Rostov 🇷🇺

Rostov-on-Don[a] is a port city and the administrative centre of Rostov Oblast and the Southern Federal District of Russia. It lies in the southeastern part of the East European Plain on the Don River, 32 kilometers (20 mi) from the Sea of Azov, directly north of the North Caucasus. The southwestern suburbs of the city lie above the Don river delta. Rostov-on-Don has a population of over one million people and is an important cultural, educational, economic and logistical centre of Southern Russia.

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Mission Control - Uone Remix by Bondi, SAAND, Uone 🎵

"The so-called "Venus of Kostenki" was recovered from one of the Paleolithic sites on the Don River in Russia. Several figurines from this area share the same traits and indicate a single goddess who is encountered not just in Russia but throughout prehistoric Europe and the Near East. Her commonalities in so many figurines include the largeness of breasts, belly, thighs, and buttocks; a globe of a head with closely plated hair or more likely a knitted cap; and arms folded under breasts. Of subtler recurrence, least often remarked upon but of signal importance, is how often her head is tipped downward, not skyward, for the afterlife is not in the sky but in her own womb, the womb of the fatted earth. She is additionally faceless, as the Goddess in her wholeness is unknowable. This is the standard appearance of the Kostenki goddess figurines; but how nearly identical she is to prehistoric figurines from France to Israel is what startles. It is now known that a series of prehistoric societies were extremely far-ranging in their influences, amounting to a vast society of roaming hunter-gatherers. The last of these cultures has been named the Gravettian, the mammoth hunters who built sturdy shelters of mammoth bones to stand against even Ice Age storms, or dwelt in caves or semi-underground habitations. They were not a settled culture but did have centers revisited seasonally or periodically, ritual sites or encampments along the trails of migratory animals. Gravettian art dates from 25,000 to 20,000 BCE or older in Europe (and the Kostenki sites in use from about 37,000 BCE). This surprisingly was a unified culture that lasted a minimum of 5,000 years, with lingering elements until 17,500 BCE, and influences on the following Epigravettian era in Spain, Italy, France, the Balkans and Ukraine. Their goddess figurines were small because a nomadic existence required portability. When the Ice Age ended, Gravettian culture begins its slow fade into settled agricultural societies, the first cities, the earliest of which still created heavy-set faceless goddess figurines."

“Construction crews have been finding some seriously cool stuff while digging out a new mouth for the Don River in Toronto's Port Lands, but all of those old shoes and newspaper clippings from the 1800s pale in comparison to Waterfront Toronto's latest discovery: Brand new, very old plants.

"Over 100 years ago, fill was dumped into the biggest marsh in the Great Lakes to make the Port Lands. Now, we're digging that up to recreate a natural, marshy mouth for the Don River — and we discovered something surprising," reads a new post on the $1.25 billion Port Lands Flood Protection project's website.

....

It's been roughly five years since work began on what is being billed as "one of the largest waterfront revitalization projects in the world," and with every pound of soil removed Toronto comes one step closer to having a massive, brand new island with parks, housing, commercial and office space.

Villier's Island is expected to be complete by 2024, at which point the Don River will have been fully rerouted to protect the area from flooding (which is in fact the true impetus behind this massive undertaking.)

Progress on the river valley itself has been impressive, but excavating millions of cubic metres of old soil and gargbage takes time. While crews are working along at a clip, there's still dirt to remove and, apparently, treasures to uncover.

"In a low-lying section of the future river valley, construction crews noticed some unusual plants had sprung up out of nowhere. It's not uncommon to see plants on the site, but these plants caught their eye because they looked a lot like plants that grow in wetlands, not like the scrubby weeds that have popped up elsewhere," reads Waterfront Toronto's newest blog post, entitled "100-year-old seeds."

As it turns out, these plants were growing in an area that had been excavated about a year ago, some seven metres into the earth— deep enough to uncover the marsh's original soil without removing it.

"By chance, this area was relatively flat with poor drainage, and wasn't scheduled for further work for several months," reports Waterfront Toronto. "Over the summer the weather warmed up, water accumulated in the peaty soil, and more-than-century-old seeds sprang to life!"

It didn't take long for specialists to realize that these plants had grown from the historic marshland soil. Waterfront Toronto immediately reached out to the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority to relocate these precious new old plants and harvest any possible remaining seeds.

"We were able to identify at least two species of leafy plants that grew. Hard Stem Bulrush and Cattails were growing well, so we transplanted them to Tommy Thompson Park nearby," notes the blog post.

"The team also collected around 50 buckets of the surrounding soil, in the hopes that more seeds and species might germinate. We hope to know the results later in 2022."

Experts say it's pretty rare to find living plants that were around more than 100 years ago, and many are interested in studying the seeds. Waterfront Toronto says that a horticulturist at U of T is currently "overseeing the buckets of soil and conducting genetic tests on the plants."

"It's rare that you can compare a modern plant to a plant grown from pre-industrial seeds, so the discovery of these seeds was exciting," says Waterfront Toronto. "Only time will tell if plants adapted for the 1890s will be able to thrive in 2024 and beyond."”