Society for Interdisciplinary Studies

Biblical Numbers have exercised the minds of numerous scholars over the years but we are little wiser after all that ink has been spent. The number 4 and its multiples, such as 40 and 400, play an important role in Biblical chronology - but what does 4 imply?

At www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/03/2013/mattarahkka-mother-ear... ... we have a lovely piece, several pages of printout, on Sami rock art, by Inga-Marie Mulk, an archaeologist from northern Sweden. It is a interpretation of images scratched, etched and engraved, or even painted on rocks in northern Fenno-Scandia, some of which is thought to represent an earth mother goddess.

NASA has a story about Jupiter - see www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-095&cid=release_2013-095

A timely reminder that tree rings, ice cores, and speleotherms, which are all used to reconstruct climate in the past by geologists as much as climate scientists, are not as reliable as sometimes projected - see http://phys.org/print279271653.html

Tom Findlay has just had a book published, A Beginner's View of our Electric Universe, so he was directly asked a couple of pertinent questions by one of the correspondents on the Eric Aitchison email thread (see, it ain't all chronology and other subjects crop up). On the subject of the Russian Meteor he said its entry into the atmosphere involved a 17 second passage at around 40,000kph during which it is claimed the rock was heated by air friction alone to such a degree that it melted and disintegrated with a force greater than 30 Hiroshima bombs.

A rather strange story at http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/failure-to-hunt-rabbits-part-of-... ... and concerns the absence of rabbits and similar small animals in the diet of Neanderthals. It seems a very big assumption is being made here and it is taken further by the claim they failed to hunt rabbits, or were unable to hunt them because their technology was inadequate, and this led to their decline. I'm sure if Neanderthals were hungry they would eat anything they could catch, including our small furry friends with the long ears.

At www.cracked.com/article_20206_5-shockingly-advanced-ancient-buildings-th... .... some intersting images of underground settlements in different parts of the world. Derinkuyu in Turkey, for example, discovered in the 1960s when a house collapsed above into one of the passageways. It is basically an 18 storey underground town and was built, it is thought, in the 8th century BC, or thereabouts. Was it in response to the end of Bronze Age destructions?

At www.gsbkerala.com/saraswati.htm ... the lost river Saraswati is the the main theme and begins by saying climate change and geotectonic movements (earth movements) led to migration and abandonment of settlements. Some of the drainage systems have been lost as a result of being buried beneath silt (changing river courses) and this appears to be the position with the Saraswati. There is also evidence of flooding at the end of the Ice Age, it seems, which in the artticle is attributable to melting Himalayan glaciers - but could equally be due to other reasons.

Continuing the theme of desertification in recent posts see www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120528154943.htm ... we have climate change directly involved in the collapse of the Indus civilisation, around 4000 years ago.

This story is at http://phys.org/print282294394.html ... and concerns the discovery of a hidden network of rivers flowing beneath the Greenland ice sheet, potentiallly catastrophic as far as the stability of the ice sheet is concerned. Published in Nature Geoscience it seems fairly cut and dried - but is it?