Here there be dragons … but no centaurs

Wikimedia commons/Pearson Scott Foresman

What’s the difference between believing in centaurs and believing in dragons? Jamie L. from Australia writes in response to The Year the Water Dragon Roared:

I am a Christian and a subscriber to your magazine. I would love to find more evidence that supports our view of a creator and loving God, however sometimes I think we are just reaching. If we use this kind of rationale, we could also perhaps say that the Egyptians knew of half men half horse centaurs. I think we can do better than this, don’t you?

What We Learned About Humanity in 2012

By Charles Choi, LiveScience Contributor | LiveScience.com

The controversial extinct human lineage known as "hobbits" gained a face this year, one of many projects that shed light in 2012 on the history of modern humans and their relatives. Other discoveries include the earliest known controlled use of fire and the possibility that Neanderthals or other extinct human lineages once sailed to the Mediterranean.

Here's a look at what we learned about ourselves through our ancestors this year.

We're not alone

A trove of discoveries this year revealed a host of other extinct relatives of modern humans. For instance, researchers unearthed 3.4-million-year-old fossils of a hitherto unknown species that lived about the same time and place as Australopithecus afarensis, a leading candidate for the ancestor of the human lineage. In addition, fossils between 1.78 million and 1.95 million years old discovered in 2007 and 2009 in northern Kenya suggest that at least two extinct human species lived alongside Homo erectus, a direct ancestor of our species. Moreover, fossils only between 11,500 and 14,500 years old hint that a previously unknown type of human called the "Red Deer Cave People" once lived in China.

Proof of Ancient Bethlehem Discovered in Jerusalem

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Imagine living in a place so rich with history that significant archeological finds are commonplace. That’s the reality in Israel.

Case in point: the recent discovery of a seal, or bulla, that dates from the 7th or 8th century BCE found in routine excavations by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) in the walls around Jerusalem National Park.

Eli Shukron, director of the excavation for the IAA, explains the significance of the discovery, “This is the first time the name Bethlehem appears outside the Bible, in an inscription from the First Temple period, which proves that Bethlehem was indeed a city in the Kingdom of Judah, and possibly also in earlier periods.”

For archaeologists this is important because the small clay seal provides evidence of what Christians and Jews have long known to be true -- that Bethlehem wasn’t a “fabled biblical town,” but a real bustling city filled with commerce and trade with neighboring towns. 

cavemen knew how to keep the home-fires burning.

Boston University: “Playing with Fire”

Promethean hypothesis picks up steam from residual cooking fire.

by Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell

South African archaeological spelunking has confirmed “cavemen” knew how to keep the home-fires burning. High-tech “microstratigraphic” analysis of sediment excavated 30 meters inside the cave entrance provided “unambiguous evidence in the form of burned bone and ashed plant remains that burning events took place in Wonderwerk Cave during the early Acheulean [Homo erectus] occupation, approximately 1.0 Ma,”⁸ write the investigators in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We collect an intact block of material, something the size of a milk container where everything is preserved in its original shape,” says co-author Paul Goldberg. “We can pick out a block of this stuff . . . dry it, soak it in polyester or epoxy resin and turn it into a rock, essentially. Once we do that, we can slice it just like geologists do, mount it on a slide and then look at it under the microscope.”

This archaeological confirmation of an ancient cooking fire comes on the heels of a recent study⁹asserting the small teeth of Homo erectus were “adapted to a diet of cooked food”⁸ and supporting—according to evolutionists—primatologist Richard Wrangham’s “cooking hypothesis.” The title of Wrangham’s book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, sums up his contention that learning to control fire and cook food was the secret to humanity’s evolutionary success. (See News to Note, August 27, 2011 for a discussion of these culinary ramifications.)

“It [cooking food] gave extra energy, used for evolutionary success; reduced feeding time, freeing men to hunt; lowered weaning time, creating bigger families; allowed brain size to increase; gave us our shortfaced, flat-bellied anatomy; enabled the sexual division of labour,” says Wrangham. “It was so important that it likely drove the evolution of our genus Homo.Basically, if the cooking hypothesis is right it turned us from advanced ape to early human.”

