Gamburtsev Mountains but wasn't involved with this study, agreed with the data but not the interpretation.

Sleep worried that "550-million-year-old highlands would have long since eroded away."

Instead, he suggests a gooey, semi-solid plume of material could have formed a pond deep under Earth's cooler outer lid of rock. This would have caused the mountains to rise without spewing magma all over the surface.

Such an event may have happened within the last 50 million years, he said

Tales from the Bog

By Karen E. Lange
Photograph by Robert Clark

The man—or what was left of him—emerged from the Irish sod one winter day in 2003, his hair still styled the way he wore it during his last moments alive. The back was cropped short; the top, eight inches long, rose in a pompadour, stiffened with pine resin. And that was only the beginning of the mystery.

Spotted in the industrial-size sieve of a peat processing plant, he was naked, his head wrenched sharply to the left, his legs and lower arms missing, ripped away by the machine that had dug him from a bog in the townland of Clonycavan. His head and trunk carried marks of deliberate violence, inflicted before he was cast into the mire: His nose had been broken, his skull shattered, his abdomen sliced open. While he lay in the bog, the weight of sodden sphagnum moss had flattened his crushed head, and the dark waters had tanned his skin to leather and dyed his hair orange red.

A call went out to archaeologists, for this was no ordinary murder victim: Clonycavan Man was a bog body, a naturally embalmed testament to mysterious rituals during northern Europe’s Iron Age, the centuries just before and after Christ. Hundreds of these unusual mummies have been found in the wetlands of Ireland, the U.K., Germany, the Netherlands, and especially Denmark, preserved by lack of oxygen and anti-microbial compounds from the sphagnum.

People have been spinning tales about bog bodies ever since they were widely recognized as ancient in the late 1800s. Their sculpted repose contrasting with their cruel deaths, the bodies inspire fascination and a longing to connect with a remote ancestral past, when miry wetlands—now drained and dug out for profit—were portals to another world. Gods inhabited bogs; so did restless outcast spirits. Here Iron Age peoples might have buried the most feared or loathed among them, or sacrificed loved ones and even the powerful to win the gods’ favor.

These days investigators have new tools—CT scans, three-dimensional imaging, and radiocarbon dating—to make sense of the bodies and the few artifacts found with them. There is little else to go on. Iron Age Europeans left no written records of their beliefs and customs. Many of the bodies themselves vanished when they were reburied or left to decompose. Some, in museums, suffered the restoration efforts of overeager conservators and curators. Others are phantoms: Last year two scholars published an article called “Imaginary People” in a German archaeology journal. They reluctantly concluded that the late Alfred Dieck, a German archaeologist who made cataloging bog bodies his life’s work, fabricated many of the more than 1,800 cases he recorded.
Not surprisingly, bog body research has taken wildly wrong turns. Desperate for historical accounts of preliterate Germanic societies, researchers turned decades ago to the writings of Tacitus, a first-century A.D. Roman historian. But his description of customs beyond the Rhine was based on second- and thirdhand accounts and written to shame Romans for what he considered decadent behavior. Tacitus declared approvingly that the Germans killed homosexuals and cowards and staked their bodies down in bogs.

Accordingly, many bog bodies were interpreted as people in disgrace, supposedly punished with torture, execution, and burial in the bog instead of cremation, the customary Iron Age practice. Windeby Girl, discovered in northern Germany in 1952, was said to be an adulteress whose head had been shaved in a manner described by Tacitus. Then, researchers speculated, she was blindfolded and drowned in the bog. A body found nearby was identified as her lover.

But the theory unraveled after Heather Gill-Robinson of North Dakota State University took a close look at the body and tested its DNA: Windeby Girl was likely a young man. Radiocarbon dating by other scientists revealed that the supposed lover lived three centuries earlier. The Windeby “girl” may have lost his hair when archaeologists digging out the body were careless with their trowels. And growth interruptions in the bones indicated that the young man was malnourished and sickly and might have simply died of natural causes. University of Hamburg archaeologist Michael Gebühr speculates that the body was blindfolded before burial to protect the living from the gaze of the dead.

In Denmark, a team of forensic investigators including Niels Lynnerup of the University of Copenhagen has reexamined that country’s bog bodies and found that some of the damage once interpreted as torture or mutilation was actually inflicted centuries after death. Grauballe Man, discovered in a bog northwest of Copenhagen in 1952, is one of the best preserved bog bodies and now the most thoroughly examined. Previous x-rays of his body were hard to read—the bones, demineralized by acidic bog waters, looked like glass. Now CT scans have shown that Grauballe Man’s skull was fractured by the pressure of the bog, abetted when a boy wearing clogs accidentally stepped on the body as it was being excavated. Grauballe Man’s broken leg could also be the work of the bog and not, as some scholars had thought, proof of a vicious blow to force him to kneel for execution.
Lynnerup, archaeologist Pauline Asingh, and other members of the team now interpret Grauballe Man’s death some 2,300 years ago as a sacrifice to one of the fertility goddesses that Celtic and Germanic peoples believed held the power of life and death. It could have happened one winter after a bad harvest, the researchers say. People were hungry, reduced to eating chaff and weeds. They believed that one of their number had to die so the rest could survive.

Grauballe Man, a strapping 34-year-old, apparently learned his fate a few days in advance: Stubble on his jaw indicates that he stopped shaving. Then came the terrible hour when the villagers—perhaps his friends and family—led him into a nearby bog. They picked their way among holes dug for peat and bog iron, the ore from which Iron Age people forged tools and weapons. At the edge of a flooded pit, one of them pulled back Grauballe Man’s head and, with a short knife, slit his throat from ear to ear. The executioner pushed the dying man into the pit. The body twisted as it fell and was swallowed by the bog.

