The Neolithic period dates back to about 6000 years ago. It began when some groups of people adopted a new lifestyle, switching from their earlier nomadic lives hunting and gathering to land farming and animal farming.

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   Fred Hoyle was convinced of the extraterrestrial origin of life on our planet. With physicist Chandra Wickramasinghe and many other colleagues, he published a paper in 1978 in which he claimed that life was seeded on Earth by life-bearing comets about 4.1 billion years ago. So, this was a theory of cosmic biology, and not strictly terrestrial biology. Fossils of micro-organisms contained in meteorites of the kind continuously arriving on Earth would be the kind of thing needed to prove Hoyle’s idea. In September 2023, NASA’s mission Osiris Rex to the asteroid Bennu found traces of carbon, water, and abundant material that would be relevant to a cosmic origin for life on Earth, at least for some of its necessary ingredients, although no living organisms, not even space-resistant bacteria, are likely to be involved. So, of course, Hoyle, was not suggesting that life on Earth began with the arrival of little green men.

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   Tourism is probably a good thing for economic reasons, but not so good for the preservation of historical sites. Too many people visit these vulnerable archaeological sites, many with little or no respect toward them. Newgrange limits the numbers of tourists, but personally I feel that adding the artificial effects of the Sun’s rays was not really necessary.

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   Being a glass artist myself, I often make glass beads. I find it interesting that this craft fascinated ancient peoples like the Egyptians, and that it has been around in human history for so many centuries.

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   I recently visited the Egyptian Museum in Turin, Italy. I was curious about the Pharaoh Akhenaten and, among the many tombs, sculptures, and hieroglyphic texts, hoped to find something mentioning the importance of Akhenaten’s life. Well, it turns out that the “damnatio memoriae” was indeed borne out!

Authors and Affiliations

1. Campiglia Marittima, Italy

   Laura Pesce

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Correspondence toLaura Pesce.

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