The researchers, like Wrangham, believe “the ability to control fire was a crucial turning point in human evolution”⁸ and that the ability to cook had to be in the hominin skill set by 1.9 million years ago, the time evolutionists claim Homo erectus evolved. These findings are the “earliest” known evidence of controlled use of fire and therefore are assumed to support these Promethean concepts of human evolution. (For readers rusty on their classical mythology, Prometheus was the Greek Titan credited in Greek mythology and the plays of Aeschylus and Shelley with giving mankind the gift of fire.)

The researchers have ruled out wildfire, convinced the fire was a controlled fire fed by plant material and that debris was not washed or blown in. Goldberg believes “it was unlikely there was any vegetation of wood or wood-like material that would have been there [30 meters inside] to burn on the spot – you can exclude local burning of material by natural causes. These ashes are really quite delicate, so they can't have been transported by wind or water, they would have never survived as intact pieces. It [the fire] has to be something local, right there on the spot.”

They also found pot lids made of iron. Fractures in these iron artifacts are consistent with those achieved by experimentally heating to over 500 degrees Celsius, again suggesting the fire was used for cooking.

The million-year date ascribed to the burned debris was obtained by integrating paleomagnetic data and cosmogenic isotopic (26Al/10Be) ratios measured outside the cave in recent years.¹⁰The latter measurements are based on decay of beryllium-10 and aluminum-26 isotopes formed in sand exposed to cosmic radiation. Magnetic field reversals are thought to affect the rate of isotope formation, allowing magnetic and isotope data to be integrated. (Decreased magnetic field intensity during reversal would allow more cosmic rays to reach earth causing an increase in isotope production.)

Paleomagnetic reversals are conventionally thought to indicate long ages based on the assumed long age of the earth. Creationist physicist Dr. Russ Humphreys has proposed, however, that convection currents in the core of the earth—affected by Flood-associated tectonic shifts—reversed earth’s magnetic field every few weeks during the global Flood.¹¹ Subsequent research has documented analogous rapid magnetic field reversals in thin layers of cooled lava.¹² Thus paleomagnetic dating is unreliable because magnetic reversals can occur rapidly and likely did so during the global Flood.

Furthermore, many factors can affect the geochemical cycling of these isotopes, including altered production rate due to magnetic reversals and other causes, changes in atmospheric circulation of the isotopes, and changes in precipitation.¹³ Thus these dating methods, singly and together, suffer from the usual problems with unverifiable assumptions that haunt other radiometric dating methods. In particular, the global Flood very likely affected the calibration of at least one of the parameters in a dramatic way for which observable geology has provided an analogous model. Without the million-year date, these findings become merely confirmation that early humans knew how to cook.

Homo erectus was fully human and, like Neanderthals and early modern humans, had smaller teeth than apes’ teeth. Intelligent descendants of people scattered from the tower of Babel, they would all know how to cook. There is no proof cooking enabled “hominins” to evolve bigger, better brains. Brain size is not linked to human intelligence, so the fact that Homo erectus had cranial capacity on the small end of human average and Neanderthals had cranial capacity on the large end fails to show an ascending human evolutionary path. Nothing in the study supports the concept of human evolution from brutish or ape-like ancestors.

On the other hand, the historical accounts in the Bible shed light on the post-Flood Ice Age and the dispersion of Noah’s descendants from Babel, showing how human fossils like Homo erectusfit the biblical picture. Homo erectus, Neanderthals, and Denisovans appear in the Pleistocene rock layers as do extinct Ice Age animals. While Genesis does not offer the details of the post-Flood climate change, the natural result of the global Flood was the Ice Age that affected so much of our world for hundreds of years. People migrating from Babel had to cope with those climate changes and probably used caves for shelter and to bury their dead.

