Each of the following three discoveries has something in common. The archaeologists make claims that they can never prove. While we like the discoveries, these claims are better left unsaid as they have no chance to verify one of them.
#1. Newly found Chinese artifacts illuminate mysterious ancient kingdom
It would not be an exaggeration to say that the vessel is one of its kind, given its distinctive shape, fine craftsmanship and ingenious design. Although we do not know what this vessel was used for, we can assume that ancient people treasured it,” said Li Haichao, a professor at Sichuan University who is in charge of the excavation at pit 7, according to Xinhua…
…“The sculptures are very complex and imaginative, reflecting the fairy world imagined by people at that time, and they demonstrate the diversity and richness of Chinese civilization,” Zhao Hao, an associate professor at Peking University who led the excavation of pit 8, told Xinhua.
#2. Black Death origin mystery solved nearly 700 years later, researchers say
Not anymore, according to researchers who say they have pinpointed the source of the plague to a region of Kyrgyzstan, after analyzing DNA from remains at an ancient burial site.
“We managed to actually put to rest all those centuries-old controversies about the origins of the Black Death,” said Philip Slavin, a historian and part of the team whose work was published Wednesday in the journal Nature…
…It reported a spike in burials in 1338-39 and that several tombstones described people having “died of pestilence.”
“When you have one or two years with excess mortality it means that something funny was going on there,” Slavin told reporters.
“But it wasn’t just any year — 1338 and 1339 was just seven or eight years before the Black Death,” he said.
It was a lead, but nothing more without determining what killed the people at the site.
#3. Ancient Swiss Army knife indicates how early humans communicated – study
People have walked out of Africa for hundreds of thousands of years, and we have evidence for early Homo sapiens in Greece and the Levant from around 200 thousand years ago. But these earlier exits were overprinted by the big exit around 60 thousand years ago, which involved the ancestors of all modern people who live outside of Africa today, ” Dr Way, from the Department of Archaeology at the University of Sydney and the Australian Museum explained…
…“Why was this exodus so successful where the earlier excursions were not? The main theory is that social networks were stronger then. This analysis shows for the first time that these social connections were in place in southern Africa just before the big exodus,” Dr Way added.
We do not want to be a broken record but these three discoveries are being used to disguise the past, not illuminate it. It is a travesty to think that educated people could pass this information off as true when they know they can’t prove what they say is true.
It is best to focus on the artifacts and not what these archaeologists claim.
theoarch 