On this day in 565, the Loch Ness Monster was sighted for the first time.

The Irish monk St. Columba is said to have made the first sighting of the Loch Ness “monster” on this day while helping establish Christianity in the wilds of Scotland.

The legends, folk tales, accurate observations or complete hoaxes — your choice — that have come down to us as “Nessie” have bedeviled zoologists and everyone else who has tried to establish the existence of this cryptid over the centuries.

Descriptions of Nessie have depended almost solely on visual sightings and film and photographic evidence, which is of dubious quality at best. She (if that’s what the monster is) has been variously identified as a plesiosaur, an exceptionally large eel, a long-necked seal and even a swimming elephant.

While most photos, eyewitness sketches and some physical evidence seem to suggest the plesiosaur, paleontologists believe that the aquatic dinosaur was a cold-blooded reptile requiring much warmer water than is found in Loch Ness, where the average temperature is around 42 degrees Fahrenheit.

Serious searching for Nessie began in the mid-20th century, and a number of technologies — cameras, submersibles, sonar — have been employed since, all in vain. The Loch Ness monster remains as elusive, and as integral to the Scottish tourist industry, as ever.

There is a new film of JFK right before his assassination that has just surfaced. According to the website JFK.org:

This newly-discovered home movie of the fateful Kennedy motorcade was recently donated to The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza. The photographer, George Jefferies, filmed President and Mrs. Kennedy on Main Street at Lamar in downtown Dallas less than 90 seconds before the assassination. Secret Service Agent Clint Hill, assigned to protect Jackie Kennedy, can be seen riding on the left rear bumper. The donor, Wayne Graham, is the son-in-law of Mr. Jefferies.

Click here to view the video footage.

Inhabitants of the New World had chile peppers and the makings of taco chips 6,100 years ago, according to new research that examined the bowl-scrapings of people sprinkled throughout Central America and the Amazon basin.

Upcoming questions on the research agenda — and this is not a joke — include: Did they have salsa? When did they get beer?

The findings described today in a 15-author report in the journal Science make chile pepper the oldest spice in use in the Americas and one of the oldest in the world.

The researchers believe further study may show the fiery pod was used 1,000 years earlier than their current oldest specimen, as it shows evidence of having been domesticated, a process that would have taken time. If so, that would put chile pepper in the same league (although probably not the same millennium) as hoarier spices such as coriander, capers and fenugreek.

Chile pepper, however, makes up for its junior status with rapid spread and wild popularity. Within decades of European contact, the New World plant was carried across Europe and into Africa and Asia, adopted widely, and further altered through selective breeding.

Today, chile pepper is an essential cooking ingredient in places as different as Hungary (where paprika is a national symbol), Ethiopia (where the signature spice berbere is a mixture of chile powder and a half-dozen other substances) and China (where entire cuisines are built around its heat).

In all seven New World sites where chile pepper residues were found, the researchers also detected remnants of corn. That suggests the domestication of the two foods — still intimately paired in Latin American cuisine — may have gone hand-in-hand.

However, the new study — led by Linda Perry of the Smithsonian Institution — does more than illuminate the early history of cooking. It also provides details about early plant cultivation in South America, where agriculture emerged independent of its “discovery” in the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia.

Chile pepper residues were found in both the Amazon basin and on the coast of Ecuador. Because the plants don’t grow in the high, arid areas where the Incas and other advanced cultures evolved, the domestication probably occurred in more primitive, tropical cultures, which then traded in domesticated plants across the huge mountain range.

“The usual idea is that the tropical lowlands were mostly on the receiving end, that they were not areas of innovation. Now our findings are beginning to cast doubt on that,” said J. Scott Raymond, an archaeologist at the University of Calgary and co-author of the paper. Artifacts he excavated in western Ecuador contained chile residues.

The research also advances techniques in “archaeobiology,” a discipline that fuses archaeology and, in this case, botany. Specifically, it shows the study of microscopic starch granules stuck in the crevices of cooking implements can reveal the presence of foods that weren’t thought to have enough starch in them to be traceable.