Homo erectus fossils, with “large brow ridges, small chins, and receding foreheads”¹⁴ along with their characteristic tools are preserved near Babel in the Lower and Middle Pleistocene layers of East Africa and Central Asia. Homo erectus fossils also appear farther from Babel in Upper Pleistocene layers along with other varieties of people, such as Neanderthals and the very shortHomo floresiensis of Indonesia. Yet the fossil record does not preserve further record of these members of the human race after the Ice Age, suggesting they ultimately succumbed. Without DNA from Homo erectus we cannot document whether they live on in modern humans as do Neanderthals, but there is no reason to doubt their humanity or their intelligence—or to suppose they were evolving quasi-humans whose humanity depended on newly acquired culinary skills.

For more information:

• Axing Evolutionary ideas—Stone Dead!
• Still Trying to Make Ice Cores Old
• The ‘Principle of Least Astonishment’!
• See also Answers magazine volume 7, number 2 (April–June 2012) which contains several articles and helpful diagrams (example, right) explaining how “cavemen” can be explained within the biblical timeline in the special feature: “Finding a Home for Cavemen: Who were they? When did they live? How are they different?”

http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/2012/04/07/news-to-note-04072012#one

LOST GOLD: THE S.S. REPUBLIC

Posted on Sep 6, 2008 in Found Treasure

Estimated Value: $75,000,000 – $180,000,000 (75 – 180 Million Dollars)

SHIPWRECK

When the sidewheel steamer SS Republic left New York in October of 1865, she was carrying 62 passengers and a cargo of $400,000 (1865 face value) in gold and silver coins. She was headed for New Orleans where the money would be used to help pay for reconstruction of the South after the Civil War.

On the fifth day of her voyage, a hurricane off the coast of Georgia proved too strong for the ship. By evening, her hull was leaking so badly that the fire in the boiler was extinguished. She stalled in heavy seas, taking on water faster than her crew and passengers could bail. The Republic sank beneath the waves.

While most of the passengers were able to abandon ship, the precious cargo of Gold and Silver Coins plunged to the bottom of the Atlantic ocean where they remained until…

REDISCOVERY

In the summer of 2003 Odyssey Marine Exploration, a commercial treasure hunting company out of Tampa, Florida, discovered the wreck of the SS Republic 1700 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean approximately 100 miles off the Georgia coast.

Odyssey was awarded title and ownership to the shipwreck and it’s cargo, including the hull, artifacts and all the gold and silver coins that were on board when she sank.

SEARCH AND RECOVERY

A high-res side scan image of the SS Republic site.

The ship’s bell was recovered in October 2003.

The discovery of the SS Republic wasn’t just dumb luck, it took 12 years and thousands of man hours to finally pinpoint the wreck site.

Like a scene stolen from a Clive Cussler Novel, the search area was systematically narrowed down using information from old newspapers, survivors reports, ships’ logs and computer simulations.

The resulting data predicted potential locations for the ship’s sinking, based on combinations of surface current speed, effect of winds upon the ship’s movement after the engine failed, and effects of wind and current upon the movement of the ship’s boats and raft after they cast off.

All the research paid off; In July 2003, side scan sonar revealed a promising target, an initial video inspection was conducted which revealed a sidewheel partially buried by sediment, the ship’s rudder sheathed in copper, and a large field of artifacts and bottles, including preserved bottles of fruit or other food with corks still intact.

The ship’s bell was eventually located and recovered to positively identify the shipwreck as that of the SS Republic.

And there was much rejoicing!

COINS AND ARTIFACTS

Coins recovered from the SSRepublic shipwreck site. Each coin is picked up individually to avoid marring the surface.

To date more than 51,000 coins have been recovered from the wreck including $20.00 Double Eagles, $10.00 Eagles, Half Dollars and Quarter Dollars. The retail value of coins recovered so far is expected to exceed $75 million dollars.

The collection includes many of the finest examples of United States gold and silver coins from the period. To see samples check outfeatured coins from the SS Republic on Odyssey’s website.

In addition to the coins, approximately 14,000 artifacts have been recovered from the SS Republic, literally bringing the past to life. Many artifacts and rare items of cargo will be kept in Odyssey’s permanent collection for display and study.

The search and recovery effort was depicted in a National Geographic Society TV documentarycalled Civil War Gold. There is also a book about the search and recovery -  Lost Gold of the Republic.

