100,000 year-old beads suggest modern culture emerged earlier than previously thought

Source: Eurekalert

Three shells with holes bored into their centers, excavated from sites in Israel and Algeria, may be the oldest known evidence of personal decoration.

New findings suggest that the shells are 100,000 year-old beads, which lends support to the idea that modern human behavior emerged gradually instead of bursting forth later in Europe. The study appears in the 23 June 2006 issue of the journal Science, published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society.

"Our paper supports the scenario that modern humans in Africa developed behaviors that are considered modern quite early in time, so that in fact these people were probably not just biologically modern but also culturally and cognitively modern, at least to some degree," said study coauthor Francesco d'Errico of Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique Unité Mixte de Recherche (CNRS UMR) in Talence, France.

"This idea has been postulated before now, but the evidence has been quite scant," he said.

Until recently, researchers generally believed that the first signs of modern human culture appeared 40,000 years ago, when anatomically modern humans arrived in Europe. The cave paintings, musical instruments, jewelry and other artwork preserved from this time period, the Upper Paleolithic, indicate that humans were capable of symbolic thinking.

Jewelry probably conveyed many aspects of people's social and cultural identities, and most archaeologists agree that personal decoration was one of the most important expressions of modern human culture, according to study coauthor Marian Vanhaeren of University College London in London and CNRS UMR in Nanterre, France.

In a previous study, d'Errico and Vanhaeren reported, along with other colleagues, the discovery of perforated shells from Blombos cave in South Africa (Science, 16 April 2004). These beads were dated to about 75,000 years ago.

D'Errico and Vanhaeren wanted to find beads from more than a single site, however, in order to firmly establish that beadworking was underway earlier than was previously thought.

The two researchers and their colleagues searched through museum collections and found bead-like shells from the sites of Skhul, in Israel, and Oued Djebbana, in Algeria. The shells were the same genus as those found at Blombos and were perforated in a similar way.

"It's very important to establish the chronology of these modern types of behaviors, and this paper constitutes we think a significant advancement," said d'Errico.

Archaeologists excavated Skhul in the early 1930s using less meticulous methods than archaeologists use today, so the Science authors had to do some additional work to determine exactly where the shells came from and how old they were.

One of the site's sediment layers contained a series of human skeletons, which recent dating efforts placed at 100,000 to 135,000 years old. Coauthor Sarah James, a researcher at the Natural History Museum, London, where the Skhul specimens are kept, analyzed the crust of sediment stuck to one of the two shells and found that the shells came from the same sediment layer that the skeletons did.

The relatively large size of the shells from Skhul and Oued Djebbana also seems to confirm their old age, since this species was bigger 100,000 years ago than it is today, the authors say.

Oued Djebbana was excavated in the late 1940s. Currently just a single radiocarbon date is available, indicating that the site is more than 35,000 years old. Based on the technology and style of the stone tools found there, however, the site could be up to 90,000 years old, according to the authors.

The shells, Nassarius gibbosulus, are scavenging marine snails that live in shallow waters and are now only found in the central-eastern Mediterranean.

The sample size is small, but the authors argue that Skhul and Oued Djebbana are so far from the sea -- 200 km in case of Oued Djebbana -- that the shells must have been intentionally brought there, most likely for beadworking. By studying modern Nassarius shells from Mediterranean beaches, they also determined that shells with single holes in the centre are rare in nature and that Skhul and Djebbana inhabitants must have purposely perforated or deliberately picked out such shells, arguably for symbolic use.

Advanced Civilizations in Pre-Columbian Caribbean?

The recent discovery of jade mines in Guatemala may challenge the idea that the only "true" civilizations that existed in the New World before the arrival of Columbus were those of Mexico, Central America, and South America.

Scientists believe it is likely that jade axes found on Antigua in the 1990s were made from material mined by the Maya in present-day Guatemala. This suggests that the people living on Antigua (and throughout the Caribbean) may not have been as primitive as previously thought.

Trade between the people of the Caribbean and the mainland would have required quite a sophisticated system of sea-trade, and artifacts found in both areas support the idea that such a trade network existed.

