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It is a scene of war between the ancient religions that archaeologists have discovered INRAP in Angers: a Mithraic temple probably sacked by Christians.
Anno 393 to Andecavorum. A group of men approached a small building near an excavated domus. The leader opens a kick a wooden door opening onto a room in the basement. Loud cries, his men penetrate and devastate the furniture Loved picks. They have been working on a bas-relief showing a figure wearing a Phrygian cap slaying a bull.
Traces of this scene were found in Angers, where one of the few temples dedicated to the worship of the Gauls of Indo-Iranian god Mithra has been discovered. Mysterious cult reserved for men, almost sectarian Mithraic cult was especially popular in the Roman Empire through military and merchants. It is remarkable to find a Mithraeum Angers – a first – because it suggests that rich members of the elite practicing Mithraism (merchants and officials) have introduced the cult in the western Gaul.
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In the city of Palenque, Mexico, the ruins of a waterworks show that the Mayans did not wait for the arrival of the Spaniards to design hydraulic systems where water under pressure.
The gardens surrounding the castle of Versailles, with 50 fountains and 620 water jets, were the pride of Louis XIV. The mechanisms used to meet the water needs of all were at the height of the spectacle, but as most of the examples known since antiquity, they are based on the same principle, the gravity feed of water towers water via ducts, structures where the water gushes. The earliest example was discovered in a Minoan palace in Crete, dated to 1400 BC!
We thought that this technology had been introduced in the Americas by the Spanish from the sixteenthe century. It is not. Kirk French and Christopher Duffy of the University of Pennsylvania, United States, have uncovered the remains of such a hydraulic system in Palenque, Mexico, a Mayan city that flourished between 250 and 600 AD before being abandoned around the year 800.
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Research in Asia shows how weather events influence the course of a thousand years of history, the collapse of the Khmer empire until the fall of the Ming Dynasty
A study published in Science outlined a detailed profile of the four major droughts that hit Asia in the last millennium, managed to place them in relation to variations in the phenomenon of El Nino, the periodic phenomenon of surface warming in some areas of the Pacific.
The research was conducted through an extensive curriculum dendrochronological lasted over 15 years, most of which are used to identify a number of trees old enough. The researchers carefully examining more than 300 forest sites from Siberia to Indonesia, northern Australia to Japan to Pakistan, being able to identify different than thousand copies.
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Rare polar bear fossil discovered in Norway in 2004 has become a treasure of information about age and the evolutionary origins of the species, now highly threatened by global warming.
A study by researchers at Pennsylvania State University, the University of Buffalo, of Oslo, and other institutions, is putting in place the key pieces of the puzzle of the evolutionary history of polar bears and grizzly bears, including response to past climate changes.
The results of this study confirm that the polar bear is a species evolutionarily young man who was separated from brown bears about 150,000 years ago and evolved very rapidly during the late Pleistocene, probably adapted to the opening of new habitats and food sources in response to climate change just before the last interglacial period.
Very few fossils have been found polar bears, which has led to a wide range of estimates of when and how exactly evolved. The fact that these bears live in ice, which often makes their bodies fall to the bottom of the ocean.
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Most amber deposits are located in America North and Eurasia. Only a few amber Nonfossiliferous were known to the ancient Gondwana. Also discovered in Ethiopia in 2005, the first amber fossil in Africa, dating from about 95 million years ago, she was of primary importance.
About twenty of German researchers, French, Austrian, Ethiopian, Italian, English and American, has worked to study the geology of the deposit of the amber and fossils it contains. The study of insects led by Vincent Perrichot, paleontologist at Geosciences Rennes, revealed the great diversity and ecology of species, including a primitive ant, the oldest of Gondwana. This will better understand the early evolution of these organisms and trophic interactions within this ecosystem former. These results have just been published in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA).
Tropical forests, composed of conifers and even archaic populated by dinosaurs, grew in the Cretaceous (1) in this region of Ethiopia already famous for being considered one of the “cradle of humanity”.
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The idea that the ancient island of Hateg, Romania, dwarf dinosaurs existed, was proposed a century ago by Baron Franz Nopcsa, whose family owned property in the area. He realized that many dinosaurs had Hateg close evolutionary relatives in ancient rocks from England, Germany and North America, but specimens of Romania had only half the size.
Nopcsa The hypothesis has been validated for the first time in a new work by Professor Mike Benton of the University of Bristol, and six experts from Romania, Germany and the United States. They have found that dinosaurs were really Hateg island dwarfs.
A hotly debated topic among evolutionary ecologist is whether there is an “island rule” whereby the large animals isolated on an island tend to become smaller. There is no doubt that dinosaurs were found in Hateg small, the question was whether such individuals had reached adult size or not.
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At the end of the last interglacial period, 115,000 years ago, there were significant climatic fluctuations. In Central and Eastern Europe, the smooth transition that followed the final stage of the Eemian interglacial period was marked by increasing instability in patterns of vegetation, possibly with at least two warming events.
This is the finding of a team of German and Russian climate scientists who have evaluated the geochemical and pollen analysis of lake sediments in Saxony-Anhalt, Brandenburg and Russia.
The authors of the study, the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ, for its acronym in German), the Saxon Academy of Sciences (SAW) in Leipzig and the Russian Academy of Sciences, have concluded that a short event warming at the end of the last interglacial period marked the final transition to the ice age.
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Climatic fluctuations are likely to have precipitated the fall of Angkor, capital of the Khmer kingdom, 1450.
This is a millennium, Angkor formed the heart of the Khmer Empire. Megalopolis populated by a million inhabitants in its heyday, the city had an Achilles heel, however: water. A study of Brendan Buckley and his colleagues at Columbia University, researchers associated with Vietnamese, Thai and Australian, suggests that two periods of drought punctuated by torrential rains have contributed to its abandonment in the mid-fifteenthe century.
Agriculture in the South-East Asia depended then, as now, the summer monsoon. As established by the French archaeologist Bernard-Philippe Groslier, the French School of Far East (EFEO), in the 1950s, Angkor – the “hydraulic city” – had built a network of storage and distribution water covering more than 1 000 square kilometers, made reservoirs (baray), Ponds and canals.
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A team of archaeologists from the Universities of Manchester and eighty Ghana have discovered ancient clay figures showing that during a bygone era in West Africa there was a sophisticated society, now forgotten.
These statues are the last and most impressive batch of wonderfully human and animal figures carved from 1,400 to 800 years old, that have been unearthed from several mysterious burial mounds, also containing human skulls, in a remote region of northern Ghana.
Using modern analysis of the amount, context and distribution of figurines, Benjamin Kankpeyeng of the University of Ghana, Tim Insoll of Manchester enlightening hope to obtain data on the ancient ritual practices and beliefs of this sophisticated society, thus filling a gap in the history of this period in Africa.
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Paleontologists have discovered in the U.S. Utah, a large part of the new type of skeleton herbivorous dinosaur from the period before 185 million years. Named him Seitaad by monsters, which according to legend navajske the creation of the world buried their victims in the sand dunes.
Skeleton lacks a majority of the head and neck and some parts of the tail. Research has indicated that the animal was probably buried alive in a sudden landslide sand dunes. Missing parts of the skeleton, the scientists probably destroyed erosion.
The animal had a small head a long neck and long tail. It was about three feet high and about four meters long. Probably weighed around eighty pounds and could walk with four or sit and walk just two. Belonged to a group of dinosaurs from which later evolved the biggest giants, such as Brachiosaurus and Apatosaurus (also known under the older name brontosaurus).
“He was found in a sand dune, but this former desert had to be around when wetter and provide enough vegetation to feed these small dinosaurs and other animals,
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