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Giant rats lead scientists to ancient face carvings

Group of petroglyphs in Lena Hara Cave, East Timor. Credit: John Brush

Ancient stone faces carved into the walls of a well-known limestone cave in East Timor have been discovered by a team searching for fossils of extinct giant rats.

The team of archaeologists and palaeontologists were working in Lene Hara Cave on the northeast tip of East Timor.

“Looking up from the cave floor at a colleague sitting on a ledge, my head torch shone on what seemed to be a weathered carving,” CSIRO’s Dr Ken Aplin said.

“I shone the torch around and saw a whole panel of engraved prehistoric human faces on the wall of the cave.

“The local landowners with whom we were working were stunned by the findings. They said the faces had chosen that day to reveal themselves because they were pleased by the field work we were doing.”

The Lene Hara carvings, or petroglyphs, are frontal, stylised faces each with eyes, a nose and a mouth. One has a circular headdress with rays that frame the face.

Uranium isotope dating by colleagues at the University of Queensland revealed the ‘sun ray’ face to be around 10,000 to 12,000 years old, placing it in the late Pleistocene. The other faces could not be dated but are likely to be equally ancient.

Lene Hara cave has been visited by archaeologists and rock art specialists since the early 1960s to study its rock paintings, which include hand stencils, boats, animals, human figures and linear decorative motifs. The age of the pigment art in Lene Hara is currently unknown but a fragment of limestone with traces of embedded red ochre was dated previously by Professor Sue O’Connor of The Australian National University to over 30,000 years ago.

Although stylised engravings of faces occur throughout Melanesia, Australia and the Pacific, the Lene Hara petroglyphs are the only examples that have been dated to the Pleistocene. No other petroglyphs of faces are known to exist anywhere on the island of Timor.

“Recording and dating the rock art of Timor should be a priority for future research, because of its cultural significance and value in understanding the development of art in our past,” Professor O’Connor said.

‘Faces of the ancestors revealed: discovery and dating of a Pleistocene-age petroglyph in Lene Hara Cave, East Timor’ was published in the Journal Antiquity following the discovery in May 2009.

THE HOLLOW EARTH: REALITY OR MYTH Part I

Popular Purveyor of the Paranormal, Brad Steiger, Takes a Look at One of the Most Persistent Legends of Esoterica by Brad Steiger

A hundred years before William Reed wrote The Phantom of the Poles ("scientific evidence proving that the earth is hollow") and Marshall B. Gardner privately published his A Journey to the Earth's Interior and when Jules Verne, who would later write A Journey to the Center of the Earth, was only nine years old, Edgar Allan Poe published his longest tale, "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym," which told of a fantastic land located in Earth's center, reached by a hole at the pole. So convincingly did Poe weave the pseudoscientific beginning of his narrative that Horace Greeley soberly endorsed the Pym adventure as a true account, without finishing the tale and encountering its later sections of obvious fantasy.

In 1823, Captain John Cleve Symmes, a dour, humorless, retired war hero, petitioned the U. S. Congress for funds to conduct an expedition to explore the hollow earth. Captain Symmes and his small band of followers felt somewhat anointed for the task because the great American clergyman Cotton Mather had defended the theory of a hollow earth in his book The Christian Philosopher. Mather, in turn, had developed his hypothesis from a little-known essay penned by English astronomer Edmund Halley in 1692.

Quaint notions from an unsophisticated and romantic past, smiles the modern reader. Lest he remain secure in such an appraisal, he should be informed that one of the greatest military-scientific aggregations of this century was also prepared to explore and to exploit the alleged world within our planet.

THE THIRD REICH
In April, 1942, Nazi Germany sent out an expedition composed of its most visionary scientists to seek a military vantage point in the "Hollow Earth." Although the safari of leading scientists left at a time when the Third Reich was putting maximum effort in their drive against the Allies, Goering, Himmler, and Hitler enthusiastically endorsed the project.