For more on this story, please see the full article at National Geographic.

Scribes and Education in Ancient Mesopotamia

You may have heard the saying, "knowledge is power." And how do we gain knowledge? Through education, of course.

For most of human history, a great majority of people were uneducated, at least in the traditional sense. By that I mean that most people did not know how to read and write, were not familiar with the workings of government or law, and could not do anything beyond the simplest math. That's not to say that they were not educated in some way.

Throughout history, most children's education came from their parents. If you were the son of a farmer in ancient Mesopotamia, you would learn the ways of a farmer. You would then take over the family farm and pass that knowledge down to your children. If you were a girl in ancient Mesopotamia, you learned the incredibly important skills of your mother - cooking, raising children, caring for the family, making clothes, possibly creating pottery, etc. In other words, you learned the occupation of your mother or father.

The Sumerians, however, created the first known formal education system (schools). These schools taught the skills of a scribe. A scribe was (and is) basically a professional writer. Learning to be a scribe was a possible pathway to the most powerful profession in ancient Mesopotamia - a priest. Priests needed to know how to read and write to keep the records of the ziggurat (a Mesopotamian temple) and to monitor the sun, moon, stars and planets. Scribes could also go to work for the government (keeping track of taxes, building projects, floods, etc.) or for business owners (sales records, harvests, etc.)

The path of a scribe was not easy, however. First, you had to be a member of a wealthy family. It is unlikely that you could get into scribe school if you were the son of a lowly farmer. By the way, scribes were almost exclusively males. Second, you had to attend school for many years to learn the written language (cuneiform), the number system (based on the number 60), and the methods and conventions of a scribe. Much of scribe school consisted of memorizing and copying cuneiform texts from one tablet to another. Scribe teachers ran a tight ship too. Beatings were not uncommon for students that did not perform well or misbehaved.

No, it was not easy, but the student that could make it through school and become a scribe earned the right for many rewards. Scribes were some of the most powerful people in Mesopotamia because they controlled information and knowledge. Anytime you can do something that most people cannot, you have a good chance to be respected, powerful, and possibly very wealthy.

Check out this site for some interesting information and activities dealing with writing and scribes in ancient Mesopotamia from the British Museum.

Clues to India, Rome Sea Trade Found

The discovery of artifacts, including Roman amphora pottery and jewelry, by archaeologists working on the coast of southwest India seem to provide a missing link to the ancient sea trade believed to have existed between the civilizations of Rome and India.



The clues point to the location of the ancient Indian port city of Muziris. Researchers now believe the ancient port may have been near the small, modern-day town of Pattanam.

The port was likely the point for transfer of spices, particularly black pepper, from India in exchange for wine, oils, glass, and jewelry from Rome.

One of the first clues to the location of the ancient port of Muziris was the 1983 discovery of a cache of Roman coins near the modern site of Pattanam.

Amphoras, a term that I am embarrassed to not have been familiar with prior to reading the BBC story, were two-handled pottery vessels used by the ancient Greeks and Romans to transport wine and oils.

Source: BBC
Photo: Example - Late Greek amphora (public domain)

I don't understand the BC vs BCE, AD vs CE debate

A fight is going on in Kentucky on which historical dating system to use.

I don't understand what the big deal is. Yes, I realize the debate is religiously charged, but personally, I find it obvious that teachers should teach both systems in the public schools. I had never heard of the BCE/CE system until I got to college. I think teaching both offers the opportunity for discussion on why historians, archaeologists, etc, developed the new system.

I'm guessing most of you probably know the difference already, but here goes anyway...

The BC/AD system is the one most of us are used to. BC stands for "Before Christ" and refers to all years prior to the birth of Christ. AD is short for "Anno Domini," which is Latin for "year of our Lord." The problem with this system is the uncertainty over exactly which year in history Christ was born. Nobody has been able to pin it down for sure. Last I heard, there were theories that Jesus was born anywhere from -3 (3 BC) to AD 6. So, if this is the system in use, it is not absolute because using BC/AD basically means dealing with a possible +/- 10 year error when referring to a date.

