Histórias de invernos passados, do El-dorado (finalmente) descoberto e das capacidades náuticas do Homo Erectus

• Call this a real winter?|Climate Ark: "A few inches of snow, a touch of nocturnal frost and a flurry or two of sleet -- call this a winter? Why, when I was a boy there were fogs and smogs, snow from Boxing Day to March, icicles as long as golf clubs and frosts so severe the sea froze. Real winters, they were -- hard enough to see off a pipsqueak like 2009-10 and still have plenty of menace to spare. And so, in response to those who think the present season a cause for complaint, I present the 10 toughest winters in thermo-- meter history:"
• Amazon explorers uncover signs of a real El Dorado | World news | guardian.co.uk: "Some seekers called it El Dorado, others the City of Z. But the jungle swallowed them and nothing was found, prompting the rest of the world to call it a myth. The Amazon was too inhospitable, said 20th century scholars, to permit large human settlements. Now, however, the doomed dreamers have been proved right: there was a great civilisation. New satellite imagery and fly-overs have revealed more than 200 huge geometric earthworks carved in the upper Amazon basin near Brazil's border with Bolivia. Spanning 155 miles, the circles, squares and other geometric shapes form a network of avenues, ditches and enclosures built long before Christopher Columbus set foot in the new world. Some date to as early as 200 AD, others to 1283. Scientists who have mapped the earthworks believe there may be another 2,000 structures beneath the jungle canopy, vestiges of vanished societies. The structures, many of which have been revealed by the clearance of forest for agriculture, point to a 'sophisticated pre-Columbian monument-building society', says the journal Antiquity, which has published the research." 
• Hominids Went Out of Africa on Rafts | Wired Science | Wired.com: "Human ancestors that left Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago to see the rest of the world were no landlubbers. Stone hand axes unearthed on the Mediterranean island of Crete indicate that an ancient Homo species — perhaps Homo erectus — had used rafts or other seagoing vessels to cross from northern Africa to Europe via at least some of the larger islands in between, says archaeologist Thomas Strasser of Providence College in Rhode Island."