A team of archaeologists from the University of Alabama in Birmingham used infra-red satellite cameras to locate evidence of 17 lost pyramids and thousands of ancient structures not visible to the naked eye. In addition to the pyramids, they also identified 1,000 tombs and 3,000 ancient settlements.

Archaeologists on the ground have excavated several sites and confirmed there is something on them.

Ancient Egyptians used dense mud bricks to build their homes and temples, and the cameras were able to differentiate between that and the regular soil surrounding them.

[NY Daily News]

Archaeologists have recently unearthed a 2600-year-old human skull from a bog in the United Kingdom, and the skull contained what is believed to be one of the oldest known intact human brains. The skull belonged to a man in his thirties, who was hung,  and then had his head cut off and thrown in the bog.

“The brain-containing skull was found at Heslington, Yorkshire, in the United Kingdom. O’Connor and her team suspect the site served a ceremonial function that persisted from the Bronze Age through the early Roman period. Many pits at the site were marked with single stakes. The remains of the man were without a body, but the scientists also found the headless body of a red deer that had been deposited into a channel.”

The brain had no evidence of fungal or bacteria and they described it as being “odorless…with a resilient, tofu-like texture.” Delicious.

[Discovery News]

National Geogrphic has some really interesting historical findings on where the Dead Sea Scrolls might have originated. Also:

And on Jerusalem’s Mount Zion, archaeologists recently discovered and deciphered a two-thousand-year-old cup with the phrase “Lord, I have returned” inscribed on its sides in a cryptic code similar to one used in some of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

…either that or Jesus was really fussy about people using his favorite cup so he had to write his name on it.

[Nat Geo]

Strange bones found in Charlotte, VT in 1849

It was 1849, near Charlotte some ten miles south of the capital city of Burlington. Vermont was slowly industrializing, and the railroad was coming with the promise of connecting this perpetually rural region with the rest of the nation. To keep the railroad level enough for the primitive engines of the time, rail beds were hand-dug by large labor crews. The rocky soil and hilly terrain made work difficult.

The workmen were accustomed to finding unusual things as they made their slow progress towards Burlington. Arrowheads and pottery shards were common; bones, less so. And bones like those found one particular day had never been seen before.

As they dug through a hillside, a skull emerged from the slimy grey-blue clay. It was big, and at first the workmen thought they’d found the remains of a large horse. As they unearthed more of it, they realized they’d encountered something very different, for this horse had no legs.

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Penn Bullock Reports:

No – that’s not a small, cooked, headless chicken, but a 25,000 year-old statuette just unearthed in Germany. Archeologists are calling it the earliest known example of human pornography. When we at Weirdthings took a closer look, we observed, without arousal, the “dramatically exaggerated breasts” as put in the delicate words of the archeologists. The curves on this female form suggest, for one, that thin hasn’t always been in. 25,000 years ago, man’s ideal woman had the body of a boulder, chicken wings for legs, protruding, basket-ball-sized breasts, and no head. Imagine the pressure on women back then to live up to the ideal.

While we’re still on the subject of the earthquake, more Italian weirdness has come of it. 15,000 year old caves, once used by local inhabitants, have been found under the City of L’Aquila, near the epicenter of the quake. The largest of the vaulted caves was found near the bus terminal of the regional capital, where the sediment shook loose to reveal the ancient cavern. Archeologists are abuzz over the new ruins.

-Read the original article here.

Archeologists have uncovered an ancient wooden replica of Stonehenge at the Hill of Tara in Ireland. Pictured above is an artist’s rendering of the massive ring as it would have looked in its heyday. Scientists speculate that it would have taken an entire forest of trees to provide enough wood for it’s epic circumference.

More monumental goodness after the jump…
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