Secret HistoryS


Black Cat 2

Oldest drawing of ghost found on 3,500-year-old Babylonian tablet in British Museum vault

Dalya Alberge
The Guardian
Sun, 17 Oct 2021 11:06 UTC
spirit babylon
© The British MuseumA lonely spirit being led to eternal bliss by a lover on a Babylonian clay tablet. White line tracing James Fraser and Chris Cobb for The First Ghosts, by Irving Finkel.
Its outlines are faint, only discernible at an angle, but the world's oldest drawing of a ghost has been discovered in the darkened vaults of the British Museum.

A lonely bearded spirit being led into the afterlife and eternal bliss by a lover has been identified on an ancient Babylonian clay tablet created about 3,500 years ago.

It is part of an exorcist's guide to getting rid of unwanted ghosts by addressing the particular malaise that brought them back to the world of the living - in this case, a ghost in desperate need of a companion. He is shown walking with his arms outstretched, his wrists tied by a rope held by the female, while an accompanying text details a ritual that would to dispatch them happily to the underworld.

Comment: See also:

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Info

Not 'out of Japan' - Native American origins debunked by genetics and skeletal biology

Harry Baker
Live Science
Wed, 13 Oct 2021 16:23 UTC
The biological evidence "simply does not match up" with archeological finds.
Ancient Skull
© ShutterstockAnalysis of teeth has revealed Native Americans did not directly descend from the Jomon people in ancient Japan.
Native Americans may not have originated in Japan as previous archaeological evidence has suggested, according to a new study of ancient teeth.

For years, archaeologists had predicted that the first people to live in North America descended directly from a group called the Jomon, who occupied ancient Japan about 15,000 years ago, the same time people arrived in North America around 15,000 years ago via the Bering Land Bridge, a strip of land that previously connected Russia to North America before sea levels rose above it. This theory is based on archaeological similarities in stone tools, especially projectile weapons, found in Native American and Jomon settlements.

However, the authors of the new study say this scenario is highly unlikely because the biological evidence "simply does not match up" with the archaeological findings, according to a statement from the researchers.

"The Jomon were not directly ancestral to Native Americans," lead author G. Richard Scott, an anthropologist at the University of Nevada, Reno, told Live Science. "They [the Jomon] are more aligned with Southeast Asian and Pacific groups than with East Asian and Native American groups."

Instead, the researchers suspect that Native Americans descended from a different group living somewhere in East Asia, although a lot of uncertainty remains about exactly where and when those ancestors lived.
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Smoking

Earliest evidence of tobacco use dates to over 12,000 years ago says new study

Bruce Bower
Science Alert
Mon, 11 Oct 2021 11:00 UTC
Burnt Tobacco
© D. DUKE ET AL/NATURE HUMAN BEHAVIOR 2021Burned tobacco seeds found at an archaeological site in Utah, including this seed shown here from multiple angles, date to more than 12,000 years ago.
Ancient North Americans started using tobacco around 12,500 to 12,000 years ago, roughly 9,000 years before the oldest indications that they smoked the plant in pipes, a new study finds.

This discovery replaces the pipe-smoking report as the oldest direct evidence for the human use of tobacco anywhere in the world.

Excavations at the Wishbone site in Utah's Great Salt Lake Desert uncovered four charred seeds of wild tobacco plants in a small fireplace, say archaeologist Daron Duke of Far Western Anthropological Research Group in Henderson, Nev., and colleagues.

Those seeds, three of which the scientists radiocarbon dated, likely came from plants gathered on foothills or mountains located 13 kilometers or more from the Wishbone area, Duke's team reports October 11 in Nature Human Behavior.
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Blue Planet

The unearthing of Ireland's mysterious sweathouses

Ronan O'Connell
BBC
Mon, 11 Oct 2021 12:00 UTC
sweathouse ireland
© Holmes Garden Photos/Alamy
Until the 1900s, when people in Ireland got sick, they would get naked and disappear into steamy saunas. Now, a new project is aiming to uncover these timeworn structures' secrets.N

Naked and sweaty, they laid inside grass-covered stone igloo-like structures in the remote fields of Ireland. Some were ill, others may have been having hallucinations, hatching plans to distil illegal alcohol or imagining they were the Vikings who once raided this country. By the time these addled folk emerged from the structures back into the fresh air of 19th-Century Ireland, they had been through a jarring mental and physical journey. One that still holds many mysteries.

