Shroud of Turin's Authenticity Probed Anew

Authentic or Not? View a slideshow of the Shroud's history.

The Shroud of Turin, the 14- by 4-foot linen believed by some to have been wrapped around Jesus after the crucifixion, might not be a fake after all, according to new research.

The director of one of three laboratories that dismissed the shroud as a medieval artifact 20 years ago has called for the science community to reinvestigate the linen's authenticity.

"With the radiocarbon measurements and with all of the other evidence which we have about the shroud, there does seem to be a conflict in the interpretation of the different evidence," said Christopher Ramsey, director of England's Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, which carried out radiocarbon dating tests on the cloth in 1988.

Venerated by many Catholics as proof that Christ was resurrected from the grave, the yellowing cloth is kept rolled up in a silver casket in Turin's Cathedral.

Shroud Science: Chapter One

Scientific interest in the linen, which has survived several blazes since it was discovered, began in 1898, when it was photographed by lawyer Secondo Pia. The negatives revealed the image of a bearded man with pierced wrists and feet and a bloodstained head.

In 1988, three reputable laboratories in Oxford, Zurich and Tucson carried out radiocarbon tests on the cloth and declared it a brilliant, medieval fake produced between 1260 and 1390.

Nevertheless, the piece of linen made of fine, tightly woven herringbone twill has remained an unquestioned object of veneration. When it last went on public display in 2000, more than three million people saw it. Many more visitors are expected for next public display in 2025.

Shroud scholars, known as sindonologists, have always argued that no medieval forger could either have produced such an accurate fake or anticipated the invention of photography.

Yet, despite arguments and claims of revisionist scholars, all theories on how the radiocarbon tests could have been inaccurate have been rejected by the scientific community.

A Question of Contamination

In this latest chapter, Ramsey's call to revisit the subject follows tests taken by Ramsey, himself, to investigate a contamination hypothesis by John Jackson, a U.S. physicist who conducted the first major investigation of the shroud in 1978.

Ancient Humor: Raunch, Riddles and Religion

Ancient History?

- In the ancient Greek poem "The Odyssey," the story's hero, Odysseus, tells the Cyclops that his name is "Nobody." When Odysseus instructs his men to drive a fiery iron spit into the monster's single eye, the Cyclops yells out in vain, "Friends, Nobody is killing me now," so no one comes to help.

This action-adventure humor, dating to around 800 B.C., is one of the first recorded jokes, according to the classics scholar Owen Ewald, who recently presented his findings on "Humor in the Ancient World" at Seattle Pacific University.

The world's first one-liners, however, were likely delivered tens of thousands of years before Homer, author of "The Odyssey," was born.

The Earliest Evidence for Humor

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, anthropologists Louis Schulze and Charles Chewings became the first outsiders to record contact with Australian aboriginals, who had been genetically and culturally isolated from the rest of the world for at least 35,000 years. They witnessed evidence of a comedic tradition that could date as far back, according to Joseph Polimeni, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Manitoba.

Polimeni recently authored a paper on the evolutionary origins of humor, published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology.

Schulze and Chewings got caught in a terrifying thunderstorm they thought would scare the Australians. Instead, as they later wrote: "When the thunder rends the air in deafening claps...the natives show no fear. On the contrary, they will converse freely, make light of it, and even burst out laughing at an unusually loud or peculiar clap of thunder."

The ability to be amused by life's inevitable surprises goes back at least 35,000 years, Polimeni said, citing the isolated Australians' genetic capacity for humor.

"Since archaeologists believe that modern Homo sapiens date to 100,000 to 200,000 years ago, it's actually not a very provocative statement," he added. "In fact, humor is probably at least as old as that."

The Co-Evolution of Humor and Spirituality

The 35,000-year-ago mark is significant because many milestones in human evolution began to surface at that point. Polimeni thinks people were beginning to develop the brainpower for more abstract thinking. One of the earliest symbolic pieces of art, a figurine with the head of a lion and the legs of a person, dates to this period.

Evidence for the earliest spirituality also dates to the same era, through archaeological depictions resembling contemporary shamanistic art, Polimeni said. Zombies -- still a comedic B-movie favorite --represent the sort of early beliefs that mixed spirituality with the contradictions that often form the basis of humor.

"A zombie, a spiritual concept in many hunting and gathering societies, is a person who is dead," explained Polimeni. "Being both dead and an active person is a contradiction...a violation, a concept reflecting opposite positions," qualities present in many a joke.

Polimeni theorizes that humor and spirituality emerged together, perhaps as ways for humans to relieve stress, communicate and make social connections in lieu of grooming, roughhousing and other, more direct means used by our primate ancestors.

"Given that the basis of humor may conceivably be rooted in the same cognitive machinery that allows animals to play and tease, it is certainly possible that the cognitive processes that allow spirituality may have piggy-backed on this humor cognitive substructure," he said.

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Oldest Human Ancestor Fossil Found

A small piece of jawbone unearthed in a cave in Spain is the oldest known fossil of a human ancestor in Europe and suggests that people lived on the continent much earlier than previously believed, scientists say.

