Thursday 4 February 2010

First Century Asian man's bones found in southern Italy

I don't know if this item has any biblical significance, but it's interesting:

A TEAM of Canadian archeologists working in southern Italy has unearthed a 2,000-year-old set of bones that shouldn't be there.

The unexpected male skeleton with DNA from East Asia -- bur­ied at a time when the Roman Empire knew little about China and had no direct contacts with civilizations in the Far East -- is forcing scholars to re-examine what they thought they knew about the world in the first century following the birth of Jesus Christ.

The Asian man's grave was found in a cemetery at Vagnari, which experts have determined became the site of an imperial estate at some point after the rise of Caesar Augustus in 27 B.C. and before the death of Nero in 68 A.D. Seventy-five skeletons from the first, second and third centuries A.D. have so far been excavated at the estate in a project led by McMaster University archeologist Tracy Prowse.

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