Explorers discover Applecross cave

The cavers found the underground chamber via a water-filled
passage (L-R: Ritchie Simpson, Toby Speight, Jane
Stewart-Boland and David Morrison)

A 180m-long cave, with stalactites up to 2m long, has been discovered in the west coast of the Highlands.

The underground chamber in Applecross was found by members of the caving club, Grampian Speleological Group.

The cavers enlarged a small man-sized entrance they had found, to explore a water-filled passage that led to a series of underground chambers.

David Morrison said it was "possibly the most beautifully decorated passage anywhere in Scotland".

He added: "This is a significant discovery in the context of Scottish caves and I believe we have probably found the 'master-cave' of the area."

Mr Morrison found the cave along with fellow cavers Ritchie Simpson, Toby Speight and Jane Stewart-Boland.'Underground heritage'

The Grampian Speleological Group, which has more than 150 members, was founded in 1961 by Alan Jeffreys.

Cave holds clues to dawn of Egypt

View of a wall at the Cave of the Beasts.

Archaeologists are studying prehistoric rock drawings discovered in a remote cave in 2002, including dancing figures and strange headless beasts, as they seek new clues about the rise of Egyptian civilisation.

Amateur explorers stumbled across the cave, which includes 5,000 images painted or engraved into stone, in the vast, empty desert near Egypt's southwest border with Libya and Sudan.

Rudolph Kuper, a German archaeologist, said the detail depicted in the Cave of the Beasts indicate the site is at least 8,000 years old, likely the work of hunter-gatherers whose descendants may have been among the early settlers of the then-swampy and inhospitable Nile Valley.

The cave is 10 km from the Cave of the Swimmers romanticised in the film the English Patient, but with far more, and better preserved, images.

By studying the sandstone cave and other nearby sites, the archaeologists are trying to build a timeline to compare the culture and technologies of the peoples who inhabited the area.

"It is the most amazing cave ... in North Africa and Egypt," said Karin Kindermann, member of a German-led team that recently made a trip to the site 900 km southwest of Cairo.

Royal visit will start cave rescuers' celebrations

Members of the CRO carry a casualty across moorland

A member of the royal family will visit the world’s oldest operational cave rescue team.

The Duke of Kent will tomorrow meet members of the Cave Rescue Organisation which this year celebrates its 75th anniversary.

The duke will join celebrations at the organisation’s base at Clapham in the Yorkshire Dales national park. The volunteer team carries out rescues both in the area’s limestone caves and potholes and above ground on the fells in the West of the national park.

There are only three such rescue teams in the UK, all of them in the Dales, which perform both cave and mountain rescue.

Archaeologists find 5,000-year-old skeletons in Morocco

Archeologists in Morocco uncovered an ancient burial ground in a cave east of the capital Rabat, digging up human skeletons dating back 5,000 years.

It is the first time that human skeletons dating from the end of the Neolithic period to the Bronze Age have been discovered in Morocco, said Youssef Bokbot, leader of the team carrying out the digs.

"Seven skeletons and four graves will allow us to identify very precisely the funeral rites of the Beaker culture, a first," Bokbot said of the discovery in a cave near Khemisset, 80 kilometers (50 miles) from Rabat.

"The copper objects that we found confirmed humanity's evolution, the passage from stone to metal, a real transformation", the archaeologist added.

The digs, which began in 2006, were in a cave 18 kilometers (11 miles) from Khemisset.

Source: News.com.au

The horse-hunting hyenas of Srbsko Chlum-Komin Cave

Breaking down a hyena kill. Given competition with other
carnivores, prehistoric hyenas (like their living counterparts)
would probably have disarticulated and transported parts of
horses they killed. From Diedrich 2010.

In Hollywood films, there is nothing like an assemblage of bones strewn about a cave floor to testify to the power and voraciousness of a predator. Every skeleton is a testament to the hunting prowess of the carnivore, which causes even more alarm when the person who has stumbled into the cave realizes that they have just walked into a literal dead-end.

Although amplified for dramatic effect in the movies, this cinematic convention is based upon fact. Some mammalian carnivores do create bone assemblages in caves, and through the fossil record we know that they have been doing so for millions of years. In fact, the bone-collecting habits of carnivores have proven to be a boon for paleontologists, creating assemblages which not only represent the animals which lived in the area, but also provide clues as to the interactions between predator and prey during the distant past.