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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Marine archaeologists investigating the ancient shipwreck that yielded the Antikythera mechanism — a complex, bronze, geared device that predicted eclipses and showed the movements of the Sun, Moon and planets in the sky — have recovered a wealth of treasures, including bronze and marble statue pieces, a sarcophagus lid and a mysterious bronze disc decorated with a bull. The artefacts were trapped under boulders in a previously unexplored part of the site near the island of Antikythera, Greece, and the researchers think that large parts of at least seven statues are still buried nearby.
The discoveries are "extremely exciting", says Kenneth Lapatin, curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California. Only a handful of bronze statues survive from the ancient world, and they have almost invariably been treated and altered by previous conservators, undergoing processes that destroyed much of the information scientists might have gleaned from them. "Technology has improved so much," says Lapatin. "We can learn from these untreated finds."
[...] The team has made a stream of discoveries since work began in 2014, including wine jars, giant anchors, gold jewellery and a human skeleton, which is now being analysed for DNA. But the statues have remained hidden until now.
On 4 October, the team announced that during a 16-day dive season the previous month, they found several major statue pieces, including two marble feet attached to a plinth, part of a bronze robe or toga, and a bronze male arm, with two fingers missing but otherwise beautifully preserved. A slim build and "turning hand" gesture suggest that the arm may belong to a philosopher, says Theodoulou.
[...] Fresh, untreated finds such as those from Antikythera will give researchers the opportunity to use modern techniques to study a significant aspect of ancient Greek life — for example, by looking at casting methods, which precise alloys were used and whether the statues were made for export or had been previously displayed.
Foley and Theodoulou's team also recovered an intriguing bronze disc or wheel, about eight centimetres across, attached to four metal arms with holes for pins. A layer of hardened sediment hides its internal structure, but it superficially resembles the Antikythera mechanism, and researchers had initially hoped that it might be part of that ancient device: perhaps the gearing that calculated the positions of the planets, which is missing from the find.
But preliminary X-ray imaging conducted in an Athens hospital on 25 September revealed a surprise: instead of gear wheels, the image of a bull appeared.
[...] The team plans to return to Antikythera in May 2018, to break up the boulders and excavate beneath. "It's going to be a major operation," says Foley. "But we think it will be spectacular."
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @05:48AM (5 children)
Well, everyone laughed at the idea that mankind was at all technologically advanced in antiquity, and then they found the Antikythera mechanism.
Well, still, everyone laughed at the idea that mankind was at all technologically advanced in pre-history, and then they found Göbekli Tepe, which is undisputedly carbon-dated to at least 9130 BC (when it was deliberately buried), and which has tantalizing evidence(PDF) [maajournal.com] of knowledge about an astronomical phenomenon as subtle and complex as the Earth's axial precession [wikipedia.org].
Wake-up, sheeple. The hardware that composes modern man's body and brain has been around perhaps as long as 300k years; there's a long, strange, and storied past that our species has forgotten. The Younger Dryas [wikipedia.org] happened, and it could well happen again.
(Score: 2) by rylyeh on Monday October 09 2017, @06:25AM (4 children)
Good point! How many geniuses lived in the last 50k years. I wonder what secrets of the 'ancients' remain to be discovered.
But, of course we must all agree, Erich von Däniken is(was?) an Alien!
"a vast crenulate shell wherein rode the grey and awful form of primal Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss."
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday October 09 2017, @07:02AM (1 child)
He is still alive, the aliens have not come and picked him up yet.
(Score: 2) by rylyeh on Monday October 09 2017, @07:33AM
Good. He must now be prepared for his journey to the eternal kingdom of Osiris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_the_Dead [wikipedia.org] upon the Twelfth Planet. http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sitchin/sitchinbooks01.htm [bibliotecapleyades.net]
in one of the remaining Chariots of the Gods! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariots_of_the_Gods? [wikipedia.org]
"a vast crenulate shell wherein rode the grey and awful form of primal Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss."
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Arik on Monday October 09 2017, @08:08AM (1 child)
People are not particularly given to sharing their power. And in days when communication required face-to-face proximity, and travel meant walking... there weren't all that many people you could share it with even if you wanted to. And even if you want to give it away, people don't always listen! Expect many things were invented, and lost, many times over. Some things many, many times.
But at the same time, sharing power, including knowledge, is one of the things people cannot help but do, no matter how much they may loathe it. It is the sort of animal we are. Our children learn more than we would ever teach. It's better to cooperate with our neighbors than to feud with them. So knowledge is passed, willingly, unwillingly, semi-willingly, it is passed from generation to generation.
But think, writing, as best archaeologists know, is no more than ~8k years old. And that probably pushing. Tally-marks and portraits for book-keeping go back ~10k but it's not really writing.
Before that (and in most parts of the world long after that) people needed to store information nonetheless. Humans have been around in our current form ~250k years. Writing and pre-writing covers roughly 10 of them, partially. What did we do without them?
What we did was poetry and visualization.
Poetry seems obvious but may be the most alien to moderns. Consider a recipe. Todays cook might experiment for some time to perfect the recipe for a particular dish, and what does he do next? He writes it down. These days, probably on a computer. Then he backs it up/posts it/blogs it/excretes it upwards into the cloud or whatever. That preserves it.
The stone-age chef could not do that. Forget sharing it. HE NEEDED TO REMEMBER IT! Whatever would he do?
Most likely, he would compose a poem. If done right, the poem would contain all the specifics of the recipe, and it would be impossible to misremember without becoming linguistically defective - think of it as a checksum. "when leeks you stew/chop only three... no wait that breaks the rhyme, what was it? oh yeah, two."
If and when he taught it to someone else, the poem would be the means of conveyance in a similar way to a written recipe today - but of course dissimilar insofar as you actually needed to learn the damn poem if you wanted to be sure to remember the recipe, even just long enough to compose your own poem cause this one sucks!
When you learned to make a stone knife, to make twine, to make a javelin or a spear or a bow or a sling... you were taught a poem. When events which were considered so significant they needed to be recorded and passed down occurred, someone had to compose a poem, and recite it periodically thereafter. Any people with a consciousness of being a people required at least one poet, and any craftsman was also a poet of some skill. Even mapmaking required the skills of a poet.
Then visualization was added to complement the poetry. From an early age, you spent a portion of each day with your eyes closed, creating your astral palace. Much like you might do today with some computer sim, only with no computer, no storage outside of your own brain. You visualize it every day, you spend some time examining it, filling in the details, etching them into your memory so they will stay with you as long as you function. Very important things could be stored there. Pictures, tens of millenia before the cameras eye was constructed, simply etched into the neural pathways by constant repetition. A new method of keeping a map, it could be scratched into the dirt and then that picture etched into your brain. And after writing came about, this was also the storage used for the most important notes, the critical formulæ that one needed in the field, with no need to carry around some heavy tablets for reference.
"If we see further today, it is only because we stand on the backs of giants." (from memory so likely to be a paraphrase, so sue me.)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by rylyeh on Monday October 09 2017, @08:40AM
The last source I can remember for that golden quote is Carl Sagan in the OG Cosmos. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos:_A_Personal_Voyage [wikipedia.org]
Your comment does also point to James Burke's piece on the how the Cathedral was used as a memory device. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series) [wikipedia.org] but I can't tell you the episode number.
'Thirty days hath September'
"a vast crenulate shell wherein rode the grey and awful form of primal Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss."