Word: caving
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...when his flock became restive, a shepherd boy in 10th century France left his bread and goat's-milk cheese behind him in a cave near the village of Roquefort. Weeks later the boy came back to see what had become of his lunch. The bread was a lost cause, but the cheese was covered with green mold that proved highly edible. The result: mankind began eating Roquefort cheese...
...University of New Mexico student chanced upon some provocative remains in a cave at Sandia, about 15 miles outside Albuquerque. His anthropology professor, Frank Cummings Hibben, examined the cave and got pretty excited himself. On the cave's lowest level, Hibben's party found fragments of the tusk of a Pleistocene mammoth, along with a few ancient flint spearheads...
Hibben thought the remains had been left by an ancient human hunter, who had dragged the beast's carcass into the cave. He christened him Sandia Man. He estimated that Sandia Man was of an even earlier generation than the 10,000-year-old Folsom Man, whose traces were first found in Folsom, N.Mex. in 1925-and, later, on a higher level of Sandia Cave. But other scientists treated the findings with skepticism. There was no proof, they said, that Folsom Man had any ancestors on the American continent...
When American schoolboys learn about prehistoric cave paintings, they are usually taught about the ones at Altamira, Spain. Enthusiasts may go on to study those of Southern France, Africa and Australia. Amazingly, the nation's own Stone Age art treasures-mainly concentrated in the Southwest -are seldom mentioned. Yet amidst the labyrinthine grandeur of Arizona's Canyon de Chelly (pronounced shay) are thousands of caves, largely still unexplored by white men, where Indians long lived and left samples of their...
...lies at the heart of the Navaho reservation, about 80 miles northwest of Gallup, N.M. on a spine-rattling dirt road. Down the winding course of the canyon runs an underground river. In summer, Navahos farm the sandy banks and dig for water in midstream. Superstitiously afraid of the cave ruins, they build their hive-shaped hogans at the feet of the sky-filling sandstone cliffs. The Navahos still paint animals, like the cows below, on the cliffs; the earliest known example of their reportorial pictures is reproduced above...