Peppers are in the botanical family Solanaceae, which includes tomatoes, another wildly popular New World plant. Perry is going after them next.

“We are very excited that we now have a microfossil — these starch grains — that will make plants that were previously invisible visible to us,” she said.

It’s impossible to identify with certainty the first spice ever sprinkled on a roasting haunch of meat or thrown in a stew pot.

But Wendy Applequist, an ethnobotanist at the Missouri Botanical Garden, said capers have been found at 10,000-year-old sites in Iran and Iraq; coriander at a 8,500-year-old site in Israel; and fenugreek in Syria’s Tell Aswad, which is 9,000 years old. Whether these were domesticated or wild is not known.

As for the beer, David John Goldstein, an anthropologist at Northeastern Illinois University, in Chicago, said the New World’s oldest dedicated brewery is at a 2,600-year-old site in southern Peru. There, people from the Wari empire made a drink called chicha from the sugary seeds of a local tree and drank it for ceremonial purposes. Source

A village of small houses about three kilometers from Britain’s mysterious Stonehenge that may have sheltered its builders has been found, local media reported Wednesday.

The ancient houses have been excavated by a group of archaeologists studying the stone circle in England at a site known as Durrington Walls, where it is also the location of a wooden version of the stone circle, said Mike Parker Pearson of Sheffield University at the National Geographic Society.

“Eight of the houses, with central hearths, have been excavated, and there may be as many as 25 of them,” said Parker Pearson, “the village was carbon dated to about 2600 B.C., about the same time Stonehenge was built.”

Both Stonehenge and Durrington Walls have avenues connecting them to the Avon River, indicating a pattern of movement between the sites, according to researchers.

“Clearly, this is a place that was of enormous importance,” said Julian Thomas of Manchester University.

Stone tools, animal bones, arrowheads and other artifacts were uncovered in the village. Remains of pigs indicated they were about nine months old when killed, which would mark a midwinter festival.

The researchers speculated that Durrington Walls was a place for the living and Stonehenge — where cremated remains have been found — was a cemetery and memorial, media reported.

The megalithic ruin known as Stonehenge stands on the open downland of Salisbury Plain west of the town of Amesbury, Wiltshire, in Southern England. It is not a single structure but consists of a series of earth, timber, and stone structures that were revised and re-modelled over a period of more than 1400 years. Source

European history was altered by a bacterial infection in someone’s stomach, according to a report from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.

The stomach in question belonged to Napoleon, and the infection led to ulcers, which likely caused the French dictator to get cancer and die. Even if Napoleon had managed to escape from house arrest on the island of St. Helena, where the British stuck him after the 1815 battle of Waterloo, he would have been too weak to mount a comeback, the researchers added.

The study also cast doubt on the theory that Napoleon was poisoned with arsenic.

Dr. Robert Genta at UT, along with Canadian and Swiss scientists, essentially took the notes from the autopsy conducted at Napoleon’s death and threw it a battery of modern tests. The autopsy descriptions show that Napoleon’s stomach was filled with a dark material that resembled coffee grounds, an indication of gastrointestinal bleeding that likely was the immediate cause of death, according to Genta. The doctors then compared the descriptions against modern images of 50 benign ulcers and 50 gastric cancers. They determined that no benign cancer could look like the lesion described in the autopsy.

“It was a huge mass from the entrance of his stomach to the exit. It was at least 10 centimeters long. Size alone suggests the lesion was cancer,” Genta said in a prepared statement.

Genta also noted that contemporaries noted that Napoleon–who was rather tubby in his lifetime–lost 20 pounds toward the end. An ironic ending for a man who has a pastry named after him.

source

Before the great pyramids, ancient Egyptian kings left less grandiose monuments to themselves: fortresslike sanctuaries enclosed by mud-brick walls. Inside these mortuary complexes, people presumably gathered to worship and perpetuate the memory of their departed ruler.

