Who’s got two thumbs and wants to get all up in some sacred Mayan pools once believed to be portals to the underworld where offerings were dropped down to appease the evil forces waiting below?

These guys!

Steering clear of crocodiles and navigating around massive submerged trees, a team of divers began mapping some of the 25 freshwater pools of Cara Blanca, Belize, which were important to the ancient Maya. In three weeks this May, the divers found fossilized animal remains, bits of pottery and — in the largest pool explored — an enormous underwater cave.

Would it be totally against the rules to leave a burger while you’re down there, you know, just in case?

[Science Daily]

The crew invents a new form of inter-species prejudice, declares their willingness to do stupid things in the name of science and then goes metaphysical.

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Discover Magazine has a very intriguing story: In 1913 two farmers uncovered a skull in South Africa that still has paleontologists scratching their heads. The so-called Boskop Man was first thought to be a distinct genus while some argued he’s a variation of anatomically modern humans.

What made Boskop Man unique and the the other similar skulls found like him is that his brain was much, much larger then ours in relation to ours. Based on what we can infer about brain size between species, his (and her) larger brains and neocortex suggest this ancient race of man was way smarter than us. How much smarter?

In a classroom with 35 big-headed, baby-faced Boskop kids, you would likely encounter five or six with IQ scores at the upper range of what has ever been recorded in human history. The Boskops coexisted with our Homo sapiens forebears. Just as we see the ancient Homo erectus as a savage primitive, Boskop may have viewed us in somewhat the same way.

Boskop Man is believed to have lived between 30,000 to 10,000 years ago. Why this super-genius vanished is a mystery. The Discover Magazine article postulates some interesting theories, but no concrete leads. One potential scenario is that he just blended in with the rest of us as a wise uncle:

At his new dig site, FitzSimons came across a remarkable piece of construction. The site had been at one time a communal living center, perhaps tens of thousands of years ago. There were many collected rocks, leftover bones, and some casually interred skeletons of normal-looking humans. But to one side of the site, in a clearing, was a single, carefully constructed tomb, built for a single occupant—perhaps the tomb of a leader or of a revered wise man. His remains had been positioned to face the rising sun. In repose, he appeared unremarkable in every regard…except for a giant skull.

Maybe they just leap-frogged us altogether?

link: What Happened to the Hominids Who Were Smarter Than Us? | Human Evolution | DISCOVER Magazine

link: Boskop Man – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Voynich manuscript, a mysterious medieval document that has confounded the best cryptographers for centuries may finally have been cracked.

A researcher studying the manuscript suggests that the secret coding may be anagrams created by a young Leonardo da Vinci? Does it sound far fetched? We’ll have to ask Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon…

Read: Voynich manuscript decoded?

Wikipedia

As the Hollywood and occult hype machines spin into overdrive about the proposed end of the world on December 21st, 2012, at least one person who may or may not know something about it says it’s all bunk. According to an AP story, Chile Pixtun, a Guatemalan Indian Elder had this to say:

Definitely not, the Mayan Indian elder insists. “I came back from England last year and, man, they had me fed up with this stuff.”

Another person who should know points out:

“If I went to some Mayan-speaking communities and asked people what is going to happen in 2012, they wouldn’t have any idea,” said Jose Huchim, a Yucatan Mayan archaeologist. “That the world is going to end? They wouldn’t believe you. We have real concerns these days, like rain.”

He goes onto suggest this doomsday thing is a Western concept we’re projecting onto the Maya. So if the Maya say it’s bunk, who should we believe? Them or the folks who remade Godzilla?

link: Mayan Year 2012 Stirs Doomsday Theories – International News | News of the World | Middle East News | Europe News – FOXNews.com

It took 2,500 years but investigators finally cracked the case of out what killed an Egyptian woman. What makes this particularly interesting is how recent DNA extraction techniques made it possible to extract fragments of tuberculosis bacteria DNA. She had been misdiagnosed just a decade earlier as having been killed by ovarian cancer.

After analyzing ancient DNA from tissue samples, Helen D. Donoghue of University College London and colleagues say that the mummified woman, who lived around 600 B.C. and was entombed in Thebes, died of tuberculosis, not ovarian cancer.

link: Observatory – Revising the Diagnosis Behind an Ancient Death – NYTimes.com

Archeologists have been unearthing massive structures in the Jordan Valley that appear to be shaped like feet when viewed from the sky. The ancient structures, that date back to the 12 Century BCE, were apparently used as rallying point for troops and ceremonies. The discovering team pondered the Ancient’s decision to shape the structures like feet:

“The ‘foot’ structures that we found in the Jordan valley are the first sites that the People of Israel built upon entering Canaan and they testify to the biblical concept of ownership of the land with the foot,” said archaeologist Prof. Adam Zertal of the University of Haifa, who headed the excavating team that exposed five compounds in the shape of an enormous “foot”, that it were likely to have been used at that time to mark ownership of territory.”

The sites have been shown to be consistent with the biblical description of “Gilgals”, Hebrew for camp, a term used heavily in the bible. These foot shaped structures would be the first archeological evidence for the existence of Gilgals if so. The above photo still kind of looks like an ear to us.

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