Eamonn Kelly, keeper of Irish antiquities at the National Museum of Ireland, thinks similar scenes of sacri�ce may have played out in his country’s ancient kingdoms. Three months after Clonycavan Man came to light, another ancient body fell from the bucket of a backhoe digging in a bog 25 miles away. This man had once stood almost six feet four inches tall, but only his trunk and arms remained. Arm wounds suggested he had tried to fend off a knife before he was fatally stabbed in the heart.

Then his body had been oddly mutilated—his nipples apparently cut, his upper arms pierced and small wreaths (withies) of twisted hazel threaded through the holes. Encircling one biceps was an armband of braided leather with a bronze amulet incised with Celtic designs. Like Clonycavan Man’s hair pomade, made with resin that archaeologists concluded must have been imported from the south of France, these were costly marks of status.
Another clue linked this new body, called Oldcroghan Man, to some 40 other Irish bog bodies including Clonycavan Man: All were buried on borders between ancient Irish kingdoms. Together with the costly ornaments, Kelly says, the locations suggest tales of royal sacrifice. In ancient times, he explains, Irish kings symbolically married the fertility goddess; famine meant the goddess had turned against the king and had to be mollified. Kelly believes the bog bodies represented the most splendid of offerings: high-ranking hostages taken to force rebellious lords into obedience, pretenders to the throne, or even the failed kings themselves. Each injury they suffered honored a different aspect of the goddess—fertility, sovereignty, and war. “It’s controlled violence,” Kelly says. “They are giving the goddess her due.”

Oldcroghan Man normally ate meat, laboratory analysis of his hair and nails showed. But residues in his gut indicated that his last meal consisted of cereals and buttermilk, emblems of fertility befitting a sacrifice to the goddess. After his death, his nipples may have been cut to mark him as a rejected ruler, says Kelly—in ancient Ireland a king’s subjects ritually demonstrated their submission by sucking on the ruler’s nipples. Then his body was hacked to pieces and sown along the border of the kingdom, his arms threaded with withies to confer protective magic that would guard the territory.

Science can’t prove Kelly’s scenario. Other researchers say, for example, that the bog rather than the killers might be responsible for the damage to Oldcroghan Man’s nipples; his waterlogged body was as fragile as wet cardboard. And even if Kelly is right about the royal status of Irish bog bodies, people on the Continent had a different culture—Germanic rather than Celtic—chiefs instead of kings, and, almost certainly, other rites of sacrifice.

Bodies still lying undiscovered in the bogs of northern Europe will yield more clues about how and why the bog people met their ends. But new finds are likely to be rare and often damaged when they are ripped from the earth by peat cutters and backhoes.

Lynnerup, who has applied the most powerful science available to the secrets of Grauballe Man and who can call up three-dimensional images of the body’s bones and muscles and tendons on his computer, doesn’t mind the lingering mysteries. “Strange things happen in the bog. There will always be some ambiguity.” Lynnerup smiles. “I sort of like the idea that there’s just some stuff we’ll really never know.”

Unknown "Structures" Tugging at Universe, Study Says

John Roach
Something may be out there. Way out there.

On the outskirts of creation, unknown, unseen "structures" are tugging on our universe like cosmic magnets, a controversial new study says.
Everything in the known universe is said to be racing toward the massive clumps of matter at more than 2 million miles (3.2 million kilometers) an hour—a movement the researchers have dubbed dark flow.

The presence of the extra-universal matter suggests that our universe is part of something bigger—a multiverse—and that whatever is out there is very different from the universe we know, according to study leader Alexander Kashlinsky, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

The theory could rewrite the laws of physics. Current models say the known, or visible, universe—which extends as far as light could have traveled since the big bang—is essentially the same as the rest of space-time (the three dimensions of space plus time).

Picturing Dark Flow

Dark flow was named in a nod to dark energy and dark matter—two other unexplained astrophysical phenomena.

The newfound flow cannot be explained by, and is not directly related to, the expansion of the universe, though the researchers believe the two types of movement are happening at the same time.

In an attempt to simplify the mind-bending concept, Kashlinsky says to picture yourself floating in the middle of a vast ocean. As far as the eye can see, the ocean is smooth and the same in every direction, just as most astronomers believe the universe is. You would think that beyond the horizon, therefore, nothing is different.

"But then you discover a faint but coherent flow in your ocean," Kashlinsky said. "You would deduce that the entire cosmos is not exactly like what you can see within your own horizon."

There must be an out-of-sight mountain river or ravine pushing or pulling the water. Or in the cosmological case, Kashlinsky speculates that "this motion is caused by structures well beyond the current cosmological horizon, which is more than 14 billion light-years away."


"We Found a Great Surprise"

Unknown "Structures" Tugging at Universe, Study Says<< Back to Page 1 Page 2 of 2
The study team didn't set out to explode physics as we know it.

They simply wanted to confirm the longstanding notion that the farther away galaxies are, the slower their motion should appear.

That movement is detectable in data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which NASA says "reveals conditions as they existed in the early universe by measuring the properties of the cosmic microwave background radiation over the full sky"—radiation thought to have been released about 380,000 years after the birth of the universe.

Hot gas in galaxy clusters warms the microwave background radiation, and "a very tiny component of this temperature fluctuation also contains in itself information about cluster velocity," Kashlinsky said.

