Arkeo Blusukan

The Real Fact-Checking Lawrence of Arabia  Some scholars  have accused British military officer T.E. Lawrence, later known as Lawrence of Arabia, of exaggerating his experience fighting with Bedouin guerrillas during the 1916–1918 Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire. (Photo: Ali Badry) (Countasy: Horizon Pictures (II), 1962, UK) Now archaeologists working in the Arabian Desert in Jordan can place him at the scene of one of the most dramatic moments described in his autobiography,  Seven Pillars of Wisdom . In the account, Lawrence records that he led an ambush on a Turkish military train. While surveying the site of that attack, the team found a spent bullet that was fired from a Colt 1911 automatic pistol, a weapon that would have been extremely rare in the Middle East at the time—and that Lawrence is known to have carried. “You can never be 100 percent sure,” says University of Bristol archaeologist Nick Saunders, “but we are confident this bu...

Genomes Suggest Two Groups of First Farmers in Middle East BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS—Population geneticists Iosif Lazaridis and David Reich of Harvard Medical School suggest that farming was developed by two different populations in the Middle East. They obtained genetic material, which is poorly preserved in hot climates, from the tiny ear bones of 44 people who lived in the Middle East between 3,500 and 14,000 years ago. Nature  reports the researchers found that the Neolithic farmers who lived across the Zagros Mountains of western Iran were more closely related to hunter-gatherers in the region than they were to farmers in the southern Levant. “There has been a school of thought arguing that everything happens first in the southern Levant and everyone learns how to be farmers in from this initial dispersal,” said Roger Matthews of the University of Reading, who is also co-director of the Central Zagros Archaeological Project. “But the archaeological evidence shows very strong ...