BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | 'Pompeii of the East' discovered

An expedition to the site of the largest volcanic eruption in modern times has uncovered a lost kingdom.

More than 100,000 people died when Mount Tambora erupted on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa in 1815.

Remains of a house with two occupants buried under ash have been unearthed for the first time in a discovery hailed the "Pompeii of the East".

Scientists say bronze bowls, ceramic pots and other recovered artefacts shed light on an old Indonesian culture.

"There's potential that Tambora could be the Pompeii of the East, and it could be of great cultural interest," said Professor Haraldur Sigurdsson, of the University of Rhode Island, US, who has been researching the area for 20 years.

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CNN.com: 'Lost world' found in jungle

OSLO, Norway (Reuters) -- Scientists say they have found a "Lost World" in an Indonesian mountain jungle, home to dozens of exotic new species of birds, butterflies, frogs and plants.

"It's as close to the Garden of Eden as you're going to find on Earth," said Bruce Beehler, co-leader of the U.S., Indonesian, and Australian expedition to part of the cloud-shrouded Foja mountains in the west of New Guinea.

Indigenous peoples living near the Foja range, which rises to 2,200 meters (7,218 feet), said they did not venture into the trackless area of 3,000 square kilometers (1,200 square miles) -- roughly the size of Luxembourg or the U.S. state of Rhode Island.

The team of 25 scientists rode helicopters to boggy clearings in the pristine zone.

"We just scratched the surface," Beehler told Reuters. "Anyone who goes there will come back with a mystery."

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Research: Donners didn't resort to cannibalism

From CNN:

RENO, Nevada (AP) -- There's no physical evidence that the family who gave the Donner Party its name had anything to do with the cannibalism the ill-fated pioneers have been associated with for a century and a half, two scientists said Thursday.

Cannibalism has been documented at the Sierra Nevada site where most of the Donner Party's 81 members were trapped during the brutal winter of 1846-47, but 21 people, including all the members of the George and Jacob Donner families, were stuck six miles away because a broken axle had delayed them.

No cooked human bones were found among the thousands of fragments of animal bones at that Alder Creek site, suggesting Donner family members did not resort to cannibalism, the archaeologists said at a conference of the Society for Historical Archaeology in Sacramento, California.

Oldest Known Photo of a Tornado

From Wikipedia

The New York Times on Ilya Ivanov, cross-breeding apes, and Stalin

From the article:

In the mid-1920's, the culture wars were dominated - as they are today with "intelligent design" - by the debate between creationism and evolutionary thinking. In 1925, John T. Scopes had been found guilty of teaching that mankind arose from something other than divine creation. But the United States was not the only country passionate about the issue. The young Soviet Union, in its effort to stamp out religion, was determined to prove that men were descended from apes. In 1926, a Soviet scientist named Ilya Ivanov decided the most compelling way to do this would be to breed a humanzee: a human-chimpanzee hybrid.

Kissing Cousins - New York Times

Stalin's half-man, half-ape super-warriors

From THE SCOTSMAN

By CHRIS STEPHEN AND ALLAN HALL

THE Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the creation of Planet of the Apes-style warriors by crossing humans with apes, according to recently uncovered secret documents.

Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia's top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior.

According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told the scientist: "I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat."

In 1926 the Politburo in Moscow passed the request to the Academy of Science with the order to build a "living war machine". The order came at a time when the Soviet Union was embarked on a crusade to turn the world upside down, with social engineering seen as a partner to industrialisation: new cities, architecture, and a new egalitarian society were being created.

The Soviet authorities were struggling to rebuild the Red Army after bruising wars.

And there was intense pressure to find a new labour force, particularly one that would not complain, with Russia about to embark on its first Five-Year Plan for fast-track industrialisation.

Mr Ivanov was highly regarded. He had established his reputation under the Tsar when in 1901 he established the world's first centre for the artificial insemination of racehorses.

Mr Ivanov's ideas were music to the ears of Soviet planners and in 1926 he was dispatched to West Africa with $200,000 to conduct his first experiment in impregnating chimpanzees.

Meanwhile, a centre for the experiments was set up in Georgia - Stalin's birthplace - for the apes to be raised.

Mr Ivanov's experiments, unsurprisingly from what we now know, were a total failure. He returned to the Soviet Union, only to see experiments in Georgia to use monkey sperm in human volunteers similarly fail.

A final attempt to persuade a Cuban heiress to lend some of her monkeys for further experiments reached American ears, with the New York Times reporting on the story, and she dropped the idea amid the uproar.

Mr Ivanov was now in disgrace. His were not the only experiments going wrong: the plan to collectivise farms ended in the 1932 famine in which at least four million died.

For his expensive failure, he was sentenced to five years' jail, which was later commuted to five years' exile in the Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan in 1931. A year later he died, reportedly after falling sick while standing on a freezing railway platform.

Giant ape lived alongside humans

Research into Gigantopithecus blackii began in 1935, when the Dutch paleontologist G.H. von Koenigswald discovered a yellowish molar among the "dragon bones" for sale in a Hong Kong pharmacy. Traditional Chinese medicine maintains that dragon bones, basically fossil bones and teeth, possess curative powers when the fossils are ground into a fine powder, and ingested.

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Robert H. Johnston, 77; Explored Ancient Documents With Digital Technology

Robert H. Johnston, an archeologist and teacher who combined his interest in ancient texts with digital imaging technology to help uncover new information about the Dead Sea Scrolls and other rare documents, died Oct. 19 at his home in Rochester, N.Y. He was 77.

I learned much about Johnson in the past five years as the Carl Denham Restoration Project worked to decipher various etched artwork and glyphs present on "Skull Island" artifacts recovered in France. Much of what we were able to piece together was thanks to techniques that grew directly from Johnson's innovations.

From the Los Angeles Times:

"Bob was a pioneer," said Bruce Zuckerman, director of the West Semitic Research Project at USC. "He built a bridge between technical enhancement and the humanities."

Zuckerman supplied Johnston with photographs of the so-called Temple Scroll, which is 28 feet, the longest and one of the most important in the Dead Sea collection.

Johnston and his team, including Roger L. Easton, an imaging scientist on the school faculty, as well as others at Eastman Kodak Co. and the Xerox Corp., found 18 Hebrew letters on the scroll, which describes an ideal Hebrew temple.

"That might not sound like a lot, but whole matters of history can turn on a single, specific letter," Zuckerman said.

Johnston and his team made other breakthroughs when they examined a 10th century copy of a treatise by Archimedes, the Greek mathematician who died in 212 BC.

The original Archimedes text, "On the Method of Mechanical Theorems," had been erased so the parchment could be reused as a prayer book. In addition to new text, the pages were covered with painted images and candle wax.

"We were able to extract things that had been trapped," Easton said Thursday of the book and other documents he and Johnston examined. "Bob was the conduit between the scholars and the technicians."

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