A 17th-century wreck of a ship belonging to the Dutch East India Company has been found off the coast of Brazil.

Voetboog was a three-mast flyboat, which left the port of Batavia (now Jakarta) for The Netherlands with a 109-member crew on board, the expedition leader Attila K. Szaloky told MTI, a Hungarian news agency.

Owned by the Dutch East India Company, the Fluyt ship carried silk, spices, tea, Japanese and Chinese porcelain as well as nearly 180,000 pieces of Dutch golden ducats.

“The estimated value of the wreckage is about 1 billion dollars,” said Szaloky.

Sailing on the Atlantic, the ship was probably caught by a storm and its only chance to get home was to stick close to the Brazilian coast.

[Full story] [Photo source]

The conclusion of a three-year study about Lake Superior’s past has brought human activity along the shoreline into sharper focus.

Scientists from Northern Michigan University’s geography department recently completed a project at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore that located 23 new archaeological sites.

The researchers also helped define the shoreline as it existed 4,500 years ago.

Department head John Anderton said the National Park Service-backed effort was designed to find cultural resources so they can be protected during future road building and other developments.

“In the first year of the project, satellite imagery was used to identify distinct land forms, notches, ridges and barriers created by wave action, to map the older shorelines,” Northern Michigan spokeswoman Kristi Evans wrote on the school’s Web site. “They found that the water was 30-40 feet higher than it is today.”

[Full story] [Photo source]

Evidence found on ancient bird bones show that cavemen roasted and ate birds.

First, they found “cutmarks on bones of both the front and hind limb.”

Second, they identified the “presence of burning patterns on the extremities of the bones, areas of the skeleton with less meat.”

Finally, the researchers discovered “human tooth marks on limb bones.”

Although both Neanderthal and modern human remains have been found at the Bolomor Cave complex, the geological level of the roasted duck finds suggests that Homo heidelbergensis is the human species that ate the duck meals.

[Full story]

A prehistoric ’super-river’ is the reason why Britain was cut off from Europe.

An Anglo-French study has revealed that long before the English Channel there was a giant river which ran south from an area of the North Sea.

Previous research found that 500,000 years ago a range of low hills connected Britain to Europe between the Weald in South-East England and Artois in northern France.

But during a series of ice ages beginning 450,000 years ago huge ice sheets covered much of northern Europe, trapping a portion of the North Sea the size of East Anglia.

The great rivers of Europe poured into this lake at the southern end of the North Sea.

To the north it was bordered by glaciers and to the south by the low-lying land mass connecting Britain to France.

[Full story]

The BBC has an interesting article about Denis Avey, a British soldier who smuggled himself into Auschwitz to witness the horror there.

He arranged to swap for one night at a time with a Jewish inmate he had come to trust. He exchanged his uniform for the filthy, stripy garments the man had to wear. For the Auschwitz inmate it meant valuable food and rest in the British camp, while for Denis it was a chance to gather facts on the inside.

He describes Auschwitz as “hell on earth” and says he would lie awake at night listening to the ramblings and screams of prisoners.

“It was pretty ghastly at night, you got this terrible stench,” he says.

He talked to Jewish prisoners but says they rarely spoke of their previous life, instead they were focused on the hell they were living and the work they were forced to do in factories outside the camp.

[Full story]