The crumbling, almost vanished remains of such structures, archaeologists say, attest to the political hierarchy and religion of the newly unified Egyptian state, beginning more than 5,000 years ago. As symbols of the early power of kings and their roles in the cosmic order, these mysterious funerary centers are considered ancestral in purpose to the classic pyramids of Giza.

The last and largest of the cult centers — the only major one still standing in clearly recognizable form — was erected for King Khasekhemwy, who ruled in the second dynasty around 2780 B.C. Known today as Shunet el-Zebib, the two-acre enclosure stands on a desert plain at Abydos, 300 miles south of Cairo near the burial grounds of early Egyptian rulers.

Now, in an ambitious effort to preserve this ruin, archaeologists, engineers and teams of artisans and laborers are shoring up the walls and gates of Shunet el-Zebib, ravaged by time and the elements and in danger of imminent collapse.

Officials of the project said in recent interviews that the work over the last two years had been slow and careful, but was at least halfway completed. More than 250,000 mud bricks, made on the scene from an ancient recipe, have been laid to build up the high walls. It has cost $1 million, and an equal amount is being raised to finish the job.

“We are not trying to restore the original structure, producing a kind of Walt Disney thing,” said David O’Connor, an Egyptologist at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. “We are preserving and stabilizing it as it is in a way that reflects its nearly 5,000-year history.”

Dr. O’Connor, director of the preservation work, has conducted excavations at Abydos that have exposed the ruins of eight such enclosures. He suspects there are one or two others yet to be discovered.

British archaeologists investigating the site more than a century ago described the enclosures as fortresses, but more recent excavations, particularly at the one dedicated to Khasekhemwy, revealed the association with royal mortuary practices. Even so, owing to a dearth of inscriptions, archaeologists remain largely in the dark as to just what went on inside these centers to memorialize the king in afterlife.

The rulers were not buried at these sites. The underground royal tombs at Abydos are a mile south of the excavated enclosures. Later kings were buried elsewhere inside pyramids, which adjoined stone temples where priests made offerings and conducted rituals for the king.

At Shunet el-Zebib, the pre-pyramid architecture represents a grandeur of purpose and an investment of time and labor signifying expanding royal power. High, thick double walls, more massive than for any previous mortuary complex, enclose a rectangular open space. Originally, the structure had four monumental gates and a whitewashed facade that glistened in the sun.

“Most of these details have been lost or obscured by millennia of exposure, erosion and collapse,” said Matthew Douglas Adams of N.Y.U., associate director of the project. “But the enclosure itself still looms impressively over the surrounding landscape.”

The open area in the center could accommodate a multitude of people, though archaeologists are not sure if the public was allowed inside. Traces of small chapels have been uncovered inside the walls. Each was dedicated to a specific king.

In two such chapels at other enclosures, Dr. O’Connor said, remains were found of benches for statues or inscribed tablets, as well as evidence of spilled libations and burnt incense.

Writing in “The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt,” edited by Ian Shaw, Kathryn A. Bard, an Egyptologist at Boston University, said, “The paramount role of the king is certainly expressed in these monuments, and the symbols of the royal mortuary cult which evolved at Abydos were to become further elaborated in the pyramid complexes” of later dynasties.

Betsy M. Bryan, a professor of Egyptian art and archaeology at Johns Hopkins University, who is not involved in the project, said the Abydos enclosures and also one at another site on the Nile, Hierakonpolis, were important artifacts in serious danger.

The enclosures, Dr. Bryan said, “provide great information not only about burial preparation but about elite religious beliefs on the eve of Egypt’s ‘big bang’ — the pyramid age.”

A generation after Khasekhemwy, King Djoser introduced burial pyramids. His tomb was the Step Pyramid (designed as a “staircase to heaven” for the king) near the ancient capital Memphis, outside modern Cairo. Scholars note that Djoser’s burial complex incorporates significant aspects of the Abydos enclosures. The pyramid was surrounded by walls enclosing chapels.