"Some people reckoned the cure was worse than the disease," archaeologist Aidan Harte told me of this sweltering experience, as he stood atop a 150-year-old Irish sweathouse in Killadiskert, an isolated corner of County Leitrim. "Part of the reason there's crazy theories about hallucinations and making alcohol is because we just don't fully know the truth about sweathouses and all their uses. They're a bit of a riddle that we're now trying to work out."

Comment: See also: And check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: Who was Jesus? Examining the evidence that Christ may in fact have been Caesar!

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Info

Oldest footprints of pre-humans identified in Crete


Universität Tübingen
Mon, 11 Oct 2021 03:09 UTC
Six million year old fossilized footprints on the island show the human foot had begun to develop.
Footprint in Crete

The oldest known footprints of pre-humans were found on the Mediterranean island of Crete and are at least six million years old, says an international team of researchers from Germany, Sweden, Greece, Egypt and England, led by Tübingen scientists Uwe Kirscher and Madelaine Böhme of the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Palaeo-environment at the University of Tübingen. Their study has been published in the journal Scientific Reports.

The footprints from fossilized beach sediments were found near the west Cretan village of Trachilos and published in 2017. Using geophysical and micropaleontological methods, researchers have now dated them to 6.05 million years before the present day, making them the oldest direct evidence of a human-like foot used for walking. "The tracks are almost 2.5 million years older than the tracks attributed to Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy) from Laetoli in Tanzania," Uwe Kirscher says. This puts the Trachilos footprints at the same age as the fossils of the upright-walking Orrorin tugenensis from Kenya. Finds connected with this biped include femurs, but there are no foot bones or footprints.

The dating of the Cretan footprints therefore sheds new light on the early evolution of human perambulation more than six million years ago. "The oldest human foot used for upright walking had a ball, with a strong parallel big toe, and successively shorter side toes," Per Ahlberg, professor at Uppsala University and co-author of the study, explains. "The foot had a shorter sole than Australopithecus. An arch was not yet pronounced and the heel was narrower."
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Attention

Breaking the News: How the first media moguls shaped history

James Corbett
Corbett Report
Sun, 10 Oct 2021 18:03 UTC
Media Moguls
© Corbett Report
I'm sure you're familiar with the old adage that "you are what you eat." Well, here's a similarly important observation that you probably weren't told as a child: you are what you read. Or, to put it in terms that the "Netflix and chill" generation can understand: you are what you watch.

This should be a pretty obvious insight. Why do you think one of Jeff Bezos' first moves in his quest to become the real-life embodiment of a comic book supervillain was to buy The Washington Post? It's sometimes said that money is power, but Bezos' purchase of WaPo shows that owning a major press outlet is a way to leverage that power and stretch those dollars even further. Indeed, as I observed in How to Save the World (in One Easy Step!), narrative — the ability to shape people's understanding of the world through story — is the most powerful weapon in the world. It should go without saying that owning a major media entity is the most effective way of wielding that weapon.

I say "it should go without saying" because the history of mass media is the history of rich and powerful people trying to shape entire nations' understanding of the world. But, as usual, this is the type of history that is not taught in schools, so it's entirely possible that this observation in fact does not go without saying.

So today let's examine the story of some of the early media moguls and the effect that their control of the press had in shaping the history of the world in the 20th century.
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Folder

Declassified CIA files raise further questions about US complicity in Colombian massacres

Kit Klarenberg
RT
Fri, 08 Oct 2021 16:57 UTC
Jimenez
© AFP/HO/POLICIA NACIONALCarlos Mario Jimenez
Newly released files reveal the extent to which the US has long been aware of collusion between the Colombian government and paramilitary groups intent on wreaking havoc - and yet seemingly turned a blind eye to it.

On September 28, a US federal court in Miami, Florida found former Colombian paramilitary chief Carlos Mario Jiménez guilty of the 2001 murder of Bogotá community leader Eduardo Estrada.

The judgment marks the culmination of a legal battle lasting over a decade. Then-Colombian President Álvaro Uribe extradited Jiménez - nicknamed 'Macaco' by his subordinates - to Washington in 2008, whereupon he was convicted of drug trafficking and served 11 years of a 33-year sentence.

