M.J. Rose

…”The purpose and origin of the hoard remains a mystery…”

6,000-year-old crown found in Dead Sea cave revealed

(by April Holloway – Ancient Origins)

“The world’s oldest crown, which was famously discovered in 1961 as part of the Nahal Mishar Hoard, along with numerous other treasured artefacts, are to be revealed in New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World as part of the ‘Masters of Fire: Copper Age Art from Israel’ exhibit.

The ancient crown dates back to the Copper Age between 4000–3500 BC, and is just one out of more than 400 artefacts that were recovered in a cave in the Judean Desert near the Dead Sea more than half a century ago. The crown is shaped like a thick ring and features vultures and doors protruding from the top. It is believed that it played a part in burial ceremonies for people of importance at the time…”

See more here.

In a universe teeming with earth-like habitable planets, have you ever wondered why we have not yet been visited by extraterrestrials? The theory of Biocentrism attempts to explain many things in our universe in a way that makes beautiful sense, and this is one of them. (If you think we have been visited, this video will also intrigue you…)

This may sound like science fiction, but scientists really are resurrecting lost species.

The Mammoth Cometh

Bringing extinct animals back to life is really happening — and it’s going to be very, very cool. Unless it ends up being very, very bad.

By NATHANIEL RICH (New York Times)

“The first time Ben Novak saw a passenger pigeon, he fell to his knees and remained in that position, speechless, for 20 minutes. He was 16. At 13, Novak vowed to devote his life to resurrecting extinct animals. At 14, he saw a photograph of a passenger pigeon in an Audubon Society book and “fell in love.” But he didn’t know that the Science Museum of Minnesota, which he was then visiting with a summer program for North Dakotan high-school students, had them in their collection. He was shocked when he came across a cabinet containing two stuffed pigeons, a male and a female, mounted in lifelike poses. He was overcome by awe, sadness and the birds’ physical beauty: their bright auburn breasts, slate-gray backs and the dusting of iridescence around their napes that, depending on the light and angle, appeared purple, fuchsia or green. Before his chaperones dragged him out of the room, Novak snapped a photograph with his disposable camera. The flash was too strong, however, and when the film was processed several weeks later, he was haunted to discover that the photograph hadn’t developed. It was blank, just a flash of white light.

In the decade since, Novak has visited 339 passenger pigeons — at the Burke Museum in Seattle, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, the American Museum of Natural History in New York and Harvard’s Ornithology Department, which has 145 specimens, including eight pigeon corpses preserved in jars of ethanol, 31 eggs and a partly albino pigeon. There are 1,532 passenger-pigeon specimens left on Earth. On Sept. 1, 1914, Martha, the last captive passenger pigeon, died at the Cincinnati Zoo…”

For the complete article (it’s really quite wonderful) click here to go to the New York Times Magazine.