The Mysterious Ram Setu

The space images taken by NASA reveal a mysterious ancient bridge in the Palk Strait between India and Sri Lanka. This recently discovered bridge currently named as Adam's Bridge, made of chain of shoals, is 30 km long. This information is a crucial because it supports the mysterious legend called Ramayana, which was supposed to have taken place in "Tredha Yuga" (according to Hindu mythology more than 1,700,000 years ago). The legends as well as Archeological studies reveal that the first signs of human inhabitants in Sri Lanka date back to the a primitive age, about 1,750,000 years ago and the bridge's age is also almost equivalent.

585 New Marine Species in the dark water of the Antarctica

Carnivorous Sponges, 585 new species of crustaceans and hundreds of new worms are discovered by scientists in the dark water of the Antarctica. This discovery have given scientists a new light about the evolution of marine species and how they can adapt to changes in climate and environment. Among the new creatures, the scientists have found a gourd-shaped carnivorus sponge called Chondrocladia, free swimming-worms and 674 species of isopod of which 585 species had never been seen before. The unique species tend to be the kind that do not spread easily , which sggests the deep, cold southern oceans may have been the source of many types of marine life.

Treasure of the 'Pirates of the Atlantic' : The Richest Sunken Treasure Ever Discovered :Worth USD 500 Million!

Odyssey Marine, a marine exploration company, has struck gold- the biggest shipwreck treasure in history worth estimated USD 500 million. The find contains over 500,000 pieces from the Colonial Era, and each piece is estimated to bring $1000 from collectors. "I don't know of anything equal or comparable to it.", said Nick Bruyer, a coin expert who has seen coins found in the wreckage. He noted a range of varieties and dates of coins that are probably uncirculated.

The real life sunken treasure is discovered in the Atlantic Ocean, in a high traffic area where many colonial era vessels were believed to have been sunken. The site is near the English Channel, located about 40 miles off England's coastline. Because the shipwreck was found in a shipping lane where many colonial-era vessels went down, there is still some uncertainty about its nationality, size and age, although evidence points to a specific known shipwreck.

Calling the project "Black Swan," Odyssey isn't releasing details about the coins for security reasons. Nor they are talking about the types, denominations and country of origin of the coins. Till now (20.05.2007), they only indicated an announcement would be forthcoming. Court records indicate the coins might come from a 400-year-old ship found off England and the site of the ship is out of any country's territorial jurisdiction.

2700 Year-Old Piece of Fabric Found inside Funeral Urn of Unknown Ancient Greek

It is only speculation whether or not the Trojan war really occurred as depicted by Homer in his epics, Iliad and Odyssey. We only know that a war did take place around a city that quite likely was Troy, that Troy was destroyed utterly. This war, however, is still regarded as the defining cultural moment in Greek history. In Iliad, the poet describes Slain Heroes being cremated in elaborate funerals, which fell out of fashion in later times. But with the latest discovery of rare 2700 year old piece of fabric along with dried pomegranates and charred human bones inside a funeral copper urn confirms that this tradition was popular even later. Archaeologists have discovered the artifacts from a burial they believe imitated the elaborate cremation of soldiers described in Homer's Iliad.

The Mystery Resolved; the Tomb of King Herod Found

It has long been believed that King Herod, the legendary builder of ancient Jerusalem and the Holy Land, was buried somewhere in Herodium, a flattened hilltop in Judean Desert. Herod built two palaces on it, and decades of excavations had revealed a lot them but the tomb. Now, the tomb is found in between the two palaces by Ehud Netzer, a Hebrew University professor.

Herod became the ruler of the Holy Land under the Roman Empire in 40 BC. He built a wall around the old city Jerusalem which still stands, and he also ordered big construction projects in Caesaria, Jericho, the hilltop fortress of Massada which was occupied by Jewish rebels after the Jewish revolt in the first century. The rebels defended themselves from a Roman army for months. When it appeared that the Romans would finally conquer the fortress, hundreds of rebels committed suicide rather than be taken as prisoners by the conquering Romans. Although this fort is not mentioned in the Bible, it does give insight into the Roman military methods as well as the life of King Herod and his construction.

Herodium was one of the last strong points held by Jewish rebels fighting against the Romans, and the fort was destroyed by the Roman army in AD 71, a year after they destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem.

