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To: Mannie who wrote (1459)1/27/2000 10:08:00 PM
From: elpolvo  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 35685
 
OH MY GOD!



To: Mannie who wrote (1459)1/28/2000 10:20:00 AM
From: myadd  Respond to of 35685
 
Scott...Thanks, Great shot from the Hubble...one of the very few things our Gov. can get right...with the Mars disasters...look for cut back in the space programs...of course substituted by social programs by our socialist Congress and wonderful lame duck president.

james



To: Mannie who wrote (1459)8/11/2000 1:21:19 PM
From: T L Comiskey  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 35685
 
Silica Valley........778,000 BC

Israel Fossils Change Record
Evidence Puts Hominid Migration 250,000 Years Earlier

The Associated Press
W A S H I N G T O N, Aug. 11 — New findings in the
sediments of a dried lake bed in Israel show that
early hominids migrated into the region some
780,000 years ago, bringing with them
sophisticated stone tool-making skills developed
in Africa.
Craig S. Feibel, a Rutgers University geologist, said that
the findings show that a hominid called Homo erectus
migrated from Africa and settled at a site called Gesher
Benot Ya’aqov some 250,000 years earlier than previous
studies had suggested.
Gesher Benot Ya’aqov is located in the Dead Sea rift of
northern Israel. The site is dry now, but once it was the
center of a freshwater lake, surrounded by trees and lively
with game, said Feibel, the co-author of a studying
appearing today in the journal Science.

New Dating Technique
Feibel said that a shift in the Earth’s geomagnetic field
enabled the researchers to establish the new age for the
Gesher Benot Ya’aqov site.
The Earth’s magnetic field, for reasons not understood,
will occasionally reverse. Rocks and some soils carry the
signature of the magnetic field that existed at the time they
were formed.
The last magnetic field reversal, the one that causes
compasses now to point north instead of south, occurred
780,000 years ago. Researchers digging at the Gesher Benot
Ya’aqov site preserved the orientation of sediments and then
checked their magnetic polarity in the laboratory.
Feibel said they found that specimens in a middle depth
of the Gesher Benot Ya’aqov dig had a reverse polarity, while
rock higher up in the dig had the current magnetic polarity.
Fossils were found in both the upper and lower parts of the
dig. This proved that Homo erectus was living at the site
when the reversal occurred, he said.
Specimens from the site include fossils of elephants,
antelope, deer and other animals that the hominid used for
meat, he said. There were also residues from a variety of
edible plants.

Evidence of Hominid
There were no actual fossils of the hominid, but Feibel said
the researchers found stone tools, principally a type of ax,
that bore the same characteristic stone chipping techniques
used by hominids that lived earlier in Tanzania.
“What we see at [the site] is a whole new technology
that also was found at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania,” said
Feibel. “All the technological breakthroughs [in stone
tool-making] seem to have been made in Africa and they
came out of Africa.”
Homo erectus is a human-like animal that preceded
modern humans by hundreds of thousands of years



To: Mannie who wrote (1459)9/8/2000 6:11:31 PM
From: T L Comiskey  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 35685
 
Scott...Read Baillie's book last year......
Exodus to Arthur...........excellent read

Dark Age Disaster
Tree Rings Suggest Catastrophe Triggered Dark Ages

L O N D O N, Sept. 8 — Something catastrophic
occurred on Earth 1,500 years ago that may have
led to the Dark Ages and coincided with the end
of the Roman Empire and the death of King
Arthur, a Northern Irish scientist said today.
It could have been a bombardment of cometary debris
or the eruption of a super volcano.
But whatever it was, it is clearly etched in the chronology
of tree rings from around the world, according to Professor
Mike Baillie of Queen’s University in Belfast.

Written in Trees, Not Books
The global environmental event that occurred around A.D.
540 is not recorded in any history books. But the tree ring
chronologies compiled from samples of trees, some
preserved in bogs, which date back thousands of years,
single out something that was quite extraordinary.
“It was a catastrophic environmental downturn that
shows up in trees all over the world,” Baillie told a news
conference at the British Association for the Advancement of
Science conference. “This event is clear in the tree ring
records.”
The height of a tree is indicative of the quality of soil it is
growing in but the rings hold clues about past climate
conditions and have been used to date events in the past.
They correctly recorded the year without a summer in
the North American region in 1816 and the eruption of
various volcanoes around the world.
Baillie believes the slowdown of tree growth recorded in
the rings around A.D. 540 was due to a bombardment of
cometary debris which happened around the time of King
Arthur’s death, the end of the Roman Empire and the
beginning of the Dark Ages.

Sky on Fire
Traditional myths recorded in 13th-century texts refer to a
comet in Gaul around A.D. 540, when the sky seemed to be
on fire, according to Baillie.
“These myths hint strongly at a bombardment vector for
the environmental downturn but are almost universally
dismissed as fiction or fantasy by academics,” he said.
Baillie is appealing to historians to accept that something
terrible happened around 540 and to find a record of it.
“I am calling for a debate by scientists and historians on
how to approach the evidence for catastrophic events of this
kind which were previously not known to have taken place,”
he added.