Scientists Just Discovered Zeus's God Temple That Has Been Sealed & Undisturbed For Centuries

Archaeological news constantly transports us around the globe and across time, all the way from the dawn of human history to the current day. The discoveries discovered by archaeologists are quite interesting because they shed light on the lives of ancient people and provide additional information about their lives. Each new discovery deepens our comprehension of the past and whets our appetite for further information. And, now new information has come. scientists just discovered Zeus’s, God Temple which has been sealed and undistributed for centuries.

Himera: One of the Most Archaeological Finds in Recent Years

Wherever there is an out-of-the-way war, there will be mercenaries — hired fighters whose only common bond may be a hunger for adventure. Some join foreign armies or rebel forces because they believe in the cause; others sign on because the price is right.

This was true in ancient Greece, although you wouldn’t know it from ancient Greek historians, for whom the polis, or independent Greek city-state, symbolized the demise of kingly oppression and the rise of citizen equality and civic pride. For instance, neither Herodotus nor Diodorus Siculus mentioned mercenaries in their reports of the first Battle of Himera, a fierce struggle in 480 B.C. in which the Greeks from various Sicilian cities united to beat back a Carthaginian invasion. Mercenaries were considered the antithesis of the Homeric hero.

“Being a wage earner had some negative connotations — avarice, corruption, shifting allegiance, the downfall of civilized society,” said Laurie Reitsema, an anthropologist at the University of Georgia. “In this light, it is unsurprising if ancient authors would choose to embellish the Greeks for Greeks aspect of the battles, rather than admitting they had to pay for it.”

But research published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the ancestry of the troops defending Himera was not as strictly Greek as historical accounts of the time would have it.

The victory was widely seen as a defining event for Greek identity. But the new study, an analysis of degraded DNA from 54 corpses found in Himera’s recently unearthed west necropolis, found that the communal graves were largely occupied by professional soldiers from places as far-flung as those known today as Ukraine, Latvia and Bulgaria.

The finding buttresses research published in 2021 in which Katherine Reinberger, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Georgia, and her colleagues performed a chemical analysis of the tooth enamel of 62 fallen fighters buried near Himera’s ancient battlefield, where two major clashes played out: one in 480 B.C., when Himeran forces defeated the Carthaginian general Hamilcar Mago, and a second battle seven decades later, when Hamilcar’s grandson returned for revenge and Himera was destroyed. Dr. Reinberger’s team concluded that about one-third of those who fought in the first conflict were locals, compared with three-fourths in the later battle. Dr. Reitsema is a principal author on both studies.

Angelos Chaniotis, a Greek historian at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, said the new study cast new light on the composition of the battles at Himera, if not on their outcomes. “It confirms the general picture that we had from ancient sources, highlighting at the same time the role of mercenaries,” he said. “Mercenaries are mentioned in our evidence, but they are often hiding in plain sight.”

David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard whose lab generated the data, noted that their paper “suggests that Greeks minimized a role for mercenaries, potentially because they wanted to project an image of their homelands being defended by heroic Greek armies of citizens and the armored spearmen known as hoplites.” Presumably, armies staffed with commandos-for-hire would undermine this picture.

The tyrants who ruled Greek Sicilian cities in the Hellenic Age recruited soldiers of fortune for territorial expansion, and in some cases because those rulers were wildly unpopular with their citizenry and required bodyguards. “The recruitment of mercenaries even spurred the use of coinage in Sicily to pay them,” Dr. Reitsema said.

The Sicily of antiquity, rich in resources and strategically located, was home to both Greek and Carthaginian colonies, which for a long time coexisted amicably. But when Terillus, tyrant of Himera, was ousted by his own people in 483 B.C., he called on his Carthaginian allies to help him retake the city.

Three years later, the Carthaginian general Hamilcar Mago sailed from North Africa to Himera with an expeditionary force estimated by Herodotus at more than 300,000 strong. (Modern historians put the figure closer to 20,000.) But cavalry and foot soldiers from two neighboring Greek Sicilian city-states, Syracuse and Agrigento, came to Himera’s aid, and Hamilcar’s troops were routed and his ships set ablaze. When all seemed lost, the general is said to have killed himself by leaping into a pyre.

