Secret HistoryS


Biohazard

Army admits secretly conducting germ warfare at 239 locations across US, exposing thousands to deadly biohazards

Rachel Blevins
Free Thought Project
Sat, 28 Apr 2018 00:00 UTC
bioterror
The U.S. Army has admitted that it secretly conducted at least 239 germ warfare tests in locations across the country, targeting unsuspecting Americans.

While the United States government claims to be horrified every time there are reports of a chemical attack that was allegedly carried out by the Syrian government, history serves as a reminder that the U.S. is responsible for carrying out a number of chemical attacks on thousands of unsuspecting Americans, and some of the innocent victims are still suffering from the effects today.

In 1977, the U.S. Army admitted that it secretly conducted at least 239 germ warfare tests in the open air in cities across the country between 1949 and 1969. The areas where the lethal germs were simulated on the public were typically in major cities such as Washington D.C., San Francisco, New York City, Key West and Panama City, according to a report the Army submitted to the Senate Health Subcommittee.

In the report, the Army insisted that the purpose of the tests was to study how biological warfare affects the public, in case it needs to defend against it. Calling tests "essential," the Army claimed it needed to "substantiate theories and fill knowledge gaps and to determine vulnerability to attack."

Comment: And this is to say nothing of what the US has and is now doing around the world:

Pentagon Biological Weapons Program Never Ended: US Bio-labs Around The World

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Dig

Human origins are much more diverse than previously thought

Eleanor Scerri
New Scientist
Wed, 25 Apr 2018 12:00 UTC
human origin
© Giordano Poloni
Imagine visiting a tourist attraction in any major world city. There are people from all over - a Nigerian family, a Chinese couple, a German school party, and more. They all look very different from one another, which isn't surprising given that their ancestors have lived in far-flung parts of the world for generations. Yet, everyone alive today can trace their origins back to Africa, so there must have been a time when such physical differences didn't exist, right? Actually, no.

In fact, if you were to travel back to the very beginnings of our species and select a random group of humans, they would look unlike anyone living today in Africa or elsewhere. What's more, they would show extraordinary physical variation - greatly exceeding that in modern human populations. Far from becoming more diverse as we have adapted to life in different parts of the planet, Homo sapiens is more homogeneous today than our ancestors were.

This is a real puzzle. It simply doesn't fit with the long-held idea that we arose from a single population in a corner of East Africa. In fact, mounting evidence from fossils, archaeological remains and genetic analysis points in a new direction. Now researchers, including myself, are trying to work out what it all means: why our African forebears were so physically different from each other, and how our species lost the huge variety it once had.

Comment: See Also:

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Dig

Ancient Peruvian skull binding practices may have conveyed community privilege

Linda B. Glaser
Cornell Chronicle
Tue, 20 Feb 2018 14:26 UTC
peruvian caves
© David Rodri­guez SotomayorAbove-ground tombs at the cemetery site of Yuraq Qaqa, Colca Valley, Peru.
The idea of binding and reshaping a baby's head may make today's parents cringe, but for families in the Andes between 1100-1450, cranial modification was all the rage.

Like Chinese foot binding, the practice may have been a marker of group identity. Its period of popularity in what is now Peru, before the expansion of the Inca empire, was marked by political upheaval, ecological stress and the emergence of new cultural practices. In a study published in the February edition of Current Anthropology, Matthew Velasco, assistant professor of anthropology, explores how head-shaping practices may have enabled political solidarity while furthering social inequality in the region.

Velasco analyzed hundreds of human skeletal remains from multiple tombs in the Colca Valley of highland Peru and discovered that before 1300 most people did not have modified heads. He found that the number of individuals with cranial modifications increased over time, from 39.2 percent to 73.7 percent during the later portion of the Late Intermediate Period.

