Explorers ID 19th-century schooner in Lake Ontario

ROCHESTER, N.Y. - Two explorers conducting underwater surveys of Lake Ontario have uncovered an aquatic mystery - a rare 19th-century schooner sitting upright 500 feet under the waves.

Jim Kennard and Dan Scoville located the 55-foot long dagger-board ship unexpectedly this fall using deep scan sonar equipment off the lake's southern shore, west of Rochester.

The ship is the only dagger-board known to have been found in the Great Lakes. Kennard said vessels of this type were used for a short time in the early 1800s. The dagger-board was a wood panel that could be extended through the keel to improve the ship's stability. The dagger-boards could be raised when the schooner entered a shallow harbor, allowing the boat to load and unload cargo in locations that would not otherwise be accessible to larger ships.

The shipwreck was found upright and in remarkable condition considering it had plunged more than 500 feet to its resting place on the bottom, the men said.

The schooner's origin is a mystery so far.

The name of the schooner is unknown and there are no documented accounts of a dagger-board schooner sinking in Lake Ontario.

The explorers suspect the schooner was being converted to a barge or other sailing craft by its owners and perhaps broke free from its moorings in the ice or during a violent storm and was carried far out on the lake before it eventually sank.

The men found it on the very last survey run of the season. A faint image of something protruding from the bottom showed up at the very edge of the display screen, and another run was made to obtain a better image and the position of the object.

The two explorers returned to the site two weeks later and used a remote operated vehicle to explore and photograph the shipwreck.

It appeared from the video survey of the shipwreck that the schooner had been stripped of all useable items such as anchors, iron fittings, cabin with contents, and tiller, Kennard said.

During the past several months, the explorers have been seeking help from Great Lakes maritime historians to learn more about the schooner.

The dagger-board schooner is one of the older ships discovered in Lake Ontario and the Great Lakes.

In May 2008, Kennard and Scoville discovered the British warship HMS Ontario, which was lost in 1780. The Ontario is the oldest shipwreck ever found in the Great Lakes and the only British warship of this period still in existence in the world.

There are estimated to have been over 4,700 shipwrecks in the Great Lakes, including about 550 in Lake Ontario.

 MrsHobieJoe wrote: 
Thanks for the link. And bravo to these heroes.

 maryte wrote: 

Identifiable alphabetic writing 3000 years old? That is so rare as to be virtually unique.

Archaeologists report finding oldest Hebrew text

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Archaeologists in Israel said on Thursday they had unearthed the oldest Hebrew text ever found, while excavating a fortress city overlooking a valley where the Bible says David slew Goliath.

Experts have not yet been able to decipher fully the five lines of text written in black ink on a shard of pottery dug up at a five-acre (two-hectare) archaeological site called Elah Fortress, or Khirbet Qeiyafa.

The Bible says David, later to become the famed Jewish king, killed Goliath, a Philistine warrior, in a battle in the Valley of Elah, now the site of wineries and an Israeli satellite station.

Archaeologists at Hebrew University said carbon dating of artifacts found at the fortress site, about 20 km (12 miles) southwest of Jerusalem, indicate the Hebrew inscription was written some 3,000 years ago, predating the Dead Sea Scrolls by 1,000 years.

They have been able to make out some of its words, including "judge," "slave" and "king."

Yosef Garfinkel, the lead archaeologist at the site, said the findings could shed significant light on the period of King David's rule over the Israelites.

"The chronology and geography of Khirbet Qeiyafa create a unique meeting point between the mythology, history, historiography and archaeology of King David," Garfinkel said.

(Writing by Ari Rabinovitch; Editing by Sami Aboudi)

Wildfire uncovers part of Oregon Trail
Group to chart pioneers' path

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

BOISE — A wildfire that destroyed nine homes and damaged 10 others in southeastern Boise last month also revealed remnants of the Oregon Trail.

Members of the Idaho Chapter of the Oregon-California Trails Association plan to mark portions of the pioneer trail that are now visible following the Aug. 25 fire.

Before the blaze, two parallel pathways measuring about a half-mile altogether had been covered by tall sagebrush and cheatgrass. The paths, which are light depressions in the ground, stretch across a vacant field below a ridge where the homes were burned in the fire.

The pathways were discovered in satellite photographs taken days after the fire.

"We plan to mark it before the snow flies," association member Wally Meyer told the Idaho Statesman.

He said the last wagon through southeastern Boise probably crossed the flat plain about 1890 on the property now owned by the Idaho Power Co., which is negotiating with the group to allow signs along the newly found pathways.

"We are happy to help with this historic effort," said Idaho Power spokeswoman Anne Alenskis.

Investigators have concluded that an equipment failure on one of the company's electricity lines ignited the fire.

