Details about an undersea site reportedly containing ancient city walls more than 10,000 years old will soon be unveiled as the government announced its support for an exploratory project yesterday.
Huang Yung-chuan (黃永川), deputy director of the National Museum of History, announced the project in a press conference.
The site, located between Hsichi island (
"After numerous attempts, we finally discovered the stone walls at the northeast side of Tungchi island at the end of September," said Steve Shieh (謝新曦), chairman of the Chinese Dolphin Diving Club.
"These stone walls are on average 1m high and 50cm wide. They are about 100m long. Our water sonar date revealed there are about five such stone walls at the site," said Shieh.
The Public Television Service Foundation (PTSF) deployed a team to the archeological site to shoot film of the walls.
"When I was examining the stone walls, I found heaps of coral pieces and pebbles at the leeward sides of the walls. These could hardly be natural accumulations," said Ke Chin-yuan (
Huang said the accumulation of coral pieces and pebbles is only one piece of evidence proving the stone walls may have been built by humans.
"The walls are very straight and only 50cm wide. It is extremely rare for natural forces to form such straight and thin walls," Huang said.
Huang said these walls could even have been built about 10,000 years ago.
Tian Wen-miin (
"These sonar graphs show the seabed around the site is very even. However, at near the stone walls there are many regular protrusions that look like alleys, staircases, walls and stages," Tian said.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide