Greek Subway Dig Unearths Roman Road

Well, this might give the ancient home of democracy a shot in the arm: Digging deep beneath the streets of Thessaloniki, Greece's second-largest city, has revealed the remains of roads built more than 2,000 years ago. Timing is everything in the archaeology business — or is that the advertising business?

The government has made a big show it if nonetheless, with a public display of the marble-paved road that just happens to be decorated with illustrations of children's games and cart wheels. Archaeologists also found lamps and other tools, as well as bases of marble columns, lending an air of authenticity to the whole thing.

The road getting all the attention is the Roman one (naturally), which was laid down 1,800 years ago. But (typically) it is the Greek road that is even older (naturally), by about 500 years. So obviously, these civilizations knew what they were doing when they built certain things to last. They also knew what they were doing when carving out transportation routes, since modern roads more or less parallel (vertically) several ancient roads.

It's all part of a subway project that was begun in 2006, in the afterglow of the Olympics, and has yet to be completed. Part of the delay came when diggers discovered more than 1,000 graves. Some of those graves contained treasure, and that had to be sorted out.

The long-range plan is for the subway system to have 23 stations. That leaves another whole buried world to discover.

Easter Island statues 'walked': new theory

A pair of scientists have announced a new theory for how the monstrous Easter Island statues were transported: they "walked."

An archaeologist from California and an anthropologist from Hawaii have demonstrated their theory by building their own comparatively smaller moai and using really strong ropes and a large group of people. The demonstration featured ropes tied to three of the giant statue's four sides (left, right, and back), and the volunteers moved the ropes ever so slightly back and forth, approximating a "walk."

It's the latest in a series of explanations for how the island's residents were able to move around such large structures without using heavy machinery. One widely regarded theory supposes that the island's residents cut down lots of trees and fashioned sleds on which to transport the statues. That theory, so the story goes, conveniently explains the population decrease because of the antecedent deforestation.

The proponents of this latest "walking" theory propose that the real reason for the dropoff in population on Rapa Nui was a lack of immunity to diseases brought by European "visitors."

Both theories suffer a bit when tightly reviewed, actually. If the islanders "walked" the statues, then they certainly took risks all along the way that the statues would tumble over in transit. The model moai weighed 5 tons, much less than the standing statues, some of which weighed in at 90 tons. Much safer to "sled" the statues around, unless you're eventually wanting to stand them up, which is what happened, at which point the same toppling risk would ensue, just not as much as during a "walk."

Of course, a completely implausible explanation is that the ancient (or alien) civilization that supplied the Egyptians, Sumerians, and half a dozen other peoples who experienced a "sudden and great leap forward in technology" had a giant crane or two spare and that the residents of Rapa Nui borrowed the cranes for a bit. That theory doesn't stand up to even a loose review. 

As to the real story, we might never know. After all, we haven't gotten around to inventing time travel yet. 

Annie Oakley Auction on Target for Big Payday

It's a bull's-eye to the savings account, as a collection of Annie Oakley items goes under the hammer. 


You can spend your hard-saved cash on the legendary yet all-too-real Annie's guns, her Stetson hat, and mundane items like letters and pictures. It's all part of a Heritage Auctions production featuring 100 items put forward by Oakley's descendants.

Tommye Tait and Terrye Holcomb, two of Annie's great-grandnieces, now own the items, and many more like them, having inherited them all from their mother, Billie Butler Serene, who died three years ago. In true family tree fashion, Serene was reared by her grandfather, who was the brother of Frank Butler, Annie Oakley's husband and manager. Turns out that Serene learned how to handle a gun from Annie herself.

The famous Stetson hat is expected to sell for $4,000. That's nothing compared to the even more famous 12-gauge Parker Brothers shotgun, which is expected to go to some lucky collector for $100,000. (If you're gun-inclined but don't have that much walking-around money, you can settle for a Marlin .22-caliber rifle, which could be yours for a mere $22,000.)

See, this is famous stuff, wielded (or worn) by a famous lass, who was larger than life in her day and even more larger than life in the years after her day. It's a marvel, really, that these items haven't been put on public display before. (The hat, the family says, was a treasured item at family dress-up parties.) The family took all-in-the-family to heart and kept all of Annie's stuff close to home. 

The photos should be of special interest to historians because they feature formal portrait of Annie — with her gun. 

This is not the only Oakley-related collection, of course. You can find lots of authentic Annie stuff in various locations around the country, including the Buffalo Bill Historical Center and, of course, the Annie Oakley Center. 

Stone Age Artists Did Animation on Cave Walls, Study Asserts

We're familiar with the Stone Age, right? Fred Flintstone and all of that, not to mention the complete absence of industrial machinery.

Seriously, the Stone Age was a few generations of great progress, just not very fast on the evolutionary scale, as it were. But wait a bit, what about their art?

Not known for its art, the Stone Age is, yet a new study by an artist and an archaeologist concludes that the people who painted some of the images in France's famous Chauvet cave were, in fact, animators. 

How do you like that, Walt Disney? Mickey who?

Well, it's not that serious. Disney's hold on the popular animated imagination is probably secure. But what could be in dispute is the narrative that says that the first animations happened not all that long ago.

After careful study of the paintings on the wall of the Chauvet cave, the artist and archaeologist, Marc Azema and Florent Rivere, some of the art is meant to suggest multiple versions of the same scene — in other words, animation. 

The bison that looks like it has eight legs is merely one image of a bison superimposed on another image of the same bison, to suggest movement. View the image by the flicker of a torch's light, and you see what could very well be the simulation of that bison in motion.

Well, fancy that. Presumably, you could achieve the same effect by shaking your head vigorously from side to side. The predators in the image sure look like multiple versions of the same animal, shown at slightly different times in a slightly different space. So maybe there is something to this idea after all.

