Archaeologists Unearthed the First Pope In History. What They Found Proved Something Incredible

The mummy of Pope St. Pius I is one of the best preserved in the history of mankind. His corpse was not embalmed it was mummified naturally for a period of about 1,700 years.

His remains are considered a true discovery for science, because even though during life he suffered from cardiovascular diseases, gallstones, gout, diabetes, caries and tuberculosis, these organs preserved very well.

This bishop is considered as the first official Pope. He was born in Aquileia, Italy. And he died in 155, to be buried in the beautiful cathedral of Aquileia.

Much later, in the year 1789 the building of the cathedral was demolished. The coffin of the Pope was opened and everyone was surprised by the fact that the body was in perfect condition. Finally the body was transferred to a chapel in the year 1875.

Studies say there are several reasons why the body has been preserved in such a good way. First, because he was naturally mummified thanks to the air between the months of November and December, which are the coldest of the year and because of the large amount of plants and humidity inside the crypt.



But until 2010 scientists had no possibility to study the remains carefully.
The coffin’s pillow and mattress were filled with plants and vegetables that gave off a strong smell, probably to hide the smell of the corpse, but also to preserve it. There were lavender, mint, hops and juniper berries. ”

However, the most surprising thing was that they found a plenty of documents narrating different versions of the alleged life of the son of God, Jesus of Nazareth.



The discovery suggests that senior leaders of the Catholic Church hid the evidence that proves that the history of the Messiah was only an invention to carry out the purposes of the order.

Among the documents could be found the stories of hundreds of prophets who had a life very similar to that of Christ, among which stand out the figures of Horus, Mithra, Krishna, Dionysius, etc.

After the find, a large number of versions about what actually happened with Jesus has emerged. Science, on the other hand, claims that there is evidence to prove the existence of Jesus the man, but not as the life of the supposed son of God, that the narrative created from the life of other prophets and different cultures of the world.

Source: www.smithsonianmag.com

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Neanderthal dental tartar reveals plant-based diet – and drugs

This Neanderthal individual was eating poplar, a source of aspirin, and had also consumed molded vegetation including ‘penicillium fungus,’ source of a natural antibiotic. Photograph: Paleoanthropology Group MNCN-CSIC

Analysis of teeth of Spanish Neanderthals shows diet of pine nuts, mushrooms and moss and indicates possible self-medication for pain and diarrhea

A diet of pine nuts mushrooms and moss might sound like modernist cuisine, but it turns out it was standard fare for Spanish Neanderthals.

Researchers studying the teeth of the heavy-browed hominids have discovered that while Neanderthals in Belgium were chomping on woolly rhinoceros, those further south were surviving on plants and may even have used naturally occurring painkillers to ease toothache.

The findings, the researchers say, are yet another blow to the popular misconception of Neanderthals as brutish simpletons.

“Neanderthals, not surprisingly, are doing different things, exploiting different things, in different places,” said Keith Dobney, a bio-archaeologist and co-author of the research from the University of Liverpool.

Writing in the journal Nature, Dobney and an international team of colleagues describe how they analyzed ancient DNA – from microbes and food debris – preserved in the dental tartar, or calculus, of three Neanderthals dating from 42,000 to 50,000 years ago. Two of the individuals were from the El Sidrón cave in Spain while one was from the Spy Cave in Belgium.



The results reveal that northern Neanderthals had a wide-ranging diet, with evidence of a mushroom known as grey shag in their tartar, together with traces of woolly rhinoceros and wild sheep.

By contrast Neanderthals from El Sidrón showed no evidence of meat eating – instead they appear to have survived on a mixture of forest moss, pine nuts and a mushroom known as split gill.

The difference was further backed up by DNA-based analysis of the diversity and make-up of microbial communities that had lived in the Neanderthals’ mouths.

The findings support previous studies suggesting that the Neanderthals of El Sidrón ate little meat, although Dobney cautioned against drawing broader conclusions, citing the small sample size of the latest study. “I hesitate to say that we have clear, definitive proof that Neanderthals in Spain were vegetarian,” he said.

Indeed, research looking at marks on the bones of Neanderthals from ‘El Sidrón’ has suggested they, might been the victims of cannibalism. While Dobney does not rule out the possibility, he points out that the two Neanderthals in the latest study are unlikely to have been feasting on their relatives.