The fire also revealed a ramp used by early pioneers that connects the plain with what is now Oregon Trail Heights, a subdivision where the homes were destroyed.

"The ramp that comes down over the hill looks good now," said Jim McGill, a preservation officer with the Oregon Trail group. He said the group would like to get markers on that portion of the trail "before the weeds grow back"

Meyer said the ramp probably was dug by hand. He said that in the 1970s he unsuccessfully tried to save the section of the Oregon Trail where the subdivision was built.

During his 30-year career with the Bureau of Land Management, Meyer said, he marked about 150 miles of immigrant trail remnants on public land between Hagerman and Parma.

Meyer said the recent discovery is not a major surprise given what's known about the trail's route through Boise.

"Nobody's ever really looked before," Meyer told The Associated Press. "I've always kind of wondered. But it didn't pay to check these because there was pretty tall sagebrush and growth there. But the Oregon Trail is always easy to find after a fire."

dionysius wrote:
I remember my trip to Cyprus and seeing my first really ancient Greek ruins and suddenly realizing (neglecting the slavedom and all that) how incredibly civilized these people lived.  Beautiful tiled houses of marble columns overlooking the sea and with underfloor heating and water more or less on tap..

We really haven't come so far since then.

 maryte wrote:  

How very cool, my dear. Before civilization and writing emerged, we have little idea of how people lived. More than we used to, but not nearly a complete picture. This stuff fascinates me.

Remains of cemetery found in Sahara

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science Writer

WASHINGTON - A tiny woman and two children were laid to rest on a bed of flowers 5,000 years ago in what is now the barren Sahara Desert.

The slender arms of the youngsters were still extended to the woman in perpetual embrace when researchers discovered their skeletons in a remarkable cemetery that is providing clues to two civilizations who lived there, a thousand years apart, when the region was moist and green.

Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago and colleagues were searching for the remains of dinosaurs in the African country of Niger when they came across the startling find, detailed at a news conference Thursday at the National Geographic Society.

"Part of discovery is finding things that you least expect," he said. "When you come across something like that in the middle of the desert it sends a tingle down your spine."

Some 200 graves of humans were found during fieldwork at the site in 2005 and 2006, as well as remains of animals, large fish and crocodiles.

"Everywhere you turned, there were bones belonging to animals that don't live in the desert," said Sereno. "I realized we were in the green Sahara."

The graveyard, uncovered by hot desert winds, is near what would have been a lake at the time people lived there. It's in a region called Gobero, hidden away in Niger's forbidding Tenere Desert, known to Tuareg nomads as a "desert within a desert."

The human remains dated from two distinct populations that lived there during wet times, with a dry period in between.

The researchers used radiocarbon dating to determine when these ancient people lived there. Even the most recent were some 1,000 years before the building of the pyramids in Egypt.

The first group, known as the Kiffian, hunted wild animals and speared huge perch with harpoons. They colonized the region when the Sahara was at its wettest, between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago.

The researchers said the Kiffians were tall, sometimes reaching well over 6 feet.

The second group lived in the region between 7,000 and 4,500 years ago. The Tenerians were smaller and had a mixed economy of hunting, fishing and cattle herding.

Their burials often included jewelry or ritual poses. For example, one girl had an upper-arm bracelet carved from a hippo tusk. An adult Tenerian male was buried with his skull resting on part of a clay vessel; another adult male was interred seated on the shell of a mud turtle.

And pollen remains show the woman and two children were buried on a bed of flowers. The researchers preserved the group just as they had been for thousands of years.

"At first glance, it's hard to imagine two more biologically distinct groups of people burying their dead in the same place," said team member Chris Stojanowski, a bioarchaeologist from Arizona State University.

Stojanowski said ridges on the thigh bone of one Kiffian man show he had huge leg muscles, "which suggests he was eating a lot of protein and had an active, strenuous lifestyle. The Kiffian appear to have been fairly healthy - it would be difficult to grow a body that tall and muscular without sufficient nutrition."

On the other hand, ridges on a Tenerian male were barely visible. "This man's life was less rigorous, perhaps taking smaller fish and game with more advanced hunting technologies," Stojanowski said.

Helene Jousse, a zooarchaeologist from the Museum of Natural History in Vienna, Austria, reported that animal bones found in the area were from types common today in the Serengeti in Kenya, such as elephants, giraffes, hartebeests and warthogs.

The finds are detailed in reports in Thursday's edition of the journal PLoS One and in the September issue of National Geographic Magazine.

While the Sahara is desert today, a small difference in Earth's orbit once brought seasonal monsoons farther north, wetting the landscape with lakes with lush margins and drawing animals and people.

The research was funded by National Geographic, the Island Fund of the New York Community Trust, the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.