Banaue Rice Terraces

The Banaue Rice Terraces (Tagalog: Hagdan-hagdang Palayan ng Banawe) are 2000-year old terraces that were carved into the mountains of Ifugao in the Philippines by ancestors of the indigenous people.

The Rice Terraces are commonly referred to by Filipinos as the "Eighth Wonder of the World". It is commonly thought that the terraces were built with minimal equipment, largely by hand.
The terraces are located approximately 1500 meters (5000 ft) above sea level and cover 10,360 square kilometers (about 4000 square miles) of mountainside. They are fed by an ancient irrigation system from the rainforests above the terraces. It is said that if the steps are put end to end it would encircle half the globe.

"Lost" Languages to Be Resurrected by Computers?

New program can translate ancient Biblical script.

Tim Hornyak
for National Geographic News


A new computer program has quickly deciphered a written language last used in Biblical times—possibly opening the door to "resurrecting" ancient texts that are no longer understood, scientists announced last week.

Created by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the program automatically translates written Ugaritic, which consists of dots and wedge-shaped stylus marks on clay tablets. The script was last used around 1200 B.C. in western Syria.

Written examples of this "lost language" were discovered by archaeologists excavating the port city of Ugarit in the late 1920s. It took until 1932 for language specialists to decode the writing. Since then, the script has helped shed light on ancient Israelite culture and Biblical texts.

 
Using no more computing power than that of a high-end laptop, the new program compared symbol and word frequencies and patterns in Ugaritic with those of a known language, in this case, the closely related Hebrew.

Through repeated analysis, the program linked letters and words to map nearly all Ugaritic symbols to their Hebrew equivalents in a matter of hours.

The program also correctly identified Ugaritic and Hebrew words with shared roots 60 percent of the time. Shared roots are when words in different languages spring from the same source, such as the French homme and Spanish hombre, which share the Latin root for "man."

Led by computer science professor Regina Barzilay, the team may be the first to show that a computer approach to dead scripts can be effective, despite claims that machines lack the necessary intuition.


"Traditionally, decipherment has been viewed as a sort of scholarly detective game, and computers weren't thought to be of much use," Barzilay said.

"Our aim is to bring to bear the full power of modern machine learning and statistics to this problem."
Not Always a "Rosetta Stone"

The next step should be to see whether the program can help crack the handful of ancient scripts that remain largely incomprehensible.

Etruscan, for example, is a script that was used in northern and central Italy around 700 B.C. but was displaced by Latin by about A.D. 100. Few written examples of Etruscan survive, and the language has no known relations, so it continues to baffle archaeologists.

"In the case [of Ugaritic], you're dealing with a small and simple writing system, and there are closely related languages," noted Richard Sproat, an Oregon Health and Science University computational linguist who was not involved in the new work.

"It's not always going to be the case that there are closely related languages that one can use" for Rosetta Stone-like comparisons.

But study leader Barzilay thinks the decoding program can overcome this hurdle by scanning multiple languages at once and taking contextual information into account—improvements that could uncover unexpected similarities or links to known languages.

A paper describing the new computer program was presented last week at the 48th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Uppsala, Sweden. 

What is the history with Ketchup?

In the 1690s the Chinese mixed together a tasty concoction of pickled fish and spices and called it ke-tsiap.

By the early 1700s, the table sauce had made it to Malaysia, where it was discovered by British explorers, and by 1740, it had become an English staple.

Although today's ketchup is tomato based, it did not appear until about a century after other types.

By 1801, a recipe for tomato ketchup was created by Sandy Addison and was later printed in an American cookbook, the Sugar House Book. James Mease published another recipe in 1812.


In 1824, a ketchup recipe using tomatoes appeared in The Virginia Housewife (an influential 19th-century cookbook written by Mary Randolph, Thomas Jefferson's cousin).

Neanderthal Males Had Popeye-Like Arms

By Jennifer Viegas 

Arm bone remains show that Neanderthals were unusually pumped up on male hormones, possibly due to an all-meat diet.

Remains of an early Neanderthal with a super strong arm suggest that Neanderthal fellows were heavily pumped up on male hormones, possessing a hormonal status unlike anything that exists in humans today, according to a recent paper.

Neanderthal males probably evolved their ultra macho ways due to lifestyle, genes, climate and diet factors, suggests the study, published in the journal Archaeology, Ethnology & Anthropology of Eurasia.


Project leader Maria Mednikova told Discovery News that Neanderthal males hunted in the "extreme," helping to beef up one arm.

"The common method for killing animals was direct contact with the victim," said Mednikova, a professor in the Institute of Archaeology at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Instead of shooting prey, such as mammoths, with a bow and arrow from a distance, Neanderthal males would engage in face-to-face contact, jabbing long, thick spears directly into the animal's flesh.
Neanderthal females weren't delicate creatures either.

Mednikova and her colleagues believe that "compared to anatomically modern humans, (both male and female Neanderthals) had a larger muscle mass and experienced a higher loading on the upper extremity than did Homo sapiens." Also, "they differed from modern humans by a greater functional difference between the sexes in the use of the right arm."

Neanderthal males had Popeye-type right arms, while Neanderthal females had arms that were more evenly matched and not nearly as muscular.

Mednikova and her team analyzed a fossil humerus (long bone that extends from the shoulder to the elbow) for what they believe was an Neanderthal male that might have lived around 100,000 years ago in what is now Khvalynsk, Russia. The bone was put through computerized tomography, X-rays and other analysis.

The fossil displays an unusual mixture of thickened walls with narrow bone marrow region cavities. This, according to the scientists, suggests "intense mineralization" provided for the strong, sturdy bone structure, with the inner narrowness "based on a stronger shaft architecture requiring much less mineralization."

The mixture is puzzling, because "Neanderthals demonstrate a markedly androgenic constitution," meaning they seemed to have a lot of steroids, yet these same hormones can cause reduced mineralization.

As a result, the researchers say "Neanderthals were characterized not only by peculiar biomechanical adaptations, but also by a specific hormonal condition which has no close parallels among modern human hormonal conditions either normal or pathological."

This condition might have evolved as a result of inherited genes, life in an often cold, northern climate, and an almost all-meat diet.

Mednikova and her colleagues explained that edible plants in colder regions were few and far between, and the vegetation period was short. With little fruit and vegetables, the Neanderthals became "specialized hunters who hunted terrestrial herbivores," such as mammoths and forest deer.

Their diet then consisted "nearly exclusively of proteins and lipids," which must have affected their hormones and bones.