The 1st century historian Josephus Flavius described the tomb of King Herod who died in approximately 40 BC, and mentioned also about the funeral procession of the legendary king.

Oldest Proverbs In Paintings

Painting on popular proverbs was one of the most interesting trends in the history of painting. These paintings remind us of some of our oldest proverbs. The famous painting ‘Netherlandish Proverbs’ (1599) by Pieter Bruegel, one of the greatest Netherlandish artists, is probably the best in this line. It includes some most popular proverbs of the Netherlands. Examples include “The sow removes the spigot”(to make a pig of oneself), “He butts his head against the wall”(to bang one’s head against a brick wall), “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch”, “He opens the door with his bottom”(he doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going”), “He who spills his gruel can’t pick it all up”(it’s no use crying over split milk), “He kills two flies with one blow”(to kill two birds with one stone), “They pull for the long piece”(to draw straws/pull the wishbone), “He throws money into the water”(to throw money down the drain), “He cannot reach from one loaf to the other”(He cannot make ends), “He doesn’t care whose house is burning as long as he can warm himself from the coals”(I’m all right Jack), “To poke a stick into the wheel”(to put a spoke in the wheel”, “He speaks out of two mouths”(to be two- faced), “One holds the distaff while the other spins”(it takes two to gossip) and many more. The painting ‘Netherlandish Proverbs’ depicts over 120 proverbs and sayings. The abstract activities of the villagers in the painting reflect the topsy-turvy nature of the world. The proverbs fall into two groups- those which show the absurdity of human behaviour, and those which demonstrate sinfulness (such as the woman wrapping a blue clock around her husband, symbolizing her adultery). Pieter Bruegel modeled this painting on a contemporary painting ‘The Blue Clock” by Frans Hogenberg. But Bruegel changed the abstract village setting into a realistic one. Moreover he increased the number of proverbs in his new painting from 40 to more than 100.

The Fighting Temeraire By Turner

One summer evening in 1838, Joseph Turner, the famous British painter, was a passenger on a steamer chugging along the Thames from Margate to London. Standing along the rail, the painter watched the warship Temeraire. The 98 gun veteran warship was not an ordinary one. It had taken part in the Battle of Trafalgar, the battle in which two most powerful fleets in the world, Britannia and Bonaparte, had engaged to establish their supremacy in the sea. The British naval force had won the greatest battle in British naval history but at the cost of thousands of lives of British soldiers, and England's brightest son Vice Admiral Lord Nelson. The painter was impressed; patriotic sentiment aroused at the sight of the Temeraire. This was the warship which avenged the death of Nelson! Turner rapidly made a number of little sketches on card. In 1839, he exhibited the ‘Fighting Temeraire’ at the Royal Academy.From the day of its first exhibition, the ‘Fighting Temeraire’ has been Turner’s most popular painting. It exhibits Turner’s mingling of pictorial splendor with patriotic sentiment. The picture shows the Temeraire being towed up the Thames to a breaker’s yard. The ship in full sail in the background symbolizes the Temeraire’s own days of glory while the black buoy looming in the foreground suggests the finality of the Battle of Trafalgar, the melancholy journey. The silver white of the ship endows a ghostly majesty to it while the black tug symbolizes evil. The blazing sunset in the picture indicates an era coming to its end and bloodshed as well. In 1939, the Morning Chronicle described this painting as ‘the Sun of the Temeraire is setting in Glory’. The famous English novelist William Thackeray compared the effect of this picture with a performance of ‘God Save the Queen” to evoke enthusiasm of both public and critics.

