9000 year old dental drill found

Believe it or not! Dentistry has existed 4000 years longer than thought. Near perfect holes had been drilled into 9 skulls that have been found for patients between 5500 BC and 7000BC in a Paksitan graveyard. For more see the link to the right.

Spartel Island, in the Gulf of Cadiz...a candidate for the origin of the Atlantis?

Where, oh where could Atlantis be?

Perhaps Spartel island will lead the way. See the below article from the BBC, August 15, 2005:

Tsunami clue to 'Atlantis' found

A submerged island that could be the source of the Atlantis myth was hit by a large earthquake and tsunami 12,000 years ago, a geologist has discovered.

Spartel Island now lies 60m under the sea in the Straits of Gibraltar, but some think it once lay above water.

The finding adds weight to a hypothesis that the island could have inspired the legend recounted by the philosopher Plato more than 2,000 years ago.

Evidence comes from a seafloor survey published in the journal Geology.

Marc-André Gutscher of the University of Western Brittany in Plouzané, France, found a coarse-grained sedimentary deposit that is 50-120cm thick and could have been left behind after a tsunami.

Shaken sediments

Dr Gutscher said that the destruction described by Plato is consistent with a great earthquake and tsunami similar to the one that devastated the city of Lisbon in Portugal in 1755, generating waves with heights of up to 10m.

Some think the Atlantis legend was inspired by real events

The thick "turbidite" deposit results from sediments that have been shaken up by underwater geological upheavals.

It was found to date to around 12,000 years ago - roughly the age indicated by Plato for the destruction of Atlantis, Dr Gutscher reports in Geology.

Spartel Island, in the Gulf of Cadiz, was proposed as a candidate for the origin of the Atlantis legend in 2001 by French geologist Jacques Collina-Girard.

It is "in front of the Pillars of Hercules", or the Straits of Gibraltar, as Plato described. The philosopher said the fabled island civilisation had been destroyed in a single day and night, disappearing below the sea.

Sedimentary records reveal that events like the 1755 Lisbon earthquake occur every 1,500 to 2,000 years in the Gulf of Cadiz.

But the mapping of the island carried out by Dr Gutscher failed to turn up any manmade structures and also showed that the island was much smaller than previously believed.

This could make it less likely that the island was inhabited by a civilisation.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4153008.stm

Could it be... the Ark of the Covenant???

Real life "Indiana Jones", Dr. Vendyl Jones announced last month on Israel National Radio that his team will likely find the site of the long lost, much mythologized Ark of the Covenant before August 14th...

Pin camera ready to roll on Ark of Covenant discovery

by Judi McLeod, Canada Free Press.
Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Toronto-- Mark August 14, 2005 on your calendar as potentially momentous. It’s one day before Ariel Sharon’s planned removal of 8,000 settlers from the Gaza strip, a dramatic event no matter the outcome.

Providing even more drama of a coincidental kind is Dr. Vendyl Jones. With the kind of credentials that make him one of the world’s most renowned experts on Qumran and the Land of Israel, Jones last month announced on Israel National Radio that he hopes to reveal the long-hidden site of the Ark of the Covenant "by August 14."

Stirring human imagination down through the ages, the Ark of the Covenant is allegedly the acacia chest in which Moses placed the Ten Commandments.

Jones calls his project to reveal the site of the ark, "Project Petakh Tiquah", "Door or opening of Hope".

No single story could ever do justice to the amazing accomplishments of Vendyl Jones, who was the true-life inspiration for Indiana Jones of Raiders of the Lost Ark blockbuster movie fame.

The real heroes of life are not up on the silver screen, they’re out in the field conducting tireless missions, under funded, media mocked, but soldiering on. The true-life red-blooded version always dwarfs the movie version.

Dr. Vendyl Jones’ painstaking detective work pinpoints the long lost ark as being "hidden in a secret passage that runs 18 miles south of the Temple Mount into the Judean desert."

No Hollywood hype could provide the same level of anticipation.

Since 1972, Jones has conducted eight major excavations of Qumran, the area where the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered in 1947. The Shemen Afar Shimon, the Holy Annointing Oil from the Holy Temple, was found in April 1988 by Jones’ archeological team. With an investment of nearly $2 million, all of it donated by supporters of his Vendyl Jones Research Institute and none of it from government, foundations and grants, Jones’ digs involve over 300 dedicated volunteers.

