How 5 coins and an 'X' on a map could rewrite our history

Five copper coins and a nearly 70-year-old map with an ''X'' could rewrite Australia's history.
Ian McIntosh, an Australian scientist and professor of anthropology at Indiana University in the US, is planing an expedition in July to revisit the location where five 1000-year-old coins were found in the Northern Territory in 1944.

Seafarers from distant countries landed in Australia much earlier. 

The coins could mean seafarers from distant countries landed in Australia much earlier than is believed.

In 1944, the Wessel Islands - an uninhabited group of islands off Australia's north coast - had become a strategic position to help protect the mainland.

Australian soldier Maurie Isenberg was stationed on one of the islands to man a radar station and spent his spare time fishing on the idyllic beaches. He discovered the handful of coins in the sand.

In 1979, he sent the coins to a museum to get them identified. They proved to be 1000 years old.

Still not fully realising their significance, he marked an old map with an ''X'' where he had found them. The discovery was apparently forgotten until a few months ago.

Professor McIntosh and his team of Australian and American historians, archaeologists, geomorphologists and Aboriginal rangers say the five coins date back to the 900s to 1300s.

They are African coins from the former Kilwa sultanate, now a World Heritage ruin on an island off Tanzania. Kilwa once was a flourishing trade port with links to India in the 13th century to 16th century.

The copper coins were the first coins produced in Sub-Saharan Africa and, according to Professor McIntosh, have only twice been found outside Africa: once in Oman and Mr Isenberg's find.

Archaeologists have long suspected that there may have been early maritime trading routes that linked East Africa, Arabia, India and the Spice Islands, even 1000 years ago. Or the coins could have washed ashore after a shipwreck.

When Mr Isenberg discovered the copper coins, he also found four coins that originated from the Dutch East India Company - with one dating back to 1690.

Professor McIntosh wants to answer some of these mysteries during his planned expedition to the Wessel Islands.

He will also be looking for a secret cave Aboriginal legends refer to. It is supposed to be close to the beach where Mr Isenberg found the coins and is said to be filled with doubloons and weaponry.

Source - http://www.smh.com.au/national/x-marks-the-spot-1000yearold-coins-may-prove-traders-visit-20130519-2junc.html

CERN reposts the world’s first Web page

In an effort to preserve the Web’s history, CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) republished the world’s first Web site — two decades after physicists made the technology behind the Web open to everyone.

The site’s reappearance is part of a project to preserve the history of the Web, and tocelebrate 20 years of a “free, open Web” that changed the way we do just about everything.

Photo taken on April 30, 2013 in Geneva shows a 1992 copy of the world's first web page. The world's first web page will be dragged out of cyberspace and restored for today's Internet browsers as part of a project to celebrate 20 years of the Web

The first reaction to the Web was less than enthusiastic. Mike Sendall, the supervisor who reviewed a 1989 proposal to create an information network from British physicist Sir Tim Berners-Lee, gave his nod to the project with the words: “Vague, but exciting.”

Berners-Lee first designed the network to act as a way for CERN physicists and engineers to manage and share information.

On April 30, 1993, a team at CERN first made the technology underlying the World Wide Web available, royalty-free, to anyone who wanted to use it.

The Web site itself isn’t much to look at — just a rundown of the product that includes a look at its development history, instructions of how to create your own pages and technical information about the World Wide Web — but it laid the groundwork for an estimated 630 million Web sites to come in the next 20 years, CERN said in a blog post.

The page that started it all went offline sometime between its birth in 1993 and its twenty-year anniversary and was never preserved with so much as a screenshot, CERN said in its blog post, but those working on the project have been sifting through server files to find the earliest copies of the first Web files that they possibly can.

Interest in the first Web site was so high Tuesday that the site went offline again, however briefly, when it was overwhelmed by Web traffic. The group responsible for its restoration posted a Twitter message saying that the interest brought the site “to its knees.”

“We’re working on it,” the message read. “Terrific to see so much interest!”

The page’s resurrection is part of a larger project to preserve the Web’s earliest days, including efforts to recreate the experience of using early Web browsers, preserving data on the first Web servers used by British computer scientist and Web pioneer Sir Tim Berners-Lee and providing an archive of information on the earliest days of the Web.

The group is also trying to preserve the first hardware used to host early Web files, including, the BBC reported, a 1990s era, $6,500 computer built by NeXT — the company founded by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs after he was ousted from the company in 1985. The computer is still intact but does not work.

Source - http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/cern-reposts-the-worlds-first-web-page/2013/04/30/d8a70128-b1ac-11e2-bbf2-a6f9e9d79e19_story.html