The Fuehrer had long been convinced that Earth was concave and that man lived on the inside of the globe. According to theory advanced by the Nazi scientists, if the Third Reich were to position their most astute radar experts in the proper geometric area, they would be able to determine the position of the British Fleet and the Allied bomber squadrons, because the concave curvature of the globe would enable infrared rays to accomplish long-distance monitoring.

When the Nazi exponents of the Hollow Earth hypothesis sent the expedition to the island of Rugen, they had complete confidence in their pseudo-scientific vision. Those nearest the Fuehrer shared his belief that such a coup as discovering the entrance to the Inner World would convince the Masters who lived there that the Nazis were truly deserving of mixing their blood in the hybridization of a master race.

An important element in the Nazi mythos was the belief that representatives of a powerful, underground secret race emerged from time to time to walk among Homo sapiens. Hitler's frenzied desire to breed a select race of Nordic types was inspired by his obsessive hope that it should be the Germanic peoples who would be chosen above all other humans to interbreed with the subterranean supermen in the mutation of a new race of heroes, demigods, and god men.

LEGENDS OF THE OLD ONES
There are persistent legends in nearly every culture that tell of the Old Ones, an ancient race who populated the earth millions of years ago. The Old Ones, an immensely intelligent and scientifically advanced race, have chosen to structure their own environment under the surface of the planet and manufacture all their necessities.

The Old Ones are hominid, extremely long-lived, and pre-date Homo sapiens by more than a million years. The Old Ones generally remain aloof from the surface peoples, but from time to time, they have been known to offer constructive criticism; and it has been said, they often kidnap human children to tutor and rear as their own. There is scarcely a culture known to man that does not have at least one segment of their folklore built around troll-like creatures that live underground and do their best to steal the children of surface folk.

In virtually all the legends, the Old Ones have gone underground to escape natural catastrophes or the hidden death that exists in the life-giving rays of our sun. At this point a persistently propagated theory of Atlantis crosses the path of the Old Ones, the mysterious Teachers from the Caves, which declares that those Atlanteans who survived the great cataclysm learned to perpetuate themselves in underground caverns.

An alternate theory has it that the Cave Masters are surviving colonies of spacemen, who after walking the earth in god-like mien, grew disgusted with Homo sapiens and retreated to underearth bases from which they might watch over the primitive species' intellectual and cultural development. The Buddhists have even incorporated Agharta, a subterranean empire, into their theology and fervently believe in its existence and in the reality of underworld supermen, who periodically surface to oversee the progress of the human race.

Among the American indians, the Navajo legends teach that the forerunners of man came from beneath the earth. The ancient ones were possessed of supernatural powers and were driven from their caverns by a great flood (yet another echo of the traditional Atlantis myth). Once on the surface, they passed along great knowledge to humans before they once again sought secret sanctuary.

The Pueblo Indians' mythology places their gods' place of origin as being an inner world connected to the surface people by a hole in the north. Mesewa, according to the Pueblos, was succeeded as leader of the gods by his brother, Oyoyewa, which some researchers have pointed out is quite similar to the Hebrew Yahweh.

THE HOLLOW EARTH
Dr. Raymond Bernard's The Hollow Earth, originally published by Fieldcrest Publishing Company of New York, has become the classic work in the rather amorphous field of "proving" the existence of an Inner Earth. In his introduction to the book, Dr. Bernard promises to prove that ". . . the earth is hollow and not a solid sphere . . . and that its hollow interior communicates with the surface by two polar openings...."Dr. Bernard's magnum opus discloses that Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd flew beyond rather than over the North Pole and that his later expedition to the South Pole passed 2,300 miles beyond it. According to Dr. Bernard, the North and South Poles have never been reached, because they do not exist. In his view, the nation whose explorers first find the entrance to the hollow interior of the earth will become the greatest nation in the world.

There is no doubt, the reader learns, that ". . . the mysterious flying saucers come from an advanced civilization in the hollow interior of the earth . . . that, in event of nuclear world war, the hollow interior of the earth will . . . provide an ideal refuge for the evacuation of survivors of the catastrophe...."

