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Underwater looters damage historic submarine

Divers have stolen from the Holland 5, a historically important submarine wreck lying in the English Channel.

English Heritage said divers stole the torpedo tube hatch of the Holland 5, which sank six miles off Eastbourne in East Sussex in 1912.

The theft was discovered during a licensed dive by the Nautical Archaeology Society (NAS) in June and confirmed during a dive last month.

The NAS described the wreck as a “remarkable piece of naval heritage”.

Sussex Police and English Heritage have appealed for help to catch the perpetrators, who may have struck up to two years ago.

Experts said a group of people would have been behind the theft but that the hatch carried very little monetary value.

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Remains of prehistoric child found in Mexico

The 10,000-year-old remains of a child have been found in an underwater cave in Mexico.

 

The remains of a prehistoric child were removed from an underwater cave in Mexico four years after divers stumbled upon the well-preserved corpse that offers clues to ancient human migration.
The skeletal remains of the boy, dubbed the Young Hol Chan, are more than 10,000 years old and are among the oldest human bones found in the Americas.
The corpse was discovered in 2006 by a pair of German cave divers who were exploring unique flooded sandstone sinkholes, known as cenotes, common to the eastern Mexican state of Quintana Roo.
Scientists spent three years studying the remains where they lay before deciding it was safe to bring the skeleton to the surface for further study, according to the Mexican National Institute for Anthropology and History.

 

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13,000-year-old artifacts found at bottom of Florida salt spring

A collection of prehistoric artifacts have been found 90 feet below the surface of the Little Salt Spring, south of Tampa, Florida.

Artifacts are delicately uncovered from a ledge 90 feet below the surface, archaeologists say, offering up glimpses of what life was like for who is believed to have been Florida’s first residents.

John Gifford, an underwater archaeologist with UM’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science along with aquarium divers are working together to gather the artifacts.

“In the last ice age, between about 10,000 and 13,000 years ago, the water level was 90 feet lower then than it is today,” Gifford said. “It’s generally thought that along that early beach area, those early humans left their tools or whatever artifacts they found at that site.”

The site has been under excavation by scientists sporadically over the past three years, and only about 6 percent of the submerged ledge has been scoured.

“Little Salt Spring,” Gifford said, “is where we have at least a fighting chance at finding some traces of human activity say 9,000 or 10,000 years ago.”

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Probing Lake Quarun for Egyptian antiquities

Experts are exploring the depths of Lake Qarun, south of Cairo, with remote sensing radar in an attempt to find sunken artifacts.

Antiquities supremo Zahi Hawass said the work was launched a few days ago. “It is the first time ever that the antiquities department carries out an archaeological mission in Lake Qarun.”

Khaled Saeed, who heads the department of pre-historic affairs at the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said the team under his supervision hopes to pinpoint “huge basalt rocks” at the bottom of Lake Qarun.

According to Saeed, the discovery of the rocks was first made by Egyptian-American scientist Faruq al-Baz, a veteran of NASA’s Apollo programme, five years ago.

Baz, who now runs the Centre for Space Studies at Boston University, was carrying out a satellite survey of Egypt’s Western Desert when he and his team discovered in the Lake Qarun area “a large number of huge blocks of rock.”

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Fossil remains of extinct monkey found underwater

The fossilised remains of an extinct monkey, which date back 3,000 years, has been found in an underwater cave in the Dominican Republic.

He explained that the bones, which included a skull that was almost complete, were found by a team of scuba divers who were exploring an underwater cave in the area.

“It’s miraculous that they even saw it,” he told BBC News.

“When they discovered it, they were fearful the bones were exposed, so they moved the material to a little nook to protect it.”

Having sought official permission to remove the fossil from the cave, Dr Rosenberger returned to with the scuba divers to retrieve it in October of last year.

The divers packed the skeleton into tupperware boxes in order to bring it safely to the surface.

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