“You would expect if Neanderthals were eating each other, that the quantity of Neanderthal DNA would be a lot higher in [the tartar] – it would be part of the food debris,” he said. “[That] doesn’t appear to be the case.”

One of the Spanish Neanderthals is known to have had a painful dental abscess, while analysis of the tartar from the same individual yielded evidence of a parasite known to cause diarrhea in humans.

To cope, the researchers add, the unfortunate individual might have been self-medicating. While previous work has suggested the El Sidrón Neanderthals might have exploited yarrow and chamomile, the tartar of the unwell individual shows evidence of poplar, which contains the active ingredient of aspirin, salicylic acid, and a species of ‘penicillium fungus’, suggesting the Neanderthal might have benefited from a natural source of antibiotics.

“Potentially this is evidence of more sophisticated behavior in terms of knowledge of medicinal plants,” said Dobey. “The idea that Neanderthals were a bit simple and just dragging their knuckles around is one that has gone a long time ago, certainly in the anthropological world.”



Dobney believes the new approach could prove valuable in understanding the evolution not only of our diet but also of our microbiota, suggesting similar analysis be carried out on the remains of even earlier hominid relatives. “We can really start to mine this amazing record of our joint evolutionary history with these key microorganisms that are basically part of our lives and keep us alive,” he said.

Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist and expert in human origins from the Natural History Museum in London who was not involved in the research, welcomed the study. “It is tremendous work and very exciting,” he said.
But, he warns, the dental tartar might not tell the full story, since it might not preserve all components of a Neanderthal’s diet, nor the proportions in which they were eaten. Contamination from DNA preserved in sediments in the cave must also be considered, he said, while the plant material found in meat-eating Neanderthals might, at least in part, have come from the hominids eating the stomach contents of their prey.

Stringer is also enthusiastic about the revelations around the Neanderthals’ microbiota. “To have that data from inside the mouth of a Neanderthal from 50,000 years ago is astonishing stuff,” he said.
Source: Nicola Davis - The Guardian

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Questions of Refugee Deservedness

As anthropologists of forced migration, we are used to being kept on our toes as the nature, causes, consequences, and policies that enshroud forced migration are constantly fluctuating. When I returned to Cameroon for ethnographic fieldwork after over a decade living in the region as a humanitarian professional, I came with the intention of working with a large and growing population of Central African refugees.

When I had last left Cameroon a year earlier in 2015, this population was growing rapidly, and garnering the attention of the world, or at least those of us who pay attention to forced migration in Africa. However, in the midst of my research over the summer of 2016, I found a Rwandan community silently struggling with the invocation of a Cessation Clause, built into the 1951 Geneva Convention, for all Rwandan refugees who arrived in asylum countries prior to 1998 and who had not been resettled. They feared this clause would cause the majority to lose their refugee status at the end of 2017. As many had hedged their bets on resettlement, they were at a loss of what to do next, after decades of waiting, and what now felt like rejection of the very foundation of their fears of returning home. Intrigued,

I shifted my focus.
When I first met Francois (pseudonym), a Rwandan refugee in his early 40s, he was dressed in a pressed, dark gray, suit. He stood out in the middle of the informal boutiques made out of plywood and vegetable stands set-up in the open air market. He told me that he was on his way to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ (UNHCR) office. However, looking at the crushing traffic, he decided to delay his travel to the next day for fear of arriving late and wasting fuel along the way. He was going to follow-up on his request for resettlement in the United States. A dossier ten years in waiting still provided him with an inkling of hope. When I introduced myself as an anthropologist who wanted to better understand the Rwandan urban refugee community, he asked if I had time to visit his house, which was down the street.



As we pulled up to a dusty neighborhood store, he introduced me to his wife Antoinette (pseudonym), a nurse. Antoinette brought me to a back room attached to the store where they lived with their two young children. Francois immediately pulled out stacks of papers and handed them to me. They were piles of balances owed to different vendors, which demonstrated to me that all he owned had been purchased on credit.

