Recent analysis of the controversial Jordan Lead Codices, a collection of 70 lead and copper books that are purported to chronicle the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, suggests that the books are indeed two millennia old, contrary to claims being made by scholars that the documents are merely modern forgeries.
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The wrecks of several warships that were sunk during the Battle of the Java Sea in 1942 have mysteriously disappeared, after marking the graves of their respective sailors for nearly three-quarters of a century. Officials are blaming commercial scrap metal scavengers for looting the site, having pilfered ships that belonged to the American, British and Dutch navies. But at least one salvage expert is skeptical about this being the work of ordinary scavengers.
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First posited by the 16th century Spanish naturalist, José de Acosta, it has been a long-standing theory that the indigenous human populations in North and South America arrived there at the end of the last ice age, via the Bering land bridge, before rising ocean levels cut off the connection between the Asian and North American continents. According to this theory, the migrants made their way south via an ice-free corridor that ran between the Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets, cutting southward through what is now the province of Alberta in western Canada.
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Recovered from a 1st-century Roman shipwreck in 1901, the Antikythera Mechanism is the world’s oldest known analog computer, at an estimated 2,200 years old. While the device’s mechanism has long since been known to have involved astronomical calculations, its full nature has been shrouded in mystery, with the mechanism’s approximately 30 bronze gears having corroded into a single lump over the millennia that it lay on the seafloor. However, new examinations by a multi-national research team have deciphered nearly all of the surviving text that had been inscribed on the device by its builder from ancient Greece.
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