In 409 B.C., Hamilcar’s grandson, Hannibal Mago, returned to settle scores. This time, the Greek army consisted mainly of citizens of Himera, with few reinforcements. The Greeks were defeated, and the city was razed.

The graves and the western necropolis at Himera were discovered in 2009, during the construction of a rail line connecting Palermo and Messina. The site has since yielded the remains from more than 10,000 burials. To archaeologists, one of the best indicators of a mercenary — foreign or local — is burial in a communal grave.

“Most likely, mercenaries would not have been known to the people cleaning up the battlefield and burying the casualties,” Dr. Reitsema said. As a result, mercenaries would have been more likely than citizen-soldiers to wind up in anonymous mass graves and become archaeologically invisible, or less visible, Dr. Reitsema said.

The dead found in the mass graves at Himera were all adult men. According to Dr. Reitsema, distinguishing the combatants from everyone else required “several lines of evidence.” Traces of violent trauma, such as spearheads lodged in a body, implied that an individual had died in action. “We didn’t find armor and weapons, apart from those embedded in bones,” Dr. Reitsema said. “Those items would have been recovered by the survivors on the battlefield.” The dates of the graves, based on stratigraphy and a few scattered objects, closely aligned with the dates of the historically documented battles.

Determining which bones were Himeran and which were Carthaginian was a matter of location. Alissa Mittnik, a Harvard geneticist responsible for the genomic analysis, said the deliberate burial of the fallen within the necropolis denoted that they were part of the Himeran army rather than the enemy.

“While we know nothing of the manner in which members of the Carthaginian army were buried,” she said, “it was typical in Greek warfare for the victor to allow the enemy access to the battlefield to remove its dead.”

Chemical isotopes in the mercenaries’ bones indicated that the soldiers were born far away and that their parents and grandparents were not immigrants. And the ancient genomes were sequenced and compared to all published genomes, Dr. Reich said: “The ones those new genomes are closest to are those from Ukraine and Latvia.”

Dr. Mittnick speculated that the hirelings may have arrived at Himera with the army led by the tyrant Gelon of Syracuse. Diodorus wrote of 10,000 foreign “colonists” whom Gelon later rewarded with citizenship, although their geographic origins are unknown.

“We know that many of the young men in the mass graves likely grew up outside of the Mediterranean but might have come to Sicily for the promise of citizenship or monetary rewards,” Dr. Mittnick said.

Beyond highlighting the disparate genetic backgrounds of troops, the research showed that genetic ancestry informed which bodies were interred in which graves. “The intentional groupings of foreigners sheds light on the internal logic of the identity constructions of Greek colonists,” Dr. Reitsema said.

Foreign fighters from a variety of backgrounds were buried in the same mass graves: sufficiently respected to be buried in the necropolis but still differentiated from many other persons of Greek descent. The smaller mass graves, in which soldiers probably were Greek, show the signs of greatest care in body placement and burial objects, indicating greater reverence or prestige than the outlanders.

Britney Kyle, an anthropologist at the University of Northern Colorado and an author of the study, said the research demonstrated the power and potential of new techniques to illuminate what life was like in the past.

“Too many studies of ancient DNA focus only on genetic results without fully exploring the biocultural background to contextualize their findings,” she said. “We’ve made a concerted effort to bring together information from historical accounts, archaeology, bioarchaeology and isotopic analyses to contextualize the genetic data. It’s amazing what we can learn when we weave diverse lines of evidence.”

Of all the surprises Dr. Kyle encountered while fact-finding, the biggest may have been the distances over which some of the mercenaries traveled to reach Sicily. “We think of warfare as causing or deepening divisions between people,” she said. “So it is fascinating to think of war as something that could bring people together.”

Source: https://archaeonewsnet.com/2018/11/himera-...

Stunning gold earring discovered in Denmark may have been gifted by the Emperor of Byzantium to a Viking chief 1,000 years ago

A stunning gold earring discovered in Denmark may have been gifted by the Emperor of Byzantium to a Viking chief 1,000 years ago, experts claim.