Should Vendyl Jones find what he is looking for in the Judean desert, Indiana Jones, the flickering ghost of the screen will be replaced by truth-is- stranger-than-fiction immortality.

By Aug. 14, Jones and Company are going to drill a borehole into the chamber which they believe contains the ark, drop a pin-camera in and, hopefully reveal the find to a watching world.

Non-believers may be interested to know that Jones has already discovered some of the holy items associated with the ark.

A credible Torah teacher, who hails from Texas, Jones has represented the Israeli Foreign Minister in a two-year lecture series on college campuses with P.L.O. representatives.

Rabbi Adin Israel Steinsalz, head of the Institute for Talmudic research and thought to be the world’s most renowned Talmudic scholar called Jones’ work, "Scientifically valid research which may result in important findings for the Jewish people and the world."

Wherever you plan to be on or around Aug. 14, you could be front row center to the filmed discovery of one of the world’s greatest artifacts of all time.

Missing for centuries, the ark is believed to have disappeared with the destruction of the First Temple by King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon in 587 B.C. Indeed, the exact whereabouts of the ark have been shrouded in mystery ever since.

Incredibly the Ark of the Covenant has a pretender.

With the blessings of the United Nations, a bizarre ark knock-off, carried through Vermont farm fields and sailed by sloop to UN Manhattan headquarters, has been making the rounds as a show-and-tell exercise at public schools. Called the Ark of Hope, the replica carries, among other things, the Earth Charter, a replacement for the Ten Commandments as advocated by former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev and Kofi Annan right hand man, Maurice Strong.

The Earth Charter is "an international peoples’ treaty for building a just, sustainable and peaceful global society in the 21^st century". (Philologos Bible Prophecy Research).

Even as you read this, the hidden location of the real artifact is underway with results possibly coming your way the summer of 2005.

Ancient "Bog" Body Unearthed in Germany

"A body found in a peat bog in northern Germany, first thought to be a murder victim, turned out to be a sensational archeological find: the 2,700 year old mummified corpse of a teenage girl."-- Deutsche Welle, see link to the right for more details of this extraordinary find of a 2,700 year old preserved bog body found in a peat bog in northern Germany.

Bogs contain extraordinary preservative qualities which have kept ancient remains intact for thousands of years. We have unearthed numerous bog bodies over the years, from unwary travelers, to victims (or willing participants) of ritual sacrifice.

The materials and artifacts recovered from bogs gives us insight into life in the wetlands. Bogs could be deadly places. Travelers frequently disappeared in the bogs as they tried to cross them. Bogs were often impassable with their spongy and uneven surfaces. People would construct track ways (wooden planks or a membrane of woven branches) across the bogs so as to connect with other villages.

The Sleeping Buddha of Bamiyan...

There was a fascinating tv program on Afghanistan by National Geographic the other day. I was just devastated when I saw the annihilation of Buddhas that had been carved into the Bamiyan hills overlooking its beautiful valley by the now ousted Taliban.

The Taliban had established themselves and their extremely fundamentalist interpretation of the Koran in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s. Their horrid interpretation of Islam and the subsequent distortion of the Koran's lessons led to the repression of the Afghan people. Westerners became aware of the plight of Afghan women in the 1990s. This started to highlight the Taliban's extremist views which condoned the mutilation or murder of anyone in the name of their god. Among other things, the Taliban also believed it sinful for art to imitate life.

Blindly destroying anything they could find that might serve as a representation of life today or in the past amounted to nothing short of an almost successful erasure of thousands of years of history and culture captured within the art of the Afghans.

I was mesmerized by Zemaryalai Tarzi, an exiled Afghan archaeologist's quest to find the Sleeping Buddha of Bamiyan. It is highly probably that he might already have found the beginnings of a foot to this statue, which could be over 1,000 foot long.

Referenced in the writings of a Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang almost 1400 years ago (630A.D.) Tarzi is convinced he has found the location of an enormous and ancient monastery where Xuanzang claimed to have seen the awe-inspiring sleeping Buddha during his pilgrimage on the Silk Road.

Tarzi will be returning to Bamiyan the summer of 2005 to continue with the excavation. I cannot wait to see what he will unearth!