Second To Mona Lisa’s Smile- The Cavalier’s Laughter

Apart from the ‘Mona Lisa’ by Leonardo da Vinci, ‘The Laughing Cavalier’ is probably the most famous portrait in the world. This painting earned its fame at a much later period. It was painted in 1624 by Frans Hals, one of the greatest portraitists in the seventeenth century. Its familiar but the inaccurate title (the cavalier is smiling rather than laughing), now inseparable from the work, did not appear till 1888. The title was certainly a Victorian era invention. When the painting was acquired in 1865 by Richard Wallace’s father, it was called ‘Portrait of a Young Man’. However the young man in the painting is still unknown. There is no record available now. Nowhere Hals recorded his name. At the top right corner of the portrait it is inscribed "Æ'TA SVÆ 26/A°1624", which imply that the ‘young man’ was 26 in the year 1624 when Hals made his portrait. This portrait is spontaneous, and it reflects the brilliance of Hals as a portraitist. Like his other portraits, this ‘Laughing Cavalier’ shows his power in depicting smiles and laughter so convincingly. The sitters in his painting usually seem to enjoy life. This ‘Laughing Cavalier’ is certainly the best example. In the eighteenth century print, this painting fetched a modest price at auction. But in 1865 it was auctioned at 51000 francs, a mind boggling sum that heralded the great boom in the popularity of the painting. ‘The Laughing Cavalier’ is now in the Wallace Collection, London.

Duel Between Abraham Lincoln And the Gunfighter!

Fortunately, the duel was won without shedding a drop of blood! Here the challenged was the legendary President Abraham Lincoln and the challenger was a renowned gunfighter. In a duel the challenged party had the privilege to choose the place and manner of the duel. Lincoln accepted the challenge, and his condition was- duel with broadswords in six feet of water. The challenger withdrew the challenge as Lincoln was 6 feet 4 inch. The wise President was the victor ,and later the foe became his friend.Another ‘real’ duel was between a General and, again, a Prime Minister. It was the duel between Floquet, the Prime Minister of the Republic of France, and the ex war Minister General Boulanger. In 1888 general Boulanger insulted the Prime Minister who responded with a challenge that led to a duel. Boulanger had choice of weapons and chose swords. Everyone thought that the General would be the winner. He was a soldier 10 years younger than his opponent and he had fought for his country in Italy, Indochina, Algeria, and the Franco-Prussian war. But to the surprise of all the ‘Brave General’ was fatally wounded in the throat. Floquet, the Prime Minister, was the victor. The British press were scathing about the duel, as dueling had been banned in England about half a century beforehand.In history, there are dozens of example of famous duels. Another among them is the duel between the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin and Georges d’Anthes. The later was accused of cheating in this duel in which the poet was mortally wounded. Another famous duel was between Robert Lyon and John Wilson. This time it was a pistol duel in which the challenger Lyon was killed. There were also some unusual duels. In 1808 France, two duelists fought in balloons; in 1843 two duelists used billiard balls as their weapons; and some used even to use sledgehammers, howitzers, forkfuls of pig dung and other ridiculous weapons.

The Naked Maja

Francisco de Goya, best known for his “The Naked Maja” and the “The Clothed Maja”, was the one of the greatest painters of all time. He was born in 1746 in Fuendetodos, a small village in western Spain. His beginnings as an artist were very slow. But soon the genius showed his capabilities as an artist. The first major breakthrough came when he was elected a member of the most reputed Madrid Academy. After Charles IV was crowned in 1789, goya became one of his court painters. It was a period of political unrest in Spain, chiefly due to the French invasion of Spain.Goya recorded the horror of the Napoleonic invasion in some of his famous paintings.The most famous painting of Goya are “The Naked Maja” and the “The Clothed Maja”. Like the “Mona Lisa” by Leonardo da Vinci, these two paintings are the source of one of the most popular legends in the history of art. Most of the critics believes that these two paintings are of the widowed Duchess of Alba, a rich and powerful woman with whom Goya was on particularly close terms. This woman, who was 16 years younger than Goya, was famous for her capricious nature. Her late husband had been Goya’s patron. After his death, she retired with the artist to her estate in Andalusia. Here it has been supposed that, the Duchess of Alba posed for the erotic painting “The Naked Maja” (1800). The other painting “The Clothed Maja”, painted three years before (1797) the first one, also hints at the fact that Goya had a very close relationship with this woman.But Goya was not a relentless womanizer or a manic depressive as some of his critics view. Although he is best known for his “The Naked Maja” and the “The Clothed Maja”, and also for the pictures depicting the horror of the Napoleonic invasion, they do not fully reflect his character. Some other prominent works of Goya include Portrait of Mariana Waldstein, The Incantatio,Dona Teresa Sureda,The Colossus,Group on a Balcony.

Lilliputs Were Our Ancestors!

