Thread: New 7 wonders of world??

I still would have liked the Easter Island stautes & Stonehenge on the list.. but then again.. YOU CAN'T PROVE THAT THEY WERE "man-made"..... maybe "alien-made"

Giant statues reveal red hat secrets
Mon Sep 7, 1:41 pm ET

LONDON (AFP) – British archaeologists said Monday they believe they have solved the ancient mystery of how the giant stone statues on Easter Island acquired distinctive red hats.

The researchers said the key to the mystery lies in their discovery of a road on the tiny Pacific island.

The hats were built in a quarry hidden inside the crater of an ancient volcano, and then rolled by hand or on tree logs to the site of the statues, said the team from the University of Manchester and University College, London.

The archaeologists examined the way the hats, each weighing several tons and made of red scoria, a pumice-like volcanic rock, were moved by Polynesians between 500 and 750 years ago.

They were placed on the heads of carved stone human figures known as moai standing on ceremonial platforms which encircle the island's coastline.

But the riddle of how they were raised and attached remains unsolved.

Dr. Colin Richards from the University of Manchester said: "We now know that the hats were rolled along the road made from a cement of compressed red scoria dust with a raised pavement along one side.

"It is likely that they were moved by hand, but tree logs could also have been used."

Dr. Sue Hamilton, of University College, London, said: "The hat quarry is inside the crater of an ancient volcano and on its outer lip. A third of the crater has been quarried away by hat production.

"So far we have located more than 70 hats at the ceremonial platforms and in transit. Many more may have been broken up and incorporated into the platforms."

Richards said there was evidence the quarry, known locally as Puna Pau, had previously produced statues before changing to hats.

"Initially the Polynesians built the moai out of various types of local stone, including the Puna Pau scoria, but between 12,000 to 13,000 AD, Puna Pau switched from producing statues to hats.

"The change correlated with an increase in the overall size of the statues across the island."



http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090907...cienceresearch

Timbuktu tomb destroyers pulverise Islam's history
By Pascal Fletcher | Reuters – Tue, Jul 3, 2012


A traditional mud structure stands in the Malian city of Timbuktu May 15, 2012. Al Qaeda-linked Mali Islamists armed with Kalashnikovs and pick-axes began destroying prized mausoleums of saints in the UNESCO-listed northern city of Timbuktu on June 30, 2012 in front of shocked locals, witnesses said. The Islamist Ansar Dine group backs strict sharia, Islamic law, and considers the shrines of the local Sufi version of Islam idolatrous.

(Reuters) - The al Qaeda-linked Islamist fighters who have used pick-axes, shovels and hammers to shatter earthen tombs and shrines of local saints in Mali's fabled desert city of Timbuktu say they are defending the purity of their faith against idol worship.

But historians say their campaign of destruction in the UNESCO-listed city is pulverising part of the history of Islam in Africa, which includes a centuries-old message of tolerance.

"They are striking at the heart of what Timbuktu stands for ... Mali and the world are losing a lot," Souleymane Bachir Diagne, a professor at New York's Columbia University and an expert on Islamic philosophy in Africa, told Reuters.

Over the last three days, Islamists of the Ansar Dine rebel group which in April seized Mali's north along with Tuareg separatists destroyed at least eight Timbuktu mausoleums and several tombs, centuries-old shrines reflecting the local Sufi version of Islam in what is known as the "City of 333 Saints".

For centuries in Timbuktu, an ancient Saharan trading depot for salt, gold and slaves which developed into a famous seat of Islamic learning and survived occupations by Tuareg, Bambara, Moroccan and French invaders, local people have worshipped at the shrines, seeking the intercession of the holy individuals.

This kind of popular Sufi tradition of worship is anathema to Islamists like the Ansar Dine fighters - Defenders of the Faith - who adhere to Salafism, which is linked to the Wahhabi puritanical branch of Sunni Islam found in Saudi Arabia.

"A Salafi would say that creating a culture of saints is akin to idol-worshipping," Diagne said. Unlike Christianity, where the clergy formally confers sainthood, the veneration of "saints" in various, non-Wahhabi, strands of Islam largely arises from popular reverence for pious historical figures.

Rejecting a wave of outrage inside and outside Mali against the shrine destructions, an Ansar Dine spokesman in Timbuktu, Sanda Ould Boumama, defiantly told French radio RFI at the weekend that the actions were in line with the group's aim of installing sharia Islamic law across all of divided Mali.