If a cluster were moving faster or slower than the universe's background radiation, you'd expect to see the background heated slightly in that region of the universe—the result of a sort of electron-scattering "friction" between the cluster's hot gas and particles in the background radiation.

Because these fluctuations are so faint, the team studied more than 700 galaxy clusters.

The researchers had expected to find that, the farther away clusters are, the slower they appear to be moving.

Instead, Kashlinsky said, "We found a great surprise."

The clusters were all moving at the same speed—nearly 2 million miles (3.2 million kilometers) an hour —and in a single direction.

Though this dark flow was detected only in galaxy clusters, it should apply to every structure in the known universe, Kashlinsky said.

Explaining the Unexplainable

To explain the unexplainable flow, the team turned to the longstanding theory that rapid inflation just after the big bang had pushed chunks of matter beyond the known universe.

The extra-universal matter's extreme mass means it "could still pull—tug on—the matter in our universe, causing this flow of galaxies across our observable horizon," said Kashlinsky, whose team's study appeared in the October 20 issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"Strong Doubts"

Not everyone is ready to rewrite physics just yet.

Astrophysicist Hume Feldman of the University of Kansas has detected a similar, but weaker, flow.

He said the Kashlinsky team's study is "very interesting, very intriguing, [but] a lot more work needs to be done.

"It's suggestive that something's going on, but what exactly is going on? It basically tells us to investigate," he said.

David Spergel, an astrophysicist at Princeton University, echoed the sentiment.

"Until these results are reanalyzed by another group, I have strong doubts about the validity of the conclusions of this paper," he wrote in an email.

He added that, if the result does hold up, "it would have an important implication for our understanding of cosmology."

Study leader Kashlinsky agrees many questions remain unanswered. For starters: What exactly are these things that are apparently tugging our universe?

"They could be anything. As bizarre as you could imagine—some warped space-time," Kashlinsky said.

"Or maybe something dull."

"Star Trek" Shield May Protect Astronauts

Richard A. Lovett

A powerful magnetic shield may be able to deflect dangerous solar radiation from spacecraft traveling to the moon and other planets, a new study says.

Magnets tested in a recent laboratory experiment could divert radiation safely, a discovery that's "like Star Trek coming to life," said lead author Ruth Bamford, a plasma physicist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the U.K.
On Earth, humans are protected from radiation partly by the atmosphere. But our planet's magnetic field, called the magnetosphere, repels many of the harmful particles before they reach us.

"Life might not have been possible on Earth without a magnetic field as this first line of defense," Bamford said.

"With a journey to Mars, [radiation] is the most difficult problem," she said. "So the idea is, Why don't we just bring a magnetosphere with us?"

The idea of using magnetic fields as radiation shields was first proposed in the 1960s, but the concept languished until a resurgence of interest in manned expeditions to the moon and Mars.

Little Earthlings

One of the greatest dangers facing future astronauts is radiation, much of which comes from the sun via solar wind, a stream of particles from the sun's atmosphere.

Solar flares can be as deadly to life on Earth, and prolonged exposure to lower doses can cause cancer.
Until recently, however, scientists thought shielding spacecraft would require an impractically large magnet—one capable of generating a field 60 miles (100 kilometers) or more across.

We said, Hang on," Bamford explained. "People are small. We only need to make a little hole in the solar wind."

To test the idea, her team borrowed laboratory equipment used for work in fusion power, a process that also involves magnets. The scientists placed a small magnetized object—a simulated "spaceship"—into a flow of supersonic plasma, which consists of charged particles.
"You don't expect experiments to work first time," she said of the research, which is published today in the journal Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion.

"But this did. It was very clear that it was doing its job."

Magnetic Bubble

Erika Harnett, a space physicist at the University of Washington in Seattle, isn't surprised that the magnetic shield worked.

A few years ago, Harnett and colleagues researched an idea for a spaceship-propulsion system called mini-magnetosphere plasma propulsion (M2P2) and saw similar results.

M2P2 creates a magnetic bubble, then fills it with plasma. In space, the bubble would be battered by the same solar radiation particles that pose a hazard to astronauts. (See sun photos.)

"The solar wind would sort of push this bubble away from the sun," she said.

Not only would this reaction protect the spacecraft from radiation, "[but] we thought it was a practical means of propulsion."

But the concept has only been tested in laboratories at a small scale, she added.

Exposure Concern

Lead author Bamford notes that her team's work is restricted to the laboratory. "We're [just] working on the physics of what would be possible," she said.

One of the problems is making sure a space crew isn't exposed to the magnetic field.

"One would have to make sure the field doesn't enter the ship itself," said Carl Frederick, a physicist and science fiction writer in Ithaca, New York.

"But the idea of having a ship, in effect, carrying its own magnetosphere with it is appealing," he added by email.

Bamford agrees that it may be necessary to protect the crew from magnetic forces.

But she believes this could be solved by careful engineering: for instance, balancing fields on the inside of a spacecraft so that the magnetic field is canceled out.

Alternatively, two spacecraft might fly in formation, with astronauts living on one and the magnetic field being generated on another.

Oldest Shaman Grave Found; Includes Foot, Animal Parts

Israel
Archaeologists in northern Israel say they have discovered the world's oldest known grave of a shaman. The 12,000-year-old grave holds an elderly female of the mysterious Natufian culture, animal parts, and a human foot.

The immediate area contains several burials, but the shaman's grave is unique in its construction, contents, and arrangement.
"From the standpoint of the status of the grave and its contents, no Natufian burial like this one has ever been found," lead archaeologist Leore Grosman said.