US prosecutors opted to focus exclusively on narco-related charges, meaning thousands of victims of Macaco's paramilitary group, Bloque Central Bolivar, were prevented from seeking justice for assassinations, massacres, and other acts of extreme violence perpetrated by him and his criminal fraternity over the course of their never-ending, blood-spattered war against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

Released in 2019 and repatriated to Colombia, Jiménez was immediately arrested on homicide and conspiracy charges. Now at last brought to justice, the presiding judge cited "an abundance of evidence" that Bloque Central Bolivar "operated in a symbiotic relationship with Colombian state actors," and moreover with protection from law enforcement, as the group committed countless hideous atrocities.
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Book

Zbigniew's Ghost: An Exorcism (A Book Review of Valediction: Three Nights of Desmond)

Matthew Ehret
Strategic Culture Foundation
Sat, 25 Sep 2021 00:00 UTC
Brzezinski
© Jim Young/ReutersZbigniew Brzezinski
The only difference between 2021 and 1981 is that today, a Multipolar Alliance led by the Russia and China has created a new paradigm, capable of challenging the dystopic unipolar hegemon that Brzezinski believed should govern the New World Order.

As a journalist, it is necessary to do my best not only to stay up-to-date on as many of the cutting edge developments as possible, but to also keep a flexible mind so that the buzzing myriad of facts emerging every day can be imbued with value such that my analysis can be useful to readers.

Over the past weeks, my mind processed such a dizzying array of information pertaining to the evolving situation surrounding Afghanistan that I ultimately had to shut myself off of reading any breaking news for a few days. It was during this short break that I took great pleasure reviewing the pre-release of a new novelized memoir entitled Valediction: Three Nights of Desmond, published by Trine Day Press and written by the husband and wife team of Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould.

Just when I was beginning to think that nothing new could be offered to the topic, I was happily surprised that this book provided an invaluable dimension to Afghanistan's story within the context of world history from the first-hand account of the only two American journalists permitted to enter the war-torn nation in 1981 and again in 1983. The two documentaries produced by the duo during that period went far to shatter the carefully-constructed narrative of a "Russian Vietnam" that had been built up for years by a western deep state.
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Better Earth

Italian sailors knew of America 150 years before Christopher Columbus, new analysis of ancient documents suggests

Taylor & Francis
Phys.org
Fri, 08 Oct 2021 21:18 UTC
ship columbus
© Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain
New analysis of ancient writings suggests that sailors from the Italian hometown of Christopher Columbus knew of America 150 years before its renowned 'discovery'.

Transcribing and detailing a, circa, 1345 document by a Milanese friar, Galvaneus Flamma, Medieval Latin literature expert Professor Paolo Chiesa has made an "astonishing" discovery of an "exceptional" passage referring to an area we know today as North America.

According to Chiesa, the ancient essay — first discovered in 2013 — suggests that sailors from Genoa were already aware of this land, recognizable as 'Markland'/ 'Marckalada' - mentioned by some Icelandic sources and identified by scholars as part of the Atlantic coast of North America (usually assumed to be Labrador or Newfoundland).

Comment: It's likely that North America was rediscovered by a number of different Europeans - with one of the stronger contenders being the Vikings - as well as peoples from other continents, it just so happens that the Columbus story is now best known and probably because it served some in Western society best: Also check out SOTT radio's: MindMatters: America Before: Comets, Catastrophes, Mounds and Mythology



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Stock Down

Guterres and the Great Reset: How Capitalism Became a Time Bomb

Matthew Ehret
Strategic culture
Wed, 06 Oct 2021 00:00 UTC
puppet masters
During the 76 session of the United Nations General Assembly on September 20, 2021, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres lunged into a dire warning saying:
"I am here to sound the alarm. The world must wake up. We are on the edge of an abyss — and moving in the wrong direction. Our world has never been more threatened or more divided. We face the greatest cascade of crises in our lifetimes... A surplus in some countries. Empty shelves in others. This is a moral indictment of the state of our world."
While these words appear very truthful on the surface, sitting as we are upon a systemic meltdown of the world economy and potential collapse of population levels unseen since the days of the 14th century dark age, it is worth asking: What are the primary causes for the collapse into an abyss which Guterres is so concerned about?

Is it neocolonialism managed by a financier oligarchy which has kept the majority of the global south poor, indebted, starved, divided and at war?

Is he concerned about the drive for full spectrum first strike nuclear hegemony by Anglo-American unipolarists?

Or is it the immanent collapse of the $1.2 quadrillion financial bubble masquerading as the western economy?

It is in fact none of those things.

Comment: See also:

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