Discovery Channel is making an 11-part series about Odyssey and their salvage operations that will air sometime in 2009 – think “Deadliest Catch” but with Gold instead of Crabs as the prize. You know I’ll be watching!

RESOURCES

View Pictures and Video Clips of the search for and the archaeological excavation of the SSRepublic on Odyssey’s official website (NOTE: You’ll be required to create an account before you can view the media).

As part of the pre-disturbance survey, the Odyssey team created a detailed photomosaic. Small areas of the shipwreck site were photographed and then the individual images were ‘stitched’ together. For a comprehensive view of the SS Republic photomosaic please click on the following link: “SS Republic Photomosaic“, courtesy of National Geographic 

Magazine.http://www.thelifeofadventure.com/lost-gold-the-ss-republic/#more-1386 

THE ATOCHA

Posted on Sep 14, 2008 in Found Treasure

 

Estimated Value: $400,000,000 (400 Million Dollars)

On September 4, 1622 the Tierra Firme flota of twenty-eight ships left Havana bound for Spain with one of the richest new world cargos ever assembled; silver from Peru and Mexico, gold and emeralds from Colombia and pearls from Venezuela.

The heavily armed Nuestra Señora de Atocha sailed as Almirante, or rear guard, of the fleet, following the others to prevent an attack from behind the fleet. She’d been built for the Crown in Havana in 1620 and was rated at 550 tons, with an overall length of 112 feet, a beam of 34 feet and a draft of 14 feet.

For the 1622 return voyage the Atocha was loaded with a cargo that is almost beyond belief – 24 tons of silver bullion in 1038 ingots, 180,00 pesos of silver coins, 582 copper ingots, 125 gold bars and discs, 350 chests of indigo, 525 bales of tobacco, 20 bronze cannon and 1,200 pounds of worked silverware! To this can be added items being smuggled to avoid taxation, and unregistered jewelry and personal goods; all creating a treasure that could surely rival any other ever amassed.

DISASTER!

On September 23, 1622, as the fleet passed near the Florida Keys, a Hurricane fell upon them. The Atocha, Santa Margarita, Nuestra Señora del Rosario and two smaller vessels all at the tail end of the convoy received the full impact of the storm.

With their sails and rigging reduced to shreds, and masts and tillers battered or broken, the ships drifted helplessly toward the reefs – all five ships were lost, the Atocha being lifted high on a wave and smashed violently on a coral reef. She sunk instantly, pulled to the bottom by her heavy cargo of treasure and cannon.

Of the 265 people aboard the Atocha, only five survived!

Spanish salvage boats sped to the scene as soon as the storm abated and easily found the wreck. The Atocha’s mizzenmast protruded above the water and her hull was visible fifty-five feet below. Her hatches and gun ports, however had been securely sealed against the storm, and divers could not get into the hull.

Spanish Treasure Routes

Click to Enlarge

By the time the salvagers returned with the heavy tools and explosives needed to break in, the ship was gone. A second hurricane had dismembered her and buried her remains in the churning sands. For five decades, the Spanish searched relentlessly for the Atocha, but she had vanished without a trace.

The Atocha and her treasure remained undisturbed for over 350 years, time and events slowly erased memories of the ship and its name eventually vanished from the lips of all but a few treasure seekers and historians.

Copies of the ship’s register and written events of the times eventually found their way into theArchives of the Indies in Seville, Spain. These documents, like the treasure itself, were to lay in obscurity waiting for the right set of circumstances centuries later.

THE HUNT FOR THE ATOCHA

The twentieth century was a period of tremendous technological advancement; for the Atocha, one of the most significant occurred in 1942 when a French naval lieutenant named Jacques Cousteau developed the self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, or SCUBA for short. It allowed divers to remain underwater for extended periods of time, something the Spanish salvors were not able to do in 1622.

During the 1960′s this new technology contributed to the discovery of ten wrecks from the 1715 Spanish treasure fleet near Vero Beach, Florida. This highly publicized salvage operation, conducted by Real Eight Corporation, ignited an unprecedented interest in Spanish colonial shipwreck salvage, which remains strong to this day. It was this event that drew people such as Mel Fisher into the industry and onto the path of the Atocha.