Are we hoodwinked to believe that a new tiny Homo species roam the earth at the same time as that of our ancestors? With giant Dragons and pigmy elephants? Whatever more will be revealed in future about the “Little Lady of Flores” depends on future research and discovery. But now it is sure that we cannot throw away the kind of stories telling the mysterious existence of ‘Yeti’ or other human like species. The ‘Lady of Flores’ is the best example which proves such an Indonesian legend about Ebu Gogo, a three feet tall human like creature. Even in the 16th century, when the island of Flores was colonized by the Dutch, they repeatedly heard stories of ‘Little People’ having been seen in the jungle from the local tribes, but none of these rumors appear to have been proven.But now it is proved with the discovery of a new and unexpected species of human who lived in this planet 18000 years ago, which is regarded a very little time when we study human evolution. They were little more than 3 feet high, used fire, and hunted down fierce dragons, pigmy elephants and giant rats. Reads like a fairy tale! But the researchers of human evolution are now busy with these fairy tale elements after Dr Mike Morood and his colleagues has unearthed, in September 2004, the evidence of a distant and previously unknown relatives of ours. The story leads us to a remote island of Indonesia- Flores which lies towards the eastern end of the chain of islands that make up Indonesia. Some Australian and Indonesian researchers led by Dr Mike Morood discovered the bones of some miniature human in the cave of ‘Liang Bua’, situated in the heart of western end of the island. This new species is named Homo Floresiensis, after the island on which it was found. It is also dubbed by dig workers as ‘hobbit’, after the tiny creatures from the ‘Lord of the Rings’. The most remarkable among them is the near complete skull of a woman with her incomplete skeleton- the ‘Little Lady of Flores’ [also called LB1, named after the cave where it was found]. It is just 1meter [3.3feet] tall, weighed about 25 kilograms, and was of an adult aged around 30 at the time of her death. She had a grapefruit sized skull that is one third of a modern man. Found with her in the cave were bones of at least seven hobbit sized individuals and also faunal remains including fish, frog, snake, tortoise, birds and bats, giant rats, a giant carnivorous lizard, similar to but larger than Komodo dragons, and 17 tiny elephants called Stegodons that disappeared almost 40,000 years ago. What is interesting with this ‘Little Lady of Flores’ is the fact that she not only proves the existence of a new kind of human species totally unknown to us but also rewrites the history of human evolution indicating that these Homo Floresiensis lived in this planet with modern Homo sapiens just 18000 years ago, and that they are younger than the Homo neanderthalensis who disappeared 30000 years ago. Currently it is widely accepted that only two ‘hominin genuses’, Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis, co-existed before the later one vanished. But the carbon dating method and other dating methods like TL and ISRL reveal that the bones found in the cave of Liang Bua are only 18000 years old and thus prove that Homo sapiens shared the planet with other humans much more recently than previously believed. There are some other things that set anthropologists atwitter; when did these tiny people come to the remote island? Dr.Morood has failed to find any evidence that can prove that the Homo sapiens existed in the island before 11,000 years. But he has found some 80000 years old artifacts in Liang Bua that are very similar to those of Javanese Homo erectus. So it may be possible that the first hominid immigrants to Flores were about 80,000 years ago, and they came as Homo erectus, not as Homo Floresiensis. But that over the millennia, isolated on the island, their size decreased as a response to limited food supply or otherenvironmental causes.Thus we can find a cause behind the small size of the Homo Floresiensis. But problem arises when we look at their small brain of 380 cm³ which is very small compared to that of Homo sapiens (1000-1700 cm³), Homo neanderthalensis (1100-1140 cm³) and Homo erectus (750-1250 cm³).Those people with a body of a three year old modern child must be intelligent enough to hunt down giant dragons and pigmy elephants that weighed at least 1,000 kilograms. Even more surprising, these critters used fire. The blades, perforators, points and other cutting and chopping utensils, and the faunal remains of Komodo dragons and pigmy elephants found in Liang Bua prove both of the facts. How so much of intelligence is possible with such a small brain? The answer may lie in the fact that these Flores man carried a small brain that once used to be a big brain. A modern man who has suffered massive brain damage or undergone serious brain surgery often manages a normal life with only two thirds of the brain tissue working; then why not these Flores men?