"This indicates the woman had a distinct societal position."

The Hilazon Tachtit site—9 miles (14 kilometers) inland from Israel's Mediterranean coastline—is associated with the Natufian culture, which flourished in the eastern Mediterranean between 11,500 and 15,000 years ago.

Hundreds of Natufian graves have been excavated in Israel, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. But only the one uncovered by Grosman contains a woman believed to have been a shaman.

The term "shaman" originated in Siberia, but these magic-invoking priest-doctors are common in cultures around the globe.

The 1.5-meter-tall (nearly 5-foot-tall), 45-year-old woman was relatively old for her time. After her death, she was placed in a mud-plastered and rock-lined pit in a cave and was buried beneath a large stone slab.

She was not buried with everyday items and tools, as hunters, warriors, or political leaders were. Instead, her grave contained 50 arranged turtle shells and parts of wild pigs, eagles, cows, leopards, martens, and a human foot, among other artifacts.

Shedding Light on Strange Rites

During this period Natufian culture changed from a nomadic, hunting-and-gathering culture to a sedentary, agriculture-based lifestyle, according to Grosman, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Grosman received partial funding from the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration for her work on the Natufian site.

This transition was likely accompanied by an evolution of the culture's social structure as well as new rules, rituals, and belief systems.

The artifacts found in the woman's grave shed light on some of the specifics of Natufian rituals from this period, said Grosman, whose study was published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

For example, the turtles appear to have been eaten as part of the burial ceremony. Their shells were then placed around the deceased woman. Pig bones were cracked open and their marrow was removed before the bones were placed beneath the woman's hand. The grave was closed with the slab perhaps to prevent damage caused by animals.

"Like Finding Napolean's Grave"

Harvard University anthropologist Ofer Bar-Yosef said the shaman grave is a rare find. For every 50 Natufian hunter-gatherers, only one would have been a shaman, he said.

"Finding a shaman's burial is like finding Napolean's grave," said Bar-Yosef, who was not involved in the study but who served with a group of fellow scientists who reviewed the report for inclusion in the journal.

"I've spent many years digging other Natufian sites, and I've found a bunch of graves, but I've never found anything like this."

The shaman's grave and its contents "finally give another view into a society that didn't leave behind a written record. … It's almost equivalent to a textual record."

Grosman's findings can assist researchers investigating shamanistic societies in other parts of the world, Bar-Yosef said. Though burial rituals differ from culture to culture, the graves of shamanic or religious leaders generally stand out from those of the general public, he added.

Oldest Hebrew Text Is Evidence for Bible Stories?

Mati Milstein in Elah Valley, Israel

What may be the oldest known Hebrew text, found on a hilltop above the valley where David is said to have battled Goliath, could lend historical support to some Bible stories, archaeologists say.

The 3,000-year-old pottery shard with five lines of text was found during excavations of the Elah Fortress, the oldest known biblical-period fortress, which dates to the tenth century B.C.
It is the most important archaeological discovery in Israel since the Dead Sea Scrolls, according to lead researcher Yosef Garfinkel of the Hebrew University's Institute of Archaeology.

His team believes the text may provide evidence for a real-life King David and his vast kingdom, the existence of which has been long doubted by scholars.

Carbon-14 dating of olive pits found at the archaeological site, as well as analysis of pottery remains, also place the text to between 1000 and 975 B.C., the time King David, head of the Kingdom of Israel, would have lived.

"This means that historical knowledge of King David could pass from generation to generation in writing—and not just as oral tradition."

The exact nature of the text— believed to be Hebrew written in Proto-Canaanite script, a type of early alphabet—has yet to be determined, but a number of root words have already been translated, including "judge," "slave," and "king."

But the archaeologist's claims are disputed by an Israeli colleague, who says there is not enough scientific information to reach definitive conclusions.

Strategic Valley

The fortress is located southwest of Jerusalem on what was the border between the Israelite-run Kingdom of Judea and the coastal Philistine territories. Philistines, who possibly came from Crete, settled the southern coast of Palestine around the same time as the Israelites in the 12th century B.C.

During the biblical period, the Elah Valley was the main point of passage between the two territories.
It's not known whether the Judeans or the Philistines controlled the strategic fortress overlooking the Elah Valley, which was surrounded by nearly 3,000-foot-long (700-meter-long) fortifications built of massive stones.

But Garfinkel believes the site was most likely the westernmost outpost maintained by the Kingdom of Judea, which controlled land in southwest Asia and Palestine and was a predecessor to the Kingdom of Israel.

For instance, pottery at the fortress is similar to that found at other Israelite sites, and there are no pig remains—an indicator that often distinguishes Israelite from Philistine sites.

The newfound Hebrew text has also added new evidence of Judean rule, since key words indicate the text is most likely Hebrew.

Proving the Bible?

Garfinkel believes the Elah site and newfound writing could provide historic evidence of the United Monarchy in the tenth century B.C.

That's when King David is said to have united Judea and Israel, establishing a large kingdom that stretched between the Nile River in present-day Egypt and the Euphrates in Iraq, according to the Bible.

Though most researchers don't believe this kingdom existed, evidence from the site and pottery shard seems to support the idea of a strong central administration based in nearby Jerusalem, as detailed in the Bible, Garfinkel said.
"There is a big debate if the biblical tradition is accurate history or mythology written hundreds of years later … But this is the first time in the archaeology of Israel we have evidence that in the time of King David such heavily fortified cities were built."

ABC Evolution

The ancient text may also shed light on the evolution of the world's alphabetic languages.