BCE/CE on the other hand is an absolute dating system. It sets the starting point for dates at, currently, 2006 years ago. Everything before that is BCE (before common or current era). Everything after is CE (common or current era).

I use the systems interchangeably in my class. I explain the difference at the beginning of the year, but then I sort of oscillate between the two. I think it's important for students to be familiar with both because they will encounter both on a regular basis if they do much research.

Incidentally, another couple of useful terms or abbreviations relating to dates are YBP (years before present) and YA (years ago). I use these a lot when writing notes or handouts, usually in reference to really old dates (i.e. the Neolithic revolution took place approximate 10,000 - 12,000 YBP).

Hatshepsut: From Queen to Pharaoh

An exhibit on one of the relatively few femal pharaohs of Egypt, Hatshepsut (18th Dynasty), just closed at The Metopolitan Museum. However, they have a great page on the Hatshepsut exhibition still up at the site.

The page includes links to a great slide show from the exhibition, more information on Hatshepsut, and a audio file of Sam Waterston telling the story of Hatshepsut.

King Tut on Exhibit in Chicago

The windy city will be hosting the most famous of all the ancient Egyptian pharaohs through the end of the year. The following is part of a press release from The Field Museum in Chicago:



For more than 3,000 years they lay unseen beneath the Egyptian sands: gleaming treasures of gold and semi-precious jewels; statues and chests of breathtaking artistry; magical amulets and articles of ancient life; the mummified body of a young pharaoh.

Invention of Writing in Sumer - Cuneiform

One of the most important inventions that came from the civilization of ancient Sumer was writing. Oral language existed for centuries before, but the Sumerians developed a system for recording language around 3100 BC. Today, we call the Sumerian writing system cuneiform.

The word cuneiform comes from from Latin and means "wedge writing." It should come as no surprise then that cuneiform was a writing system based on different combinations of wedges. These wedges were pressed into moist clay tablets using a stylus made from the reeds that grew along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The pattern of wedges on the tablet could then be interpreted by someone that knew cuneiform into words, phrases, sentences, and even entire books. If the tablet was intended to be a permanent record, it could be fired, much the way a potter fires her pot to make it more or less permanent.

When cuneiform first developed, the wedge patterns resembled the objects they represented. For example, in Figure 1 (a list of gods c2300 BC), the star looking symbols on the left were a symbol for divinity. This makes sense since many of the gods lived in the sky. Figure 2 (religious record c2500 BC) also shows patterns that appear to represent objects or ideas. This early cuneiform is sometimes called pre-cuneiform.


Figure 1



Figure 2


In later examples of cuneiform, the wedge patterns appear much simpler, and they were therefore much faster to write. However, they were also harder to decipher because the wedge patterns have no resemblance to the literal ideas they represent. Similarly, the English language, when written, means nothing to someone that cannot read it. Figure 3 (sketch of cuneiform found on cliffs in Persia/Iran c500 BC) is an example of later forms of cuneiform.

In fact, Figure 3 is part of the script from the key to cuneiform, the Behistun Inscription. The Behistun Inscription was part of a memorial to King Darius I of Persia, and, much like the Rosetta Stone of Egypt, it was inscribed in three languages, Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian. All of those languages were in written in cuneiform, and by decoding one of the languages, Britain's Sir Henry Rawlinson and his colleagues were able to translate all three languages by the 1860s.


Figure 3


Cuneiform was used for all sorts of things in ancient Sumer. It could be used to keep crop or animal records and other important business transactions. The first known recipe, a recipe for beer, was found in the region of ancient Sumer. Cuneiform could also be used to record oral traditions. In fact, the first written story ever came out of Sumer. The story was called the Epic of Gilgamesh. Eventually, cuneiform was also used to develop the first written set of laws - Hammurabi's Code.

Image attribution: Figures 1, 2, and 3 are all considered to be in the public domain.

