For the first time, excavations have been allowed in Cueva de Ardales, a cave in Málaga in southern Spain that is famous for over 1,000 examples of prehistoric art by modern humans and Neanderthals, and they show the cave was used for over 50,000 years just for making art, burying the dead, and very little else. We modern humans should be ashamed – 50,000 years and not once did anyone smear cake on the artworks.
A viral optical illusion is a static set of black dots with a large dark blob in the middle that most observers swear looks like an expanding black hole about to swallow them in a void – scientists say the mind is predicting a change from brightness to darkness and causing the viewers’ pupils to dilate as they would in real darkness, giving the illusion of a growing black hole. Or is that just what they want you to believe?
A 22-year-old man in Germany has been diagnosed with a rare form of dissociative identity disorder (DID) which causes him to have 10 different personalities that control his behavior at different times, forcing him to lose focus, lose memories, be unable to work and cause him to stay in his house out of fear for his safety – but he calls them his ‘friends’ and doesn’t want them to go away. However, it would be nice if they at least helped with the rent.
Photos of a male lion at China’s Guangzhou Zoo have gone viral because the beast’s mane is coiffed with impeccable baby bangs that zookeepers swear are completely natural and not the result of hours in a salon – they believe it’s either caused by the humidity in Guangzhou or overly enthusiastic grooming by his partner. Just three more and they could form an Animals tribute band.
Horticulturalists in Chile claim an ancient Patagonian cypress (Fitzroya cupressoides) in the Alerce Costero national park that is affectionately known as ‘Gran Abuelo’ (Great Grandfather), is 5,484 years old, making it 600 years older than Methuselah, a bristle cone pine in the White Mountains of California that is the current world’s oldest tree. They don’t know the secret to its longevity but it’s definitely not exercise.
Archaeologists excavating at the Legio VI Ferrata Roman Legion near Megiddo in northern Israel found evidence of the first military amphitheater to be identified in the Southern Levant – unlike the over 230 Roman civilian amphitheaters found throughout what was once the Roman Empire, military amphitheaters were rare and used for both training and for entertainment such as gladiator battles and animal fights. Just like today’s NFL, the lions rarely won a championship.
A system of 35 hidden interconnecting tunnels was found by archeologists beneath the Chavín de Huántar temple complex in the Ancash Region of Peru that was built by the pre-Inca Chavín culture who lived there between 900 to 250 BCE and may have used it as a ceremonial gallery that was part of the ceremonial gathering place for pilgrims. Somewhere at the other end they’re bound to find a souvenir shop.
The Shelta Cave Crayfish (Orconectes sheltie), a small, rare crayfish thought to be extinct for 30 years, has been rediscovered in the Shelta Cave in Huntsville, Alabama, by researchers snorkeling in the cave’s groundwater where the four specimens were swimming. Finding that the Shelta Cave Crayfish are not extinct is a good sign for the local ecology and local seafood trucks.
Footage has been made public of an encounter on November 6, 2018, between pilots of a U.S. Army AH-64 Apache attack helicopter and three unidentified aerial phenomena during a training flight in Arizona, and experts who analyzed the video say no known aircraft could travel faster than the speed of sound while rotating around each other, making full 360-degree turns in less than 3 seconds. Is it time to devote a C-SPAN channel to nothing but congressional hearings on UAPs?
Climate change allowed a team of German and Kurdish archaeologists to visit a 3,400-year-old Mittani Empire-era city once located on the Tigris River that has emerged from the waters of the Mosul reservoir earlier this year as water levels dropped due to the extreme drought in Iraq – the city with a palace and several large buildings may be ancient Zakhiku dating back to 1550 BCE. Indiana Jones would be excited, but he’d still think climate change is turning the planet into a temple of doom.