Archaeologists have discovered the remains of what appears to be an ancient lodging almost 20 feet wide and 65 feet long in central Reykjavík. A government-sponsored team stumbled across the remains of the building and believes it predates another, similar lodge discovered in 2001.

While dating information and analysis aren’t yet finished, the researchers firmly believe that this discovery will rewrite local history regarding the settlement of that area of Iceland.

Another great example that illustrates that we really don’t have a full grasp of the planet’s history with each new discovery…

And a reminder that somewhere…under layers of dirt…

The ancient ones are probably waiting for us to find them.

[Icelandic Review]

In a move only he could’ve seen coming…you know….because he’s who he is…the Amazing Kreskin has opened the gates on a new dating site…

A site for “enthusiasts of the paranormal, the unexplained, the mystical, the implausible…”

While we’re pretty sure the guy-to-girl ratio will probably be a lot like a magic club, Kreskin is predicting (yeah…we know) great things for the site:

“I have a feeling that it’s going to take on a dimension that I never realized.”

With Kreskin’s foresight that online graphic design will eventually swing back around to the geocities-era of the internet, the site will probably lure a niche market of older folks who have seen, captured or smelled a bigfoot or been abducted by time-traveling Atlanteans who need love just like the rest of us.

Which brings up some questions: What sort of beings are looking for love? Will they all be human or other things in diguise? Are there vampires and werewolves worried about the fall out from a public tryst in light of the Twilight movies? Are there off-world species seeking to swing it with a human for a cheap thrill on their way to somewhere else? Are the reptilians using the site for some sinister plot? Will other creatures find that someone special without having to brave daylight, pitchforks and torches?

Or is it just a bunch of lonely, probably really nice people just looking for a little companionship in a big and often harsh, ridiculing reality?

Answers will only come with time…

And filling out the sign up page.

[I09]

In May of 2013 during a geophysics survey along the Coast of Norfolk in England, researchers stumbled across what might be the oldest
evidence of human life in the region…footprints.

While skeptical at first, archaeologists have been doing extensive testing of dozens of foot-like indentations in a sediment layer that’s been
revealed by the tide and erosion in the area (similar to the discovery of a possible pyramid we talk about in the latest episode of the Weird Things podcast).

Scientists took photos of the indentations from every angle in order to create a 3D model that they could use to determine whether these odd
hollows in the sediment were, in fact, footprints or, perhaps, something else.

Almost a year later and with lots of careful analysis, researchers are agreeing that these are footprints left by what appears to be “…at least two
children and one adult male.” Researchers are estimating that these prints date back between 800,000 to 1 million years ago.

[I09]

For quite a while archaeologists have suspected that people inhabited Portugal long before people claimed to have first inhabited Portugal. Within the last three years, researchers have discovered small rock pyramids on a small island called Pico as well as cave paintings and tons of new artifacts believed to possibly be several thousand years old on the nearby island of Terceira.

Now reports are buzzing the news feeds about a find that could validate the theory that people settled in the area long before historians imagined…

The owner of a private yacht out for a spin around the islands picked up something on his GPS instrumentation.

That something appears to be a perfectly shaped pyramid approximately 200 feet tall.

Researchers and archaeology experts are descending on the area in hopes of learning more about the discovery.

We’re secretly hoping they find underwater versions of everything from Stargate or Mermummies or…something else just as awesome.

[Portuguese American Journal]

This fall a collaboration between NOVA & National Geographic will show how scientists think primitive culture may have moved the five-ton, ten-foot-tall Moai statues on Easter Island.

[National Geographic YouTube Channel]

One year ago Swedish Ocean Explorer Team (Ocean X), using sonar, came across something buried under the ice in the Baltic Sea. Tons of hopeful theories have been tossed around as to what it may be. Ufo? Sunken ship? Arctic Stonehenge? No one could guess from the sonar imagery.

Now, a year later, Ocean X is actually on site and beginning a deeper investigation into what this thing is that has even them baffled.

As they continue to uncover the mystery, pictures are starting to emerge from the site causing even more speculation and excitement.

There is definitely something down there. While the research team from Ocean X, a company that finds sunken ships and sells what they find for a substantial profit, explores the site their finds are not making this discovery any less fascinating.