This family was surviving month to month, but only by borrowing money. Business was slow as the shop was tucked inside of a semi-informal settlement where the population had limited purchasing power. He shook his head quietly, noting that with the Cessation Clause, he wasn’t really sure about their future. Antoinette added that she had tried supplementing their income by working at a local hospital. However, she stopped working because her wages did not cover costs of transportation to the hospital. Antoinette felt that her employer believed that because she was a refugee, who was “treated better” than Cameroon citizens who also needed support, she did not need a higher salary.



This narrative exemplifies that for outsiders, the combination of Rwanda’s current perceived stability and evidence of the Rwandan stores that had cropped up signaled that refugees had successfully integrated. This, coupled with the global migration crisis and increasing pressures on humanitarian agencies, may have culminated in the UNHCR and the Rwandan government’s agreement to instill the Cessation Clause. To many Rwandan refugees, this means that at the end of 2017, they may find themselves without the legal protection that the UNHCR offers them, losing the right to their status as refugees in exile. These individuals need and are actively seeking allies.

I draw attention to these Rwandan refugees because they represent several issues which we are still grappling to understand in the area of forced migration. In today’s climate of xenophobia towards refugees, the refugee label has become increasingly politically and emotionally charged. In some rhetoric refugees are imagined as moochers, taking resources away from others in society who need it more. The false binary between services for refugees and Veterans, for example, often comes up without much justifiable reason as the two budgets are not and never have been in opposition to each other, or even under the same agency. Other times refugees are feared. The fear and the violence that they are fleeing is somehow thrust back onto them in an attempt to make them look like perpetrators, rather than survivors, of human rights abuses. Even as scholars and advocates write articles, op-ed pieces, and conduct interviews, it seems that too often our words and well-researched pieces either preach to the choir or fall on deaf ears of those who have already made up their minds about how dangerous refugees are. Sadly, the latter often occurs without them having ever met a refugee.



As anthropologists, we want our efforts to reach a broader audience. This raises the question: How we can better unite to make sure that our research is disseminated in ways that can influence policies, and public opinion on refugees? Over my humanitarian and research career, I have seen refugees, countless times, feel the need to repeat their stories, to package them in a way that make them “deserving” of the refugee papers and the protection and hope they provide. They need allies to help in their push against these enormous bureaucratic obstacles both in the United States and the many other countries of the world where refugees we are working with are facing similar, often chronic, issues related to rejection of their asylum or refugee status. We should figure out how to be among these allies.
Sources: Kelly Yotebieng is a doctoral student in anthropology at Ohio State University.
Newman is assistant professor of anthropology at Wayne State University and secretary of SUNTA.

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Myths and Truths about Phlegm, Snot and Boogers

By: Alexandria Addesso

Although Spring is slowly approaching, the cold and flu season is still among us. One of the most unpleasant symptoms of such winter sicknesses as the cold and flu is an increased amount of mucus. Whether, if it's in the form of phlegm, a runny nose or dry booger build-up, an increase in mucus production is a major annoyance and inconvenience.

Although it seems that most people experience an increased production of mucus at least once a year, whether it be during cold and flu season or allergy season, there is still a lot of misinformation about it. Although it seems like a nuisance, mucus actually plays a beneficial role for the human body’s ecosystem. Mucus functions as naturally occurring moisturizer for nasal, mouth, and sinuses, without which the tissue surface could easily become dry and crack. The thick and sticky consistency of mucus also helps prevent bacteria, dust, and other harmful substances from entering the body by trapping it and removing it when it is extracted.



Many parents have taught their children that you can tell what type of common illness you have by judging the color of the snot or phlegm. This is not exactly true, when a harmful virus or bacteria enters the sinuses the enzymes in the mucus contain high levels of iron to combat it thus producing a thick green consistency. When mucus sits for several hours without being expelled, such as when a person is asleep, it becomes more concentrated thus making it a dark yellow or green, thick consistency.

Mucus in all forms; snot, phlegm, and boogers; usually gross most of the general population out. Most believe that they are loaded with harmful germs. Yet, these forms of mucus are actually loaded with a variety of strong antibacterial, antiviral, and other protective chemicals that work to keep you healthy. Now this doesn't mean that you should seek out other people’s runny noses to bask in, but rather just not be too freaked out about it. Especially when it comes to your own. When someone touches snot or phlegm and then touches an object or surface without washing their hands first, the virus will only live on that surface for 24 hours.
Be safe, don’t be too grossed out by mucus, and wash your hands.

