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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dayuhan who wrote (35707)	4/24/1999 2:27:00 PM
From: Grainne	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

Did you actually read the url I cited, Steve? Within it is this quote: "In 1992, toxicologist, Dr. Svetla Balabanova of the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Ulm (Germany) tested the ancient Egyptian mummified remains of Henut-Tawy, Lady of the Two Lands. The results came as a "shock" to this scientist who regularly used the identical testing methods to convict people of drug consumption. She had not expected to find nicotine and cocaine in an ancient Egyptian mummy. She repeated the tests and sent out fresh samples to three other labs. When the results came back positive she published a paper with two other scientists. (Balabanova, S., F. Parsche and W. Pirsig, "First Identification of Drugs in Egyptian Mummies", Naturwissenschaften 79, 358 (1992) Springer-Verlag 1992.)" I cited that quote which included the Atlantan reference because it was a quick, accurate synopsis of the television program about the cocaine mummies. Balabanova's articles have been published in ten scientific and archaeological journals; I found references to them in a web search but was not able to locate the actual findings. Perhaps someone knows of an academic search engine which would find them, however. I think there is much we do not know about early civilizations, and I do not always exclude automatically every bit of data because it is loosely associated--by being cited on a web page--with a group of people who believe in a fantastic theory. I would be more concerned if Dr. Balabanova had endorsed this theory, but she clearly has no association with this group. There may be a legitimate academic challenge of her results, although they were verified by three independent laboratories in different countries before the show was broadcast. Certainly, the meaning of the findings is open to interpretation. However, I would not take the logical leap that you did in ridiculing the hypothesis, calling it close to creation science, simply because a group which is not scientific wrote about the program on the web. And even though Atlantis doesn't exactly make sense, the Newsweek article I cited earlier this week--with all the ancient Americans coming from several different continents--certainly suggests that there are many more cultural connections between ancient cultures than we understood previously. The Atlantis legend is another way to explain these connections, and that is what myth and legend are created to do. As far as radical earth movements, there is much we do not know yet. Here is an article from a newspaper this week about ancient lava flows that I found interesting: sfgate.com Oh, and yesterday there was an article in the journal Science about evidence of another very early hominid, a "missing link" between apes and humans. This one seems to have had a small, apelike brain, been a skilled maker of tools which he used to butcher meat, and had huge black teeth, an anomaly which has not been seen before. sfgate.com I continue to maintain that there is too much we do not know about human development to be really confidently smug that most of what we have assumed is correct.