The researchers said the fossil found last year at Atapuerca in northern Spain, along with stone tools and animal bones, is up to 1.3 million years old. That would be 500,000 years older than remains from a 1997 find that prompted the naming of a new species: Homo antecessor, or Pioneer Man, possibly a common ancestor to Neanderthals and modern humans.

The new find appears to be from the same species, researchers said.

A team co-led by Eudald Carbonell, director of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleo-Ecology and Social Evolution, reported their find in Thursday's issue of the scientific journal Nature.

The timing of the earliest occupation of Europe by humans that emerged from Africa has been controversial for many years.

Some archeologists believe the process was a stop-and-go one in which species of hominins -- a group that includes the extinct relatives of modern humans -- emerged and died out quickly only to be replaced by others, making for a very slow spread across the continent, Carbonell said in an interview.

Until now the oldest hominin fossils found in Europe were the Homo antecessor ones, also found at Atapuerca, but at a separate digging site, and a skull from Ceprano in Italy.

Carbonell's team has tentatively classified the new fossil as representing an earlier example of Homo antecessor. And, critically, the team says the new one also bears similarities to much-older fossils dug up since 1983 in the Caucasus at a place called Dmanisi, in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. These were dated as being up to 1.8 million years old.

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Earliest Voice Recording Features French Song

At first listen, the grainy high-pitched warble doesn't sound like much, but scientists say the French recording from 1860 is the oldest known recorded human voice.

The 10-second clip of a woman singing "Au Clair de la Lune," taken from a so-called phonautogram, was recently discovered by audio historian David Giovannoni. The recording predates Thomas Edison's "Mary had a little lamb" -- previously credited as the oldest recorded voice -- by 17 years.

The tune was captured using a phonautograph, a device created by Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville that created visual recordings of sound waves.

Using a needle that moved in response to sound, the phonautograph etched sound waves into paper coated with soot from an oil lamp.

Giovannoni and his research partner, Patrick Feaster, began looking for phonautograms last year and in December discovered two of Scott's -- from 1857 and 1859 -- in France's patent office. Using high-resolution optical scanning equipment, Giovannoni collected images of the phonautograms that he brought back to the United States.

"What Scott was trying to do in 1861 was establish that he was the first to arrive at this idea," Giovannoni said. "He was depositing with the French Academy examples of his work."

"We took those images back to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and found that (Scott's) technique wasn't very developed," Giovannoni said. "There were squiggles on paper, but it was not recording sound."

So Giovannoni, who collaborates with many other audio historians, including scientists at Berkeley, asked the French Academy of Sciences to send digital scans of more of Scott's papers. Those scans arrived on March 1.

"When I opened up the file, I nearly fell off my chair," Giovannoni said. "We had beautifully recorded and preserved phonautograms, many of which had dates on them."

While Giovannoni was excited by the images, they still needed to be translated into sound.

Early Weapon Evidence Reveals Bloody Past

- New research concerning some of the world's earliest weapons suggests that while some Stone Age Africans benefited from spurts of high-tech brilliance, Neanderthals and modern humans in Europe battled big beasts in face-to-face combat that must have been bloody and brutal.

The recent discoveries shed light on Paleolithic life in ancient Europe and push back the invention of the bow and arrow in Africa by at least 20,000 years. They paint a picture nearly as vivid as a scene from The Lord of the Rings, with modern humans, Neanderthals and archaic humans all struggling for survival with their various favored weapons in hand.

Early weapon usage may even go back to our primate ancestors.

From Poop Throwing to Rocks

In fact, the roots of today's technologically advanced warfare may be traced back to primates throwing feces. For defense or possibly out of anger, many primates toss poop or vegetation, such as sticks, at intruders.

"Primates have broad hips and they throw poorly," John Shea, a leading expert on ancient weaponry, told Discovery News.

"No one's ever been killed by a thrown turd, but the roots of aimed throwing are there," added Shea, who is an associate professor of anthropology at New York's Stony Brook University.

He explained that humans evolved a rib cage, a pelvis and rotating hips and shoulders suitable for fast movement and running. These anatomical modifications gave us better throwing ability, enabling us to do serious damage with just a tossed rock hurled while sprinting.

"Not long ago I watched an East African kid drop a gazelle with a single stone," he said.

Stone and Bone Arrows

As humans became more skilled at shaping stones, arrows and darts emerged. At some point, certain human groups in Africa switched to developing bone tools, including arrowheads made out of animal bones.

One bone tool-making operation, called the Howiesons Poort Industry, was based at Sibudu Cave along the north coast of South Africa. Researchers Lucinda Backwell and Lyn Wadley of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and Francesco d'Errico of the University of Bordeaux recently analyzed three bone tools from the site.

The tools, dating to more than 61,000 years ago, include a slender, needle-like implement likely used in piercing tasks, a polished spatula-shaped piece that probably smoothed and softened animal hides and, most importantly, an arrow point that was likely used for hunting small prey.

