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“Nonhuman” is a fairly ironic statement. By definition alone, a cat, giraffe, or bumblebee would all constitute nonhuman entities that, without a doubt, inhabit this planet alongside humankind. And yet, strangely, when you use an expression such as “nonhuman entities,” even without clarification, the image this spurs in the mind tends to be of something innately human like, just not quite Homo sapien.
Funny, then, that “nonhuman” almost invariably will evoke images of beings which, for the most part, appear very similar to humans, particularly among those of us of the Fortean persuasion. I’ve long wondered whether, in some capacity, there might have been (or might still be) other entities on planet Earth that were very similar to being humans–hominid sub-species whose branches only stemmed away from the evolutionary trunk a few thousand years before the course which led our ancestors to being what we are today–that remain undiscovered.
This sounds particularly elementary as stated here, since anthropologists will quickly name the variety of early bipeds and robust hominids that did invariably precede us. Dating back to humanity’s frail beginnings that were entombed in dust and stone around our early Ethiopian relative, Lucy, she and her kind were later discovered by the Leakey family in parts of Africa beginning in the late 1950s. But aside from the known hominids, could there be evidence of other humanoids that have existed alongside us here on Earth for thousands of years or more?
Part of this riddle lay hidden not only beneath the soil of hundreds of generations, as did Lucy’s nearly infantile frame, but also steeped in the mists of rumor and folklore carried about in the verbal traditions of many cultures.
Read more at our favourite podcast’s site: Mysterious Universe
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Notes on the back of a 400-year-old letter have revealed a previously unknown language once spoken by indigenous peoples of northern Peru, an archaeologist says.
Penned by an unknown Spanish author and lost for four centuries, the battered piece of paper was pulled from the ruins of an ancient Spanish colonial church in 2008.
But a team of scientists and linguists has only recently revealed the importance of the words written on the flip side of the letter.
The early 17th-century author had translated Spanish numbers—uno, dos, tres—and Arabic numerals into a mysterious language never seen by modern scholars.
“Even though [the letter] doesn’t tell us a whole lot, it does tell us about a language that is very different from anything we’ve ever known—and it suggests that there may be a lot more out there,” said project leader Jeffrey Quilter, an archaeologist at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.
Read more: National Geographic
Just after sunrise on a misty spring morning last year, my fellow acoustician at the University of Salford, Bruno Fazenda, and Rupert Till of the University of Huddersfield, UK, could be found wandering around Stonehenge popping balloons. This was not some bizarre pagan ritual. It was a serious attempt to capture the “impulse response” of the ancient southern English stone circle, and with it perhaps start to determine how Stonehenge might have sounded to our ancestors.
An impulse response characterises all the paths taken by the sound between its source – in this case a popping balloon – and a microphone positioned a few metres away. It is simply a plot of the sound pressure at the microphone in the seconds after the pop. The first, strongest peak on the plot represents the sound that travelled directly from the source to the microphone. Later, smaller peaks indicate the arrival of reflections off the stones. The recording and plot shows the impulse response Bruno and Rupert measured with a microphone positioned at the centre of Stonehenge and a popping balloon at the edge of the circle.
This impulse response represents an acoustic fingerprint of the stones. Back in the lab, it can be used to create a virtual rendition of any piece of music or speech as it would sound within the stone circle. All that is needed is an “anechoic” recording of the raw music or speech – a recording made in a reflection-free environment such as the open air or, better, a specialist anechoic chamber such as we have at Salford. The anechoic recording and the impulse response can then be combined using a mathematical operation called convolution.
Read more: New Scientist
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When Uri Geller saw a rocky lump off Scotland’s eastern coast was for sale a couple of years ago, the famed spoon-bender says he knew he had to have it.
“I didn’t know why. I was somehow drawn to it,” Mr. Geller recalls. He put in a successful £30,000, or about $46,000, offer.
Today, the 63-year-old paranormalist says he now understands why he bought the uninhabited, 100 yard-by-50 yard Lamb Island. Buried inside, he says, is an Egyptian treasure including relics supposedly brought there by a pharaoh’s daughter some 3,500 years ago.
Mr. Geller was once one of the most famous people in the world in the 1970s, regularly appearing on television and baffling audiences with his spoon-bending exploits. He continues to draw a crowd, and his sudden interest in “The Lamb,” as it’s known locally, is raising eyebrows among skeptical Scots.
Tales of Scotland’s ties to ancient Egypt date back to the 15th century, but many regard them as a bit of nonsense. According to the legend, King Tutankhamen’s half-sister, Princess Scota, fell out with her family and fled to Ireland and then Scotland, thereby giving the country its name. Some say the alignment of the Lamb and two nearby islands closely mirrors the layout of the pyramids at Giza, near Cairo, not to mention the three main stars in the Orion’s Belt constellation.
Read more: Wall Street Journal
