From: gavrila@imhfhp16.epfl.ch (Spyros Gavrilakis)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.greek
Subject: Kleftiko with hippos
Date: 25 Jan 93 08:05:16 GMT
Organization: Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne


There seem to have been some problems with the net. Sometimes
I find no new articles in any group. I hope things are now ok.
sg

PS : "kleftiko" is a Cypriot dish with meat.

----------------------------------------------------------------

Title : First Cypriots feasted on hippo.

<<When people first settled in the island of Cyprus 10,500 years
ago they found a ready supply of meat, in the shape of a pig-sized
pygmy hippopotamus. It was not long b4 the new arrivals drove the
hippos to extinction.

<<Until now paleontologists believed that the people and the pygmy
hippos never met. The general view was that people had arrived on
the island nuch later - no earlier than 8000 or 9000 years ago.
And, all the evidence suggested that the hippos had disappeared
long b4 then, killed off by the a change of climate.

<<A rather different picture emerges with the discovery of pygmy
hippo bones in the collapsed remains of a rock shelter at the
southern tip of the island. Rolfe Mandel of the University of
Nebraska at Omaha and Alan Simmons of the University of Nevada
at Reno uncovered ancient hearth sites. Around them were more
than a thousand human artefacts, mostly thumb-sized rock
scrapers, and bone fragments, mostly from hippos. The bones also
included remains of dwarf elephants and flightless birds. They
believe humans used the shelter for cooking, then cached the bones.

<<The age of the shelter has been put at 10,500 years, well b4 other
evidence of any other human habitation on the Mediterranean islands.
The most recent date for pygmy hippo remains had previously been
20,000 years.

<<The discovery shows that people reached the Mediterranean islands
earlier than had been thought, and links them with the demise not
only of hippos but also of other ice-age animals, which were
thought to have vanished before humans arrived.


<<Pygmy hippos were agile creatures, well adapted to life on a
mountainous island. They had prospered in the absence of large
predators, but that may have been their undoing, because they
would never have learnt to be wary of hunters.

<<More recently, human hunters have killed off other large
island animals, such as the flightless moas of New Zealand
and the elephant birds of Madagascar. This new discovery shows
that more primitive people did the same in the Med.>>

(NS)
----------------------------------------------------------------

Title : The magnetism of hidden Troy.

<<Discovery of what looks like part of a wall buried near the
ancient city of Troy could provide the first hard evidence that
the Trojan War was more than a legend.

<<A German archaeologist has located a feature near the citadel
of Troy which, he says, could be a wall that formed part of the
fortifications protecting the sparwling  settlement around the
base of the Trojan citadel. Signs of fire damage in the wall might
give credence to Homer's epic tale of the fall of Troy, and
indicate roughly when it happened, says Donald Easton, a British
archaeologist who is part of the international team working at
Troy.

<<Manfred Korfmann, at the Univeristy of Tubingen, supervised a
team of researchers which examined the feature with a magnetometer,
a device which detects deflections in the Earth's magnetic field.

<<Korfmann took many readings over a wide area at Troy and translated
the data into a computerised plot showing the most distinct features.
The results, published in the current issue of the journal "Studia
Troica" indicate clearly a feature 120 meters long and between 3 and
4 meters wide.


<<"We found a disturbance which may be a fortification wall," says
Korfmann. However, he is cautious that "it's like taking an X-ray
into the ground, and there can be other interpretations. We will
excavate to confirm the identity of the feature next summer."

<<Archaeological investigations at Troy over the past century
have focused on the citadel of Troy, a fortress built on a cliff-top
mound overlooking the Dardanells. But archaeologists have neglected
the "urban sprawl" that grew up outside the citadel wall, says
Easton. He says that excavations of similar settlements in central
Turkey have yielded "fantastically important" documants and
features relating to the middle and late Bronze Age.

<<If Korfmann's buried feature is a wall, it probably encloses a
late Bronze Age settlemnt dating from that time of the Trojan War.
"It will put the citadel into context," says Easton. He estimates
that the "wall", about 340 meters south of the citadel mound, could
originate from any time between around 700 BC and 1700 BC. "If
there was a Trojan War, it probably happened around the 13th
century BC," he said.>>

(NS)
----------------------------------------------------------------


Newsgroups: soc.culture.greek,alt.news.macedonia