But evidence suggests it wasnt always this way. But Sloan, our knowledgeable and bearded guide, told us the cave dates back to more than 550 million years, when the Appalachian Mountains stood taller than Mt. Maybe the prehistoric man thought like that too. And on the nearby island of Papua, he says, some people express their grief when a loved one dies by cutting off a finger. Yet, the story of Atlantis is not unique, as other Amid the once-tranquil village of Sanxingdui, in a quiet part of Sichuan province in China, a remarkable discovery took place which immediately attracted international attention and has since As Greek mythology goes, the universe was once a big soup of nothingness. From these resources, fungus and bacteria are able to grow, and that sort of kicks everything off, says Cory Holliday, cave and karst program director for The Nature Conservancys Tennessee chapter. Smith, working with colleagues at several institutions, is just getting the first results from an analysis of paintings and engravings in the Kimberley, an area in northwestern Australia reached by modern humans at least 50,000 years ago. The only thing that has changed on the north side of the creek since the millpond was created is the water level. While Holliday remains hopeful for the project, he does note that its a last-ditch effort. As with the rest of the cave dwellers, bats are long-lived and dont reproduce often, recalling what Holliday says: Once [the cave ecosystem] is gone, it tends to be gone., A boy scout ventures through Worley's Cavern. Back in Australia, he spent weeks painstakingly grinding the rock samples into thin layers before separating out the uranium and thorium in each one. Once the scouts choked down their beef jerky, we hiked back to the entrance, noting the curious hanging speleothems (cave formations) called mineral curtains on the way. Strange Mysteries of the Appalachian Mountains - Mysterious Universe Photo by Matthew Niemiller. This has led many historians to an obsession with finding lost shipwrecks. Nothing sparks the human imagination quite like the question, what came before? [8] In the third subclass, the typic foothills type, tulip poplar is the dominant species, but the canopy also may include basswood, white ash, mockernut hickory, yellow buckeye, silverbell, American beech, white oak, and red maple. A National Natural Landmark, Grand Caverns was discovered in 1804 by Bernard (Barnette) Weyer while trying to retrieve one of his hunting traps. Since then, its been found in 19 states, and Holliday, also a regional expert on white-nose syndrome, says that the fungus is just starting to hit its critical phase in the southern Appalachians. He cites Rhino Cave in Botswana, where archaeologists have found that 65,000 to 70,000 years ago people sacrificed carefully made spearheads by burning or smashing them in front of a large rock panel carved with hundreds of circular holes. The Appalachian Mountain range is one of the oldest continental mountain systems in the world. This is an extreme example of endemism, the ecological state where a species is unique to a defined geographic location. VIrginia Tech is only 27 miles away with a outstanding anthropology and geology departments that are constantly poking around in the country side and have never broached such a theory, Dave Miller spent every summer as a kid playing in the caves surrounding Greenville, West Virginia, deep in the Appalachian Mountains. Along the side of Yanmen Shan mountain, located twenty kilometers to the east of Nanjing, China, the legendary Yangshan quarry can be found.