Interesting Stuff

[Super Nova]

Buffaloes save baby elephant

https://www.msn.com/en-ae/video/watch/b ... spartanntp

[Super Nova]

A killer whale has been taught by scientists to copy human speech.

The researchers were studying a 14-year-old female killer whale named Wikie, who was well-trained and had been taught how to copy behaviours in a previous study.

Wikie was recorded mimicking English words like “hello”, “bye bye” and “one two”, as well as the name of her trainer, Amy.

https://www.msn.com/en-ae/news/world/ki ... spartandhp

[Black Orchid]

I wonder what happened to the poor little elephant? Surprised his/her herd was not close by.

[Super Nova]

Mars Rover video

https://www.msn.com/en-ae/video/wonder/ ... spartandhp

[Black Orchid]

[Black Orchid]

MORE than 60,000 structures that were hidden for centuries underneath the jungle in Guatemala have been discovered, changing everything we thought we knew about the Maya civilisation.

Researchers uncovered the vast, interconnected network of ancient cities using technology called LiDAR (light detection and ranging) in what’s been hailed as a “major breakthrough”.

They used the technology to map 2100 square kilometres of the Maya Biosphere Reserve in the Peten region of Guatemala, and then removed the tree canopy from aerial images of the landscape.

This revealed a huge system of ruins far more complex than what has widely been believed by Maya specialists, including highways connecting cities and quarries, and complex irrigation and terracing systems supporting masses of workers.

“The LiDAR images make it clear that this entire region was a settlement system whose scale and population density had been grossly underestimated,” said Thomas Garrison, an Ithaca College archaeologist and National Geographic Explorer who took part in the project.

While it was previously believed that sparsely populated and scattered city states abounded in Central America, the research shows it was actually an advanced civilisation, at its peak 1200 years ago.

Most experts had estimated the population at around 5 million, now researchers believe it could have been much greater at 10-15 million. That includes many who were living in low-lying swampy areas that had been previously thought to have been uninhabitable.

“This was a civilisation that was literally moving mountains,” co-researcher Marcello Canuto said.

“We’ve had this western conceit that complex civilisations can’t flourish in the tropics, that the tropics are where civilisations go to die. But with the new LiDAR-based evidence from Central America and [Cambodia’s] Angkor Wat, we now have to consider that complex societies may have formed in the tropics and made their way outward from there.”

Another surprising finding was the defensive walls, fortresses and terraces, showing warfare was actually “large-scale and systematic, and endured over many years”, not only towards the end of the civilisation.

The researchers are also exploring just who the rulers of the vast society were, including an obscure royal dynasty known as the Snake Kings who dominated the Maya world. Previously unknown, new evidence points to the Snake Kings ruling from Mexico and Belize through to Guatemala. They are believed to have conquered Tikal in 562, the greatest Maya city ever and now a popular tourist area.

The LiDAR survey has also uncovered a previously unknown pyramid in the centre of Tikal, an important discovery, as well as evidence the city is up to four times larger than previously known.

http://www.news.com.au/travel/world-tra ... 605f4d915a

[Black Orchid]

To add to this ...

Industrial-sized agricultural fields and irrigation canals.



The Maya culture flourished between roughly 1,000 BCE and 900 CE. This buried Temple was already known to scientists but thousands of others were found buried in the jungle.

Mr Garrison said that this year he went to the field with the LiDAR data to look for one of the roads revealed.

"I found it, but if I had not had the LiDAR and known that that's what it was, I would have walked right over it, because of how dense the jungle is," he said.

Mr Garrison noted that unlike some other ancient cultures, whose fields, roads and outbuildings have been destroyed by subsequent generations of farming, the jungle grew over abandoned Maya fields and structures, both hiding and preserving them.

"The jungle, which has hindered us in our discovery efforts for so long, has actually worked as this great preservative tool of the impact the culture had across the landscape," said Mr Garrison, who worked on the project and specializes in the city of El Zotz, near Tikal.

LiDAR revealed a previously undetected structure between the two sites that Mr Garrison says "can't be called anything other than a Maya fortress".

"It's this hill-top citadel that has these ditch and rampart systems … when I went there, one of these things is nine meters tall," he noted.

In a way, the structures were hiding in plain sight.

"As soon as we saw this we all felt a little sheepish," Mr Canuto said of the LiDAR images, "because these were things that we had been walking over all the time."

Tikal ...

[Black Orchid]

Amazing. What we are building now will barely last 2 generations before they crumble.