Dating from the 11th century, the 'completely unique' gold jewellery has never been seen before in the Nordic countries.

Likely one of a pair, it was found by a metal detectorist in a field near Bøvling in West Jutland, Denmark.

It's thought to have been originally crafted in Byzantium or Egypt and is potential evidence the Vikings had connections all the way around the Mediterranean.

The Byzantine Empire (395 to 1204 and 1261 to 1453), also known as the Eastern Roman Empire or Byzantium, was a powerful civilization based at Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul).

It's now being exhibited in Denmark National Museum's Viking exhibition 'Togtet', which translates as 'The Cruise' and is all about Viking travels to the Middle East.

Experts have so far been unable to find a similar earring in the area that may have formed a pair.

'It is completely unique to us, we only know of 10 to 12 other specimens in the whole world, and we have never found one in Scandinavia before,' said Peter Pentz, inspector at the National Museum Denmark.

'We had expected to find such a fine and invaluable piece of jewellery like this together with a large gold treasure or in a royal tomb and not on a random field in Bøvling.'

The find consists of a crescent-shaped gold plate inserted in a frame made of gold threads adorned with small gold balls and gold ribbons.

Its crescent-shaped plate is covered with an enamel, now slightly cracked, which would have been created by a special technique involving breaking and powdering glass before melting it with metal so it becomes opaque.

The motif of the enamel is two stylised birds around a tree or a plant, which symbolises the tree of life.

This type of jewellery is known especially from Muslim Egypt and Syria and from Byzantium and Russia.

In terms of style and craftsmanship, it's similar to the Dagmark cross – an 11th or 12th-century Byzantine relic.

The earring and the Dagmark Cross are thought to both date from the Viking Age or the earliest Middle Ages and were likely not traded but donated by kings and emperors.

That explains why the Dagmark cross was found in a queen's grave, at St. Bendt's Church in Ringsted, Denmark in 1683.

In contrast, the new treasure was found in a field in Bøvling without known Viking sites nearby, so how it ended up there is therefore a bit of a mystery.

The discoverer of the priceless find was 54-year-old Frants Fugl Vestergaard, who had searched the field many times before in the hunt for 'danefæ' – gold and silver in the earth without an owner.

As his detector gave a faint bleep, he picked up a clump of earth and crushed it in his hand to find the earring peeping out.

'"Stop it", I think, and then time stands still for me,' he told the National Museum.

'I get very humbled and wondered why I should find that piece and then even in West Jutland, where there is so much between the finds. It's like getting a text from the past.

'You always yearn to find something beautiful, a top find, and then you suddenly have it in your hands. It is completely inconceivable.'

One explanation for how it got there may be that many Vikings went into war service for the Byzantine emperor, who had a bodyguard consisting of warriors from Scandinavia.

Icelandic sagas show that mercenaries came home from the East with silk and weapons, and it is also said that the emperor occasionally donated fine gifts to his bodyguard.

So the earring could have been given personally by the emperor to a trusted Viking in the bodyguard and was then lost under unknown circumstances in Denmark.

The find confirms that West Jutland has always had strong connections around the world,' said Astrid Toftdal Jensen, an inspector at Holstebro Museum, which is near its finding place.

Jensen hopes the earring can be lent to the museum at a later date so that it can be seen in the area where it was found.

Source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ar...

Scariest Tribes You Don't Want to Meet | Uncontacted Tribes

People living in different parts of the world have different ways of life. In civilized countries, people follow a set pattern for daily life like going to offices or workplaces and performing assigned duties from 9 AM to 5 PM. But that's not the case for everyone. In some areas of the world there are tribes that still adhere to their unique rituals and cultural traditions which may even form part of their religious obligations. Some tribes don't have their homes and they do not have organized towns and cities. Their lifestyle is at times very scary. It may include conflicts or clashes within a tribe and some super gory post humus rituals we just don't understand. In today’s video we'll introduce you to some of the scariest tribes scattered around the world. Their culture and lifestyles are not for the faint hearted, so sit tight and enjoy meeting the part of humanity that refuses to conform.

