history

As part of the gaming "Play Apart Together" campaign going on here in the summer of global pandemic, Ubisoft's giving away a couple games. They're releasing Discovery Tour: Ancient Greece, and Discovery Tour: Ancient Egypt, both for free, in a window one week long. Where Assassin's Creed is a game about historical missions run by ancient hunters of humans, Discovery Tour is all about the history - without all the violence.

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We thought the subject of the research published this week seemed familiar. Back in the year 2016, SlashGear featured a story on the possibility that ancient monkeys crossed a large body of water to move from one continent to another. Now, here in 2020, a new finding ancient monkey teeth has a completely new set of researchers suggesting that a different set of monkeys ALSO made a trip across a large body of water to live in a new land.

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A group of researchers found the world's oldest piece of string ever strung by a humanoid. This very, very old piece of string was found in a cave in France and described in the journal Scientific Reports. The string was likely constructed and used by Neanderthals at least 41-thousand years ago. This is a very significant piece of old string.

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A new bit of research published by the National Academy of Sciences showed evidence of one of the first creatures on this planet with a mouth and a butt. More specifically, this fossil called Ikaria wariootia, is one of the oldest known bilaterians. A bilaterian is an animal with two openings and a trough-gut.

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In Washington D.C., the Museum of the Bible commissioned independent investigators to conduct research into the authenticity of their most valuable possessions. They had a collection of the "Dead Sea Scrolls", a set of texts, fragments of what were supposed to be the oldest known surviving copies of the Hebrew Bible. Unfortunate for them, all 16 fragments in the museum's collection were forgeries.

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While modern video games and gamers are more obsessed with mods and, sometimes, hacking to modify behavior and gain an upper hand, the console games of old had very little room for after-market modification. Instead, game developers would often sneak in some obscure techniques to make gamers' lives a bit easier or at least more amusing, a strategy that gave birth to an Easter egg culture that continues to exist today. One of the most popular and more usable Easter eggs is the now iconic Konami Code whose original programmer just died at 61 years of age.

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Who loves public domain access to tons of historically significant and utterly beautiful contend... now in 3D? With the internationally recognized Creative Commons Zero (CCO) license in effect, The Smithsonian launched their Open Access initiative this week to the public for the first time. This system's launch included approximately 2.8 million 2D images and 3D models, rolling the lot directly into the public domain for all to enjoy - and use!

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A slab of stone the size of a small child was discovered in southern Turkey with clues pointing to a lost civilization. "My colleague Michele Massa and I rushed straight there, and we could see it still sticking out of the water, so we jumped right down into the canal—up to our waists wading around," said Asst. Prof. James Osborne of the Oriental Institute. "Right away, it was clear it was ancient."

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A Neanderthal skeleton, the first to be excavated in 25 years, has thrown preconceptions around the so-called Neanderthal burial debate back into disarray, suggesting funeral rites may not be a uniquely homo-sapien affair. Further exploration of remains in Shanidar Cave, a remote cache of Neanderthal bones in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, built on speculation from the mid-20th Century that our assumptions about the extinct species may be incorrect.

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There's a Sony/Nintendo PlayStation prototype up for auction right now that'll end up going for many thousands of dollars by the time it's over. We've got devices today from both Sony and Nintendo that are far more powerful, more capable, more usable in every way. New devices don't look like the beige monstrosities of the early days of personal computers - that's not this, but this is not about that. This is about proof that the ephemeral world of gaming has a strange, awesome past.

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This week NASA loaded their first Artemis mission Space Launch System (SLS) Rocket Core Stage onboard the Pegasus barge in New Orleans. This stage of the hardware needed for Artemis was loaded onboard the barge on January 8th with plans to deliver to NASA’s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. This ferry journey mimics that of the NASA Apollo missions in the 1960s and 1970s.

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The creature called Dendromaia was discovered with a younger Dendromaia wrapped around it in fossil form. The fossil pair were dated to approximately 300-MILLION-years-old, making this the new eldest-known example of "parental care" in an animal on our planet Earth. Per research on this find, this puts parental care in animals approximately 40 million years BEFORE the otherwise eldest proof of this characteristic. This is now the eldest-known caring parent ever found.

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