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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Bruniquel Cave, in southern France, is home to a primitive stone circle, found deep in the darkest recesses of its subterranean chambers, and is considered to predate habitation in the region by modern humans. Much like Chauvet Cave, with it’s detailed and ancient artwork adorning it’s walls, Bruniquel Cave offers us a rare message from our distant ancestors, and what they were capable of constructing and communicating. However, an amazing new announcement by a research team has pushed back the sheer antiquity of the site, and possibly along with it, the development of the human mind.
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The mainstream scientific theory that North and South America’s indigenous cultures came across the Bering land bridge from Asia at the end of the last ice age appears to be in jeopardy, with the growing acceptance of archaeological finds across the two continents that point to a much earlier period of habitation. A recent paper published regarding an underwater sinkhole in Florida that contains human-made artifacts dating back to 14,550 years ago — over a thousand years before humans were even supposed to be in Alaska — is one such example, although the acceptance of these ideas has been slow.
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When it comes to mysterious prehistoric sites, North America’s rich treasure trove of ancient puzzles tend to get overshadowed by more famous examples from Africa, Eurasia, and South America. Earthworks like the Serpent Mound in Ohio, and numerous medicine wheel sites such as Wyoming’s Bighorn Medicine Wheel are but two types of these archaeological enigmas, who’s ages can be disputed due to the difficulty in determining how old the constructions are.
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