MEL FISHER – TREASURE HUNTER EXTRODINAIRE

Mel Fisher circa 1985

In 1969, after participating in the 1715 fleet salvage operation, Mel Fisher formed a company called Treasure Salvors Inc. and along with his rag-tag crew launched what was to become one of the most frustrating, costly, yet ultimately rewarding search efforts ever undertaken.

Using sand-clearing prop-wash deflectors, or “mailboxes,” that he invented, and specially-designed proton magnetometers, a device towed behind a boat that can detect metal objects on the sea’s bottom, they spent long years following the wreck’s elusive trail – sometimes finding nothing for months, and then recovering bits of treasure and artifacts that teasingly indicated the proximity of the ship and its cargo.

In 1970 Fisher brought a noted maritime historian named Eugene Lyons on board to research Spanish archives for clues to the Atocha’s whereabouts. Lyons found a report about the initial 1622 salvage operations of the Atocha. The report cited a ship named the Margarita, one of the other victims of the hurricane, which was documented as having gone down within four miles of the Atocha’s last sighting. Fisher figured that if he could find the Margarita, he could also find the Atocha.

The new research suggested that past exploration had been about one hundred miles off the mark. The Atocha had evidently gone down in the Marquesas, some twenty miles from Key West. The new information kicked the hunt into high gear.

Fisher’s crew dragged their high-tech proton magnetometer over 120,000 linear miles of open ocean before the first Atocha artifacts surfaced in 1971. From then on, Fisher and his crew lived a roller coaster cycle of highs and lows.

The “Mailbox” invented by Mel Fisher

In 1973, three silver bars were found that matched the weights and tally numbers found on the Atocha’s manifest which had been transcribed from the original in Seville. This verified that Fisher was close to the major part of the wreck site.

For several years, a small trickle of coins were found, but the bulk of the Atocha’s treasure eluded discovery.

In July 1975, Fisher’s eldest son, Dirk, then twenty-one and captain of the salvage tug Northwind, found nine brass cannon from the Atocha. But the jubilation over the find was short-lived. Three days later, Dirk, his young wife, Angel and diver Rick Gage all drowned when the Northwind capsized. Their deaths nearly extinguished Mel Fisher’s resolve. “I thought. ‘Maybe it just ain’ t worth it: ” he remembers. “But my son would have wanted me to complete the search, so he said, “Okay, I’ll keep it up until I find her.”

And Fisher did keep it up, pressing onward through a decade of tantalizing but unrewarding individual finds, an olive jar here, a silver bar there.

THE MOTHERLODE

It was July 20, 1985, the tenth anniversary of Dirk Fisher’s death, when his brother Kane radioed Key West with an exultant dispatch: “Throwaway the charts! We’ve got it. We’ve got it.”

Mel Fisher with some of the Atocha’s Treasure

Ecstatic crew members described the find as looking like a reef of silver bars. Within days, the shipper’s marks on the bars were matched to the Atocha’s cargo manifest, confirming Kane’s triumphant claim. At long last, the wreck’s “mother-lode” had been found – and the excavation of what was widely referred to as the “shipwreck of the century” began.

The Atocha yielded a bonanza that was unmatched by any previous ancient shipwreck. Fisher proclaimed it to be worth a total of $400 million. The treasure would continue to rise from the sea for years to come.

Among the items found on the wrecks are a fortune in gold, silver bars, and coins destined for the coffers of Spain; a solid gold belt and necklace set with gems; a gold chalice designed to prevent its user from being poisoned; an intricately-tooled gold plate; a gold chain that weighs more than seven pounds; a horde of contraband emeralds — including an impressive 77.76 carat uncut hexagonal crystal experts have traced to the Muzo mine in Colombia; religious and secular jewelry; and silverware.

Today artifacts and treasures from the Atocha and Margarita are on display at the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum.

The Atocha held the title of “the richest sunken treasure the world has ever seen” until 2007 when Odyssey Marine Explorations discovered a still unidentified wreck 180 miles west of Portugal. The estimated value of 500 million dollars beats the Atocha by 100 million.

http://www.thelifeofadventure.com/category/treasure/found-treasure/