Introduction to Civilization in Sumer


As farming and irrigation techniques in Mesopotamia improved, more food became available. This meant that people lived longer and could have more children, and thus, they needed even more food. So, the irrigation projects of the Mesopotamians, particularly in Sumer (southeastern Mesopotamia), became more complex as the population continued to boom. The stage was set for some of the world's first known cities and the world's first civilization to appear in about 3300 BC.

Iron Blade Found in Ancient Taiwanese Tomb

Source: Taiwan Journal

Archaeologists found a rusted iron blade dating back to around 500 AD in the tomb of a male on the island of Taiwan last month, the Taiwan Journal reports.

The blade, measuring around 13-inches long and two inches wide, comes from a period designated by archaeologists as the Niasong period.

Chu Cheng-yi, head of the team working on the excavation, believes the blade was obtained by trade.



Chu noted that the iron implements found in the area were almost certainly acquired through trade, as no evidence of iron smelting has yet been found in the region. The only confirmed center for iron smelting in prehistoric Taiwan is the Shihsanhang archaeological site nearly 300 kilometers to the north in Taipei County. It is not yet known, however, whether the [recently discovered] iron implements found in Tainan County came from Shihsanhang or from somewhere else across the sea.

Tigris and Euphrates Rivers - The Geography of Ancient Mesopotamia


Mesopotamia is Greek for "between the rivers." Specifically, the rivers referenced by this term are the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers that run through modern-day Iraq. These two rivers, and the land between them, are often called the "cradle of civilization" because the civilization that developed there was likely the first ever on Earth.

If we go back to the characteristics of a civilization, we know that one of the first requirements is a surplus of food. It makes sense then that the people that settled in Mesopotamia did so to utilize the life (and food) giving waters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

Like other river valley civilizations (Egypt, the people of the Indus River Valley), the people of Mesopotamia relied heavily on fairly regular spring floods that spilled the rivers over their banks, leaving behind extremely fertile soil when the waters receded. The melting snows that fed the Tigris and Euphrates came from the Taurus Mountains to the northwest in modern Turkey and the Zagros mountains to the north in Iran and Turkey.

The Tigris and Euphrates were of course used as a water supply and to irrigate crops, but they were also important for transportation and trade. Mesoptamia was a cross-roads of the early ancient world for trade between Egypt, India and China, and the people leaving on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, a region called the Levant.

Like most of the great rivers of the world, the Tigris and Euphrates have been dammed to control flooding and harness the power of the moving waters. As a result, Mesopotamia is much less "green" in modern satellite images than it would have appeared even a few centuries ago. The deserts have reclaimed much of the land between the rivers, including much of the marshlands that were once plentiful there.


The deserts also reclaimed a chunk of the Persian Gulf, where the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers join and empty. You can see this clearly on the satellite image. The area of desert all the way up to the darker, more fertile looking region was once part of the Persian Gulf.

The Fertile Crescent is a term often used to describe Mesopotamia. In fact, the Fertile Crescent actually includes Mesopotamia all the way to the mouths of the Tigris and Euphrates plus the fertile plains, plateaus, and forests of the Levant region along the coast of the Mediterranean. When a line is drawn around it, the region forms a reverse crescent, hence the term Fertile Crescent. Some textbooks and maps even include the lower Nile River valley as part of the Fertile Crescent.

However you define them, the fact remains that Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent were home to some of the earliest and most powerful civilizations, and that was due in large part to the life sustaining waters of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

If you are looking for some ideas for projects to do for Ancient Mesopotamia, check out this page...

Image attribution:

Top - published under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 License on Wikimedia Commons

Bottom - NASA image available from NASA: Visible Earth

Farming and Food in Ancient Mesopotamia

Farming in most of Mesopotamia was a challenge. After all, away from the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the region was mostly desert. The exception was the region in southern Mesopotamia where the Tigris and Euphrates deltas were. The delta region was covered with marshes and unbelievably rich soil. There, farming villages began to spring up and eventually gave rise to the first civilization - Sumer.

Irrigation in Mesopotamia

Even though the farmland of Sumer was so fertile, crops planted there still needed water, and rainfall in the area, even during ancient times, would have been very scarce. As a result, Mesopotamians developed a system of irrigation. In fact, the Mesopotamians became masters at controlling water. They had to drain marshy land to expose the rich soil, and they had to get water from the only source - the river(s) - to the crops.

