Secret HistoryS


Sherlock

Time to axe the Anglo-Saxons? Rethinking the 'migration period'

anglo saxon pendant
© Steve SherlockThis circular pendant and gold and glass beads come from Grave 70 at Street House – a 7th-century cemetery near Loftus (see CA 281).
Did 'the Anglo-Saxon migrations' take place, and were Romano-British leaders replaced by those of Germanic descent? Susan Oosthuizen's new book, The Emergence of the English, is a call to rethink our interpretations of the 5th and 6th centuries AD, reflecting on whether many of the assumptions we make about the period are actually supported by evidence. Interpretations that cannot be upheld should be discarded, she says, and all viable alternative interpretations should be explored for the strongest arguments to be identified. Chris Catling reports.
In the early 1970s, cherished ideas about the character of Roman Britain were systematically challenged by a generation of archaeologists who rejected the simple story they had inherited of armed conquest, rule from Rome, and the conversion of primitive Celts - dressed in nothing but woad and a torque - into Latin-speaking, bath-addicted, villa-dwelling Roman citizens who dined off Samian platters, drank watered-down wine, and ate food flavoured with fish sauce. Instead, they insisted that Romanisation began long before the Claudian invasion of AD 43, that it had many regional variations, and that it took many different forms over the 350-year period of Roman occupation. But they also argued that much of Britain lay outside the main sphere of Roman influence, and that life for many people in Roman Britain changed little from what they had known before - and, yes, they continued to drink beer.

Comment: Laura Knight-Jadczyk in Meteorites, Asteroids, and Comets: Damages, Disasters, Injuries, Deaths, and Very Close Calls writes:
Until that point in time, the Britons had held control of post-Roman Britain, keeping the Anglo-Saxons isolated and suppressed. After the Romans were gone, the Britons maintained the status quo, living in towns, with elected officials, and carrying on trade with the empire. After AD 536, the year reported as the "death of Arthur", the Britons, the ancient Cymric empire that at one time had stretched from Cornwall in the south to Strathclyde in the north, all but disappeared, and were replaced by Anglo-Saxons. There is much debate among scholars as to whether the Anglo-Saxons killed all of the Britons, or assimilated them. Here we must consider that they were victims of possibly many overhead cometary explosions which wiped out most of the population of Europe, plunging it into the Dark Ages which were, apparently, really DARK, atmospherically speaking.
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Cow

Study suggest prehistoric babies were weaned using animal milk

Feeding Vessels
© Katharina Rebay-SalisburyFeeding vessels from Vienna, Oberleis, Vosendorf and Franzhausen-Kokoron (from left to right), dated to around 1200-800 BC.
Mums from prehistoric times appear to have used specially fashioned pottery vessels to wean their babies with milk from domesticated ruminants, a study published in the journal Nature has found.

The clay bottles or bowls, sometimes adorned with mythical animals, had small spouts through which liquid could be poured or suckled. The earliest known vessels were found in prehistoric settlements across Europe from the Neolithic (around 5000 BC), becoming more common in the Bronze and Iron Ages.

They were previously suspected to be infant feeding vessels, says lead author Julie Dunne from the University of Bristol in the UK, but could have equally been used for feeding sick people, and in any event, it wasn't clear what they contained.

To explore this, Dunne and colleagues searched for vessels in child graves to be sure they were baby bottles. "In archaeology, context is all," she explains. They analysed three small, spouted vessels found in Bronze and Iron Age graves of infants in a Bavarian cemetery in Germany.

Because of the vessels' precious nature and often small openings, sampling for organic residues was "extremely challenging", says Dunne, so they had to modify their usual sampling method which involves grinding up potsherds.

Microscope 1

How genetics is helping reveal Jewish history

Epigénétique
© Inconnu
From the time of the Babylonian Exile, Jews have been spread far and wide, carrying with us mementos of our ancient past in our blood, spit and the microscopic double helix of our DNA. Among the best tools the Chosen People have for finding a link to antiquity is bleeding-edge technology that analyzes our genes - and while that tech is new, it's largely confirmed a familiar story of shared roots in the Middle East.

Through advancements in mapping the human genome and the study of traditionally diseases like Tay-Sachs, scientists and historians are closer than ever before to learning where the Jewish people originated, and where we ended up.

The science involved in genetic study of Jews has advanced immensely since its early days, when physical anthropologists Joseph Jacobs and Maurice Fishberg studied outward markers like stature, head size and pigmentation, said Harry Ostrer, the director of Genetic and Genomic Testing at Montefiore Medical Center and the author of "Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People" (2012). Working in the late 19th and early 20th Century, when Fishberg published "The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment" (1911), his and Jacob's primitive research - which had a troubling analogue in the measurements used by Nazi race science — was surpassed by a new effort that emerged, fittingly, in Mandatory Palestine.