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The Evolution of Area 51

By: Alexandria Addesso

Area 51 has seemed to exist in two different places for decades, on both the southern shore of Groom Lake about 83 miles north-west of Las Vegas, and in the collective consciousness of those who can only imagine the whereabouts of the military base that has long been kept “top secret” and confidential. Over three-dozen films have been made about Area 51 as well as a host of mini-series despite the fact that very little information about the base has been verified. The idea of Area 51 has definitely evolved over the years.

Area 51 was built in 1941 and was given the official name of “Watertown” in 1956. Other monikers for the test site were Paradise Ranch and Dreamland, the latter was based on a poem by Edgar Allen Poe. The site was originally used as an auxiliary airfield. By 1951 the base was being utilized by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to develop the Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance aircraft, an American single-jet engine, ultra-high altitude aircraft nicknamed “The Dragon Lady.” It is believed that over half of the unidentified flying object (UFO) sightings during the 1950s and 1960s were actually U-2 aircrafts.



This of course has helped contribute to the largely believed lure that aliens as well as their spacecrafts have been or are currently held at Area 51. It is true that aside from the U-2, numerous odd looking aircrafts have been developed, held and tested at the base. Most of which are used for spying or other military purposes. Also many of the projects done at the site are deemed confidential, to which information and details of can never be disclosed. Despite this fact many so called past employees of the base have “leaked” information. Retired Area 51 scientist Boyd Bushman released a video in which he describes the base as containing aliens, UFOs, and anti-gravity projects. The video was released right before his death.



Whether or not you believe that the confidential information about what is done at Area 51 has to do with alien life forms or not seems to be influence on your belief in extraterrestrials in general. Top secret projects done at the base having to do with both domestic and international spying is already factually known. Another reason why certain projects at Area 51 are kept confidential is because they can actually harm the general population. In the 1970s and 1980s Area 51 employees were repeatedly exposed to jet fuel toxins. In 1996 Helen Frost, the wife of one of the employees that died from these toxins, brought up a lawsuit against the United States government but it was dismissed because such allegations could not be “confirmed” and the base is exempt from any environmental laws.

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New Dead Sea Scrolls Discovered inside Qumran Cave Twelve

Fault cliff and entrance to Cave 12. Image credit: Casey L. Olson / Oren Gutfeld.

Archaeologists working near Qumran in Israel have found a cave that previously contained Dead Sea scrolls. They now suggest ‘the cave should be numbered as Cave 12, along with the 11 caves previously known to have housed the famous manuscripts.’

The surprising discovery was made by an international team of archaeologists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel and Liberty University in Virginia, the United States.

“This exciting excavation is the closest we’ve come to discovering new Dead Sea scrolls in 60 years,” said Hebrew University archaeologist Oren Gutfeld, director of the excavation.



“Until now, it was accepted that Dead Sea scrolls were found only in 11 caves at Qumran, but now there is no doubt that this is the 12th cave.”
“Finding this additional scroll cave means we can no longer be certain that the original locations (Caves 1 through 11) attributed to the Dead Sea scrolls that reached the market via the Bedouins are accurate.”

Numerous storage jars and lids from the Second Temple period were found hidden in niches along the walls of Cave 12 and deep inside a long tunnel at its rear.

The jars were all broken and their contents removed, and the discovery towards the end of the excavation of a pair of iron pickaxe heads from the 1950s (stored within the tunnel for later use) proves the cave was looted.

The finds from Cave 12 include not only the storage jars, which held the scrolls, but also fragments of scroll wrappings, a string that tied the scrolls, and a piece of worked leather that was a part of a scroll.


A piece of parchment to be processed for writing, found rolled up in a jug. Image credit: Casey L. Olson / Oren Gutfeld.

“Although no scroll was found, and instead we ‘only’ found a piece of parchment rolled up in a jug that was being processed for writing, the findings indicate beyond any doubt that the cave contained scrolls that were stolen,” Dr. Gutfeld said.

“The findings include the jars in which the scrolls and their covering were hidden, a leather strap for binding the scroll, a cloth that wrapped the scrolls, tendons and pieces of skin connecting fragments, and more.”

