Word: caving
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...exercise in nostalgia: looking back a few weeks or months and deciding which people and events are worth remembering. But this year the retro spirit took us back much farther than 1995. Jane Austen and the Beatles were back, and Bruce Springsteen returned to his roots. Discoveries in science (cave drawings in France) illuminated man's earliest days, and the big news in sports was comebacks (Northwestern?). Even in politics, Colin Powell harked back to an era when presidential candidates could emerge, Ikelike, untainted by the usual rough-and-tumble. Still, the year also had much that...
...REMBRANDT ON THE ROCKS: The discovery of dazzling drawings of rhinoceroses and other animals in a French cave suggests that prehistoric art did not mature in a simple linear fashion but may have been punctuated by the influence of individual geniuses. The images in the Chauvet cave date from 30,000 years ago, 12 to 18 millenniums before comparable ones at Lascaux, in France, and Altamira, in Spain, and much earlier than anyone thought possible for such realistic portraits...
...part of the world, it would have been a straightforward public-works project. A highway was too narrow to handle the increasing flow of traffic, so the authorities brought in heavy equipment to widen it. Partway through the job, however, a road-leveling tractor uncovered the opening to a cave no one knew was there. Work came to an immediate halt, and within hours a scientific swat team descended on the site to study...
...first, the Israelis who excavated the newly uncovered cave by the highway thought they'd found just that sort of evidence. Inside the rocky opening, located about 20 miles northwest of Jerusalem, were 23 burial containers filled with bones. A hasty analysis seemed to show that letters on one stone box spelled out part of the name Hasmonean, a family of Jewish patriots, also known as the Maccabees, whose encounter with a miraculous oil lamp is now celebrated in the lighting of Hannukah candles...
...every discovery like the Maccabees' burial cave that doesn't pan out, there seems to be another that does. Few scholars believe that miracles like Moses' burning bush or Jesus' resurrection will ever be proved scientifically; they are, after all, supernatural events. Conversely, few doubt that the characters in the latter part of the Old Testament and most of the New - Nebuchadnezzar, Jeremiah, Jesus, Peter - really existed, though some will always doubt parts of their stories...