Do you believe in Santa Claus?

Archaeologists in Turkey believe they may have found the true tomb of Hágios Nikólaos, better known in the west as Saint Nicholas, the fourth-century saint famous for his charity work and gift-giving, that eventually led to the modern-day legend of Santa Claus. Scholars have been questioning the validity of the remains interred in the Basilica di San Nicola in Bari, Italy, that are traditionally attributed to Nicholas, based on documentation retrieved from the region. Now, recent archaeological surveys have revealed an intact temple and burial site underneath Saint Nicholas Church in Antalya, Turkey, that may hold Saint Nicholas’ true remains.
read more

A new expedition to explore the Mayan complex at Chichen Itza has been launched, that will include studying the 1,000-year-old Temple of Kukulkan, and the landscape’s numerous sinkholes. The expedition’s aim is an attempt to uncover the secrets of a mysterious underworld that is supposed to exist there according to Mayan oral history. This is the first comprehensive exploration of the site in roughly half a century.
read more

A new analysis of a 3,700-year-old Babylonian cuneiform tablet suggests that the ancient Babylonians were using an advanced form of trigonometry roughly a millennium before ancient Greek mathematicians recorded what is known as the Pytharoean theorem. In addition to the tablet’s antiquity, the tables inscribed on it also suggest that the Mesopotamians’ approach to this form of mathematics may be superior to the function we use today.
read more

Researchers studying the archaeological site at Göbekli Tepe have uncovered the remains of human skulls that have had long grooves deliberately carved into them. The carved skull fragments, belonging to three different individuals, are amongst the remains of hundreds of other skull remains found amongst the site’s ancient T-shaped limestone monoliths, prompting the researchers to believe that Göbekli Tepe may have been home to one of the world’s first skull cults.
read more