Like Cave 8, in which scroll jars but no scrolls were found, Cave 12 will receive the designation Q12 (the Q=Qumran standing in front of the number to indicate no scrolls were found).

The finding of pottery and of numerous flint blades, arrowheads, and a decorated stamp seal made of carnelian, a semi-precious stone, also revealed that the cave was used in the Chalcolithic and the Neolithic periods.

“The important discovery of another scroll cave attests to the fact that a lot of work remains to be done in the Judean Desert and finds of huge importance are still waiting to be discovered,” said Israel Hasson, Director-General of the Israel Antiquities Authority.
Source: Science News (Sci-news.com)

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What Did Neanderthals Leave to Modern Humans? Some Surprises

At Vanderbilt University, John Anthony Capra, an evolutionary genomics professor, has been combining high-powered computation and a medical records databank to learn what a Neanderthal heritage — even a fractional one — might mean for people today.
We spoke for two hours when Dr. Capra, 35, recently passed through New York City. An edited and condensed version of the conversation follows.

-Let’s begin with an indiscreet question. How did contemporary people come to have Neanderthal DNA on their genomes?

-He replied: “we hypothesize that roughly 50,000 years ago, when the ancestors of modern humans migrated out of Africa and into Eurasia, they encountered Neanderthals. Mating must have occurred then, and later.”

One reason we deduce this is because the descendants of those who remained in Africa — present day Africans — don’t have Neanderthal DNA.

What does that mean for people who have it?
At my lab, we’ve been doing genetic testing on the blood samples of 28,000 patients at Vanderbilt and eight other medical centers across the country. Computers help us pinpoint where on the human genome this Neanderthal DNA is, and we run that against information from the patients’ anonymized medical records. We’re looking for associations.



What we’ve been finding is that Neanderthal DNA has a subtle influence on risk for disease. It affects our immune system and how we respond to different immune challenges. It affects our skin. You’re slightly more prone to a condition where you can get scaly lesions after extreme sun exposure. There’s an increased risk for blood clots and tobacco addiction.

To our surprise, it appears that some Neanderthal DNA can increase the risk for depression; however, there are other Neanderthal bits that decrease the risk. Roughly 1 to 2 percent of one’s risk for depression is determined by Neanderthal DNA. It all depends on where on the genome it’s located.

Was there ever an upside to having Neanderthal DNA?
It probably helped our ancestors survive in prehistoric Europe. When humans migrated into Eurasia, they encountered unfamiliar hazards and pathogens. By mating with Neanderthals, they gave their offspring needed defenses and immunities.



That trait for blood clotting helped wounds close up quickly. In the modern world, however, this trait means greater risk for stroke and pregnancy complications. What helped us then doesn’t necessarily now.

Did you say earlier that Neanderthal DNA increases susceptibility to nicotine addiction? Yes. Neanderthal DNA can mean you’re more likely to get hooked on nicotine, even though there were no tobacco plants in archaic Europe.

We think this might be because there’s a bit of Neanderthal DNA right next to a human gene that’s a neurotransmitter implicated in a generalized risk for addiction. In this case and probably others, we think the Neanderthal bits on the genome may serve as switches that turn human genes on or off.

Aside from the Neanderthals, do we know if our ancestors mated with other hominids? We think they did. Sometimes when we’re examining genomes, we can see the genetic afterimages of hominids, which haven’t even been identified yet.




MORE REPORTING ON HUMAN ORIGINS
A few years ago, the Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo received an unusual fossilized bone fragment from Siberia. He extracted the DNA, sequenced it and realized it was neither human nor Neanderthal. What Pääbo found was a previously unknown hominid he named Denisovan, after the cave where it had been discovered. It turned out that Denisovan DNA can be found on the genomes of modern Southeast Asians and New Guineans.

Have you long been interested in genetics?
Growing up, I was very interested in history, but I also loved computers. I ended up majoring in computer science at college and going to graduate school in it; however, during my first year in graduate school, I realized I wasn’t very motivated by the problems that computer scientists worked on.

Fortunately, around that time — the early 2000s — it was becoming clear that people with computational skills could have a big impact in biology and genetics. The human genome had just been mapped. What an accomplishment! We now had the code to what makes you, you, and me, me. I wanted to be part of that kind of work.

