Tuesday 18 November 2008
Saturday 15 November 2008
Mummy of King Tut
Mummy of King Tut
The mummy of King Tut, shown here, gets credit for popularizing the pharaoh's curse, but the myth's origin has been traced to a London stage act performed a hundred years before the boy king's tomb was excavated in 1922.
The Taklamakan Mummies(Tocharian mummies)
The Taklamakan Mummies(Tocharian mummies)
In the late 1980's, perfectly preserved 3000-year-old mummies began appearing in a remote Taklamakan desert. They had long reddish-blond hair, European features and didn't appear to be the ancestors of modern-day Chinese people. Archaeologists now think they may have been the citizens of an ancient civilization that existed at the crossroads between China and Europe.
Victor Mair, a specialist in the ancient corpses and co-author of “Mummies of the Tarim Basin”, said:"Modern DNA and ancient DNA show that Uighurs, Kazaks, Krygyzs, the peoples of Central Asia are all mixed Caucasian and East Asian. The modern and ancient DNA tell the same story.”
The discoveries in the 1980s of the undisturbed 4,000-year-old ”Beauty of Loulan” and the younger 3,000-year-old body of the ”Charchan Man” are legendary in world archaeological circles for the fine state of their preservation and for the wealth of knowledge they bring to modern research. In the second millennium BC, the oldest mummies, like the Loulan Beauty, were the earliest settlers in the Tarim Basin.
Mummies of "Tomb 2"
 | The first Tocharian Nordic mummy found in 1989: a White female with long blond hair, finely preserved by the arid desert atmosphere of the Taklamakan desert. Based on her partially dismembered limbs and gouged out eyes, archaeologists believe she was a sacrificial victim. |
 | This mummified boy, approximately one-year-old, was found in the same grave. He, too, is believed to have been a sacrificial victim who was buried alive. |
 | A Tocharian female mummy with long flaxen blond hair, perfectly preserved in ponytails. Items of weaved material, identical to Celtic cloth, definitively proved the Indo-European origins of the Tocharians, who not only built the fantastic Silk Road cities which today lie deserted, but who are also credited with bringing Buddhism, horses, the saddle, and iron working to China. This mummy was approximately 40-years old, was found in the main chamber of the same tomb. Her tall stature, high nose, and red hair indicate that she was of European descent. |
 |
Mummies from the Wupu cemetery
 | This mummy of an 18 to 20 year old woman is on display at a museum in Khumul. Her features, particularly her overbite, indicate Caucasian heritage. |
 | A Tocharian man with red-blond hair; his clear European features still visible after nearly 3,500 years in his desert grave in Taklamakan. This mummified man was approximately 40 years old at the time of his death. |
Source:
 | "Cherchen Man" and Family (China) A family of immaculately preserved, 3,000-year-old caucasian mummies were found in East Turkistan, in 1978. Though it was commonly believed that the first contact between East Turkistan and the West occurred relatively late in world history — around the middle of the second century B.C. — carbon dating has shown that the Cherchen man and his family died 900 years earlier. They were preserved naturally by the salty and dry Chinese landscape. |
Source:
 | Meanwhile, Yingpan Man, a nearly perfectly preserved 2,000-year-old Caucasoid mummy, discovered in 1995 in the region that bears his name, has been seen as the best preserved of all the undisturbed mummies that have so far been found. Yingpan Man not only had a gold foil death mask -- a Greek tradition -- covering his blonde bearded face, but also wore elaborate golden embroidered red and maroon garments with seemingly Western European designs. His nearly 2.00 meter (six-foot, six-inch) long body is the tallest of all the mummies found so far and the clothes and artifacts discovered in the surrounding tombs suggest the highest level of Caucasoid civilization in the ancient Tarim Basin region. |
 |  |
| One of the most famous Tocharian mummies found, the so-called "Beauty of Loulan"; and right, her face as reconstructed by an artist. | |
Egyptian Mummy Pictures
Egyptian Mummy Pictures
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Images Copyrighted by Historylink101.com & found at Egyptian Picture Gallery.
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Items from Tut's Tomb #1 Items from Tut's Tomb #2 Valley of the Kings
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Giant anaconda in india
Giant anaconda
The giant anaconda has been rumored since reports from early European explorers of the South American jungles, who claimed to see giant anacondas up to sixty feet long. Some of the native peoples have reported similar findings, but all these reports remain unverified.
Another claim of an anaconda of extraordinary size was made by adventurer Percy Fawcett. During his 1906 expedition, Fawcett wrote that he had shot an anaconda that measured some sixty-two feet from nose to tail.
The Wildlife Conservation Society has, since the early 20th century, offered a large cash reward for live delivery of any snake of thirty feet or more in length. The prize has never been claimed. In a study of a thousand wild anacondas in Brazil, the largest captured was 17 feet long.