Controlling water in Mesopotamia was no easy task. The land was flat, so Mesopotamian engineers had no real natural help from gravity in moving water without altering the terrain. Most water moving was done by canals. The canals then carried water from the river or the marsh to a reservoir where it could be stored until needed. More canals connected the reservoir to the farmland where it could be directed further to water the crops. Of course these networks of canals, channels, and reservoirs had to be maintained, and much of it had to be rebuilt each year after the destructive floods ended.

Likely, the water from the marshes was not very good for growing crops because it was stagnate and salty. Some evidence suggests that the river water was slightly hard or salty also, and the buildup of that salt in the soil over centuries and millennia may have helped bring down the civilizations of Mesopotamia.

Mesopotamian Food

The Mesopotamians farmed all kinds of things, but the most valuable food sources were the grains they grew. Barley was probably the most common of these. Barley could be ground into flour for bread, made into soups, or fermented and turned into beer. They also grew common vegetables and gathered wild growing (and later domesticated) fruits such as figs and dates. The Mesopotamians had herds of livestock (cattle, goats, sheep) that could used for their meat, milk, and wool or hides.

Even though they were accomplished farmers and herders, the Mesopotamians also hunted wild game and caught fish from the river and sea. Grains, however, were the staple food of the Mesopotamians. Grain could be grown in abundance and packed the most punch in terms of nutrition and calories.

Sensational find: The mini-dinosaurs from the Harz Mountains

Bones are of dwarf sauropods – island location led to smaller size

When unusually small dinosaur fossils were found in a quarry on the northern edge of the Harz Mountains in 1998, it was initially assumed that these were the remains of a group of young dinosaurs. This was a fallacy, as the Bonn palaeontologist, Dr. Martin Sander, recently discovered. The microstructure of the bones, he says, makes it very likely that the animals involved were adults – a scientific sensation: at a maximum estimated weight of one tonne they were only a fiftieth the weight of their closest relatives, the brachiosaurs, and thus by far the smallest of the giant dinosaurs which have ever been found. The study will be published on 8 June in the journal 'Nature'.

In dinosaur bones there are what are known as growth marks, similar to the annual rings on trees. When the dinosaurs are young the growth marks are comparatively far apart, because the animal is still growing fast. When the dinosaur has reached its maximum size, the growth marks lie correspondingly close together. 'And it is precisely these tightly compressed marks that we have discovered just beneath the surface of the fossil's bones,' says Bonn lecturer Dr. Martin Sander, one of the few experts worldwide on the micro-structure of dinosaur skeletons. 'So the dinosaurs must have been fully grown when they died.' The newly discovered species is a dwarf compared with the other giant dinosaurs: the animals were only just longer and heavier than a car. 'They stopped growing when they reached 6 metres in length and a tonne in body mass,' Martin Sander estimates. Their cousins, by contrast, were up to 45 metres long and weighed in at 80 tonnes – as much as a small town of over 1,000 inhabitants. They are the biggest land animals which have ever existed.

The 150 million year old fossil bones had been regarded as a scientific rarity even before this discovery: 150 million years ago large parts of Germany were under water. There were only a few islands which lay above sea level – for example, the region around Oker. Dinosaurs, however, are land animals, with the result that fossil finds of dinosaurs are correspondingly rare in Germany.

Elephants as small as St. Bernards and the 'Flores hobbit'

This island situation may well be the reason why the 'pygmy dinosaurs' evolved: when the sea level rose, flooding more and more land, food resources became scarce. 'The result was enormous pressure to evolve: smaller animals which needed less food had better chances of survival,' explains Nils Knötschke of the Dinopark in Münchehagen, who has exposed more than 80 per cent of the bones found and also headed the excavations in the quarry. 'Shrinkage like this due to a reduction in the food available can take place extremely rapidly, sometimes within 10 or 20 generations,' Dr. Sander confirms. In Britain, he adds, deer were introduced to the Shetlands which within a short time evolved into a dwarf species of deer.