So I switched over to biology. And it was there that I heard about a new field where you used computation and genetics research to look back in time — evolutionary genomics.



There may be no written records from prehistory, but genomes are a living record. If we can find ways to read them, we can discover things we couldn’t know any other way.

Not long ago, the two top editors of The New England Journal of Medicine published an editorial questioning “data sharing,” a common practice where scientists recycle raw data other researchers have collected for their own studies. They labeled some of the recycling researchers, “data parasites.” How did you feel when you read that?
I was upset. The data sets we used were not originally collected to specifically study Neanderthal DNA in modern humans. Thousands of patients at Vanderbilt consented to have their blood and their medical records deposited in a “biobank” to find genetic diseases.

Three years ago, when I set up my lab at Vanderbilt, I saw the potential of the biobank for studying both genetic diseases and human evolution. I wrote special computer programs so that we could mine existing data for these purposes.

That’s not being a “parasite.” That’s moving knowledge forward. I suspect that most of the patients who contributed their information are pleased to see it used in a wider way.

What has been the response to your Neanderthal research since you published it last year in the journal Science?

Some of it’s very touching. People are interested in learning about where they came from. Some of it is a little silly. “I have a lot of hair on my legs — is that from Neanderthals?”

But I received racist inquiries, too. I got calls from all over the world from people who thought that since Africans didn’t interbreed with Neanderthals, this somehow justified their ideas of white superiority.

It was illogical. Actually, Neanderthal DNA is mostly bad for us — though that didn’t bother them.

As you do your studies, do you ever wonder about what the lives of the Neanderthals were like?
It’s hard not to. Genetics has taught us a tremendous amount about that, and there’s a lot of evidence that they were much more human than apelike.

They’ve gotten a bad rap. We tend to think of them as dumb and brutish. There’s no reason to believe that. Maybe those of us of European heritage should be thinking, “Let’s improve their standing in the popular imagination. They’re our ancestors, too.’”
Source: Claudia Dreifus

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Twelve new tombs discovered in Gebel el Silsila, Egypt

Researchers have discovered 12 new tombs dating from the 18th Dynasty (Thutmosid period).
Credit: Image courtesy of Lund University

The Swedish mission at Gebel el Silsila has discovered 12 new tombs dating from the 18th Dynasty, including crypts cut into the rock, rock-cut tombs with one or two chambers, niches possibly used for offering, a tomb containing multiple animal burials, and several juvenal burials, some intact.

The Swedish mission at Gebel el Silsila, led by Dr. Maria Nilsson from Lund University and John Ward, has discovered 12 new tombs dating from the 18th Dynasty (Thutmosid period), including crypts cut into the rock, rock-cut tombs with one or two chambers, niches possibly used for offering, a tomb containing multiple animal burials, and several juvenal burials, some intact. “The eighteenth dynasty of ancient Egypt (Dynasty XVIII) (c. 1543–1292 BC) is the best known ancient Egyptian dynasty. It boasts several of Egypt's most famous pharaohs, including Tutankhamun, whose tomb was found by Howard Carter in 1922. The dynasty is also known as the Thutmosid Dynasty for the four pharaohs named Thutmosid (English: Thot bore him)”.



The archaeological material produced from the newly discovered tombs and burials chronologically correlate with those excavated within the cemetery previously, so far limited to the reigns of Thutmosis III and Amenhotep II. In addition to the architecture, the excavation has revealed a wealth of material culture, including finely dressed sandstone sarcophagi, painted car-tonnage, sculptured and occasionally painted pottery coffins, textile and organic wrapping, ceramic vessels and plates, as well as an array of jewelry, amulets and scarabs.



Preliminary studies of the vast amount of human remains so far recovered from the necropolis indicate generally healthy individuals. At this time, very little evidence of malnutrition and infection has been discovered. Fractures of the long bones and increased muscle attachments amongst the skeletal remains indicate behaviors related to occupational hazards and an extremely labor intensive environment. Furthermore, many of the injuries appear to be in an advanced stage of healing, suggesting effective medical care.

The new finds add exciting new components to the necropolis, changing yet again the perceived function and apparent appearance to the site of Gebel el Silsila, and with further fieldwork the team look forward, to increasing their understanding of the overall function and role of the area during the New Kingdom.
Story Source: Lund University

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