"Human beings cannot be elevated higher than God ... When the Prophet entered Mecca, he said that all the mausoleums should be destroyed. And that's what we're repeating," Boumama said.

In what she called a "cry from the heart" for world help to halt the destruction, Malian Culture Minister Diallo Fadima Toure told a UNESCO World Heritage Committee meeting in St. Petersburg on Sunday that Ansar Dine's depredations had "nothing to do with Islam, a religion of peace and tolerance".

"Are we just going to let this go and stand and watch? Today this is happening in Mali, tomorrow where will it be?".

"CRIME AGAINST HISTORY"

Experts are comparing the Timbuktu tomb destructions to similar attacks against Sufi shrines by hardline Salafists in Egypt and Libya in the past year. The attacks also recall al Qaeda attacks on Shi'ite shrines in Iraq in the past decade and the 2001 dynamiting by the Taliban of two 6th-century statues of Buddha carved into a cliff in Bamiyan in central Afghanistan.

"It's against everybody and everything," said University of Cape Town Professor Shamil Jeppie, an expert on Timbuktu who co-edited with Diagne a 2008 study, "The Meanings of Timbuktu", on the city's priceless archaeology and ancient manuscripts.

Mali's government in the capital Bamako about 1,000 km (600 miles) south has condemned the attacks, but is powerless to halt them after its army was routed by rebels in April. It is still struggling to bolster a return to civilian rule after a March 22 coup that emboldened the rebel uprising further north.

Some believe the tomb-wrecking onslaught by Ansar Dine, which is led by Tuareg chieftain turned Salafist Iyad Ag Ghali, may have been directly triggered by UNESCO's decision on Thursday to accept the Mali government's urgent request to put Timbuktu on a list of endangered World Heritage sites.

"That is meaningless to Ansar Dine; what is UNESCO to them?" said Jeppie. Just as northern Nigerian Islamist militants are carrying out bloody bombings and shootings under the name Boko Haram (which broadly means "Western education is sinful"), so Ansar Dine's fighters may see UNESCO as an emblem of Western heresy.

"They are not scholars; they are foot soldiers," added Jeppie, adding they were probably unaware that Timbuktu, which was an alluring mirage of exoticism and remoteness for 19th-century European explorers, represented multiple and varied layers of Islamic tradition deposited like sand over centuries.

Its long history had tracked the turbulent rise and fall of the great African empires of Ghana, Mali and Songhai.

"Timbuktu was sacked many times before," said Jeppie.

"But we have had no events of destruction of monuments, mosques and tombs. It never happened before."

The UNESCO ambassadors meeting in St. Petersburg on Tuesday joined Malian Culture Minister Toure in appealing to global governments and organisations and "all people of goodwill" to act to prevent the prevent the destruction of the Timbuktu monuments by "vandals".

"We consider this action to be a crime against history," the appeal said.

UNESCO's World Heritage Committee called on the agency's director general, Irina Bokova, who has already roundly condemned the Timbuktu damage, to create a special fund to help Mali preserve its cultural patrimony from attack. It asked UNESCO members and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to provide financial resources for this fund.

PURITY OVER POPULARITY?

Just as gold-hungry 19th-century European travellers who first cast eyes on Timbuktu were disappointed to find, not glittering minarets and palaces, but a desert-rimmed cluster of dun-coloured homes and mosques, so some observers might view the city's mausoleums and tombs as modest when compared with the architectural opulence of, say, Rome or Athens or Damascus.

The rectangular local mausoleums mimic the desert earthen architecture of the city's still imposing and renowned Sankore, Sidi Yahya and Djingarei-ber mosques, the latter Timbuktu's oldest, built in mud-brick and wood in 1325.

"They are mud structures, nothing fancy at all," said Columbia University's Diagne - and so the more easily reduced to dust by the pick-axes and shovels of the Ansar Dine combatants.

But rather than visual splendour, it is what the tombs represent for Africa's history, and especially the history of Islam in Africa, than concerns historians and scholars.

They make the point that relatively few physical vestiges remain of the great Sahelian empire states that flourished and then died out centuries ago, and the damage inflicted in Timbuktu will reduce that archaeological heritage further.

They are scratching their heads as to why Ansar Dine and its well-armed allies, who hijacked a separatist uprising by local Tuareg MNLA rebels following the March coup in the Malian capital Bamako, would risk offending local sensibilities by destroying revered shrines in occupied cities like Timbuktu.