On the Indonesian islands of Floresthere used to be a miniature version of the elephant which at a height of 90 centimetres was hardly bigger than a St. Bernard – small enough to serve as food for the 'Dragon of the Orient', the Komodo dragon. This all fits in with the discovery which the scientific journal Nature reported on last year: on Flores also the 18,000-year-old bones of a 'dwarf' human. This 'Flores hobbit' was only one metre tall.

Godfather: Christian Wulff

The sensational finds were made eight years ago: in September 1998 Holger Luedtke, a hobby palaeontologist came across teeth and other remains of a herbivorous dinosaur in the Langenberg quarry near Oker on the northern edge of the Harz Mountains in North Germany. The animal was provisionally christened 'Hanna', with Lower Saxony's premier Christian Wulff in attendance as its 'godfather'. 'Hanna' is now being given a new scientific name: in honour of its discoverer it is to be called 'Europasaurus holgeri'.

An international team of scientists have excavated and preserved more than 1000 dinosaur fossils in the quarry since 1998 at the invitation of the 'Association for the Promotion of Palaeontology in Lower Saxony'. Because of the small size of the fossils they originally assumed that they had come upon a group of young dinosaurs. The scientific description of the new island dinosaur species, which is unique worldwide, was directed by Dr. Octávio Mateus of the Museo da Lourinha in Portugal. The palaeontologist Thomas Laven made a detailed study of 'Hanna's' skull: it is the only skull of a sauropod dinosaur to be hitherto found in Europe. Thomas Laven made sketches reconstructing the appearance of the animal, on the basis of which life-size models of the mini-dinosaur have now been made. They can be seen in the Münchehagen dinosaur park.

The quarry in the Harz has turned out in the meantime to be a veritable El Dorado of dinosaurs – with spectacular fossil finds of flying dinosaurs, crocodiles and tortoises. Even the footprints of dangerous carnivorous dinosaurs were found on the steep sides of the quarry. The excavation site is thus one of the few places worldwide in which the bones and the footprints of dinosaurs occur together – a veritable 'Jurassic Harz' which would have been Steven Spielberg's dream.

Source: EurekAlert

Study shows our ancestors survived 'Snowball Earth'

Source: University of Washington

It has been 2.3 billion years since Earth's atmosphere became infused with enough oxygen to support life as we know it. About the same time, the planet became encased in ice that some scientists speculate was more than a half-mile deep. That raises questions about whether complex life could have existed before "Snowball Earth" and survived, or if it first evolved when the snowball began to melt.

New research shows organisms called eukaryotes -- organisms of one or more complex cells that engage in sexual reproduction and are ancestors of the animal and plant species present today -- existed 50 million to 100 million years before that ice age and somehow did survive. The work also shows that the cyanobacteria, or blue-green bacteria, that put the oxygen in the atmosphere in the first place, apparently were pumping out oxygen for millions of years before that, and also survived Earth's glaciation.

The findings call into question the direst models of just how deep the deep freeze was, said University of Washington astrobiologist Roger Buick, a professor of Earth and space sciences. While the ice likely was widespread, it probably was not consistently as thick as a half-mile, he said.

"That kind of ice coverage chokes off photosynthesis, so there's no food for anything, particularly eukaryotes. They just couldn't survive," he said. "But this research shows they did survive."

Buick and colleagues studied droplets of oil encased in rock crystals dating from 2.4 billion years ago, recovered from the Elliot Lake area near Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada. The oil, essentially chemicals left from the breakdown of organic matter, contained biomarkers, or molecular fossils, that can be structurally identified as having come from specific types of life.

"It's the same thing as looking at dinosaur fossils, except these fossils are at the molecular scale. You are looking at the molecular skeletons of carbon molecules, such as cholesterol, held within oil droplets," he said.

This is not the first time biomarkers indicating that eukaryotes and cyanobacteria were alive before "Snowball Earth" have been found in ancient rocks. A paper reaching the same conclusion was hailed as one of the top science breakthroughs of 1999. Buick did some of the research for that paper and was a co-author. But almost from its publication, detractors have said what was seen were not really ancient biomarkers but rather some kind of contamination that got into the samples being studied, possibly from oil flowing through shale rocks at a much later time or modern fossil fuel pollution.