"This is the first time that we have a Proto-Canaanite inscription dated in [the context of] an archaeological site from the tenth century B.C.," Garfinkel said.

"This is a major contribution to the understanding of writing in the world."

The evolution of alphabetic scripts, which had their origins in Proto-Canaanite some 3,700 years ago, was one of humankind's greatest intellectual achievements, experts say.

"This allowed everyone to read and write. Before this, Sumerian scripts and Egyptian hieroglyphs were very complicated writing techniques … only trained scribes could read and write in the ancient Near East," Garfinkel said.

Archaeological Doubts

Tel Aviv University archaeologist Israel Finkelstein, who is not involved in the Elah excavations, agreed the site is very important, but has significant concerns with Garfinkel's interpretations of the findings.

Immediately drawing ties between the site and the Kingdom of Judea is a mistake, he said—and it might well have been Philistine in origin.

Also, due to the small number of samples, the carbon-14 dating of the site is also not as precise as it should be, he added.

"We need to wait for more samples. It's not enough to date the site based on two [olive pits]," he said.

He also expressed doubts about the centerpiece of Garfinkel's findings—the text.

"I am prepared to predict that it will be very difficult to determine whether the text is, in fact, Hebrew. There will be evidence indicating various possibilities," he said.

"In the nature of its discovery, this [piece of pottery] is also not unusual. There is a group of late Proto-Canaanite [pottery shards] from the same chronological phase that have been found in various sites on the coastal plain—none of them were discovered in Judea proper."

Top 10 Most Overlooked Mysteries in History

This mystery may even be a problem for those legendary investigators from CSI and the like! The bog bodies are hundreds of ancient corpses found buried around the northern bogs and wetlands of Northern Europe. These bodies are remarkably well preserved, some dating back 2,000 years. Many of these bodies have tell-tale signs of torture and other medieval “fun”, which have made some researchers postulating that these unfortunate victims were the result of ritual sacrifices.



The Minoans are best known for the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur, but it is in fact the demise of this once-great civilisation that is more interesting. While many historians concentrate on the fall of the Roman Empire, the fall of the Minoans, who resided on the island of Crete, is an equal, if not greater mystery. Three and a half thousand years ago the island was shaken by a huge volcanic eruption on the neighbouring Thera Island. Archeologists unearthed tablets which have shown that the Minoans carried on for another 50 years after the eruption, before finally folding. Theories of what finally ended them have ranged from volcanic ash covering the island and devastating harvests to the weakened society eventually getting taken over by invading Greeks.





Everyone has heard of Stonehenge, but few know the Carnac Stones. These are 3,000 megalithic stones arranged in perfect lines over a distance of 12 kilometers on the coast of Brittany in the North-West of France. Mythology surrounding the stones says that each stone is a soldier in a Roman legion that Merlin the Wizard turned in to stone. Scientific attempts at an explanation suggests that the stones are most likely an elaborate earthquake detector. The identity of the Neolithic people who built them is unknown.



The historical search for the legendary thief Robin Hood has turned up masses of possible names. One candidate includes the Yorkshire fugitive Robert Hod, also known as Hobbehod or Robert Hood of Wakefield. The large number of suspects is complicated further as the name Robin Hood became a common term for an outlaw. As literature began to add new characters to the tale such as Prince John and Richard the Lionheart the trail became more obscure. To this day no one knows who this criminal really was.



After the Parthians defeated underachieving Roman General Crassus’ army, legend has it that a small band of the POWs wandered through the desert and were eventually rounded up by the Han military 17 years later. First century Chinese historian Ban Gu wrote an account of a confrontation with a strange army of about a hundred men fighting in a “fish-scale formation” unique to Roman forces. An Oxford historian who compared ancient records claims that the lost roman legion founded a small town near the Gobi desert named Liqian, which in Chinese translates to Rome. DNA tests are being conducted to answer that claim and hopefully explain some of the residents’ green eyes, blonde hair, and fondness of bullfighting.



The Voynich Manuscript is a medieval document written in an unknown script and in an unknown language. For over one hundred years people have tried to break the code to no avail. The overall impression given by the surviving leaves of the manuscript suggests that it was meant to serve as a pharmacopoeia or to address topics in medieval or early modern medicine. However, the puzzling details of illustrations have fueled many theories about the book’s origins, the contents of its text, and the purpose for which it was intended. The document contains illustrations that suggest the book is in six parts: Herbal, Astronomical, Biological, Cosmological, Pharmaceutical, and recipes.




While many people know of the Moai of Easter Island, not that many people know of the other mystery associated with Easter Island. ‘Rongorongo’ is the hieroglyphic written language of the region’s earlier inhabitants. Rongorongo is strange in that no other neighbouring oceanic people used a written language. It appeared around the 1700s, though was unfortunately lost after the early European colonizers banned it because of its ties to the native islanders’ pagan roots.



The ancient Indus Valley people, India’s oldest known civilization had a culture that stretched from Western India to Afghanistan and a populace of over 5 million. le—India’s oldest known civilization—were an impressive and apparently sanitary bronze-age bunch. The scale of their baffling and abrupt collapse rivals that of the great Mayan decline. They were a hygienically advanced culture with a highly sophisticated sewage drainage system, and immaculately constructed baths. There is to date no archaeological evidence of armies, slaves, conflicts, or other aspects of ancient societies. No one knows where this civilization went.