It was in the 26th century B.C., a few generations later, that even more powerful kings erected the majestic pyramids at Giza, the last surviving of the so-called seven wonders of the ancient world.

In 2001, archaeologists grew concerned for the survival of the Shunet el-Zebib enclosure. They were alarmed to discover that the structure was in danger of collapse.

Some of the mud-brick walls still stood at close to their original height of 35 feet and thickness of 15 feet. But there were gaping holes where whole sections had caved in. The four gates were in ruins. Deep cracks and crumbling brick threatened further disintegration, Dr. Adams said.

The Abydos project, which also includes archaeologists from Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, called in American experts to decide what could be done to forestall further damage. The experts — William Remsen, a preservation architect; Anthony Crosby, a specialist in mud-brick and earthen architecture; and Conor Power, a structural engineer — recommended immediate action.

With financing from the American Research Center in Egypt and the United States Agency for International Development and permits from the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Egypt, workers began rebuilding some fallen walls and strengthening others. Brick makers from a nearby village were recruited.

An analysis of the ancient bricks revealed their original formula: two parts mud, one part sand mixed in water and sun-dried for two weeks. The replacement bricks, each stamped with PYIFA (for Pennsylvania, Yale and the N.Y.U. Institute of Fine Arts), now fill the most vulnerable sections of the old walls. Source: NYT

From a new analysis of a human skull discovered in South Africa more than 50 years ago, scientists say they have obtained the first fossil evidence establishing the relatively recent time for the dispersal of modern Homo sapiens out of Africa.

The migrants appeared to have arrived at their new homes in Asia and Europe with the distinct and unmodified heads of Africans.

An international team of researchers reported today that the age of the South African skull, which they dated at about 36,000 years old, coincided with the age of and closely resembled the skulls of humans who were then living in Europe and the far eastern parts of Asia, even Australia.

The timing, the scientists and other experts said, introduced independent evidence supporting archaeological finds and recent genetic studies showing that modern humans left sub-Saharan Africa for Eurasia between 65,000 and 25,000 years ago, probably closer to 45,000 to 35,000 years ago in Europe.

Until now, however, paleontologists had been frustrated by the absence of fossils to test the hypothesis of most geneticists that the people of sub-Saharan Africa and in Eurasia at this time were one and the same — modern humans. The human fossil record in Africa from 70,000 to 15,000 years ago had been virtually blank.

Some scientists, on the other hand, have contended that the migration could have begun as early as 100,000 years ago and that in the intervening time, contact with more archaic populations like the Neanderthals could have produced recognizable changes in what became the modern humans of Eurasia. But no scientists in the migration controversy have disputed that ancestors of the human species originated in Africa.

In a report in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, a research team led by Frederick E. Grine of Stony Brook University in New York concluded that the South African skull provided critical corroboration of the archaeological and genetic evidence indicating that humans in fully modern form originated in sub-Saharan Africa and migrated, almost unchanged, to populate Europe and Asia.

Dr. Grine and his colleagues said in an announcement by Stony Brook that the skull was the first fossil evidence “in agreement with the out-of-Africa theory, which predicts that humans like those that inhabited Eurasia should be found in sub-Saharan Africa around 36,000 years ago.”

Ted Goebel, an anthropologist at Texas A & M University who was not connected to the research, said the skull opened the way to important insights about “the missing years of modern humans.”

Writing in an accompanying commentary in the journal, Dr. Goebel said, “Here is the first skull of an adult modern human from sub-Saharan Africa that dates to the critical period, and one that can speak to the relationship of early moderns from Africa and Europe.”

The new findings pivoted on fixing the skull’s age. When it was uncovered in 1952 near the town of Hofmeyr, South Africa, the cranium was almost complete but the bone degraded. Not enough carbon remained for scientists at the time to extract a radiocarbon date.

Using new technology, Richard Bailey and other researchers at the University of Oxford, England, measured the amount of radiation that had been absorbed by sand grains that filled the braincase since its burial. They calculated the yearly rate at which radiation had collected in the sand and checked this with data from a CT scan of the bone. In this way, they determined that the Hofmeyr skull belonged to a human who lived 36,000 years ago, plus or minus 3,000 years.

