Cool Blog

Stonehenge Settlement Found: Builders' Homes, "Cult Houses"
A major prehistoric village has been unearthed near Stonehenge in southern England.
The settlement likely housed the builders of the famous monument, archaeologists say, and was an important ceremonial site in its own right, hosting great "feasts and parties"

Excavations also offer new evidence that a timber circle and a vast earthwork where the village once stood were linked to Stonehenge—via road, river, and ritual. Together, the sites were part of a much larger religious complex, the archaeologists suggest.

"Stonehenge isn't a monument in isolation. It is actually one of a pair—one in stone, one in timber said Mike Parker Pearson, leader of the Stonehenge Riverside Project, a joint initiative run by six English universities and partially funded by the National Geographic Society. (National Geographic News is part of the National Geographic Society.)

The Late Stone Age village—the largest ever found in Britain—was excavated in September 2006 at Durrington Walls, the world's largest known "henge," a type of circular earthwork. A giant timber circle once stood at Durrington, which is 1.75 miles (2.8 kilometers) from the celebrated circle of standing stones on Salisbury Plain.
At Durrington the archaeologists discovered foundations of houses dating back to 4,600 years ago around the time construction began on Stonehenge.
Excavations revealed the remains of eight wooden buildings. Surveys of the landscape have identified up to 30 more dwellings, Parker Pearson said.
"We could have many hundreds of houses here," he added.
The initial stone circle at Stonehenge—the so-called sarsen stones—has been radiocarbon-dated to between 2600 and 2500 B.C.
The dates for the village are "exactly the same time, in radiocarbon terms, as for the building of the sarsens," Parker Pearson said.
Six of the houses so far unearthed measured about 250 square feet (23 square meters) each and had wooden walls and clay floors. Fireplaces and furniture—such as cupboards and beds—could be discerned from their outlines in the earth, Parker Pearson said.

Posted by niegel at 5:04 PM | 0 comments Links to this post  
Labels: In Science

Ancient Gliding Beast


To paraphrase a killer-rabbit-afflicted enchanter in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, that's no ordinary squirrel. "He's got huge, sharp … er. … He can leap about. Look at the bones!"
Looking at the bones is exactly what paleontologist Jin Meng, of New York City's American Museum of Natural History, did. Fossils from eastern Mongolia told him and colleagues they'd discovered a completely new order of mammals.
Volaticotherium antiquus—"ancient gliding beast"—is what they named the only known species of the new order (shown above in an artist's conception released today by the journal Nature, along with Meng and company's study).
Weighing in at less than a pound (half a kilogram), the squirrel-like creature boasted beastly teeth that give it away as an insect-eater, like most mammals of its time, according to the study.
More important, though, are fossil impressions of an airfoil-like skin-membrane fold—as well as elongated limbs needed to support such a "sail"—which identify the animal as a glider, the researchers say. And its backbones suggest it had a long tail that served as a stabilizing rudder.
The team says it all adds up to a mammal that glided 70 million years before any other—and possibly even before birds took to the air.
Now that's something completely different.

Posted by niegel at 2:28 PM | 0 comments Links to this post  
Labels: In Science

January 5, 2007—It looks like a shiny lump of fool's gold, and it certainly has authorities fooled as to just what it is.
This metallic rocklike object crashed through the roof of a New Jersey home on January 2, ripping through the ceiling and ricocheting off a tiled bathroom floor before lodging in a wall.
No one was hurt by the impact, but local detectives trying to identify the mysterious debris may have their professional egos a little bruised.
"I've never seen anything like it in my career," Lt. Robert Brightman of the Freehold Township Police Department told the Associated Press at a press conference yesterday.
Experts from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration have already inspected the 13-ounce (0.4 kilogram) lump and determined that it is not a stray airplane part.
Another test found that the object is not radioactive, although it does appear to be magnetic.
Some astronomers have speculated that that the object could be a meteorite, since the Quadrantid meteor shower occurs annually in early January.
But meteor showers typically involve small particles of icy rock, not big metal chunks, so if the mass is a meteorite, it's likely an unusual one.
Other theories have suggested that the lump is a tool lost by an astronaut or flotsam from an orbiting satellite that melted as it entered Earth's atmosphere.

Posted by niegel at 2:16 PM | 0 comments Links to this post  
Labels: In Science