THE HOLLOW EARTH: REALITY OR MYTH Part II

"DEROS" AND "TEROS"
In the March, 1945 issue of Amazing Stories Editor Ray Palmer introduced the Shaver Mystery, a purported "racial memory" of a young welder named Richard Shaver, who first claimed to have remembered a life in the caves, then, later, maintained that he had recently been in the vast underground civilization of cave-dwellers. Life magazine (May 21, 1951) called the Shaver Mystery ". . . the most celebrated rumpus that ever racked the science fiction world." Richard Shaver, however, has never called his accounts anything other than factual reportage.

It is Richard Shaver's contention that in prehistoric times, when our solar system was young, Earth was inhabited by a race of cosmic super-beings who had come here from another solar system. Although the Elder Race were not truly immortals, they had discovered secrets of incredible longevity. This, together with their highly developed scientific technology, caused them to be regarded as gods by the primitive and unsophisticated humans. The Elder Race possessed fantastic mechanical devices, which Shaver calls "mech," capable of projecting three-dimensional images, scanning over great distances, curing diseases, producing food and clothing, and killing and destroying life when necessary.

After a time the Elder Race, the Titans, began to notice that the once beneficent sun now contained detrimental rays which were shortening their life-span by causing premature aging. To escape the harmful rays of the sun, the Elder Race entered deep underground caverns and began carving a fantastic subterranean kingdom, using their ray guns to disintegrate rock. Soon they had constructed powerful machines which could duplicate the health-giving rays of the sun while excluding the detrimental radioactivity.

Homo sapiens continued to evolve in the sun, ignorant of the rays which shortened his life-span, and puzzled by the withdrawal of his gods. However, Shaver tells his readers, the Elder Race was not without its sensualists, and certain of its members, particularly the lesser ones, varied greatly in morality and intelligence.

Perhaps the majority of the Elder Race regarded their lesser evolved human cousins with the superiority and ill-concealed contempt that a pompous research scientist might feel walking amongst Stone Age aborigines. Others may have exploited the females of Homo sapiens and may even have set the barbaric tribes against each other for the perverse pleasure of the Elder Race, who may have openly rooted for, and secretly assisted, their favorite tribes and warriors. The more humane among the Elder Race did their best to assist the primitive humans to develop a more functional culture and technology. According to Shaver, the ancient myths and legends are the unsophisticated surface dwellers' version of the myriad activities of the Elder Race.

After a time, the Shaver Mystery has it, the Elder Race became dissatisfied with life on Earth. Spaceships were sent to find another more suitable world where they could live on the surface without fearing negative rays from the sun. When the scouts returned with word of a planet with a beneficial sun, a mass exodus was at once set in motion.

Because of the great distance involved and the limited number of spacecraft large enough to serve as transports, the vast majority of their marvelous machines of super science were sealed in underground caverns. Desperate experimentation with the "mech" brought about certain radiations that destroyed a portion of the brain of many of the underpeople and produced a dangerous form of hereditary insanity.

Vast numbers of the cave people began to degenerate into physically stunned near-idiots, incapable of constructive reasoning. Shaver tells his readers that these are the "dero," detrimental-or degenerate- robots. "Robot" as Shaver used the word does not mean a mechanical representation of man, but is rather a designation for those who are controlled, or obsessed, by degenerative forces.

The deros, due to their hereditary brain damage, are completely devoid of any moral sense or humane instinct. They do harm at every opportunity and they gain immense satisfaction from the sufferings of others. They have mastered the use of certain of the "mech," and they direct negative rays at the surface dwellers whenever possible.

Their greatest delight comes in luring, or kidnapping, humans into the caverns and debasing them in sadistic orgies, which usually result in death or enslavement for the unfortunate captive. According to Shaver, the details of some of these grotesque debaucheries reached the surface world and established the foundations for the accounts of devils, demons, and the underworld hells of religion.

Editor Ray Palmer claimed that the issue of Amazing Stories (March, 1945) that carried the first Shaver fact-fiction piece brought in an unprecedented mail response of 50,000 letters, all of which Palmer said ". . . stated that Shaver spoke the truth, there actually were caves, and dero, and rays, and stim, and contrived train wrecks, and mental control, and thought records, and Titans, and ancient spaceships, and radioactive death raining down on us from the sun."

