Secret HistoryS


Sun

Solar tsunami hit Earth 9,200 years ago

Thomas A. Dobbins
Sky & Telescope
Fri, 11 Feb 2022 18:33 UTC
Scientists examining ancient ice cores have found radioactive evidence of an extreme solar storm that took place in 7,176 BCE.
Solar Flare

An international team of researchers announced the discovery of fallout from an extreme solar storm entombed in ancient ice. The fact that the outburst occurred during a time when the Sun ought to have been quiet may be even more alarming than the storm's magnitude.

Ice cores are long cylinders drilled from ice sheets and glaciers, frozen time capsules that allow scientists to reconstruct events in the distant past. The accumulating weight of each year's snowfall compresses previous layers of snow, forming dense glacial ice that contains trapped gases, aerosols, and particles. The thick ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland provide exceptionally well-preserved and detailed records of a variety of events that occurred up to 800,000 years ago — including variations in the level of solar activity.

When energetic charged particles strike atoms in the upper atmosphere, they produce three radioactive isotopes: carbon-14 (half-life 5,700 years), beryllium-10 (half-life 1.4 million years), and chlorine-36 (half-life 300,000 years). The production rate of these cosmogenic isotopes depends on the intensity of cosmic radiation, though the strength of Earth's magnetic field, which can deflect many charged particles, also plays a role.
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Arrow Up

Black Death mortality not as widespread as long thought


Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
Thu, 10 Feb 2022 18:12 UTC
Pollen data from 19 modern European countries reveals that parts of Europe experienced negligible or no impact at all.
Europe during Black Death

A new study uses pollen data to evaluate the mortality caused by the medieval plague at a regional scale across Europe. Results show that the impacts of the Black Death varied substantially from region to region and demonstrate the importance of cross-disciplinary approaches for understanding past - and present - pandemics.

The Black Death, which plagued Europe, West Asia and North Africa from 1347-1352, is the most infamous pandemic in history. Historians have estimated that up to 50 percent of Europe's population died during the pandemic and credit the Black Death with transforming religious and political structures, even precipitating major cultural and economic transformations such as the Renaissance. Although ancient DNA research has identified Yersinia pestis as the Black Death's causative agent and even traced its evolution across millennia, data on the plague's demographic impacts is still underexplored and little understood.

Now, a new study demonstrates that the Black Death's mortality in Europe was not as universal or as widespread as long thought. An international team of researchers, led by the Palaeo-Science and History group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, analyzed pollen samples from 261 sites in 19 modern-day European countries to determine how landscapes and agricultural activity changed between 1250 and 1450 CE - roughly 100 years before to 100 years after the pandemic. Their analysis supports the devastation experienced by some European regions, but also shows that the Black Death did not impact all regions equally.
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Bizarro Earth

'They used axes to spare the ammo': How modern Ukraine's Nazi heroes massacred civilians during WWII


RT
Thu, 10 Feb 2022 09:55 UTC
ukraine nazi
© archiwa.gov.plTens of thousands innocent Poles were massacred in Volyn. To this day, the torturers are still not condemned
The Second World War is usually seen as a confrontation between giant military alliances. However, in reality, many smaller separate conflicts unfolded within this epic war, and the struggle between peoples and countries was often conducted without compromise or mercy. One of the darkest and least-known pages of the Second World War is the Volyn massacre - an ethnic cleansing carried out by pro-Nazi Ukrainian nationalist groups in the Volyn region, which is now almost entirely part of Ukraine.

Volhynia has historically been a border zone. These swampy forests were part of Russia in the Middle Ages and later became part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth - the Polish state in its heyday. The partitioning of Poland brought Volhynia into the Russian Empire. After the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Russian Civil War, Volhynia was once again part of an independent Poland. In short, this region, although a bit of a backwater, has changed hands often.

Comment: Notably similarly insidious elements are still present and hold great sway in modern day Ukraine: West turns a blind eye to march honoring Nazis in Kiev: Ukraine may not be a fascist state, but it has a fascism problem

See also: And check out SOTT radio's: MindMatters: Mr. Jones and the 'Holodomor' Red Pill - What Happened During Stalin's Famine?