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Info

Traces of early humans found in Southern Iran

Early Human Traces
© Tehran Times
Tehran - A team of archaeologists has found traces of early humans and their basic handmade tools near the village of Bangelayan, southern Hormozgan province.

"Traces of early human presence, which dates over 40,000 years, were discovered in Bandar Abbas [county]," CHTN quoted Hormozgan province's tourism chief as saying on Monday.

"Stone artifacts discovered from this area include parent rock, related components, modest chips, as well as serrated and abrasives tools, which were notably scattered across the area," Reza Borumand added.

Regarding technological and typological features of the stone tools, this area can be attributed to the Middle Paleolithic, which spans [somewhat] from 300,000 to 40,000 years ago, which is coincident with the presence of Neanderthals and possibly Homo sapiens in Iran (the Iranian plateau), the official explained.

Nuke

Declassified: President Jimmy Carter knew of Israeli nuclear test, but turned a blind eye

Jimmy Carter
© CNN.comUS President Jimmy Carter
The truth is emerging four decades after the fact: the Carter administration knew of a clandestine Israeli nuclear test in the 1970s, but turned a blind eye, Foreign Policy reported this weekend, based on new analysis of declassified government documents.

The report strongly suggests the administration was worried about Carter's reelection should the Israeli test be revealed, and also about negative impact on the Israel-Egypt peace treaty, only a year old at the time. The FP report begins dramatically:
Shortly before sunrise on Sept. 22, 1979, a U.S. surveillance satellite known as Vela 6911 recorded an unusual double flash as it orbited the earth above the South Atlantic. At Patrick Air Force Base in Florida, where it was still nighttime on Sept. 21, the staff in charge of monitoring the satellite's transmissions saw the unmistakable pattern produced by a nuclear explosion — something U.S. satellites had detected on dozens of previous occasions in the wake of nuclear tests. The Air Force base issued an alert overnight, and President Jimmy Carter quickly called a meeting in the White House Situation Room the next day.
Carter wrote in his diary of the September 22, 1979 event: "There was an indication of a nuclear explosion in the region of South Africa - either South Africa, Israel using a ship at sea, or nothing," according to the report.

Problem was that under the 1977 Glenn Amendment to the Arms Export Control Act, the United States would have to cease all arms assistance to any nation not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty should they conduct a nuclear test.

USA

SOTT Focus: Puritans Gone Wild! The Hidden Yankee History of Woke SJWs

puritans sjws
Moralistic busybodies. They've made a comeback in recent years. It's understandable. They're an American tradition, after all. 'Totalitarian theocracy' is a phrase more commonly associated with Saudi Arabia or ISIS today, but some of the earliest colonies in what eventually became the United States fit the bill. And while they've lost their religion over the centuries, they haven't lost their penchant for sanctimonious posturing and coercive authoritarianism. The spirit of the Puritans of New England lives on.

Back in the 1630s the Puritans settled Massachusetts Bay. Contrary to popular myth, they weren't bastions of religious freedom. Sure, they were fleeing one sort of oppression in England, but they weren't concerned so much about freedom of religion and conscience per se as they were about their own freedom - everyone else be damned. Essentially the Puritans wanted freedom from oppression in order to practice their own form of oppression against everyone else.

To be fair, the Puritans weren't the only ones to contribute to modern American culture. As Colin Woodard argues in his book American Nations, Canada, the United States, and northern Mexico are primarily made up of eleven distinct cultures with roots in their original settlers. In each of these identifiable regions, the mindsets of their respective "founding fathers" live on. From the influence of the Spanish and mestizo culture in northern Mexico and the southern States (El Norte), the feudal French Catholics of New France, the conservative royalists and wannabe aristocracy in Virginia and the Carolinas (Tidewater), the utopian Puritans of New England (Yankeedom), the Dutch corporate traders and merchants of New Netherland (now New York), the Barbadian slave society of the Deep South, the libertarian Quakers of the Midlands, and the clan-based warrior culture of Greater Appalachia, to those that developed more recently in the 19th and 20th centuries: the Yankee-influenced "Left Coast" of individualists, activists, and entrepreneurs; the corporate and semi-dependent "Far West"; and the re-emerging "First Nation" in northern Canada, arguably representing North America's earliest and now latest distinct cultures - they may share and cross borders, but they're noticeably distinct from each other. (Mention must also go to the Polynesian culture of Hawaii and the Spanish Caribbean south Florida.)

Георгиевская ленточка

WWII, again - dismantling mainstream propaganda on the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact

Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill
© Wikimedia CommonsThe "Big Three" at the Tehran Conference.
I don't usually waste my time taking apart run-of-the-mill anti-Russian stuff: there's too much of it and it usually takes more effort to tear apart than it took the author to write. Fools and wise men, as the saying goes. But we have just had a number of pieces on the anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in Western news outlets. For example, the Washington Times, RFE/RL, The Guardian the Globe and Mail and Bloomberg. Governments have issued condemnations. The gist of them is that the pact showed that Hitler and Stalin were soul-mates and conspired to start the war and rip apart their neighbours. In most cases the authors try to tie this to today's Russia: enemy then, enemy now.

