An out-of-place artifact is an artifact of historical, archaeological, or paleontological interest found in an unusual context, which challenges conventional historical chronology by its presence in that context. Such artifacts may appear too advanced for the technology known to have existed at the time, or may suggest human presence at a time before humans are known to have existed. Other examples may suggest contact between different cultures that is hard to account for with conventional historical understanding.
Mosul is a major city in northern Iraq, serving as the capital of Nineveh Governorate. The city is considered the second-largest city in Iraq in terms of population and area after the capital Baghdad, with a population of over 3.7 million. Mosul is approximately 400 km (250 mi) north of Baghdad on the Tigris river. The Mosul metropolitan area has grown from the old city on the western side to encompass substantial areas on both the "Left Bank" and the "Right Bank", as locals call the two riverbanks. Mosul encloses the ruins of the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh – once the largest city in the world – on its east side.
Ancient astronauts refer to a pseudoscientific set of beliefs which holds that intelligent extraterrestrial beings visited Earth and made contact with humans in antiquity and prehistoric times. Proponents suggest that this contact influenced the development of modern cultures, technologies, religions, and human biology. A common position is that deities from most, if not all, religions are extraterrestrial in origin, and that advanced technologies brought to Earth by ancient astronauts were interpreted as evidence of divine status by early humans.
Flood geology is a pseudoscientific attempt to interpret and reconcile geological features of the Earth in accordance with a literal belief in the Genesis flood narrative, the flood myth in the Hebrew Bible. In the early 19th century, diluvial geologists hypothesized that specific surface features provided evidence of a worldwide flood which had followed earlier geological eras; after further investigation they agreed that these features resulted from local floods or from glaciers. In the 20th century, young-Earth creationists revived flood geology as an overarching concept in their opposition to evolution, assuming a recent six-day Creation and cataclysmic geological changes during the biblical flood, and incorporating creationist explanations of the sequences of rock strata.
Walters Art Museum is a public art museum located in the Mount Vernon section of Baltimore, Maryland. Founded and opened in 1934, it holds collections from the mid-19th century that were amassed substantially by major American art and sculpture collectors, including William Thompson Walters and his son Henry Walters. William Walters began collecting when he moved to Paris as a nominal Confederate loyalist at the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, and Henry Walters refined the collection and made arrangements for the construction what ultimately was Walters Art Museum.
Lacquerware are objects decoratively covered with lacquer. Lacquerware includes small or large containers, tableware, a variety of small objects carried by people, and larger objects such as furniture and even coffins painted with lacquer. Before lacquering, the surface is sometimes painted with pictures, inlaid with shell and other materials, or carved. The lacquer can be dusted with gold or silver and given further decorative treatments.
Massachusetts, officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is a state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It borders the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Maine to its east, Connecticut and Rhode Island to its south, New Hampshire and Vermont to its north, and New York to its west. Massachusetts is the sixth-smallest state by land area; with over seven million residents, it is the most populous state in New England, the 16th-most-populous in the country, and the third-most densely populated, after New Jersey and Rhode Island. The state's capital and most populous city, as well as its cultural and financial center, is Boston. Other major cities are Worcester, Springfield and Cambridge. Massachusetts is also home to the urban core of Greater Boston, the largest metropolitan area in New England and a region profoundly influential upon American history, academia, and the research economy. Originally dependent on agriculture, fishing, and trade, Massachusetts was transformed into a manufacturing center during the Industrial Revolution. During the 20th century, the state's economy shifted from manufacturing to services, and in the 21st century, Massachusetts is a global leader in biotechnology, artificial intelligence, engineering, higher education, finance, and maritime trade.
The written history of Boston begins with a letter drafted by the first European inhabitant of the Shawmut Peninsula, William Blaxton. This letter is dated September 7, 1630, and was addressed to the leader of the Puritan settlement of Charlestown, Isaac Johnson. The letter acknowledged the difficulty in finding potable water on that side of Back Bay. As a remedy, Blaxton advertised an excellent spring at the foot of what is now Beacon Hill and invited the Puritans to settle with him on Shawmut.
Minoan pottery has been used as a tool for dating the mute Minoan civilization. Its restless sequence of quirky maturing artistic styles reveals something of Minoan patrons' pleasure in novelty while they assist archaeologists in assigning relative dates to the strata of their sites. Pots that contained oils and ointments, exported from 18th century BC Crete, have been found at sites through the Aegean islands and mainland Greece, in Cyprus, along coastal Syria and in Egypt, showing the wide trading contacts of the Minoans.