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Info

Evidence of Europe's first homo sapiens found in French cave

Ewen Callaway
Nature
Wed, 09 Feb 2022 19:22 UTC
Stone artefacts and tooth pre-date the earliest known evidence of the species in Europe by more than 10,000 years.
Excavations at the Grotte Mandrin
© Ludovic SlimakExcavations at the Grotte Mandrin rock shelter uncovered stone tools, animal bones and hominin teeth.
Archaeologists have found evidence that Europe's first Homo sapiens lived briefly in a rock shelter in southern France — before mysteriously vanishing.

A study published on 9 February in Science Advances1 argues that distinctive stone tools and a lone child's tooth were left by Homo sapiens during a short stay, some 54,000 years ago — and not by Neanderthals, who lived in the rock shelter for thousands of years before and after that time.

The Homo sapiens occupation, which researchers estimate lasted for just a few decades, pre-dates the previous earliest known evidence of the species in Europe by around 10,000 years.

But some researchers are not so sure that the stone tools or tooth were left by Homo sapiens. "I find the evidence less than convincing," says William Banks, a palaeolithic archaeologist at the French national research agency CNRS and the University of Bordeaux.
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Bad Guys

Northern Ireland police were involved in 'collusive behaviours' in 11 loyalist murders during the Troubles, Ombudsman finds

James Gant
Daily Mail
Tue, 08 Feb 2022 00:02 UTC
the Troubles ireland
Family of those killed during the Troubles by loyalist paramilitaries in south Belfast pose together
Northern Ireland police were involved in 'collusive behaviours' over loyalist paramilitary murders during the Troubles, an investigation has found.

Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland Marie Anderson said she was 'deeply concerned' by the scale and scope of the failings she had uncovered in her probe.

She was looking into murders and attempted murders carried out by the Ulster Defence Association in south Belfast in the 1990s.

Eight loyalist attacks attributed to the UDA or its Ulster Freedom Fighters cover name were examined in the 344-page report published today.

Eleven people were murdered in the attacks, including five who lost their lives in the Sean Graham bookmakers atrocity on the Ormeau Road in February 1992.

Comment: See also: And check out SOTT radio's:

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Cross

Mass graves mystery shows the danger of the politics of hysteria

Frank Furedi
RT
Mon, 07 Feb 2022 15:08 UTC
Kamloops school
© AFP/Cole BurstonKamloops Indian Residential School
When the anthropologist Sarah Beaulieu reported that she had found 215 unmarked graves near Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia last year, the story caused a sensation. A wave of hysteria engulfed the Canadian media and political landscape. But eight months later, mystery surrounds the case, as not a single body has been found - and it is unclear if there are any plans for excavation.

What Beaulieu's ground-penetrating radar scan found were 215 areas that showed soil disturbances such as tree roots, metal and stones - but not bodies. One bone and a tooth were discovered, but she acknowledged at the time that without conducting a proper forensic investigation no "definitive" conclusions could be drawn. Nevertheless, the media and the political class were quick to characterise what had been found as mass graves.

Soon it was claimed that Kamloops Indian Residential School was implicated in an act of genocide against First Nation People. Some moral crusaders presented the discovery as integral to the colonisation of Canada by Europeans. From their perspective, the history of Canada is a story of systematic genocide against the native population. The Catholic Church, which ran Kamloops and other residential schools for First Nation children, became the target of media hostility.
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Cow Skull

Human spines mounted on sticks found in 15th century graves in Peru, and archeologists think they know why

Marianne Guenot
Business Insider
Thu, 03 Feb 2022 10:39 UTC
spine
© Jacob L. BongersAn example a reassembled human spine found in Peru.
People in the Chincha valley of Peru threaded the spines of the dead onto wooden rods around 500 years ago, a mostly-unknown practice only recently documented by archaeologists.

It may have been an attempt to restore the bodies of the dead during the European colonization, according to a study by the researchers who unearthed 192 examples of such spines. They include the remains of children.