Ray Palmer kept the mystery and the controversy going for four years, in more than fifty consecutive issues of Amazing Stories, Fantastic Adventures, Mammoth Adventures, and even South Sea Stories. The furor the Shaver Mystery set off among the science fiction and Fortean buffs continues to break out in periodic brush fires. Richard Shaver continues to contribute his "memories" to mimeographed fanzines, and occasionally, to the late Ray Palmer's Search magazine, published in Amherst, Wisconsin.

STRANGE TALES
Timothy Green Beckley, editor of Innerlight newsletter, has probably published more material on Richard Shaver and his cave dwellers than any other writer-editor outside of Ray Palmer. Beckley tells of finding a record of ostensible dero activity Black Range Tales, a book published by James A. McKenna in 1936.McKenna, who purports to be writing a factual account, tells of observing two Indian maids walk into the wall of a canyon, then reappear with buckets of water for their burros.

After the girls had left, McKenna and a friend, Cousin Jack, investigated and found the entrance to a carefully hidden cave, which sheltered an underground spring.

Later that night, Cousin Jack awoke screaming in pain, complaining of someone sticking him with needles. The two men were puzzled to discover that some form of electricity seemed to be present in the canyon and that the current had run through the grass and caused the sensation of needles being pricked into flesh.

At dawn, according to McKenna, the two men resolved to explore the strange cave. They had not penetrated very far, however, before they retreated, sickened by a sulphuric odor, shocked by the sound of a moaning voice crying for "mercy," and startled by a find of several human skeletons.Fortean researcher Ronald Calais found an account dating from 1770 which relates the experience of a laborer in Staffordshire, England, who while engaged in digging a tunnel, claimed to have heard the rumble of heavy machinery coming from behind a large, flat stone.

Prying the rock aside with his pick, the laborer was amazed to discover a stone stairway that led deep into the ground. Certain that he had come upon some ancient tomb, the man started down the steps with visions of buried treasure filling his brain.

Instead, the man swore, he found himself in a large stone chamber with the sounds of machinery becoming louder and a hooded figure fast approaching him with a baton-like object in a raised hand. The terrified laborer fled back up the stone stairway to the safety of the surface world.

By way of comparison, Calais couples this account with the comments of David Fellin and Henry Throne, who survived a 1963 Pennsylvania mine cave-in. The two miners claimed that they saw a huge door open to reveal beautiful marble steps with men clothed in "weird outfits" staring at them. The men were certain they had experienced reality, rather than hallucinations.

Brad Steiger's book "Overlords of Atlantis"  Inner Light Publications.

Remains of Pink Terraces discovered

By Hayden Donnell
Scientists using underwater robots have discovered remnants of the Pink Terraces on the floor of Lake Rotomahana, near Rotorua.
The terraces, once described as the eighth wonder of the natural world, were buried in the eruption of Mt Tarawera in 1886.
They were rediscovered this week during a joint New Zealand and American mission to map the lake floor and investigate geothermal activity at Lake Rotomahana.
Project leader Cornel de Ronde, of GNS Science, said his team was elated at the discovery.
He is "certain" they have found the remains of the terraces.
"The first sonar image gave a hint of a terraced structure so we scanned the area twice more and we are now 95 per cent certain we are seeing the bottom two tiers of the Pink Terraces.
"This discovery puts to rest more than a century of speculation as to whether any part of the Pink and White Terraces survived the eruption. Highlights in a science career don't come any better than this."

Data collected by robot underwater vehicles show crescent-shaped terraced structures in about 60m of water where the Pink Terraces were located prior to 1886, said Mr de Ronde.
Underwater photos also show terrace edges among the lake floor sediments.
Dr de Ronde said the rest of the Pink Terraces were either destroyed during the eruption, or were still concealed under thick sediment.
There was no sign of the larger White Terraces in the part of the lake that matched their location prior to 1886, he said.
The Pink and White Terraces were separated by several hundred meters before the eruption.
Discovering the remnants of the terraces would not have been possible without underwater technology and camera systems brought to New Zealand by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said Mr de Ronde.