Another member of the team, Katerina Harvati of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, made a detailed examination of the shapes, sizes and contours of all parts of the skull. She compared these three-dimensional measurements with those of early human skulls from Europe and with skulls of living humans in Eurasia and southern Africa, including the Khoe-San, commonly known as the Bushmen.

Because the Bushmen are well represented in the more recent archaeological record, Dr. Harvati said, they were expected to bear a close resemblance to the Hofmeyr skull. Instead, the skull was found to be quite distinct from all recent Africans, including the Bushmen, she said, and it has “a very close affinity” with fossil specimens of Europeans living in the Upper Paleolithic, the period best known for advanced stone tools and cave art.

“Much to my amazement,” Dr. Grine said in an interview, “the skull linked very closely with those from Europe at the time and not with South African remains 15,000 years on.”

Dr. Grine said these modern humans probably originated in East Africa, which is rich in fossils of ancestors of the species, and had then moved into Eurasia and also south to the tip of Africa.

“It would be nice,” he conceded, “if we had more than one specimen.”

Another report in Science described one of the earliest occupation sites of modern humans in Europe, at Kostenki on the Don River 250 miles south of Moscow. Its stone and bone tools and a human figurine appeared to have been made about 45,000 years ago, perhaps a little earlier than human sites to the west in Europe.

The lead author of the report was Michael Anikovich of the Russian Academy of Sciences. John Hoffecker of the University of Colorado, a team member, said the small figurine may be “the oldest example of figurative art ever discovered.”

Dr. Goebel said the new research archaeology, genetics and the Hofmeyr skull should help explain when and how modern humans leaving Africa spread out to different environments, which, he added, “is one of the greatest untold stories in the history of humankind.” Source: NYT

in 1998 President Clinton was impeached.

After nearly 14 hours of debate, the House of Representatives approves two articles of impeachment against President Bill Clinton, charging him with lying under oath to a federal grand jury and obstructing justice. Clinton, the second president in American history to be impeached, vowed to finish his term.

In November 1995, Clinton began an affair with Monica Lewinsky, a 21-year-old unpaid intern. Over the course of a year and a half, the president and Lewinsky had nearly a dozen sexual encounters in the White House. In April 1996, Lewinsky was transferred to the Pentagon. That summer, she first confided in Pentagon co-worker Linda Tripp about her sexual relationship with the president. In 1997, with the relationship over, Tripp began secretly to record conversations with Lewinsky, in which Lewinsky gave Tripp details about the affair.

For more info on this and other things that happened on this date, visit Today in history

A rib bone and a piece of cloth supposedly recovered after Joan of Arc was burned at the stake are probably not hers, according to experts trying to unravel one of the mysteries surrounding the 15th century French heroine.

Eighteen experts began a series of tests six months ago on the fragments reportedly recovered from the pyre where the 19-year-old was burned for heresy.

Although the tests have not been completed, findings so far indicate there is “relatively little chance” that the remnants are hers, Philippe Charlier, the head of the team, told The Associated Press on Saturday. read more…

Discovery rewrites history of ancient Mediterranean civilizations

Compared to the well-studied world of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the civilizations that flourished in the eastern Mediterranean just before Homer’s time are still cloaked in mystery.

Even the basic chronology of the region during this time has been heatedly debated. Now, a resolution has finally emerged — initiated, quite literally, by an olive branch.

Scientists have discovered the remains of a single olive tree, buried alive during a massive volcanic eruption during the Late Bronze Age. A study that dates this tree, plus another study that dates a series of objects from before, during and after the eruption, now offer a new timeline for one of the earliest chapters of European civilization.

The new results suggest that the sophisticated and powerful Minoan civilization (featured in the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur) and several other pre-Homeric civilizations arose about a century earlier and lasted for longer than previously thought. read more…