Most of these pieces take it for granted Putin has some sort of approval of Stalin. But is it "approval" to call communism a road to a dead end - said earlier but most recently last December? What about his statement at the Butovo execution ground?
Those who were executed, sent to camps, shot and tortured number in the thousands and millions of people. Along with this, as a rule these were people with their own opinions. These were people who were not afraid to speak their mind. They were the most capable people. They are the pride of the nation.
Or about what he said when he unveiled the memorial in the centre of Moscow?
This horrific past must not be stricken from the national memory - let alone justified in any way - by any so-called higher good of the people.
One of Putin's advisory councils speaks against statues to Stalin quoting a government resolution that it's "unacceptable" to "justify the repressions" or deny that they happened. Paul Robinson has demonstrated the falsity of the "Stalin is back" here. It's nonsense.

Cloud Grey

The bizarre social history of beds

box beds
© wikipediaIn Brittany, the closed-bed (French: lit-clos) is a traditional furnishing. In homes with usually only one room, the box-bed allowed some privacy and helped keep people warm during winter. Similar enclosed bed furniture was once also found in western Britain… Box-beds were also used to protect people of the home from the animals (pigs, hens) also living in the house, or even to protect them from wolves who might enter houses and snatch babies.
Groucho Marx once joked, "Anything that can't be done in bed isn't worth doing at all." You might think he was referring to sleeping and sex. But humans, at one time or another, have done just about everything in bed.

And yet, despite the fact that we spend one-third of our lives in bed, they're more of an afterthought.

I certainly didn't think much about beds until I found myself talking about their history with the executives of a mattress company. These humble artifacts, I learned, had a big story to tell - one that's 77,000 years old.

That's when, according to archaeologist Lynn Wadley, our early African ancestors started to sleep in hollows dug out of cave floors - the first beds. They wrapped themselves in insect-repelling grasses to avoid bed bugs as persistent as those of today's seedy motels.

Much about our beds have remained unchanged for centuries. But one aspect of the bed has undergone a dramatic shift.

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X

Why James Mattis is no hero

TrumpMattisOthers
© UnknownPresident Donald Trump • Former Secretary of Defense James Mattis - January 27, 2017
Last week the corporate media were going all out to lionize former Marine General and Secretary of Defense James Mattis in tandem with the publication of Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead, his memoir of his lengthy career (Co-authored with former Undersecretary of Defense, Bing West, also a marine officer and veteran of Vietnam). As this celebratory gala of war and warrior hood lapses yet another military idol will have joined the pantheon. When George H.W. Bush launched Desert Storm in 1991 and "kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all" he also claimed to re-elevate the glory of the American way of war whereby the exceptional U.S. would defend the underdogs of the world against the predations of Hitlers reborn. Thereafter "Mad Dog" Mattis's career would unfold.

I was struck by a statement Mattis made in one of his interviews to the effect that prior to the second siege of Fallujah in 2004, which he commanded, he said that he at first objected to the tactics to be employed because they would "harm too many civilians" in the Iraqi city. He earlier had caused a stir in military circles when he removed a subordinate for not being aggressive enough in the capture of Baghdad. The lower ranking officer had been too careful protecting the lives of his troops.

Despite his claim of moral reluctance, Mattis unleashed an enormous cyclone of deadly force in Fallujah resulting in an immense massacre of those very civilians. As he stated in an interview, "That's why orders are not requests." He continued to explain that his orders required him to do what was necessary to uproot and defeat the enemy. Mattis has also been quoted as follows: "a good soldier follows orders, but a true warrior wears his enemy's skin like a poncho."

Palette

What lies beneath: 'Lost' Picasso revealed 100 years after artist hid it

Painting
© Anthony Bourached and George Cann
New imaging technology has carefully reconstructed a never-before-seen Picasso painting that the artist covered beneath one of his most famous pieces more than 100 years ago.

One of Pablo Picasso's best-known pieces from his 'Blue Period' - when he painted almost exclusively in shades of blue - called 'The Old Guitarist' features an elderly man slumped over the stringed instrument, dating back to 1903.

However, the faint impression of a ghostly woman in the background of the painting has long been noted by art historians. In 1998, art experts photographed the artwork using x-rays and infrared light to see what might be hidden beneath its surface.

And the results didn't disappoint: they discovered the faint outline of a completely different artwork - a seated woman holding out her left arm. Picasso had painted over the piece, but experts were able to match this original, concealed painting to a similar sketch he had sent in a letter at the time.