This page features brief excerpts of stories published by the mainstream
media and, less frequently, blogs, alternative media, and even obviously
biased sources. The excerpts are taken directly from the websites cited in
each source note. Quotation marks are not used.
Source: WaPo
Jan 28, 2013
As a pathologist, Michael Zimmerman was familiar with dead bodies, but when he was asked to autopsy a mummy for the first time, he wasn’t sure what to expect. There were a dozen layers of wrapping, which he peeled off one at a time, “like Chinese boxes,” he said. When he finished, he found the body was dark brown and hard. “It smelled like old books.”That was more than 30 years ago. Now, having dissected and CT-scanned mummies from all over the world — some ancient and some just two or three centuries old — Zimmerman has begun drawing conclusions about health and disease in past eras. His work and that of other so-called paleopathologists is starting to challenge assumptions about which diseases are caused by modern lifestyles and which ones are as ancient as the pharaohs....
Source: The Post and Courier (SC)
Jan 28, 2013
For nearly 150 years, the story of the Hunley’s attack on the USS Housatonic has been Civil War legend.And it has been wrong.Scientists have discovered a piece of the Confederate submarine’s torpedo still attached to its spar, debunking eyewitness accounts that the Hunley was nearly 100 feet away from the explosion that sent a Union blockade ship to the bottom of the sea off Charleston in 1864....
Source: Italy Magazine
Jan 28, 2013
An American classics professor has uncovered ancient grape seeds that could provide insight into Roman Chianti vineyards.One of the world’s authorities on the Etruscans, Nancy Thomson de Grummond is the M. Lynette Thompson Professor of Classics and Distinguished Research Professor at Florida State University. She unearthed 150 waterlogged grape seeds during a dig in Cetamura del Chianti, an ancient hilltop located in the heart of the Chianti district of Tuscany near Siena, during the summer of 2012.De Grummond serves as project director of archaeological excavations at Cetamura del Chianti, which is in an area once inhabited by the Etruscans and then the Ancient Romans. Faculty and students of Florida State University have conducted research at the archaeological site since it opened in 1973....
Source: Past Horizons
Jan 28, 2013
Mexican archaeologists from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) recently located and recorded a rock panel covered in petroglyphs that may have been carved between 850 and 1350 CE.The site named “Cantil de las animas” [Ledge of Souls] is near the town of Jesus Maria Cortes in Tepic, Nayarit, Western Mexico.The carved symbolic representations, which are attributed to the ancient Aztlan culture, were located in a new archaeological zone within the region’s mountainous zone, and they cover a south facing surface of vertical rock about 4 metres long and 2 metres high....
Source: NYT
Jan 28, 2013
ROME (AP) — Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy praised the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini for having been a good leader in many respects, despite his responsibility for anti-Jewish laws, immediately prompting expressions of outrage on Sunday as Europeans held Holocaust remembrances.Mr. Berlusconi also defended the dictator for allying himself with Hitler, saying that Mussolini probably reasoned that it would be better to be on what he thought would be the winning side.
Source: Guardian (UK)
Jan 28, 2013
Islamist insurgents retreating from the ancient Saharan city of Timbuktu have set fire to a library containing thousands of priceless ancient manuscripts, some dating back to the 13th century, in what the town's mayor described as a "devastating blow" to world heritage.Hallé Ousmani Cissé told the Guardian that al-Qaida-allied fighters on Saturday torched two buildings where the manuscripts were being kept. They also burned down the town hall and governor's office, and shot dead a man who was celebrating the arrival of the French military.French troops and the Malian army reached the gates of Timbuktu on Saturday and secured the town's airport. But they appear to have got there too late to save the leather-bound manuscripts, which were a unique record of sub-Saharan Africa's medieval history....
Source: Bloomberg News
Jan 27, 2013
In the spring of 1945, Harald Quandt, a 23-year-old officer in the German Luftwaffe, was being held as a prisoner of war by Allied forces in the Libyan port city of Benghazi when he received a farewell letter from his mother, Magda Goebbels -- the wife of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels....Quandt was released from captivity in 1947. Seven years later, he and his half-brother Herbert -- Harald was the only remaining child from Magda Goebbels’ first marriage -- would inherit the industrial empire built by their father, Guenther Quandt, which had produced Mauser firearms and anti-aircraft missiles for the Third Reich’s war machine. Among their most valuable assets at the time was a stake in car manufacturer Daimler AG. (DAI) They bought a part of Bayerische Motoren Werke AG (BMW) a few years later....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 27, 2013
It was perhaps one of the most hazardous roles of the First World War – acting as bait for German submarines.But that was exactly the job of HMS Stock Force, one of the Royal Navy’s top secret “Q-ships” or “Mystery Ships” – specially adapted decoy vessels with concealed guns, which lured U-boats to the surface and then engaged them in a deadly duel.The Stock Force was sunk in just such a clash, in what became one of the war’s most celebrated naval encounters, which led to its captain, Lieutenant Harold Auten, receiving the Victoria Cross, and inspired an early action film....
Source: BBC News
Jan 25, 2013
Marine archaeologists working on a wreck off the coast of Sicily have discovered five large cannon from a British ship, believed to have sunk in a major battle with Spanish galleons.The team searching waters near the city of Syracuse said the "exceptional" find dates back to the Battle of Cape Passaro in the early 1700s.Pictures taken by divers show the cannon were barely covered by sand....