The key to remember here is that these images were painted on the wall of that cave 30,000 years ago. The other thing to note is that you can read more about it in the June issue of Antiquity.

Roman-era Shipwreck Find Could Sink Maritime History Theory

So the story goes that the guys (for they were all guys) who sailed to sea in ancient times in order to sell their wares in other lands were dependent on coastlines to get them from place to place. Shun the open waters did these ancient sailors, the story goes, so that the capricious winds known to plague ancient seas wouldn't destroy the poor ships, which would have no coastline to tack for in desperation.

Well, not any more, if evidence unearthed (and un-watered) is to be believed. You never can tell what to believe coming out of Greece these days, especially if it has to do with money and debt and all of that sort of thing, but the culture ministry doesn't really have that sort of agenda, so maybe we take more than a grain of salt away with this report:

Two shipwrecks found deep in the sea between Corfu and Italy are of Roman-era ships. The ships were found nearly one mile deep, which would be far deeper than ships previously found. The usual depth is between 100 and 200 feet, and the usual place is along the coastline. A massive number of shipwrecks have fit this bill, but the latest two to be discovered do not.

Crews digging to put in a gas pipeline between Greece and Italy found the wrecks. A Greek oceanography crew then scanned the area, including the use of a robot submarine, and delivered footage of amphorae, anchors, ballast stones, and even cooking utensils. Some of the amphorae was produced in north Africa.

The announcement could well be a boon for Greece's struggling archaeology industry, which no doubt needs some sort of infusion before the government gets too desperate and starts selling off the Acropolis and other antiques.

Plant-eating Dinosaurs Created Their Own Greenhouse Effect, Scientists Say

Somewhere in this story is a lesson about eating too many vegetables, but we won't go there at the moment. 

No, the more exciting news is that scientists have come up with yet another reason for the massive dying out of everybody's favorite giant creatures, the dinosaurs. Seems the theory now is that the poor beasts emitted so much methane from eating plants that they created their own runaway greenhouse effect and killed themselves off in the process.

We're not really talking about T-rexes or velociraptors or any of those other raging carnivores made realistically alive and frightening by Steven Spielberg. No, the culprits here are the big beefy plant-munching targets of those carnivores, the sauropods. 

Remember that back in those days, the planet was full of tall, tall trees containing green, green leaves and that these giant skyscraping beasts would lumber along and munch on some leaves every now and then. You have to admire these big giant guys and girls for eating their greens. Doing that sort of thing certainly kept them regular, as it were, but this team of scientists led by a guy called Graeme Ruxton out of Scotland is now asserting that even regularity can be too much of a good thing and that the result of all that leaf-munching was leaf digestion that led to leaf expulsion that created big white puffy clouds full of carbon dioxide-trapping fluffiness, giving all that dino-veggie-methane nowhere to go. The result, of course, must have been chaos, as the poor beasties would have found it getting hotter and hotter, ever so slightly, and then they would have sweated and sweated and eventually overheated and fallen over (provided that they didn't get eaten by a carnivore first).

The scientists' estimate is that a 90-ton sauropod measuring 140 feet in length would have eaten half of a ton of food every day and, once that food had been digested, would have produced a few thousand liters of methane in a day. Compare that to a cow's daily output of 200 liters, and you have some idea of the runaway problem that such "additions" to the atmosphere could cause. 

Have a thought for the T-rexes of the world, too, because they wouldn't have caused this greenhouse effect but would have certainly suffered from it. Maybe they didn't eat the sauropods fast enough? It's a tricky thing, being a carnivore. You have to have that balance between gorging yourself until sated, day after day, and allowing the population to repopulate itself enough so that you can keep feeding on it and live a good long life.

Speaking of a good long life, we have to remember as well that even if this greenhouse gas theory is correct, the extinction of dinosaurs didn't happen overnight. As dramatic as the asteroid theory is, it doesn't suggest that, either. It took a good long time for dinosaurs to disappear from the planet. They had a good long time to leave lots of fossils behind — which is all we have at the moment because none of those "terrible lizards" is around anymore to tell us their rather sad little story.

Moral of the story: It's not easy eating green.

Furry T-Rex Ancestor Discovered in China

T-rex with a conscience? Could be.

A team of Canadian and Chinese scientists have discovered a new species of tyrannosaur, Yutyrannus huali, which was a bit smaller than the feared beasts of Steven Spielberg fame and had feathers. It was also a bit smaller and, apparently, a bit better-looking, judging by the translation: "beautiful feathered tyrant." (Apparently, as well, it was still deadly.)

The excavations, from a dig in northeastern China, revealed evidence of remains of down-like feathers on the dinosaur's neck and arm. It wasn't enough to convince that the "feathered" referred to a full coat or giant bird-like wingfeathers or anything like that, but the discovery did give the excavation crew pause, enough to suggest that this species, at least, might have been a bit less like the movie-version giant tyrants that we've come to see in our imaginations.

This discovery will no doubt be more grist for the mill of debate surrounding how, when, and how fast certain species of dinosaurs lost their feathers — if they had any to begin with. The patchiness of fur found in the latest remains could suggest an overall patchy covering or, perhaps, an aging dinosaur who was losing its hair, or even a young dinosaur still growing into the coat. (One suggestion was even that the beast could ruffle its feathers and show off, like today's peacock species.) Like so many things with these ancient beasts, we just don't know and we won't ever find out firsthand (despite what Michael Crichton would have you believe).

This species lived 60 millions years before Tyrannosaurus rex, so there's little chance that they were directly related. However, that's not enough time to discount a connection altogether, either, so scientists in this field will take a good long look at these data when they are writing their next journal papers.

You can find the journal paper covering this latest discovery in Nature.