Their findings have been accepted for publication in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

The scientists believe the bone arrowhead was part of the first known bow and arrow set.

Sleek and Safe

Although the wooden bow part of the set probably eroded long ago, Backwell and her team identified the set by comparing the bone arrowhead with a wide range of bone tools from Southern African Middle and Later Stone Age deposits, an Iron Age occupation, nineteenth century Bushmen hunter-gatherer toolkits and bones that she and her team shaped experimentally.

"The Sibudu point parallels a specific type of large, unpoisoned bone arrow head used [with a bow] by Kalahari Bushmen, Iron Age and Stone Age people," said Backwell of the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

"According to this discovery, the oldest bows and bone arrows are now dated to just over 60,000 years old and are associated with Howiesons Poort people in the Middle Stone Age," she added. "These large bone points were securely fixed to reed shafts to make one solid projectile implement."

To this day, hunter-gatherer groups use similar tools without poison to kill small mammals and birds. It's probable the ancient South Africans did the same, especially since plant and animal remains suggest the region was a humid forest at around 60,000 years ago.

Pat Shipman, adjunct professor of biological anthropology at Penn State, told Discovery News that the new research "is convincing in its conclusions and has enormous implications for our understanding of changes in human culture."

Shipman explained that when historians debate when modern human behavior first arose, tool and weapon usage are often a big part of that discussion.

If humans were already making sophisticated, multi-part weapons, like bows and arrows, during the Middle Stone Age, then it's possible that modern human behavior "accompanied, or closely followed, the physical evolution of anatomically modern humans in Africa around 200,000 years ago," she said.

With bows and arrows, humans could also hunt more safely.

"Both bows and arrows and spears enable distance killing of species, thus greatly lessening the danger to the hunter of taking large game animals," Shipman said. "Combined with the use of poisons on the points, these new inventions let hunters kill large animals that would previously have been rarely taken by our ancestors."

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Oldest Bling Found in Peru

Evidence of Free Time

- The earliest known gold jewelry made in the Americas has been discovered in southern Peru. The gold necklace, made nearly 4,000 years ago, was found in a burial site near Lake Titicaca, researchers report in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The discovery "was a complete shock," said Mark Aldenderfer, an anthropologist at the University of Arizona.

"It was not expected in the least," he said in a telephone interview. "It's always fun to find something and go, 'Wow, what is that doing here?'"

In the past, it had been assumed that a society needed to be settled to produce agricultural surpluses that can support activities such as making ornamental objects, he explained.

But the people living in this region at the time were still primarily hunter-gatherers, he said. "They were on their way to becoming settled peoples, but they were not quite there yet."

Someone, though, had the time and knowledge to make this ornament, which he speculates is a sign of importance.

"These folks are obtaining this by their effort, accumulating more wealth and using objects for prestige," Aldenderfer said. It says: "Pay attention to me, I'm successful."

There is no evidence at the site that shows how it was made, he said. But it looks like a nugget of native raw gold, which occurs near the area, was pounded flat in a stone mortar and pestle.

Then the gold was probably wrapped around a piece of wood and pounded until it was folded into a tube, he said.

The researchers restrung the necklace, alternating nine small gold tubes with a series of round stones, identified as either greenstone or turquoise, with holes in them that were found in the same grave.

Cleopatra's Suicide by Snake a Myth?

"The Death of Cleopatra"

- Popular lore holds that in Cleopatra's last moments, the distraught queen -- who had just lost her kingdom and learned of her lover's demise -- smuggled a poisonous snake into her locked chamber and died, along with two ladies-in-waiting, of a self-inflicted snake bite.

Such a scenario is next to impossible, according to Egyptologist Joyce Tyldesley, who shatters the "snakebite suicide" myth in her new book, Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt, just published in Europe and slated for an upcoming U.S. release.

"It seems to me that the snake theory is just too difficult to sustain, as it leaves too many loopholes," Tyldesley, a lecturer at the University of Manchester in England and museum fellow, told Discovery News.

She posed the following questions: Do we imagine one snake killed all three women, or were three snakes brought in? How did the snake(s) get into the room? Where did the snakes then go? Since not all snakes are poisonous, how did the women ensure their own deaths?

"Basically, I think there are better and more reliable ways of killing oneself," she said, adding that some elements of the story are probably true.

Based on a number of historical accounts, Cleopatra did die in Alexandria at around 30 B.C., and there is no historical evidence of a prior illness. The moments leading up to her death are also plausible to Tyldesley, particularly Cleopatra's dismissal of her servants, save for two women, Charmian and Eiras.

"The decision to die in front of her female servants made good practical sense, as even the dead (according to ancient Egyptian spiritual beliefs) needed a chaperone," she explained.

"One of the horrors of female suicide was that the body might be glimpsed partially naked, by strangers," she added. The queen therefore safeguarded her virtue in life and in death by retaining the company of her ladies-in-waiting.

In accounts written about by the Greek historian Plutarch and the Roman historian Cassius Dio, Cleopatra had a snake smuggled into her chamber inside a jar of figs or water, but both historians expressed doubts about the scenario.