Who were the Proto-Indo-Europeans?

The existence of the Proto-Indo-Europeans (formerly referred to as Aryans) was once argued purely on linguistic evidence, but recent analysis of DNA of the Yamnaya culture and related steppe cultures, demonstrates their genetic legacy on Indo-European cultures in a timeframe that matches the expansion proposed by linguists.

Most interesting of all, despite the fact these people started off in the Pontic Caspian steppe of Eastern Europe, modern populations in all of Northern, Central and Eastern Europe all have a strong genetic affinity with them.

This video explains what genetic and linguistic evidence tells us about how they lived, what they looked like and what their pagan religion was like.

Ancient Discoveries That Nobody Can Explain

Stumbling upon a historic artifact that doesn’t have a clear history or explanation is always bound to bring out the conspiracy theorists, like that guy on the History Channel who will always tell you that it’s proof of aliens. However wild that may be, the truth is there are plenty of historical discoveries that experts just have no idea about, and while people have tried to explain them, they still can’t do anything but guess.

From the creepy snake-shaped mound in Ohio to the alleged treasure map on the Dead Sea Scrolls that even Nicolas Cage wouldn’t be able to decipher, let’s take a look at some ancient discoveries that no one can explain.

The Evidence That The Lost City of Atlantis Existed?

I was lost, then I was found, you might hear some of the wonders of the world say if they could speak. We might look at perhaps the best known once-lost city in Machu Picchu, that was abandoned in the 16th century and discovered again in the 20th century. Then you have the spellbinding city of Angkor in Cambodia, which was never really lost, but certainly needed a lot of restoration for it to look as magnificent as it does today. We also have cities that are perhaps only legends, El Dorado, The Lost City of Gold; or The Lost City of Z, whose mystery lured explorers from Europe… and some never returned home. But today we’ll talk about perhaps greatest legend of them all, in this episode of the Infographics Show, The Evidence That The lost city of Atlantis Existed.

If we want to know the origins of the city of Atlantis we have to go back to the great, Greek ancient philosopher known as Plato. You’ve probably heard of the guy. Some writers have said all philosophy is just a footnote to Plato, while he’s the man that wrote the Socratic dialogues; he came up with The Cave allegory we still talk about today and he advanced ideas on justice, law, and learning that we all should be thankful for. With that in mind, if Plato was the one that started the story of Atlantis, perhaps we should take him seriously?

Places You Should Never Search On Google Earth

In the following video we will count down the #Top10 Places You Should Never Search On Google Earth. Here are some of the most mysterious places and locations found on Google Earth, Maps and Street. From a scary giant shark found in the waters of Antarctica, to a house that has been blurred out in Ohio, USA.

We Met Neanderthals Way Earlier Than We Thought

Maybe it’s a little self-centered that we can be pretty focused on the DNA that we got from Neanderthals – but we shouldn’t forget that gene flow goes both ways. Watch the following video to find out more!

The Luckiest Dig in Archaeological History

Finding the remains of Richard III is said to be one of the luckiest finds in history. How, and the events leading up to the discovery is nothing short of amazing!

12 Most Mysterious Artifacts Finds That Change History

Almost every discovery made by an archaeologist is interesting, but some are more interesting than others. Sometimes, an archaeologist will find something that seems to confirm that the things they already believe about history are correct. On other occasions, they find things that challenge our existing understanding of history. This video is all about those types of discovery - the ones that challenge our understanding of the past!

Earth's Real Lost Continents

Miles beneath the ocean there are numerous sunken lands just waiting to be discovered. How did these lost lands form, and what would they be like today if they had been just a little higher up?

Top 5 Mummy Discoveries that Scared Archaeologists

Archaeologists' feared response to Mummy Finds. When it comes to ancient people you definitely don't want to meddle with the supposedly cursed mummies who have been buried for thousands of years. In this video let’s find out Top 5 mummies unearthed by archaeologists that gave them the willies.