Lost Army of Persian King Cambyses II Found (525 BC)

MSNBC and DiscoveryNews is reporting on a stupendous discovery this morning. "The remains of a mighty Persian army said to have drowned in the sands of the western Egyptian desert 2,500 years ago."

Herodotus reported on the tradegy that overtook the 50,000 soldiers, but this is the first concrete evidence to prove the accuracy of the ancient historian.

Bronze weapons, some small pieces of jewelry and hundreds of human bones where discovered by twin brothers --Angelo and Alfredo Castiglioni.

After studying ancient maps, the pair decided that other historians were wrong and that the army did not take the caravan route "via the Dakhla Oasis and Farafra Oasis", but instead took another route, which to the brothers made more strategic sense.

"To test their hypothesis, the Castiglioni brothers did geological surveys along that alternative route. They found desiccated water sources and artificial wells made of hundreds of water pots buried in the sand. Such water sources could have made a march in the desert possible."




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Oldest Artifact in the Americas Unearthed

It's being reported that archaeologists have found the oldest known artifact in a cave in Oregon. The tool is some sort of scraper and is said to date back 14,230 years."

Scientific American writes, "[W]hether the cave dwellers were Clovis people or belonged to an earlier culture is uncertain. None of the Clovis people's distinct fluted spear and arrow points have been found in the cave."

Last year, the same team discovered some rather ancient poop that indicated the people it came from were predominately vegetarian (see picture).

Paisley Cave Discoveries

"The War That Killed Achilles"

New History Books of Note

Amazonian Prospective
(5 customer reviews)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

The One-Star review says: "I would give it 5 stars for regurgitating trivial knowledge, 3 stars for being a competent plot summary with about a dozen sentences with interesting insights, and a zero for actually coming to terms with the subjects that the book is supposedly addressing."

The other reviewers are more credible. They were all written by fairly highly ranked reviewers with some obvious interest in the topic, and with no need for snide remarks.

There aren't any LibraryThing reviews currently. When they appear you can find them here.


You may find the NewYorkTimes review here. Steve Coates, an editor at the Book Review, writes:

Alexander’s own interpretations aren’t always persuasive. Achilles is at once a starlike demigod and a raging monster. In order to present him as an ideal commander, a serious theoretical critic of the social order and, most dubiously, a peacemaker, Alexander has to play down both his human flaws and his deeply disturbing Dark Angel aspects. Distracting, too, are the modern war parallels she draws — from World War I, Vietnam, Somalia, Iraq; fleeting and uninspired, they are, one suspects, an unnecessary effort to suggest contemporary “relevance.”

Yet, “the Trojan War represents Total War,” Alexander insightfully maintains: by the end of the “Iliad,” the cumulated grief of doomed Trojans, ordinary men, women and children, “is a match for the heroic and outsize grief” of godlike Achilles. This, after all, is the import of the epic’s title, she writes: “The ‘Iliad’ relates the fate of the soon-to-be-extinct city of ­Ilion” — and, by extension, the fate of the Mycenaean cities from which the distant ancestors of Homer’s audience fled; the fate of Carthage and then of Rome, in the imagination of cultured Romans; and ultimately, the fate of any human society subject to the sword.

The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War

• Author: Caroline Alexander
  
• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult (October 15, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670021121

The Sad Case of the Nazca People

As if to prove Jared Diamond correct (Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed), the Nazca people of southern Peru, have the joined the dubious ranks of peoples that have brought about their own destruction by trashing their environment. Like the Eastern Island people, they cut down all their trees, an act which led to their eventual starvation.

DiscoveryNews (Nov. 2, 2009) reports on a study published in the Latin American Antiquity, that "The Nazca caused their own collapse when they cleared their forests in order to make way for agriculture, thus exposing the landscape to wind and flood erosion...."

These people are best known for those large drawings animals and birds in the Peruvian desert. The ones that are best seen from the air.

They also apparently made "sophisticated ceramics and textiles and amassed one of South America's largest collection of human trophy heads."


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Thank you Garp, my buddy at LibraryThing, for bringing this article to may attention.

Mystery of the Falklands Wolf - solved or not?

Despite the fact that TheIndependent intimates that the Puzzle of the Falklands Wolf is close to being resolved, that certainly isn't the case. There may be some new evidence, but scientist remain as puzzled as today as Charles Darwin was a century ago.

The puzzle, if you aren't familiar with it, is how the heck these large mammals came to inhabit the Falklands when these isles are so far away from any major land mass.

Prof. Slater is quoted in ScienceDaily (Nov. 2, 2009) as saying:

"It's really strange that the only native mammal on an island would be a large canid.... There are no other native terrestrial mammals -- not even a mouse. It's even stranger when you consider that the Falklands are some 480 kilometers from the South American mainland. The question is, how did they get there?"

ScienceDaily then goes on to say that [P]ossible explanations for the wolves' presence on the islands, which have never been connected to the South American mainland, range from dispersal by ice or logs to domestication and subsequent transport by Native Americans. Ultimately, the Falklands wolf died out because it was perceived as a threat to settlers and their sheep, although fur traders took out a lot of the population as well.

To determine the wolf's ancestral lineage, ScienceNow explains that Graham Slater, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues compared DNA sequences from five museum specimens with those of living South American canids, including a group of foxlike animals that had been previously suggested as their most likely relatives. The team found that the Falklands wolves proved most similar to the maned wolf (Chrysocyon brachyurus), which hails from the South American savannas.

"That was a big surprise," says Slater, because of the pronounced difference between the two creatures. The maned wolf has much longer legs than the Falklands wolf and long jaws suited for catching rats and mice; the island wolf has shorter, Labrador retriever-like jaws designed for grabbing and shaking large prey, such as seals and penguins.

The study, published online tomorrow in Current Biology, points to a North American origin for all South American canids. The Falklands Island Wolf and the maned wolf diverged 6.7 million years ago, probably in North America given that the oldest fossils of canids in South America date back 2.5 million years, says Slater.

So essentially we have more information, but nothing conclusive or terribly helpful, except that we can pretty much exclude humans from the equation.


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TheIndependent