A recent aerial survey of the Maya Biosphere Reserve in Guatemala has uncovered a vast interconnected network of ancient cities, hidden for centuries beneath the jungle canopy that reclaimed this "megalopolis" after it was abandoned long ago. These new findings paint a picture of a far more complex and extensive pre-Columbian Mesoamerican civilization than what was previously assumed.
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The evidence pointing toward a major cometary impact that heralded the closure of the last ice age 13,000 years ago is steadily growing, with a new study from the University of Kansas offering more data that supports what is known as the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis.
"The hypothesis is that a large comet fragmented and the chunks impacted the Earth, causing this disaster," explains University of Kansas Emeritus Professor of Physics & Astronomy Adrian Melott. "A number of different chemical signatures–carbon dioxide, nitrate, ammonia and others–all seem to indicate that an astonishing 10 percent of the Earth’s land surface, or about 10 million square kilometers [3,9 million square miles], was consumed by fires."
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Archaeological sites in India and Israel have yielded new finds that once again illustrate the probability that some groups of people left Africa much earlier than previously assumed. Although a number of these migrations have been found to have occurred throughout humanity’s early history, the earliest movement was assumed to have taken place between 130,000, and 115,000 years ago. Two new discoveries from India, and Israel may point to an even earlier beginning to the nomadic culture of the walking people, one that might very well have taken place more than 385,000 years ago.
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Computer scientists at Canada’s University of Alberta have used artificial intelligence to decipher the mysterious Voynich Manuscript. Although computer-based cryptoanalysis has been used since World War II to crack innumerable codes, in recent years computers have been pitted against a number of enigmatic texts, such as the seventeenth-century Letter from the Devil, and now the use of AI has unveiled the meaning behind the Voynich codex, yielding some surprising results.
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