Even as the world makes its way through a historical era of earth-shattering proportions, scholars continue to make new discoveries about the history of past civilizations that changes our perceptions of the world’s history. Truths that many people grew up believing are absolute fact have been proven to be false as new facts and evidence come to light.
Some of these new findings corroborate old theories while others are as surprising as a Slotocash no deposit bonus casino longshot win. They include:
Kennedy Assassination
The assassination of President John Kennedy in 1963 remains one of America’s biggest mysteries. Many questions still remain about the assassination including
- Was there a second shooter? The trajectory of the shot that hit Kennedy in the head seems to indicate that there was another gun fired from another direction, perhaps the grassy knoll, indicating that there was a second shooter.
- How could a man like Lee Harvey Oswald, who had experienced little success in life, pull off an assassination of the United States president?
- Why did a paraffin test on Oswald's cheek, performed after his arrest, seem to indicate that he hadn’t fired a rifle?
- Could Oswald, who travelled to the Soviet Union in 1959, lived there until 1962 and unsuccessfully applied for Soviet citizenship, have been involved in some type of conspiracy? Oswald also traveled to Mexico City a few weeks before the shooting and visited both the Russian and the Cuban embassies there.
Beginning in 2017, documents pertaining to the Kennedy assassination that had previously been classified started to be released. The latest group of records to be released included 1500 documents that are now available to the public via the website of the National Archive. They contain FBI memos and notes on meetings with informants. These records were released only on December 15 so researchers have not yet had time to process them. But many people believe that they will include evidence that full details about what is known about the assassination was never made public – until, possibly,
Stonehenge
The ancient Stonehenge site has baffled historians for hundreds of years. Located on the Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, the prehistoric monument consists of an outer ring of verticle standing stones, each 7 feet high, 2 meters wide and weighing about 25 tons. Inside there’s a ring of smaller bluestones and inside that second ring is another ring of stones. The ring is orients towards the summer solstice sunrise.
For years, archaeologists have struggled to understand why Stonehenge was built and how, without heavy equipment, the Neolithics could accomplish such a task which, they believed, could date as far back as 1000 BCE.
In 2021 tests were conducted to show that nearby pits were human made. These pits were dug 4,500 years ago – dating settlement in the area much further back than had been previously thought -- and they seem to have been meant to guide people to a sacred area. Durrington Walls, one of the biggest henge monuments in Britain, is located at precisely its center.
The first circle was discovered in 2020 but throughout 2021 work continued to analyze the pits which are all identical, meaning that they are all part of one enormous structure. Researchers now believe that the same neolithic people who constructed Stonehenge also dug this monument. They also are considering the theory that while Stonehenge was erected in a way that positioned according to the solstices, the pits may have had cosmological significance.
Vikings
The theory that the Vikings had landed in North America had been bandied about for years but this year archaeologists were able to definitively ascertain that, 500 years before Columbus and his Pinta, Nina and Santa Marie sailed the Atlantic, the Vikings did indeed make it to the shores of the Americas.
At the L’Anse aux Meadows archaeological site, researchers found pieces of wood scarred with cut marks made by metal tools such as those used by the Vikings (tools that the indigenous population did not use at that time) that were dated to 1021 CE. The discovery shows that Viking migration had circumnavigated the globe, transferring goods, knowledge and genetic information.
Archaeologists had long believed that the Vikings made it to North America but now, using the science of dendrochronology which counts tree rings, they have been able to put a date on the visit.
Dead Sea Scrolls
Many archaeologists believe that the greatest archaeological discovery ever made was that of the Dead Sea Scrolls, parchments written by a Jewish sect that lived near the Dead Sea in Israel before the Common Era. These parchments provide a wealth of information about life during that period as well as about the historical era leading up to the founding of Christianity.
The first scrolls were discovered in 1946 and in the ensuing years, more were found. They include the oldest known fragments of the Old Testament and are remarkably identical to the Hebrew Bible of today. In 2017 the Israel Antiquities Authority decided to go back to the caves where the first scrolls were discovered to see if they could identify additional scrolls.
They found fragments of the books of the minor prophets of Zechariah and Nahum written in Greek, though God’s name was written in Hebrew. the scrolls have helped scholars understand different Jewish sects that were active during that period as well as the basis for legal commentaries in the Jewish Talmud. One of the lead archaeologists on the dig noted that these new fragments shed light on the evolution of biblical texts from their earliest forms.
At the dig site other artifacts dating from the Jewish Bar Kochba Revolt against the Romans were also found including coins, spear tips, sandals, arrowheads, lice combs and fabric.