External Links
Anaconda
Anaconda | Questions about this animal? Ask the Zookeeper Joan Avila |
Anacondas in the wild spend most of their time hanging out in rivers hunting for their food. They are solitary creatures that are somewhat shy and not many of them are easily seen. They are very well camouflaged in the swamps and bogs in which they thrive. There are some historical reports of early European explorers of the South American jungles seeing giant anacondas up to 100 feet long and some of the native peoples of the South American jungle have reported seeing anacondas up to 50 feet long. No one has caught and measured an anaconda anywhere near that size. It is important to note that when a dead anaconda's hide or skin is laid out it can be stretched very easily, expanding to much longer lengths than the snake exhibited when alive. Reports of outsize anacondas that cannot be verified are usually due to distortions in perception, or a snake skin being disproportionately stretched and inaccurately measured. People are generally really bad at estimating length, especially for larger snakes. In fact, the larger the snake, the larger the margin of error.
Anacondas like to hang out in rivers so it would be difficult to estimate the length of one seen swimming, without seeing the entire snake. It's the anaconda's ability to remain partly hidden in the water that makes it difficult to accurately find (and document) a specimen that exceeds the current world's record. (Would you want to jump in the water after a giant anaconda to try and measure a snake big enough to kill you?)
Anacondas are members of the boa constrictor family of snakes. That means that they kill their prey by coiling their large, powerful bodies around their victims and squeezing until their prey suffocates or is crushed to death and dies from internal bleeding. Then the snake unhinges its jaw and swallows the victim whole. Anacondas are much more likely to eat aquatic creatures, such as fish. Occasionally they have been known to eat: caimans (a relative of the alligator), other snakes, deer, and even jaguars. Anacondas are rather slow-moving snakes, so they have to rely on stealth and the element of surprise to catch their unsuspecting prey.Do Anacondas Bite? Just about every species of snake on earth has teeth, but the anacondas' teeth are not used for chewing. Snakes' teeth are used for holding onto their prey, preventing them from escaping. Some snakes have venom in two specially designed, extra long teeth (called fangs) which they use to kill their prey. Anacondas have teeth, but they are not a venomous snake. They rely on their enormous size and power to subdue their victims. It is possible to be bitten by an anaconda, but the bite itself would not be fatal.
For many people, snakes are a slithering, terrifying creature to be avoided at all costs, while others harbor a grim fascination or even fondness for them. Many people keep snakes as pets, including anacondas and reticulated pythons. Like any other pet, snakes can be a big responsibility that should be taken seriously. If you choose to keep a snake in captivity you must accept responsibility for its care and feeding, as well as preventing it from escaping into the wild.
 | | Questions about this animal? Ask the tamilJoan Avila |
Anaconda
Anaconda | Questions about this animal? Ask the Zookeeper Joan Avila |
Anacondas in the wild spend most of their time hanging out in rivers hunting for their food. They are solitary creatures that are somewhat shy and not many of them are easily seen. They are very well camouflaged in the swamps and bogs in which they thrive. There are some historical reports of early European explorers of the South American jungles seeing giant anacondas up to 100 feet long and some of the native peoples of the South American jungle have reported seeing anacondas up to 50 feet long. No one has caught and measured an anaconda anywhere near that size. It is important to note that when a dead anaconda's hide or skin is laid out it can be stretched very easily, expanding to much longer lengths than the snake exhibited when alive. Reports of outsize anacondas that cannot be verified are usually due to distortions in perception, or a snake skin being disproportionately stretched and inaccurately measured. People are generally really bad at estimating length, especially for larger snakes. In fact, the larger the snake, the larger the margin of error.
Anacondas like to hang out in rivers so it would be difficult to estimate the length of one seen swimming, without seeing the entire snake. It's the anaconda's ability to remain partly hidden in the water that makes it difficult to accurately find (and document) a specimen that exceeds the current world's record. (Would you want to jump in the water after a giant anaconda to try and measure a snake big enough to kill you?)
Anacondas are members of the boa constrictor family of snakes. That means that they kill their prey by coiling their large, powerful bodies around their victims and squeezing until their prey suffocates or is crushed to death and dies from internal bleeding. Then the snake unhinges its jaw and swallows the victim whole. Anacondas are much more likely to eat aquatic creatures, such as fish. Occasionally they have been known to eat: caimans (a relative of the alligator), other snakes, deer, and even jaguars. Anacondas are rather slow-moving snakes, so they have to rely on stealth and the element of surprise to catch their unsuspecting prey.Do Anacondas Bite? Just about every species of snake on earth has teeth, but the anacondas' teeth are not used for chewing. Snakes' teeth are used for holding onto their prey, preventing them from escaping. Some snakes have venom in two specially designed, extra long teeth (called fangs) which they use to kill their prey. Anacondas have teeth, but they are not a venomous snake. They rely on their enormous size and power to subdue their victims. It is possible to be bitten by an anaconda, but the bite itself would not be fatal.
For many people, snakes are a slithering, terrifying creature to be avoided at all costs, while others harbor a grim fascination or even fondness for them. Many people keep snakes as pets, including anacondas and reticulated pythons. Like any other pet, snakes can be a big responsibility that should be taken seriously. If you choose to keep a snake in captivity you must accept responsibility for its care and feeding, as well as preventing it from escaping into the wild.
| | | Questions about this animal? Ask the tamilJoan Avila |
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