Pictures and video are beginning to pop up online as the divers explore the strange anomoly. While the team has stated that it could be anything including a strange geological formation, they’ve also said that, due to funding, they don’t have much interest in spending too much time exploring it and need to get back to work on more profitable ventures.

“The object appeared more as a huge mushroom, rising 3-4 meters/10-13 feet from the seabed, with rounded sides and rugged edges. The object had an egg shaped hole leading into it from the top, as an opening. On top of the object they also found strange stone circle formations, almost looking like small fireplaces. The stones were covered in something resembling soot.

First we thought this was only stone, but this is something else. And since no volcanic activity has ever been reported in the Baltic Sea the find becomes even stranger. As laymen we can only speculate how this is made by nature, but this is the strangest thing I have ever experienced as a professional diver.”

We just want them to watch a copy of John Carpenter’s The Thing before they start messing around too much…oh…and to put their dogs away.

[Gizmodo]

The terracotta warriors of the Xi’an archaeology dig in north-west China have become icons of the dynasties of long ago. More than 8,000 of these warriors have been excavated over the years and just yesterday more were unearthed.

The current phase of the excavation of the figures, which began in 2009, has revealed 310 more figures as well as chariots, weapons, war horses, drums and a shield.

The new finds include what appear to be military officials, a performance troupe and a headless warrior much larger than any figure unearthed so far.

Also interesting about the new figures that’ve been absent from those uncovered in the past? Coloration. Many of the newer statues still show signs of having been painted, one even showing as much detail as having had eyelashes at one point.

As exciting as this new finding is? Many archaeologists believe there is much more still waiting to be discovered.

[The Guardian]

They’re featured in the title of practically every documentary or television show dealing with mysterious places. Their heads have adorned everything from coasters to keychains to books to backyard statuary. Heck, one of them even made it in Hollywood and nailed a part in Night at the Museum with Ben Stiller.

But now a fairly recent investigation called the EISP (Easter Island Statue Project) is uncovering something relatively new about the heads of Easter Island…they have bodies.

While experts have known about the bodies for several decades now, it’s only recently that tourists have been able to really see the dig sites up close and have seen that the enigmatic heads actually sit on shoulders of a complete figure down to the feet.

Because tourism to the islands is limited, it’s taken a while for this pictures and this information to begin circulating.

There are over 1,000 Moari heads scattered across the island and most of their bodies have simply been covered up by time.

Why is this such a big deal if experts knew about the bodies the whole time? As the bodies are excavated, petroglyphs once hidden on the statues backs and other artifacts which laid at the feet of the statues on what used to be the top layer of soil are uncovering more and more clues about the mysterious islanders who once called Easter Island home.

[Daily Mail]

Even back in the day, Stonehenge was a tourist trap. One of the oldest human remains found near the site was identified as having Mediterranean origins.

The British Geological Survey’s Jane Evans said that the find, radiocarbon dated to 1,550 B.C., “highlights the diversity of people who came to Stonehenge from across Europe,” a statement backed by Bournemouth University’s Timothy Darvill, a Stonehenge scholar uninvolved with the discovery.

“The find adds considerable weight to the idea that people traveled long distances to visit Stonehenge, which must therefore have had a big reputation as a cult center,” Darvill said in an e-mail Wednesday. “Long distance travel was certainly more common at this time than we generally think.”

Of course people travelled long distances, what else where they going to do without internet or TV? Watch each other’s hair grow?

It would be so easy to get me to go on a 2 month boat trip back then. “Hey were going to see a cult center in the north country, you might die and we’ll probably run out of food but at the same time it’s going to be a couple dozen centuries until someone invents an iPhone… so you in?”

[AP]

The figure of pure terror you see before you is not the mascot of an arena league football team. Rather, it’s the artist rendering of an ancient seabird which once roamed modern-day Chile. Fossils of the creature were recently discovered just in time for nightmares to begin.

Thanks to Weird Things reader Darcy for the tip.

[Nat Geo]

The oldest known shaman died and was buried in a Northern Israeli cave. Everyone thought it would be a good idea to stuff their faces with food in her memory. Because of this, you ate a ham plate at your Uncle Barry’s wake.