"The contamination idea has always been nattered about in corridors or talked about in meetings, but never put down in print," Buick said. "What this new paper does is confirm these as being very, very old biomarkers."

The lead author of the paper, published in the June edition of Geology, is Adriana Dutkiewicz of the University of Sydney in Australia, for whom Buick served as a postdoctoral mentor. Other authors are Herbert Volk and Simon George of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Australia and John Ridley of Colorado State University.

The researchers examined rock samples obtained from an outcrop near Elliot Lake, which then were fragmented into pieces less than one-tenth of an inch in diameter. The particles were cleaned thoroughly and checked for contamination throughout the process. The crystal fragments contained numerous minuscule pockets of fluid mostly consisting of water but also containing small amounts of oil, usually in a thin film around a bubble of water vapor. The oil resulted from decaying organic matter, probably of marine origin.

"A drop of oil is a treasure trove. It is highly concentrated molecular fossils," Buick said.

The biomarkers contained in the oil indicate that both eukaryotes and cyanobacteria first appeared before the planetary glaciation, rather than evolving at the same time or later, he said. The samples also suggest that oxygen was being produced long before the atmosphere became oxygenated, probably oxidizing metals such as iron in the Earth's crust and ocean before the atmosphere began filling with oxygen.

Grants from the Australian Research Council, the Australian Academy of Science and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Astrobiology Institute supported the research.

Operation Fortitude - Masters of Deception

Today is the anniversary of D-Day, the Normandy Invasion during World War II.

Many people know of Operation Fortitude. It was the deception operation that sucessfully kept thousands upon thousands of German tanks, vehicles, and troops from being sent to counter the Normandy landing. Operation Fortitude used dummy weapons and equipment (to fool German reconaissance planes) and fake radio traffic to at least partly convince the Germans that the Allies would invade at the Pais de Calais (the shortest route across the English Channel from Britain to France). As bad as D-Day was in terms of Allied casualties, imagine the difference had Operation Fortitude not worked.

A lesser known component of Fortitude was Fortitude North. This deception was an attempt to make the Germans think the invasion would come in Norway. This link from the BBC is an account from a British soldier that was part of Fortitude North.

Anthropologist Comments on 666 Superstition

Tomorrow is, of course, 6/6/06. The number 666 is often referred to as the number of the beast (the devil).

This belief comes from a passage in the Bible from the Book of Revelation 13:18. "Here is wisdom. Let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for the numbers that of a man; and his number is six hundred and sixty-six."

Phillips Stevens, Jr., Ph.D., associate professor of anthropology at the University of Buffalo, says that the interpretation that the number itself is evil is incorrect. Here is part of the press release from the University of Buffalo.
And, like many superstitions, the one regarding 666 is based on incorrect data: the "beast" referred to in the chapter is not Satan, but, in fact, several other entities.

"Revelation is a complex and confusing book, and is rarely read closely by lay people. Biblical scholars have pointed out that there are several 'beasts,' in Chapter 13 and elsewhere, and they all refer variously to Rome, Roman emperors and Roman cults of god- and emperor-worship," Stevens says.

"Revelation" author, John of Patmos, traditionally believed to be St. John the Apostle, was writing to other persecuted Christians in code, according to Stevens, so "many of the strange elements in 'Revelation' signify events, people or institutions familiar to first-century Christians.

"The mark of the beast, 666, signifies those in thrall to the emperor and thus opposed to Christianity, and is most probably the numerical equivalent of the Hebrew letters for Nero," Stevens says.

"Many perceived enemies of Christianity have been labeled the Antichrist, and Nero was one of the first," Stevens says, adding that there is an ever-growing, ever-changing list of persons considered the Antichrist that features "a long string of mostly historical figures -- Saladin was on the list, as was Hitler, and Saddam Hussein. The list varies according to who compiles it. Early Reformation-era Protestants had some popes on their list."