Comment: See also:

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Dig

Site of largest mass child sacrifice in known history discovered in Peru

Kristin Romey
National Geographic
Thu, 26 Apr 2018 10:36 UTC
child sacrifice archaeological site
© Gabriel PrietoPreserved in dry sand for more than 500 years, more than a dozen children were revealed over the course of a day by archaeologists. The majority of the ritual victims were between eight and 12 years old when they died.
Evidence for the largest single incident of mass child sacrifice in the Americas - and likely in world history - has been discovered on Peru's northern coast, archaeologists tell National Geographic.

More than 140 children and 200 young llamas appear to have been ritually sacrificed in an event that took place some 550 years ago on a wind-swept bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, in the shadow of what was then the sprawling capital of the Chimú Empire.

Scientific investigations by the international, interdisciplinary team, led by Gabriel Prieto of the Universidad Nacional de Trujillo and John Verano of Tulane University, are ongoing. The work is supported by grants from the National Geographic Society.

While incidents of human sacrifice among the Aztec, Maya, and Inca have been recorded in colonial-era Spanish chronicles and documented in modern scientific excavations, the discovery of a large-scale child sacrifice event in the little-known pre-Columbian Chimú civilization is unprecedented in the Americas-if not in the entire world.
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Dig

6,000 year old ancient cave art found in Tennessee


whitewolfpack.com
Fri, 27 Apr 2018 14:46 UTC
cave drawing

The faded images in Tennessee's Cumberland Plateau are believed to be the most widespread collection of such art ever found in the U.S.

Recently archaeologists have discovered America's oldest cave and rock art that has remained hidden for more than 6,000 years in Tennessee. The faded images were found in Tennessee's Cumberland Plateau and they are believed to be the most widespread collection of such art ever found in the U.S. Cumberland Plateau contains 280 caves - 21 of which are described as 'extensive' in size. Researchers claim there are 71 known prehistoric cave art sites in the greater south-eastern USA.
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Question

Was Tutankahmun's tomb originally built for a female Pharaoh?

Anand Balaji
Ancient Origins
Fri, 20 Apr 2018 08:50 UTC
The Wilbour Plaque
© Brooklyn Museum, New York.The Wilbour Plaque is named for the early American Egyptologist Charles Edwin Wilbour (1833–1896), who acquired it in Egypt in 1881. This sculptor’s model depicts Akhenaten and Nefertiti – wearing the khat headdress and ovoid cap crown respectively – and shows the royal couple as equals; which is proof of the extraordinary status enjoyed by the Amarna queen.
One of the greatest enigmas in all of Egyptology is the location of the final resting place of Queen Nefertiti, a powerful royal personage of the late Eighteenth Dynasty. Barring pieces of a votive shabti that was probably placed in her husband Akhenaten's tomb, no funerary object from her burial has ever surfaced. The quasi-royal design of Tomb 26C within the Communal Tomb in Amarna (TA26) provides evidence that it was built for Nefertiti, but the unfinished chambers of this suite hint she was not laid to rest in Akhetaten. This can only mean one thing: Nefertiti's sepulcher lies elsewhere-and is probably intact.

The Tomb of Ankhkheperure?
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Magnify

Did archeologists find evidence our ancestors hunted giant sloths?

Alan Burdick
The New Yorker
Wed, 25 Apr 2018 12:00 UTC
prehistoric humans in present-day New Mexico hunting a giant ground sloth.
© Alex McClelland / Bournemouth UniversityAn artist’s reconstruction, based on recently discovered footprints, of prehistoric humans in present-day New Mexico hunting a giant ground sloth.
When humankind entered North America, fifteen thousand years ago or more, it entered a world of giants-woolly mammoths, dire wolves, sabre-toothed cats, short-faced bears (effectively grizzlies on stilts). But, by the end of the Ice Age, about ten thousand years ago, the megafauna was mostly gone, driven extinct by the warming climate and, many scientists think, predation by us.

A paper in this week's issue of Science Advances offers tantalizing evidence of that grim process in action. Archeologists working at White Sands National Monument, in New Mexico, found a series of fossilized footprints made by giant ground sloths, lumbering behemoths that once roamed North and South America. The tracks date to between ten thousand and fifteen thousand years ago, when the region was much wetter than it is today. The giant sloth was herbivorous but nonetheless a fearsome creature-eight feet tall when standing on its hind legs, with long arms, and long claws extending from its padded feet.