Source: The New Scientist
Jan 25, 2013
Twenty-six thousand years ago in the Czech Republic, one of our ice-age ancestors selected a hunk of mammoth ivory and carved this enigmatic portrait of a woman - the oldest ever found. By looking at artefacts like this as works of art, rather than archaeological finds, a new exhibition at the British Museum in London hopes to help us see them and their creators with new eyes.Human ancestors date back millions of years, but the earliest evidence of the human mind producing symbolic imagery as a form of creative expression cannot be much older than 100,000 years. That evidence comes from Africa: this exhibition explores the later dawning of representative art in Europe and shows that even before the remarkable paintings of the Lascaux cave, France, humans were able to make work as subtle as the expressive face above....
Source: World Archaeology
Jan 25, 2013
The mystery of what happened to Greenland’s Norse population is one step closer to being solved, as new evidence suggests that the colony did not die out because its inhabitants were unable to adapt to their new environment.
Source: Yahoo News
Jan 25, 2013
It’s not too soon to start talking about the next presidential inauguration in 2017, and why the historical re-election trends favor the Republicans.Andrew Jackson.Maybe Hillary Clinton, the current very-early front-runner for the Democratic nomination, can break the struggles that Democrats have had trying to win a presidential election after its candidate (or his legal successor) won two prior elections.That’s only happened twice since 1828 for the Democrats, when the modern two-party era started in earnest. In 1836, the Democratic Vice President Martin Van Buren succeeded Andrew Jackson by defeating four Whig candidates, while President Franklin D. Roosevelt succeeded himself in 1940 by running for an unprecedented third term....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 24, 2013
It finally proved what the Dorset pensioner had long suspected – that his parents and grandmother perished in the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz nearly seven decades ago.Mr Grenville and his sister were among 10,000 Jewish children evacuated from Germany to Britain before the war as part of the Kindertransport refugee mission.They knew their parents Jacob and Klara Greilsamer and grandmother Sara Ottenheimer had been sent to an internment camp in Czechoslovakia and had been able to exchange brief messages with them via the Red Cross....
Source: NYT
Jan 24, 2013
PARIS – The Hôtel Ritz Paris, famous for its bar, its swimming pool and its assignations, had a treasure hiding in plain sight, an exceptional painting that had been hanging on a wall for decades without anyone paying it the least attention.With the hotel shut for renovation, the auction house Christie’s announced this week that art experts had decided that the long-ignored canvas was by Charles Le Brun, one of the masters of 17th-century French painting, and that it would be put it up for auction....
Source: Trent University
Jan 24, 2013
Archaeologists from Trent University have discovered a rare jade artefact, one of the first of its kind to be found in an archaeological dig, while excavating the ancient Maya city of Ka’Kabish in Belize.The six centimetre jade object, known as an Olmec spoon, was unearthed in June 2012 from a 2,700 year old grave beneath the Ka’Kabish plaza along with 16 other jade artefacts. Similar objects have been recovered in Mesoamerica, but this is one of the first times an Olmec spoon has been found in a secure archaeological site....
Source: Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
Jan 24, 2013
A team of researchers led by the UAB has found the first ancient remains of a calcified ovarian teratoma, in the pelvis of the skeleton of a woman from the Roman era. The find confirms the presence in antiquity of this type of tumour - formed by the remains of tissues or organs, which are difficult to locate during the examination of ancient remains. Inside the small round mass, four teeth and a small piece of bone were found.Teratomas are usually benign and contain remains of organic material, such as hair, teeth, bones and other tissues. There are no references in the literature to ovarian teratomas in ancient remains like those found in this study, led by the researcher Núria Armentano of the Biological Anthropology Unit of the UAB and published in the International Journal of Paleopathology....
Source: NYT
Jan 24, 2013
Senators will still be able to talk and talk and talk, though for not quite as long as they have grown accustomed to. Legislation will still be mired in mucky procedural delays, though there will be fewer of them to exploit. And there is a glimmer of hope that rank-and-file senators will actually be able to do what they were elected to do: shape legislation.
Source: NBC News
Jan 24, 2013
Dave Powers, the man widely considered to be John F. Kennedy’s best friend, kept several of the Kennedys’ photos and personal artifacts over the years. They were discovered recently at Powers’ home, and will be put up for auction next month.
Source: CBS
Jan 24, 2013
Life Magazine dug into its archives and published rare color photographs from World War II on the day before and after D-Day.
Source: PastHorizon
Jan 24, 2013
Detailed examination of samples of ancient DNA has revealed the genetic makeup of humans living circa 40,000 years ago in an area near what is now Beijing in China.An international team of researchers including Svante Pääbo and Qiaomei Fu of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have sequenced nuclear and mitochondrial DNA extracted from the leg of an early modern human from Tianyuan Cave near Beijing.Analyses of DNA recovered from the leg bones showed that the Tianyuan human shared a common origin with present-day Asians and Native Americans. In addition, the researchers found the proportion of Neanderthal and Denisovan-DNA in this early modern human is no higher than in current populations living in this region today....
