Early humans had feet like ours and left lasting impressions in the form of 1.5 million-year-old footprints, some of which were made by feet that could wear a size 9 men’s shoe.

The findings at a Northern Kenya site represent the oldest evidence of modern-human foot anatomy. They also help tell an ancestral story of humans who had fully transitioned from tree-dwellers to land walkers.

“In a sense, it’s like putting flesh on the bones,” said John Harris, an anthropologist with the Koobi Fora Field School of Rutgers University. “The prints are so well preserved .”

Almost human
Harris and other colleagues report in the Feb. 27 issue of the journal Science on finding several footprint trails within two sedimentary rock layers. An upper sedimentary layer included two trails of two prints each, one group of seven prints, and a variety of isolated prints. The lower layer had a trail of two prints and a single isolated print likely from a smaller, juvenile human.

The researchers identified the footprints as probably belonging to a member of Homo ergaster, an early form of Homo erectus. Such prints include modern foot features such as a rounded heel, a human-like arch and a big toe that sits parallel to other toes.

By contrast, apes have more curved fingers and toes made for grasping tree branches. The earliest human ancestors, such as Australopithecus afarensis, still possessed many ape-like features more than 2 million years ago — the well-known “Lucy” specimen represents one such example.
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The Baghdad Battery is the common name for a number of artifacts apparently discovered in the village of Khuyut Rabbou’a (near Baghdad, Iraq) in 1936. These artifacts came to wider attention in 1938, when Wilhelm König, the German director of the National Museum of Iraq, found the objects in the museum’s collections, and (in 1940, having returned to Berlin due to illness) published a paper speculating that they may have been galvanic cells, perhaps used for electroplating gold onto silver objects.

Description and dating
The artifacts consist of ~130mm (~5 inch) tall terracotta jars (with a one and a half inch mouth) containing a copper cylinder made of a rolled-up copper sheet, which houses a single iron rod. At the top, the iron rod is isolated from the copper by asphalt plugs or stoppers, and both rod and cylinder fit snugly inside the opening of the jar which bulges outward towards the middle (reverse hourglass shape). The copper cylinder is not watertight, so when the jar was filled with a liquid, this would surround the iron rod as well. The artifact had been exposed to the weather and had suffered corrosion, although mild given the presence of an electrochemical couple. This has led some scholars to believe lemon juice, grape juice, or vinegar was used as an acidic agent to jumpstart the electrochemical reaction with the two metals.

König thought the objects might be Parthian (between 250 BC and 224 AD) because the village where they were excavated was Parthian. However according to Dr. St. John Simpson of the Near Eastern department of the British Museum, their original excavation and context were not well recorded (see stratigraphy), so evidence for this date range is very weak. Furthermore, the style of the pottery (see typology) is Sassanid (224-640), so they are probably much more recent than König thought.

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The Antikythera device was found by chance in the remains of an ancient ship, discovered sometime before Easter 1900 at a depth of 42 m. Many statues and other artifacts were retrieved on site by Greek sponge divers. The mechanism itself was discovered on May 17, 1902, when archaeologist Valerios Stais noticed that a piece of rock recovered from the site had a gear wheel embedded in it.

Upon examination, it was found that the “rock” was in fact a heavily encrusted and corroded mechanism which had survived in three main parts and dozens of smaller fragments. The device itself was surprisingly thin; about 33cm (13in) high, 17cm (6.75in) wide and 9cm (3.5in) thick, made of bronze and originally mounted in a wooden frame. It was inscribed with a text of over 2,000 characters, of which about 95% have been deciphered. The full text of the inscription has not yet been published. The device is displayed in the Bronze Collection of the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, accompanied by a reconstruction. Another reconstruction is on display at the American Computer Museum in Bozeman, Montana
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The Phaistos Disc (Phaistos Disk, Phaestos Disc) is a curious archaeological find, likely dating to the middle or late Minoan Bronze Age. Its purpose and meaning, and even its original geographical place of manufacture, remain disputed, making it one of the most famous mysteries of archaeology. This unique object is now on display at the archaeological museum of Herakleion in Crete, Greece.

Discovery
The Phaistos Disc was discovered in the basement of room 8 in building 101 of the Minoan palace-site of Phaistos, near Hagia Triada, on the south coast of Crete. Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier recovered this remarkably intact “dish”, about 15 cm in diameter and uniformly just over 1 cm thick, on July 3, 1908.
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By PD Online Staff Member Li Heng
The widespread news of mysterious iron pipes at the foot of Mount Baigong, located in the depths of the Qaidam Basin, Qinghai Province of northwest China, has roused concern from related departments.

Some experts believe that these might be relics left behind by extraterrestrial beings (ET), for the site, with its high altitude and thin, crisp air, has long been held as an ideal place to practice astronomy.

Three caves are found at the foot of Mount Baigong. Two of them have collapsed and are inaccessible. The middle one is the biggest, with its floor standing two meters above the ground and its top eight meters above the ground. This cave is about six meters in depth, a little like a cave dug out by human beings, with pure sand and rock inside.

What is astonishing is inside for there is a half-pipe about 40 centimeters in diameter tilting from the top to the inner end of the cave. Another pipe of the same diameter goes into the earth with only its top visible above the ground.

At the opening of the cave there are a dozen pipes at the diameter between 10 and 40 centimeters run into the mount straightly, showing high fixing technique.
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