In the late 2nd century AD, the Greek writer Pausanias wrote an account of how (4-500 years earlier?) in one night a powerful earthquake destroyed the great city of Helike, with a Tsunami washing away what remained of the once-flourishing metropolis. The city, capital of the Achaean League, was a worship centre devoted to the ancient god Poseidon, god of the sea. There was no trace of the legendary society mentioned outside of the ancient Greek writings until 1861, when an archeologist found some loot thought to have come from Helike - a bronze coin with the unmistakable head of Poseidon. In 2001, a pair of archeologists managed to locate the ruins of Helike beneath the mud and gravel of the coast, and are currently trying to peice together the rise and sudden fall of what has been called the “real” Atlantis.



An amazing discovery of 2,000 year old mummies in the Tarim basin of Western China occurred in the early 90s. But more amazing than the discovery itself was the astonishing fact that the mummies were blond haired and long nosed. In 1993, Victor Mayer a college professor collected DNA from the mummies and his tests verified that the bodies were all of European genetic stock. Ancient Chinese texts from as early as the first millennium BC do mention groups of far-east dwelling caucasian people referred to as the Bai, Yeuzhi, and Tocharians. None, though, fully reveal how or why these people ended up there.

Mexico City's 'water monster' nears extinction

An Axolotl salamander, or Ambystoma mexicanum, swims to the surface for air in a tank at the Chapultepec Zoo in Mexico City, Sept. 27, 2008. Scientists warn that the roughly foot-long amphibian is just a few years away from extinction, a victim of the draining of its lake habitat, deteriorating water quality, and what is perhaps the final stake in its heart: the invasion of non-native fish species that are eating its eggs and larva, and competing with it for food. (AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills)

MEXICO CITY - Beneath the tourist gondolas in the remains of a great Aztec lake lives a creature that resembles a monster — and a Muppet — with its slimy tail, plumage-like gills and mouth that curls into an odd smile.
The axolotl, also known as the "water monster" and the "Mexican walking fish," was a key part of Aztec legend and diet. Against all odds, it survived until now amid Mexico City's urban sprawl in the polluted canals of Lake Xochimilco, now a Venice-style destination for revelers poled along by Mexican gondoliers, or trajineros, in brightly painted party boats.
But scientists are racing to save the foot-long salamander from extinction, a victim of the draining of its lake habitat and deteriorating water quality. In what may be the final blow, nonnative fish introduced into the canals are eating its lunch — and its babies.
The long-standing International Union for Conservation of Nature includes the axolotl on its annual Red List of threatened species, while researchers say it could disappear in just five years. Some are pushing for a series of axolotl sanctuaries in canals cleared of invasive species, while others are considering repopulating Xochimilco with axolotls bred in captivity.
"If the axolotl disappears, it would not only be a great loss to biodiversity but to Mexican culture, and would reflect the degeneration of a once-great lake system," says Luis Zambrano, a biologist at the Autonomous University of Mexico, or UNAM.
The number of axolotls (pronounced ACK-suh-LAH-tuhl) in the wild is not known. But the population has dropped from roughly 1,500 per square mile in 1998 to a mere 25 per square mile this year, according to a survey by Zambrano's scientists using casting nets.
It has been a steep fall from grace for the salamander with a feathery mane of gills and a visage reminiscent of a 1970s Smiley Face that inspired American poet Ogden Nash to pen the witticism: "I've never met an axolotl, But Harvard has one in a bottle."
Millions once lived in the giant lakes of Xochimilco and Chalco on which Mexico City was built. Using four stubby legs to drag themselves along lake bottoms or their thick tails to swim like mini-alligators, they hunted plentiful aquatic insects, small fish and crustaceans.
Legend has it that Xolotl — the dog-headed Aztec god of death, lightning and monstrosities — feared he was about to be banished or killed by other gods and changed into an axolotl to flee into Lake Xochimilco.
The axolotl's decline began when Spanish conquerors started draining the lakes, which were further emptied over time to slake the thirst of one of the world's largest and fastest-growing cities. In the 1970s, Lake Chalco was completely drained to prevent flooding. In the 1980s, Mexico City began pumping its wastewater into the few canals and lagoons that remained of Xochimilco.
About 20 years ago, African tilapia were introduced into Xochimilco in a misguided effort to create fisheries. They joined with Asian carp to dominate the ecosystem and eat the axolotl's eggs and compete with it for food. The axolotl is also threatened by agrochemical runoff from nearby farms and treated wastewater from a Mexico City sewage plant, researchers say.
Local fisherman Roberto Altamira, 32, recalls when he was a boy, and the axolotl was still part of the local diet.
"I used to love axolotl tamales," he says, rubbing his stomach and laughing.
But he says people no longer eat axolotls, mainly because fishermen almost never find them.
"The last one I caught was about six months ago," says Altamira, a wiry gondolier with rope-like muscles from years of poling through Xochimilco's narrow waterways.
Meanwhile, the axolotl population is burgeoning in laboratories, where scientists study its amazing traits, including the ability to completely re-grow lost limbs. Axolotls have played key roles in research on regeneration, embryology, fertilization and evolution.
The salamander has the rare trait of retaining its larval features throughout its adult life, a phenomenon called neoteny. It lives all its life in the water but can breathe both under water with gills or by taking gulps of air from the surface.
On a 9-foot-wide canal covered by a green carpet of "lentejilla" — an aquatic plant that resembles green lentils — Zambrano's researchers test water quality and search for axolotls. The air smells of sulfur and sewage.
A team member suddenly points to the trademark water ripple of an axolotl, and the crew hurls its net. But they only come up with two tilapia in a sopping-wet mass of lentejilla.
So far, scientists disagree on how to save the creature. But a pilot sanctuary is expected to open in the next three to six months in the waters around Island of the Dolls, so-called because the owner hangs dolls he finds in the canals to ward off evil spirits.
Zambrano proposes up to 15 axolotl sanctuaries in Xochimilco's canals, where scientists would insert some kind of barrier and clear the area of nonnative species.
Without carp, the water would clear, and plants the axolotl needs to breed could flourish again, said Bob Johnson, the curator of amphibians and reptiles at the Toronto Zoo.
"If you take the insults away, the lake has an amazing latent potential to heal itself," he said.
Veterinarian Erika Servin, who runs the Mexico City government's axolotl program at Chapultepec Zoo, is studying the possibility of introducing axolotls from the lab into the canals. But more study is needed to make sure the process doesn't lead to diseases and genetic problems from inbreeding.
Xochimilco residents could be another source of resistance.
Hundreds of people make a living pulling tilapia from canals or growing flowers, lettuce and vegetables on nearby land. Efforts to remove the fish or shut down polluting farms could face stiff opposition.
But while the debate goes on, time is running out.
Given its role in research alone, Johnson says, "We owe it to the axolotl to help it survive."