"They are more worried about purity than about being unpopular", is the explanation Diagne offers.

Scholars are also fretting about the fate of tens of thousands of ancient and brittle manuscripts, some from the 13th century, housed in libraries and private collections in Timbuktu. Academics say these prove Africa had a written history at least as old as the European Renaissance.

Days after the rebels took Timbuktu, local academics, librarians and citizens were hiding away the manuscripts to stop them being damaged or looted.

Jeppie said researchers had since fled the city. Some collectors had smuggled their rarest documents out to Bamako.

Diagne said the biggest fear was that historic manuscripts and artefacts would become the object of looting and trafficking for profit - just another trading commodity in the trackless Sahara, where trafficking in drugs, arms and migrants has replaced the old caravans of slaves, salt and gold.

He found it deeply ironic that the Ansar Dine tomb destroyers, who said they were upholding the name of Islam, were ignoring and denying through their acts the rich layered history and geographical spread of this great global religion.

Noting the role Sufi believers played in spreading Islam beyond its Arabian heartland, Diagne said: "If it had not been for the Sufi orders, Islam would have been a local religion."

http://news.yahoo.com/timbuktu-tomb-...151747822.html

This teenager spent three years mapping the brightest stars in constellations to major Mayan cities—a technique that no person has ever used before. Now 15-years-old, the teen may have just made a major discovery.


Teen uses Google Maps to discover ancient Mayan site
Unfortunately, the driving directions are pretty beastly.
David Grossman, PopularMechanics.com
Updated 4:11 pm, Tuesday, May 10, 2016

Next time you think there's nothing left to explore—that GPS and satellites have already discovered everything on Earth—just think about the 15-year-old kid from Canada who discovered an ancient Mayan city, The Fire Mouth.

It sounds like a reboot of Indiana Jones, one where a kid is able take raw data from satellite imagery and put it in crucial context. William Gadoury, 15, became obsessed with Mayan history after the endless media drumbeat over the predictions of the end of the world in 2012. Gadoury's discoveries appear to be the only worthwhile development stemming from that cesspool of clickbait. Gadoury became curious as to why the Mayans lived where they did, often removed from natural options like rivers. He started to focus on twenty-two Mayan constellations and began to wonder if there any correlation with the placement of Mayan cities in Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, and El Salvador.

He had solid grounds for his theory: Mayans placed a heavy emphasis on astrology, the idea that the stars directly effect life on Earth. They would use astrological signs to determine farming cycles, so it stands to reason that the signs could influence where Mayans would want to live. Gadoury started to map out the constellations and noticed that they corresponded with 117 known Mayan cities. Then he decided to add a twenty-third constellation to his map.

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/T...an-7450416.php

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/T...an-7450416.php

The twenty-third constellation was a small one, only three stars. But Gadoury, using Google Maps and later images from the Canadian Space Agency, was able to determine that a 118th city should correspond to it. He plugged in the appropriate coordinates, you can see what he found above. Dr. Armand LaRocque, a remote sensing specialist from the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, who is working with Gadoury, believes it is a Mayan pyramid surrounded by thirty smaller structures. "Geometric shapes, such as squares or rectangles, appeared in these images, forms that can hardly be attributed to natural phenomenon," LaRocque said, and it's hard to argue with that. Gadoury chose the name Fire Mouth.

Still, all the evidence lays with satellite imagery—no one has actually explored the location Gadoury spotted on Google Maps. "It's always about money," says Dr. LaRocque, bringing to light the stark contrast between the costs of physical expeditions and digital ones. Funds are currently being raised to get Gadoury to Brazil's Expo-Sciences International, where one hopes he'll be able to direct his ample abilities towards networking and finding someone willing make their way Fire Mouth.


The twenty-third constellation was a small one, only three stars. But Gadoury, using Google Maps and later images from the Canadian Space Agency, was able to determine that a 118th city should correspond to it. He plugged in the appropriate coordinates, you can see what he found above. Dr. Armand LaRocque, a remote sensing specialist from the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, who is working with Gadoury, believes it is a Mayan pyramid surrounded by thirty smaller structures. "Geometric shapes, such as squares or rectangles, appeared in these images, forms that can hardly be attributed to natural phenomenon," LaRocque said, and it's hard to argue with that. Gadoury chose the name Fire Mouth.

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/T...an-7450416.php

This article originally appeared on PopularMechanics.com http://www.popularmechanics.com/tech...nt-mayan-site/