Vitalis Veritas Blog

People abandoned thriving cities in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and farther a field at about the same time as a decades-long drought gripped parts of the planet ...   SYRIA - The missing earthworms were a sign. As archaeologist Harvey Weiss and his colleagues excavated a site in northeast Syria, they found a buried layer of wind-blown silt so barren there was hardly any evidence of earthworms at work during that ancient era. Something drastic had happened thousands of years ago — something that choked the land with dust for decades, leaving a blanket of soil too inhospitable even for earthworms. The drought hit in roughly 2200  bc , when the Akkadian Empire dominated what is now Syria and Iraq. By 2150  bc , the empire was no more. The central authority had disintegrated, and many people had voted with their feet, leaving the region. The overlap between an epic drought and the collapse of the Akkadian Empire was no mere coincidence, according to Weiss, an archaeologist at Y...

Seems that scientists have finally discovered the secret of Stonehenge ...   SOMERSET - Among the many treasures in the British Museum’s forthcoming Stonehenge exhibition is a collection of carved and polished spherical stones, each about the size of a cricket ball. The stones are 5,000 years old and have mostly been found singly in Scotland. The most famous of the 400 or so discoveries is a beautiful polished black sphere from Towie, Aberdeenshire, with three bulbous surfaces, tactile as a miniature Henry Moore. The sphere is carved with precise geometric whorls and spirals. In common with the much weightier neolithic monuments that the Stonehenge exhibition celebrates, the longer you look at the stones, the more mysterious they seem: what and why and how? If the answers to those questions remain unknowable, one thing that the balls – and the culture that prized them – make clear is their creators were people of enormous curiosity and skill, prepared to invest untold hours in ma...