"Our findings suggest that vertebrae-on-posts represent a direct, ritualized, and Indigenous response to European colonialism," Jacob L. Bongers, lead author of the study and archaeologist from the University of East Anglia, UK, told Insider.

Comment: See also:

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Info

Tattoos were for criminals and outcasts in ancient Greece

Anna Wichmann
Greek Reporter
Wed, 02 Feb 2022 18:36 UTC
Tattooed Greeks
© Twitter/Michael Lara/ Louvre MuseumA tattooed Thracian Maenad killing Orpheus is shown on a red-figure amphora.
Tattoos were considered a sign of "otherness" in ancient Greece, as it was either foreigners or slaves, criminals, and captives who had tattoos in ancient Greek society.

Body modification, such as tattoos and piercings, have been found throughout human societies across the word since the Neolithic times. Humans have felt the urge to modify their bodies with tattoos for various cultural, religious, and aesthetic reasons for centuries.

While tattooing developed independently across countless cultures, Greeks were among the first people to begin inking their skin, as historical records date ancient Greek tattooing to as early as the 5th century BC.

Tattooing has only become part of the mainstream in much of the world in recent decades, as it was previously linked to criminality in many places. A 2019 poll showed that three in ten Americans had at least one tattoo, and this number may be growing.
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Footprints

Tangled tale of NATO expansion at the heart of Ukraine crisis

Joe Luria
Consortium News
Fri, 28 Jan 2022 00:00 UTC
NATO map
© NATO
The end of the Cold War with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Soviet Union two years later presented the United States with a choice: triumphalism or reconciliation.

There was hope of a "peace dividend" because the fortune spent on armaments for so long could now be spent on domestic needs. The Warsaw Pact dissolved and there was hope that its counterpart, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, would also pass into history. Rather its expansion has become a flashpoint in the current standoff over Ukraine.

To assent to the reunification of Germany, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev ultimately agreed to a proposal from then U.S. Secretary of State James Baker that a reunited Germany would be part of NATO but the military alliance would not move "one inch" to the east, that is, absorb any of the former Warsaw Pact nations into NATO.

On Feb. 9, 1990, Baker said:
"We consider that the consultations and discussions in the framework of the 2+4 mechanism should give a guarantee that the reunification of Germany will not lead to the enlargement of NATO's military organization to the East."
On the next day, then German Chancellor Helmut Kohl said: "We consider that NATO should not enlarge its sphere of activity."
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Comet 2

A comet impact 13,000 years ago may have reset ancient civilizations

Ivan Petricevic
Curiosmos
Mon, 28 Oct 2019 16:13 UTC
asteroids hit Earth
© unknownIllustration showing asteroids impacting Earth
A massive cosmic impact (or disintegration) around 13,000 years ago may have caused the extinction of numerous animals on Earth, but also a catastrophic reset in developing ancient civilizations of the time.

Some 13,000 years ago, a massive comet fragmented and impacted Earth, changing a planet in more ways than one. The catastrophic collision was powerful. It is likely to have triggered a mass extinction on the planet, resetting along the way a number of ancient cultures that may have already been relatively well-developed at the time.

Around 13,000 years ago (12,800 to be precise), Earth cooled off rapidly.

Scientists have found that in the span of just a few years, the average temperate on Earth dropped abruptly, resulting in a climate as low as -10 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit) in some regions of the planet's Northern Hemisphere. It was an extreme change, and scientists have found evidence that this cooler period lasted for up to 1,400 years, thanks to layers of ice found in Greenland.

This abrupt change in Earth's climate is defined by the so-called Younger Dryas theory, which marked the start of an abrupt decline in ice-age megafauna, leading to the extinction of around 35 different genera of animals in Northern America alone. During the Younger Dryas, not only animals went extinct. It is believed that this period also marked the abrupt decline among different cultures around the globe, including the Clovis culture in America. The catastrophic collision 12,800 years ago is now seen and widely accepted as leaving a profound imprint in many developing cultures, starting a kind of global reset.

Although many authors and scientists have theorized that such an event took place around 13,000 years ago, the evidence was scarce, albeit there.
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