Order of the Madras High Court dated 07/06/2021 in the matter of Suo Motu Vs Archaeological Survey of India & Others regarding safeguarding of archaeological monuments in Tamil Nadu. The Madras High Court, June 7, 2021 in a slew of measures directed the concerned authorities to establish Mamallapuram World Heritage …
The March 5 order of the Allahabad High Court, directing a 12-member Archaeological Survey of India (asi) team to excavate a 30 m x 30 m area at the disputed site at Ayodhya, has led to a renewed interest in archaeology. The order is based on explorations carried out by …
November 15Legend has it that the beautiful goddess Saraswati sprung from the forehead of her father Brahma, the god of creation. It is said that as soon as Brahma looked at her beauty, he was filled with desire for her. Unhappy with the amorous attentions he bestowed upon her, she …
The City of London is full of monuments, but none record the East India Company's existence. Like a snake, the City seems embarrassed of an earlier skin. This being Britain, however, what remains is a pub - the East India Arms on Fenchurch Street. Popular with office workers, it stands …
the mystery shrouding the sudden collapse of Middle East civilisations more than 4,000 years ago might just have been solved. A two-mile-wide circular depression which looks like an impact crater has been found through studies of satellite images of southern Iraq. Scientists say that the depression raises the possibility of …
stories of how a promising technology can lose out in the maddening race for survival or the top slot always make interesting reading. This book is another such instance. But much more than that it is a critique on social choice, triumph of one technology over its competitors, some landmark …
One-third of all young Chinese men would die due to smoking in the next few decades unless they change their lifestyle, states a new study by a team of international researchers. The prediction was made after researchers studied the case histories of Chinese who died in 1998 in Hong Kong. …
the imambara of Nawab Asif-ud-daula at Lucknow ranks among the greatest architectural achievements of the Muslim period. It is a sacred building in which
SPECULATION as to whether the modern human race has any blood link with the Neanderthals may now be put to rest. There is none. Possibility of the Neanderthals - people who inhabited Europe more than 28,000 years ago - having mingled with the human race as we know it now …
DOES a new millenium have something to do with the attention that zero gets? Suddenly, we have two good books on zero. First, there is Charles Seife's "Zero, the Biography of a Dangerous Idea', brought out by Viking. Second, we have Robert Kaplan's "The Nothing that is, a Natural History …
egyptologists have found limestone inscriptions in the desert west of the Nile, probably the earliest-known examples of alphabetic writing. The discovery may fix the time and place for the origin of the alphabet. Carved in the cliffs of soft stone, the writing, in a Semitic script with Egyptian influences, has …
the history of Australia is closely linked to the fires that have engulfed the continent for centuries. Captain James Cook who reached the Australian shores in 1770 described it as a "continent of smoke'. Some describe it as a land shaped by smoke ( New Scientist , Vol 162, No …
Anthropologist Richard Wrangham and his colleagues at the Harvard University in the US have found that tubers and the ability to cook them prompted the evolution of large brains, smaller teeth, modern limb proportions and the male-female bonding in humans. The observations challenge the current belief that eating meat spurred …
as early as the ninth century, "sea coales', found in the northeast coast of England, were burned as fuel. Soon the air was reeking of dirty fumes, making it intolerable to breathe in London. A few centuries later, the then monarch of England, King Edward I (1272-1307), banned its use …
IT is time to rewrite the history of life on Earth. A Calcutta-based geologist, Pradip Bose, has found convincing evidence from a site close to Churhat, Madhya Pradesh: The first multi-celled animals evolved about 1.1 billion years ago. This finding will stretch back the chronology of animal life by about …
AFTER two decades of pitched intellectual battle over when people first inhabited the American continent, archaeologists have reached a peace treaty of sorts, acknowledging the victory of the Monte Verde excavators. Monte Verde is on the east of Peurto Montt seaport in southern Chile. It is at this site where …
IF THE findings of an international team of researchers led by Steve Weiner of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehevot, Israel, are confirmed, then it is time to rewrite 60 years of anthropology textbooks. The findings will reshape the modern view of Homo erectus, the pre-sumed ancestor of today's …
" dig deep', that must be the standing motto when it comes to archaeology. Travelling across the world to far-away excavation sites, salvaging ruins of ancient civilisations, unlocking the secrets of unknown or long-forgotten cultures
researchers have recently discovered 92-million-year old fossilised ants. With this discovery, it has become clear that these omnipresent insects have been on the Earth for more than twice as long as what was previously thought. Entomologists at the American Museum of Natural History in New York found the ants in …
INADEQUATE access to sufficient food has been a persistent problem faced by humankind through the ages, so much so that famines and the calamities associated with them find mention in the mythologies and folk tales of almost all countries. The situation is no different today. Starvation reports from places like …