The Museum of Anatolian Civilizations is located on the south side of Ankara Castle in the Atpazarı area in Ankara, Turkey. It consists of the old Ottoman Mahmut Paşa bazaar storage building, and the Kurşunlu Han. Because of Atatürk's desire to establish a Hittite museum, the buildings were bought upon the suggestion of Hamit Zübeyir Koşay, who was then Culture Minister, to the National Education Minister, Saffet Arıkan. After the remodelling and repairs were completed (1938–1968), the building was opened to the public as the Ankara Archaeological Museum.
The Roxbury Conglomerate, also informally known as Roxbury puddingstone, is a name for a rock formation that forms the bedrock underlying most of Roxbury, Massachusetts, now part of the city of Boston. The bedrock formation extends well beyond the limits of Roxbury, underlying part or all of Quincy, Canton, Milton, Dorchester, Dedham, Jamaica Plain, Brighton, Brookline, Newton, Needham, and Dover. It is named for exposures in Roxbury, Boston area. It is the Rock of the Commonwealth in Massachusetts.
Puddingstone, also known as either pudding stone or plum-pudding stone, is a popular name applied to a conglomerate that consists of distinctly rounded pebbles whose colours contrast sharply with the colour of the finer-grained, often sandy, matrix or cement surrounding them. The rounded pebbles and the sharp contrast in colour gives this type of conglomerate the appearance of a raisin or Christmas pudding. There are different types of puddingstone, with different composition, origin, and geographical distribution. Examples of different types of puddingstones include the Hertfordshire, Schunemunk, Roxbury, and St. Joseph Island puddingstones.
Objections to evolution have been raised since evolutionary ideas came to prominence in the 19th century. When Charles Darwin published his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, his theory of evolution initially met opposition from scientists with different theories, but eventually came to receive overwhelming acceptance in the scientific community. The observation of evolutionary processes occurring has been uncontroversial among mainstream biologists since the 1940s.
This glossary of geology is a list of definitions of terms and concepts relevant to geology, its sub-disciplines, and related fields. For other terms related to the Earth sciences, see Glossary of geography terms.
The Cambrian explosion, Cambrian radiation,Cambrian diversification, or the Biological Big Bang refers to an interval of time approximately 538.8 million years ago in the Cambrian Period of early Paleozoic when there was a sudden radiation of complex life and practically all major animal phyla started appearing in the fossil record. It lasted for about 13 – 25 million years and resulted in the divergence of most modern metazoan phyla. The event was accompanied by major diversification in other groups of organisms as well.
Boston, officially the City of Boston, is the capital and most populous city in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and is the cultural and financial center of New England in the Northeastern United States, with an area of 48.4 sq mi (125 km2) and a population of 675,647 in 2020. The Greater Boston metropolitan statistical area is the eleventh-largest in the country.
The geology of Massachusetts includes numerous units of volcanic, intrusive igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary rocks formed within the last 1.2 billion years. The oldest formations are gneiss rocks in the Berkshires, which were metamorphosed from older rocks during the Proterozoic Grenville orogeny as the proto-North American continent Laurentia collided against proto-South America. Throughout the Paleozoic, overlapping the rapid diversification of multi-cellular life, a series of six island arcs collided with the Laurentian continental margin. Also termed continental terranes, these sections of continental rock typically formed offshore or onshore of the proto-African continent Gondwana and in many cases had experienced volcanic events and faulting before joining the Laurentian continent. These sequential collisions metamorphosed new rocks from sediments, created uplands and faults and resulted in widespread volcanic activity. Simultaneously, the collisions raised the Appalachian Mountains to the height of the current day Himalayas.
Paleontology or palaeontology is the study of prehistoric life forms on Earth through the examination of plant and animal fossils. This includes the study of body fossils, tracks (ichnites), burrows, cast-off parts, fossilised feces (coprolites), palynomorphs and chemical residues. Because humans have encountered fossils for millennia, paleontology has a long history both before and after becoming formalized as a science. This article records significant discoveries and events related to paleontology that occurred or were published in the year 2017.
The Nampa figurine is a 1.5-inch (38 mm) fired clay doll found near Nampa, Idaho, in 1889. The figurine has been dyed red, possibly due to iron oxide deposition, and depicts a female figure with jewelry and clothing. The artifact has been the subject of substantial controversy over its apparent age. While scholarly consensus today holds that the doll is a hoax, initial estimates of the artifact placed its age at 2 million years old, significantly outdating any other clay artifacts and humanity's arrival in the Americas.