Air Cars: A New Wind for America's Roads?

A new carmaker has a plan for cheap, environmentally friendly cars to be built all over the country
An air-powered car? It may be available sooner than you think at a price tag that will hardly be a budget buster. The vehicle may not run like a speed racer on back road highways, but developer Zero Pollution Motors is betting consumers will be willing to fork over $20,000 for a vehicle that can motor around all day on nothing but air and a splash of salad oil, alcohol or possibly a pint of gasoline.

The expertise needed to build a compressed air car, or CAV, is not rocket science, either. Years-old, off-the-shelf technology uses compressed air to drive old-fashioned car engine pistons instead of combusting gas or diesel fuel to create a burst of air to do the same thing. Indian carmaker Tata has no qualms about the technology. It has already bought the rights to make the car for the huge Indian market.
The air car can tool along at a top speed of 35 mph for some 60 miles or so on a tank of compressed air, a sufficient distance for 80% of consumers to commute to work and back and complete daily chores.

Courtesy of MDI
On highways, the CAV can cruise at interstate speeds for nearly 800 miles with a small motor that compresses outside air to keep the tank filled. The motor isn't finicky about fuel. It will burn gasoline or diesel as well as biodiesel, ethanol or vegetable oil.
This car leaves the highest-mpg vehicles you can buy right now in the dust. Even if it used only regular gasoline, the air car would average 106 mpg, more than double today's fuel sipping champ, the Toyota Prius. The air tank also can be refilled when it's not in use by being plugged into a wall socket and recharged with electricity as the motor compresses air.
Automakers aren't quite ready yet to gear up huge assembly line operations churning out air cars or set up glitzy dealer showrooms where you can ooh and aah over the color or style. But the vehicles will be built in factories that will make up to 8,000 vehicles a year, likely starting in 2011, and be sold directly to consumers.
There will be plants in nearly every state, based on the number of drivers in the state. California will have as many as 17 air car manufacturing plants, and there'll be around 12 in Florida, eight in New York, four in Georgia, while two in Connecticut will serve that state and Rhode Island.

The technology goes back decades, but is coming together courtesy of two converging forces. First, new laws are likely to be enacted in a few years that will limit carbon dioxide emissions and force automakers to develop ultra-high mileage cars and those that emit minuscule amounts of or no gases linked with global warming. Plug-in electric hybrids will slash these emissions, but they'll be pricey at around $40,000 each and require some changes in infrastructure -- such as widespread recharge stations -- to be practical. Fuel cells that burn hydrogen to produce only water vapor still face daunting technical challenges.
Second, the relatively high cost of gas has expedited the air car's development. Yes, pump prices have plunged since July from record levels, but remain way higher than just a few years ago and continue to take a bite out of disposable income. Refiners will face carbon emission restraints, too, and steeply higher costs will be passed along at the pump.
Tata doesn't plan to produce the cars in the U.S. Instead, it plans to charge $15 million for the rights to the technology, a fully built turnkey auto assembly plant, tools, machinery, training and rights to use trademarks.
The CAV has a big hurdle: proving it can pass federal crash tests. Shiva Vencat, president and CEO of Zero Pollution Motors, says he's not worried. "The requirements can be modeled [on a computer] before anything is built and adjusted to ensure that the cars will pass" the crash tests. Vencat also is a vice president of MDI Inc., a French company that developed the air car.

The inventor of this technology is Mr. Guy Negre, who is the founder and CEO of MDI SA, a company headquartered in Luxembourg with its R and D in Nice, France.

Earliest Known Human Had Neanderthal Qualities

Adam, Is That You?
This is a skeletal recreation of the world's first known modern human, based on fossils found in Ethiopia. The arrows point to the newly found bones

Jennifer Viegas,
The world's first known modern human was a tall, thin individual -- probably male -- who lived around 200,000 years ago and resembled present-day Ethiopians, save for one important difference: He retained a few primitive characteristics associated with Neanderthals, according to a series of forthcoming studies conducted by multiple international research teams.

The extraordinary findings, which will soon be outlined in a special issue of the Journal of Human Evolution devoted to the first known Homo sapiens, also reveal information about the material culture of the first known people, their surroundings, possible lifestyle and, perhaps most startling, their probable neighbors -- Homo erectus.

"Omo I," as the researchers refer to the find, would probably have been considered healthy-looking and handsome by today's standards, despite the touch of Neanderthal.