Life is strange.

A study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Grosman and Natalie Munro, a zooarchaeologist at the University of Connecticut, reveals that the shaman’s burial feast was just one chapter in the intense ritual life of the Natufians, the first known people on Earth to give up nomadic living and settle in villages.

The other traditions? Carried the dead bodies along with the party supplies up the mountains to their elevated resting places. Who’s got two thumbs and is pretty psyched we dropped that one?

[Nat Geo]

A letter found in the ruins of a collapsed Spanish colonial church in Peru could be the key to a heretofore undiscovered language. Awesome.

“Even though [the letter] doesn’t tell us a whole lot, it does tell us about a language that is very different from anything we’ve ever known—and it suggests that there may be a lot more out there,” said project leader Jeffrey Quilter, an archaeologist at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.

The letter was preserved because the caved in structure protected the relatively unharmed library and offices of the facility.

[Nat Geo]

Researchers have found that Mayans protected their drinking water by installing a layer of ceramic shards. Pretty crafty…

If so, that would be a minor sensation — merely due to the quantity of ceramics required. The aguadas in Uxul were each as large as ten Olympic-size pools. Maybe there used to be even more artificial lakes. After all, the precious commodity had to be enough to last a population of at least 2,000 through the 3-month dry season.

Mayans! What will they have thought of next!

It meandered about the sea, a living blob named Drakozoon kalumon. Surviving by glomming on to other creatures and surviving on the tiniest morsels of food, this 1.7 millimeter creature was protected by a leathery outer skin bigger than it’s own body.

Until it was imprisoned in volcanic ash for 425 million years. But now, Drakozoon is back! Or at least a 3-D model of him is.

Its two coiled arms likely did the work of feeding. “If it worked like a brachiopod, and I suspect it did, it would have used fine setae (hairs) on the arms to generate currents, catch tiny pieces of food in the seawater, and pass them down the arms into the waiting mouth,” Sutton told LiveScience.

The preserved blob was attached to the fossilized shell of a type of spineless shellfish known as a brachiopod. Researchers made the discovery about six years ago in the Herefordshire Lagerstatte, one of England’s richest deposits of soft-bodied fossils.

Doesn’t Drakozoon kalumon just sound like it needs to be chanted by an evil mastermind trying to resurrect some Lovecraftian leviathan? Just asking.

[Live Science]

A ceremonial ground designed by a long-gone culture to mark and celebrate the lunar cycles… just over the river from modern-day Kentucky.

This year archaeologists began using computer models to analyze Moorehead Circle’s layout and found that Ohio’s Woodhenge may have even more in common with the United Kingdom’s Stonehenge than thought—specifically, an apparently intentional astronomical alignment.

The software “allows us to stitch together various kinds of geographical data, including aerial photographs and excavation plans and even digital photographs,” explained excavation leader Robert Riordan, an archaeologist at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio.

If this isn’t somehow referenced in a Chad Ochocinco touchdown celebration this season, we will be very disappointed. Child please.

[Nat Geo]

German explorer Leo Frobenius came to West Africa and made a startling discovery. Gorgeous statues cast in exquisite bronze. So intricate, so beautiful, they so could not be the work of the locals. No, of course not. They simply had to be the handiwork of the lost city of Atlantis. Finally! Proof had washed upon the shores of modernity!

Or not. Turns out the statues were, in fact, created by the locals. Oops.

In his book, Voice of Africa, Frobenius wrote: “Before us stood a head of marvellous beauty, wonderfully cast in antique bronze, true to the life, incrusted with a patina of glorious dark green. This was, in very deed, the Olokun, Atlantic Africa’s Poseidon.”

“I was moved to silent melancholy at the thought that this assembly of degenerate and feeble-minded posterity should be the legitimate guardians of so much loveliness,” he added.

Frobenius was referring to the people who lived in the Kingdom of Ife and whose artists, in fact, created the sculptures over the course of some four centuries. Leading art experts believe they are among the most aesthetically striking and technically sophisticated in the world.

The sculptures are now on display at the Museum of London, after which they come to the United States.

[CNN]