Ancient News Update 03/30/16
I am just as curious about extinct animals and plants as anyone else. There are certainly thousands to many millions of these, but I always try and look at the big picture. Recently the well preserved bodies of ancient animals known as cave bears have been found. They are said to be the best of preserved animals. Cave bears haven’t walked the earth for at least 10,000 years. Since the bodies were so well preserved there is DNA there for the taking and it seems the one thing scientists cannot resist is the temptation to bring extinct animals back to life. We read about this all the time. A lot of people might say, “so what, who cares?” I guess I do and let me tell you why. When ancient species of animals become extinct it might be for a good reason. Think about this, what if we bring an animal back to life and it carries some deadly disease? We might not even know how to treat one of these diseases. Another reason I don’t like this is we might decide to create a herd of these animals and who knows what affect it would have on the current environment. When you think about it the animals we would bring back would not be exactly the same, because they would have to spend their gestation period inside some other animal and would not be pure even if they look the same.
Scientists think they have found a system of writing which is even older than Sumerian which was thought to be the oldest. The writing comes from the Danube Valley civilization, which is not as famous as some of the others, although I don’t know why. It was said to have developed around 5,500 B.C. near the Balkans. There were a lot of firsts credited to them like the creation of copper tools, houses which were more than just one story huts and had a couple of floors. They are credited with creating furniture. They figured out how to weave, make clothes and cure leather. The most important of their inventions besides writing, is said to be the wheel. There is some controversy among scientists however, who say what they created was not writing, but a collection of shapes. This seems like an odd statement, because one would have to wonder why they would put these collections in different order on tablets and such. Maybe scientists are saying this to cover their inability to translate the language, after all isn’t all writing just a collection of shapes?
Not to digress, but I can’t help but wonder how scientists can be so sure of themselves that there wasn’t older civilizations which still remain undiscovered which had a written language. We know there are cave paintings which date much further back than 5,500 B.C. and in a way these were a form of language relaying to us and others what these people had seen. Perhaps smaller pictures were used in the distant past to communicate, and the evidence has disappeared over time? How would we know? It seems to me humans are clever and they must have had some way to communicate and leave messages, even in very ancient times.
There has been a lot of talk about giants in ancient times and indeed graves have been found which have contained the bones of people who could have been as tall as 20 feet. Along with this some very huge Stone Age axes were found which would have been far too heavy for a normal human to wield. The reason I bring this up is five huge Bronze Age axes have been found in Boest near Nørre Snede in Jutland. The axes are at least twice the size of a normal axe. Prior to this there had been only five Bronze Age axes found in all of Northern Europe and then the archaeologists found five at once. The axes date from around 1,600 B.C. These are very early finds for bronze axes. These axes don’t prove giants existed, it is just they are much bigger than usual and would have been hard to use by normal sized humans since the heads weighed about two and one half pounds and the axes were about twelve inches in height.
Scientists have found many ancient fossils, but they have just found one which is 2 billion years old. It is hard to even wrap one’s head around that age. What makes this fossil so important is it is the earliest known indicator of multicellular life. Scientists are hoping this find will allow them to find out more about how complex life on earth evolved and why. Scientists suggest this was caused by changes in the earth’s atmosphere. One scientist said there is clearly a relationship between the concentration of oxygen and multicellularity. Single cell organisms were said to have evolved about 3.4 billion years ago.
Did you ever wonder which was the very first animal to appear on earth? Apparently scientists did and now they think they have the answer. What was your guess, did you think it was a mouse or something even smaller? If you did you couldn’t be more wrong, at least according to them. Science is telling us the first animal was the sea sponge. If you have ever seen one you probably thought it was a plant, but according to scientists it is a simple animal. Tests have shown that the sponge was around 640 million years ago and exists almost unchanged from that time. A sea sponge is the only animal which has no body symmetry. They also have no organs, muscles or nerves. It makes one wonder if they could be some sort of alien organism.
Just when you think nothing new can be found out about Stonehenge, something new turns up. The remains of 14 women have been found buried there and it is thought they were of a very high status. Archaeologists believe for at least some of the time Stonehenge served as a cremation cemetery for leaders and other important individuals. When the archaeologists started to find the remains they realized they were finding more remains of women than men. Stonehenge contrasts with other burial mounds where the remains of men far outweighed the women’s remains which were found. So far as of the writing of this article, archaeologists believe they have found the remains of fourteen women and nine men.