"From the size of the preserved bones, we estimated that Omo I was tall and slender, most likely around 5'10" tall and about 155 pounds," University of New Mexico anthropologist Osbjorn Pearson, who co-authored at least two of the new papers, told Discovery News.

Pearson said another, later fossil was also recently found. It too belonged to a "moderately tall -- around 5'9" -- and slender individual."

"Taken together, the remains show that these early modern humans were...much like the people in southern Ethiopia and the southern Sudan today," Pearson said.

Building On Leakey's Work

Parts of the Omo I skeleton were first excavated in 1967 by a team from the Kenya National Museums under the direction of Richard Leakey, who wrote a forward that will appear in the upcoming journal.

Leakey and his colleagues unearthed two other skeletons, one of which has received little attention. Two of the three skeletons found at the site have been a literal bone of contention among scientists over the past four decades. Reliable dating techniques for such early periods did not exist in the late 60's, and the researchers could not agree upon the identity of the two skeletons.

From 1999 to the present, at least two other major expeditions to the southern Ethiopian site -- called the Kibish Formation -- have taken place, with the goal of solving the mysteries and learning more about what the area was like 200,000 years ago.

As evidenced by photographs showing the researchers followed by armed guards, work at this location proved challenging.

"It took us five plus days to get there from Addis," paleobiologist Josh Trapani of the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Michigan told Discovery News. "Once there, we had intense heat, hyenas outside camp, crocodiles in the river, many insects and two remarkable and very different groups of people, the Mursi and the Nyangatom on opposite sides of the river who were our partners in some of this work."

Primitive, Yet Still Like Us

The ordeals proved successful, as the scientists have recovered new bones for Omo I, some of which perfectly fit into place with the remains Leakey unearthed over 40 years ago.

Several scientists analyzed the bones, including a very detailed, comparative look at the shoulder bone by French paleontologist Jean-Luc Voisin. They concluded that, without a doubt, Omo I represents an anatomically modern human, with bones in the arms, hands and ankles somewhat resembling those of other, earlier human-like species.

"Most of the anatomical features of Omo are like modern humans. Only a few features are similar to more primitive hominids, including Neanderthals and Homo erectus," explained John Fleagle, distinguished professor in the Department of Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook University in New York.

"Omo II is more primitive in its cranial anatomy," he added, "and shares more features with Homo erectus and fewer with modern humans."

Unlikely Neighbors

New dating of the finds determined that Omo II lived at around the same time and location as Omo I, indicating that Homo sapiens may have coexisted with Homo erectus, a.k.a. "Upright Man," who is believed to have been the first hominid to leave Africa.

Fleagle explained the detailed nature of the latest dating techniques that place both skeletons at around the 200,000-year-old period.

He said both skeletons were recovered from rocky geological layers, with "Adam" unearthed just above a layer of volcanic rock. Precise dates can then be calculated because "when volcanic rocks form, they start a radiometric clock that ticks at a regular rate."

Fleagle added, "By looking at the ratio of parent minerals and daughter minerals you can calculate when the rocks were initially formed."Material Culture In A Different Environment

Anthropologist John Shea sifted through the Kibish dirt and rocks hoping to find evidence for early material culture.

He found it.

"The assemblages are dominated by relatively high-quality raw materials procured as pebbles from local gravels," Shea determined, adding that he unearthed stone tools flaked on both sides, hand axes, picks and spear-shaped objects. It appears that most were not retouched. So, once the early modern humans crafted their tools, they likely left them as is.

Trapani, who conducted a study on fossil fish at the site, said later-dated barbed bone points recovered from the site look remarkably like catfish spines, which "may be purely coincidental." Or, "alternatively, perhaps the spines impressed early hunters with their potential utility as flesh-piercing hunting implements."

Trapani added, "This may have come about through simple visual inspection or, perhaps -- more likely -- through painful lesson."

Living High on the Hog

Supporting Trapani's findings that large catfish, as well as Nile perch and other fish, were in abundance, studies on the site's geology indicate that conditions were wetter 200,000 years ago.

Yet another study, on the large mammal fauna at Kibish, found the humans were surrounded by big game.

Smithsonian Institution archaeobiologist Zelalem Assefa identified hippos, giraffes, elephants, zebras, rhinos, numerous other hoofed mammals and more.

"In terms of settlement strategy, the early modern humans at Kibish might have practiced some type of seasonal based settlement strategy -- possibly following the movement of big game," Assefa told Discovery News.

Perhaps his two most unusual finds were that very few remains for non-human primates and carnivores were found, which puzzles the researchers, but may suggest that the first known humans didn't have many, if any, animal predators.

Secondly, Assefa was surprised to find duiker (a small, shy antelope that usually prefers forest cover) and giant forest hog remains. The giant forest hog is the largest wild pig on Earth, weighing as much as 600 pounds. Since other parts of the site were probable grasslands, the presence of these two animals suggests a riparian forest must have also been nearby.

An Unfinished Story

Although Omo I may be the world's "Adam" for now, it's possible that modern humans emerged even earlier at some other place in Africa.

"We only have evidence for what we have found," Fleagle said, adding that there "almost certainly were modern individuals before Omo I."

He explained that Ethiopia's geology has deposits suitable to bone preservation and discovery, which is perhaps why so many fossil hominids have been excavated there over the years.

"Paleontology is a very opportunistic science," he concluded. "When we have a record of fossils in one place, we can reconstruct what happened there, but it is impossible to say what was going on in places from which there is no fossil record."