Wrapped In A Mystery The Sphinx of Greek myth was a baffling creature. She ambushed unsuspecting travellers, and then ate them when they couldn’t answer her riddles. But the original Sphinx – a colossal statue located at Giza, Egypt – is in many ways more enigmatic, and a riddle in its own right. This Great Sphinx spent most of its history buried up to the neck in sand, giving no clues to the colossal body, and the layers of meaning, lying below. Tuthmosis IV, the pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty, apparently excavated the Sphinx, as did the Romans. But shifting…
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Sex involving ‘penetration’ is part of life for at least 380 000 000 years.That’s way longer than what we suspected. Internal fertilization was common with prehistoric fishes that lived at old tropical coral reefs during the Devonian, writes Nature, in a article that casts a new light on the history of sex with vertebrate animals, and thus also us humans. The new discovery is that these ancient placoderms had developed this advanced form of mating well before the sharks. The prove that the fished did have internal fertilisation, was provided by the male fish fosiles.Those had an extra piece of…
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In the past few months, archaeologist have excavated an exceptionally well preserved urn field at Wijnegem in the province of Antwerp, Belgium.An urn field is a cemetery, where in cremation remains were placed in an urn into the soil. About 24 graves from the early Iron Age (ca.2800 years old) were examined. Circular ditches point to graves belonging to persons with a higher social status. That the graves are this well preserved, we partly thank to the fact that the site has been used as agricultural area since the early Middle Ages, and the preservation under 150 years old European…
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Young Howard Howard Carter was a talented child. Home-schooled in London, and encouraged by his artist father, he had plenty of time to practice his love of drawing and painting. And when his father went to work in Norfolk for archeaologist William Amherst, Carter caught probably his first glimpse of the kind of ancient Egyptian artefacts that would fascinate him for the rest of his life. Life in Egypt Carter’s talent for drawing and his interest in Egyptian antiquities lead William Amherst to arrange an interview for him with Percy Newberry who had been working on a site at Beni…
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