ALEXANDRIA I

Alexander the Great took over Egypt from the Persians in 331 BC, after the capture of Tyre, and it was while he was there that he founded the city which bears his name. He had first of all gone to the Egyptian city of Memphis, which was the centre of the Persian administration, visiting the site of Alexandria either en route to the oasis sanctuary of Amun at Siwa in the Western Desert, or on his return. The accounts suggest that the idea came to him, as it were, as a result of this trip, and almost by accident, but it seems more logical to suppose that Alexander already intended to found a city for his own political purposes, and that the visit to the future site of Alexandria was deliberate and premeditated.

The site was not uninhabited, and there are traces of massive harbour works there which are certainly earlier than Alexander’s time (how much earlier, and whether they still functioned in 331 BC is disputed). Other Greeks had previously gone to Egypt to visit Amun, whose oracular sanctuary had an established reputation (its visitors included the Spartan commander Lysander), so this part of Egypt was already known in the Greek world. Just how important or sizeable the Egyptian settlement here was, whose name was Rhakotis, must remain uncertain.

From Alexander’s point of view the advantages of this position were the harbour (or, if the ancient harbour works no longer functioned, the potential for the redevelopment of a substantial harbour here) combined with easy access by water to the Nile and the rest of Egypt. It was thus particularly suitable for the commercial exploitation of Egypt, and that seems to have been Alexander’s original intention. It was also something more. During the first half of the fourth century BC the Egyptians had managed, with the aid of Greek commanders and armies, to maintain their independence from Persia, and now clearly regarded Alexander as another liberator.

Alexander, for his part, had no intention other than to incorporate Egypt within his Empire, and the pattern set by his father Philip in asserting control in non-Macedonian areas such as Thrace was to establish Macedonian cities there. Moreover, to gain the support of the Greeks, especially those in Asia who had been liberated from Persia, Alexander had extended the system of alliances formulated by Philip, so that the Greek cities were free and outside direct royal control. Thus any city foundation in Egypt had to be outside the system devised for Egypt itself. A coastal site was essential, and the site chosen for Alexandria ideal. The city was not Alexandria in Egypt, but Alexandria next to Egypt, maintaining the status, however blurred in reality, of separateness. It is unlikely in the extreme that Alexander contemplated other independent or near-independent communities in Egypt. Alexander’s expedition was accompanied by a Macedonian town-planner/architect called Deinocrates, and though Vitruvius tells us that in effect he attached himself to Alexander’s entourage, drawing attention to himself by dressing in a lion skin so that he resembled Herakles, a more sober assessment would be that Alexander took him, as he took other experts with him, knowing that he would need his services.

ALEXANDRIA II

That Deinocrates was Macedonian is important. Alexandria was not developed on the analogy of the independent city-states of southern Greece, nor was it planned strictly on the example of the Ionian cities (though doubtless there was an indirect Ionian influence). The immediate precedent is a Macedonian one, and Alexandria conforms more to a pattern already established in Macedon itself. Arrian, writing in the second century AD, records a story ‘that is told’ (without quoting a specific source) that the builders did not have the means to mark out the lines of its proposed fortifications, but improvised by using meal which the soldiers had with them. This is an unlikely explanation, since presumably Deinocrates and the specialist surveyors would have had all the necessary equipment. It is more likely that the use of meal to mark a boundary had a religious significance. No account doubts, however, that the limits marked out by Alexander were those that served the city throughout its history, and given the nature of the site, between the sea and Lake Mareotis, it is difficult to see any sensible line falling short of the full extent. This means that Alexandria was to be laid out on a most generous scale. The shape of the land enclosed within the walls is described by Strabo as like a cloak, extending about 5 km from east to west, and generally about 2 km from north to south. This compares with Athens which measures no more than 1.5 by 1.5 km. It was bisected by a main east-west street, which is said by both Diodorus and Strabo to have been 100 ft in width, although this has not been confirmed by excavation. This suggests a street less than 20 m in width, though the exact width (either 19–85 or 14 m.) is uncertain. Even so, the least of these dimensions is considerably more than the usual width of streets in Greek cities, and demonstrates the abnormal scale of Alexandria. There was also a main north-south street of comparable dimensions.

