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In Japan one can find an
ancient stone pyramid. It is a beautifully shaped monolith, about six and a half
feet tall and twelve feet at the base, practically lost in the thick forest
growth on the slope of a hill near the town of Ena, in central Honsu, largest of
the Japanese islands. Cut from a single, massive block of gray granite, the
object was a pyramidian, a smaller version of the Great Pyramid and its
full-size cousins. This trignon, as they call it, might have passed for the
missing capstone of its gigantic counterpart in Giza. People leave flowers at
the base of the pyramid. Their veneration is more in keeping with Shinto
practices, which predate Buddhism in Japan by unknown centuries. There are few
folk lores about the pyramid. The only mythic element still current concerns a
white serpent that dwells either within or underneath the trignon. It is a
beneficent creature, which local people worship by laying out plates of small
eggs for the snake to consume. Somehow, this practice is related to human and
agricultural fertility.
But who cut the straight angles of the Japanese pyramid, when and for what purposes are utterly unknown. Nor is it the only such example. Perhaps 100 meters further up the same hill another trignon of approximately the same dimensions stands in an apparent alignment whose suspected celestial orientation has not yet been determined. At least one more pyramidian lies toward the north. Together, the monolithic trio forms a triangular relationship, the significance of which continues to escape investigators. Surprisingly, the immediate area features many other puzzling remnants of a culture or cultures which flourished around Ena long before the advent of recorded history. The area is uncommonly rich in petroglyphs. One site is extraordinary for the enormous, flat slab of stone, some 8 by 15 feet across its smooth surface. Reverently incorporated into the forecourt of a private home by a man sympathetic to archaeological values, it is incised with dozens of human and geometric figures, together with examples of a linear script that bears a striking resemblance to Ogam.
The petroglyph stone lies in a valley surrounded by hundreds of terraced farms where rice is cultivated in a manner preserved over the course of unguessed generations. So much so, they have been honored by the government as "national treasures." But anyone who has visited the Inka cities of Ollantaytambo or Machu Picchu in the Peruvian Andes would be struck by their similarity to the Ena agricultural terraces.
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Research has revealed details of the catastrophic Zanclean flood that refilled the Mediterranean Sea more than five million years ago. The flood occurred when Atlantic waters found their way into the cut-off and desiccated Mediterranean basin. The researchers say that a 200km channel across the Gibraltar strait was carved out by the floodwaters. Their findings, published in Nature, show that the resulting flood could have filled the basin within two years. The team was led by Daniel Garcia-Castellanos from the Research Council of Spain (CSIC). 