Comment: The results aren't conclusive, because as the paper states timing is off and clearly much is open to interpretation - but if the meat was tasty, why wouldn't our ancestors have barbecued sloth?

For more on the happenings of that time, see: Of Flash Frozen Mammoths and Cosmic Catastrophes

Also See:

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Info

Shigir idol is twice as old as the pyramids

Chris Mahon
Outer Places
Thu, 26 Apr 2018 21:23 UTC
Shigir idol
© YouTube
What's creepier than an old, desiccated mummy or a skeleton with a prosthetic knife-hand? How about an 11-foot-tall ominous wooden sculpture covered in strange faces, carved before recorded history and pulled out of a peat bog in Russia?

Sure, mummies are spooky (especially when they're locked in a tomb that promises to curse anyone who disturbs it), but they're less intimidating when you realize that their births and deaths were closer to us than they were to the ancient Shigir idol.

Unearthed in 1894 by gold miners in the Ural Mountains of Russia, the Shigir Idol was originally dated to be about 9,900 years old.

It's estimated to have originally been about 15 feet tall, though chunks of it are missing, and anthropologists noted that there were five faces carved on different parts of its human-like 'body', including the one on its head.
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Magic Wand

Evidence shows ancient Mesopotamians may have used opium and cannabis as medicine and in their rituals

Andrew Lawler
Science Mag
Thu, 19 Apr 2018 14:00 UTC
poppies
© ISTOCK.COM/OZTURKPoppies, shown here with seed pods, have been used to produce opium in the Near East for some 5000 years.
For as long as there has been civilization, there have been mind-altering drugs. Alcohol was fermented at least 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, about the same time that agriculture took hold there. Elsewhere, for example in Mesoamerica, other psychoactive drugs were an important part of culture. But the ancient Near East had seemed curiously drug-free-until recently.

Now, new techniques for analyzing residues in excavated jars and identifying tiny amounts of plant material suggest that ancient Near Easterners indulged in a range of psychoactive substances. Recent advances in identifying traces of organic fats, waxes, and resins invisible to the eye have allowed scientists to pinpoint the presence of various substances with a degree of accuracy unthinkable a decade or two ago.

For example, "hard scientific evidence" shows that ancient people extracted opium from poppies, says David Collard, senior archaeologist at Jacobs, an engineering firm in Melbourne, Australia, who found signs of ritual opium use on Cyprus dating back more than 3000 years. By then, drugs like cannabis had arrived in Mesopotamia, while people from Turkey to Egypt experimented with local substances such as blue water lily.

Comment: They wouldn't be the first civilisation to use hallucinogenic drugs to attempt (and most likely fail to achieve) contact with positive higher realities, and yet, their use probably wasn't always necessary.

Laura Knight-Jadczyk in Witches, Comets and Planetary Cataclysms writes:
My work is all about following the lines of Pagan/shamanistic ideas and teachings back to the Ice Ages - the cave painters, the Northern European origins - to find the most original, fundamental, common foundation of all of them. The idea that there was a time when man was directly in contact with the Ce­lestial Beings is at the root of many of the myths of the Golden Age. Myths tell us of a time when the 'gods withdrew' from man­kind. As a result of some 'happening', i.e., 'The Fall', when the communications were broken off and the Celestial Beings withdrew to the highest heavens.


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Blackbox

The mysterious origins of the Ket people of Siberia

dhwty
Ancient Origins
Tue, 17 Apr 2018 00:01 UTC
The Ket people of Siberia
The Kets are an indigenous people who live in Siberia and are regarded to be one of the smallest ethnic groups in that region. Their appearance, language and traditional semi-nomadic lifestyle has scientists bewildered by their origins, with some proposing links to the native tribes of North America. There is even a Ket folklore that they came from space. What might be the true origin of these seemingly out of place people?

Comment: See also:

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