The immediate model seems to have been the new towns of Macedonia itself, and in particular, Pella. This, too, covered a large area, though not as large as Alexandria, and was laid out to a grid of substantial streets, including one extra-wide street running east-west, which has been excavated in the vicinity of the agora. This measures 15 m in width, compared with the normal width of the east-west streets, which is about 10 m. This may confirm the lower of the dimensions for the main street at Alexandria, and demonstrates the probability of popular exaggeration behind both Strabo and Diodorus. The point is that the concept of a generous scale both for the total area of the city and for its streets already existed at Pella, which was where Alexander was born, and where he had lived. I do not think we have to look elsewhere for the model on which Alexandria was based.

There are other parallels. Part of the considerable area of Pella was devoted to the palace of the Macedonian kings, which is now in the course of excavation. So far, evidence for a substantial but essentially unified structure with two rectangular courtyards has been discovered, though this probably does not represent the whole of the royal quarter. Similarly, Alexandria had an area set aside for the royal palace. It was located in the north-west part of the town and was adjacent to the sea, by the projecting Cape Lochias. Like the town itself, it was conceived on a generous scale, occupying probably one-quarter or even one-third of the total area available within the city walls.

In addition to the royal buildings, Alexandria is known to have had an agora. Its location is unknown, although the usual guess is that it was in the centre, and it may well have been across the line of the broad east-west street, as is the case at Pella. It is probably to be identified with the ‘square stoa’ of the literary descriptions, an identification which would also seem to be confirmed by the discoveries at Pella, where the agora was totally enclosed by a continuous stoa on all four sides, virtually square in plan (200.15 by 180.50 m). The Pella agora is in the main area of the city, well away from the palace to the north, and would suggest for Alexandria a position to the east of the palace and set back from the sea, rather than adjacent to it. Alexandria is known to have been divided into five klimata, and these would in turn have been subdivided into blocks by the grid of the street plan. The blocks are likely to have been rectangular and elongated, rather than square, as at both Pella and Olynthus, and to have been aligned north south, although most of the published conjectural plans of Alexandria make them almost square and aligned east-west. We may deduce further that the klimata were strips across the width of the city, rather than ‘quarters’, and presumably labelled from west to east, since Delta, the eventual Jewish part, was near the palace area but beyond the harbour. Fraser (see note 1) puts this immediately to the east of Lochias; this would just leave room for Epsilon in the extreme eastern part of the city, and would confirm my suggested position for the agora. The main wide street would then run through all the divisions in succession, though there is no need to suggest that it was at the exact centre, of them. The main north-south street may have separated two klimata, and could have provided a useful ceremonial way from the palace to the centre of the town.

The Valkyries

The Valkyries were warrior maidens who would go to battlefields and pick through the bodies of those who had fallen. After finding the most worthy of the dead, they took the warriors' souls to Asgard, where half would go to Valhalla and half to Freya's hall, Sessrumnir. Between battles, the Valkyries served Odin in his hall, serving food and drinks. They are often portrayed in art as riding on winged or flying horses, but that is due to a mistranslation of "Valkyrie horse," which was actually a metaphor for a wolf. Some of the Valkyries are given names in Norse mythology, although they seldom play individual roles.

Sigurd the Dragon Slayer

A hero of the Poetic Edda, Sigurd was born after the death of his father. Sigurd's mother gave him the broken shards of his father's sword, which later was remelded to help Sigurd kill the dragon Fafnir. The sword was so strong that it cut through the anvil used to make it. Odin told Sigurd to dig trenches to hide in as he stabbed at Fafnir. Odin also told him to bathe in the dragon's blood. Following Odin's advice, Sigurd killed the dragon and bathed in his blood, which touched all his body except for his shoulder where a leaf had stuck. Next, he drank the blood and could speak to birds. Roasting the heart and eating it, he gained the gift of prophecy.