A new study led by Arizona State University paleoanthropologist Curtis Marean and ASU doctoral graduate Emily Hallett details more than 60 tools made of bone and one tool made from the tooth of a cetacean, which includes whales, dolphins and porpoises. These finds, first unearthed from Contrebandiers Cave, Morocco, in 2011, are highly suggestive proxy evidence for the earliest clothing in the archaeological record and attest to the pan-African emergence of complex culture and specialized tool manufacture.

The invention of clothing, and the development of the tools needed to create it, are milestones in the story of humanity. Not only are they indicative of strides in cultural and cognitive evolution, archaeologists also believe they were essential in enabling early humans to expand their niche from Pleistocene Africa into new environments with new ecological challenges. However, as furs and other organic materials used to make clothing are unlikely to be preserved in the archaeological record, the origin of clothing is still poorly understood.

The current study published this week in iScience, which reports on a worked bone assemblage found near the Atlantic Coast of Morocco, provides strong evidence for the manufacture of clothing as far back as 120,000 years ago.

As part of her research with the Institute of Human Origins and the Lise Meitner Pan-African Evolution Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI-SHH), Hallett was studying the vertebrate remains from Contrebandiers Cave deposits dating from 120,000 to 90,000 years ago.

The evidence of Israeli involvement is substantial, based on the level of the Jewish state's espionage operations in the U.S., Phil Giraldi writes.

The twentieth anniversary of 9/11 last Saturday has raised many of the usual issues about what actually happened on that day. Were hijacked airliners actually crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or was the damage in New York City attributable to explosives or even some kind of nuclear device? These are fundamental questions and the so-called "Truthers" who raise them have been inspired by their reading of the 585 page 9/11 Report, which is most charitably described as incomplete, though many would reasonably call it a government cover-up.

I have long believed that unless one actually sees or experiences something first hand the description of any event is no better than hearsay. The closest I came to "seeing" 9/11 was the panicked evacuation of a CIA office building, where I was working at the time. Another related bit of 9/11 narrative also came from two close friends who were driving into work at the Pentagon when they each independently observed what appeared to be a large plane passing over their cars and striking the building. I consider the sources credible but was it an airplane or a missile? And I was not there to see it with my own eyes, so I am reluctant to claim that my friends actually saw something that in retrospect might have been misconstrued.

The Yamnaya, one of the the earliest pastoralist populations of the Eurasian steppe, began expanding out of the Pontic-Caspian steppe more than 5000 years ago. These migrations resulted in gene flow across vast areas, ultimately linking pastoralist populations in Scandinavia with groups that expanded into Siberia. Just how and why these pastoralists travelled such extraordinary distances in the Bronze Age has remained a mystery. Now a new study led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History has revealed a critical clue. The Bronze Age migrations seem to coincide with a simple but important dietary shift - the adoption of milk drinking.

The researchers drew on a humble but extraordinary source of information from the archaeological record - they looked at ancient tartar (dental calculus) on the teeth of preserved skeletons. By carefully removing samples of the built-up calculus, and using advanced molecular methods to extract and then analyse the proteins still preserved within this resistant and protective material, the researchers were able to identify which ancient individuals likely drank milk, and which did not.

Their results surprised them. "The pattern was incredibly strong," observes study leader and palaeoproteomics specialist Dr. Shevan Wilkin, "The majority of pre-Bronze Age Eneolithic individuals we tested - over 90% - showed absolutely no evidence of consuming dairy. In contrast, a remarkable 94% of the Early Bronze Age individuals had clearly been milk drinkers."

Scientists screened 1,785 ancient human genomes from the last 45,000 years for parental relatedness.
At present-day, more than ten percent of all global marriages occur among first or second cousins. While cousin-marriages are common practice in some societies, unions between close relatives are discouraged in others. In a new study, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and the University of Chicago investigated how common close parental relatedness was in our ancestors.

The researchers re-analyzed previously published DNA data from ancient humans that lived during the last 45,000 years to find out how closely related their parents were. The results were surprising: Ancient humans rarely chose their cousins as mates. In a global dataset of 1,785 individuals only 54, that is, about three percent, show the typical signs of their parents being cousins. Those 54 did not cluster in space or time, showing that cousin matings were sporadic events in the studied ancient populations. Notably, even for hunter-gatherers who lived more than 10,000 years ago, unions between cousins were the exception.

To analyze such a large dataset, the researchers developed a new computational tool to screen ancient DNA for parental relatedness. It detects long stretches of DNA that are identical in the two DNA copies, one inherited from the mother and one from the father. The closer the parents are related, the longer and more abundant such identical segments are. For modern DNA data, computational methods can identify these stretches with ease. However, the quality of DNA from bones that are thousands of years old is, in most cases, too low to apply these methods. Thus, the new method fills the gaps in the ancient genomes by leveraging modern high-quality DNA data. "By applying this new technique we could screen more than ten times as many ancient genomes than previously possible", says Harald Ringbauer from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, the lead researcher of the study.

An international collaboration has identified what may be the oldest work of art, a sequence of hand and footprints discovered on the Tibetan Plateau. The prints date back to the middle of the Pleistocene era, between 169,000 and 226,000 years ago - three to four times older than the famed cave paintings in Indonesia, France and Spain.

To answer the question, "is it art?" the team turned to Thomas Urban, research scientist in the College of Arts and Sciences and with the Cornell Tree Ring Laboratory.

"The question is: What does this mean? How do we interpret these prints? They're clearly not accidentally placed," said Urban, a co-author of the paper, "Earliest Parietal Art: Hominin Hand and Foot Traces from the Middle Pleistocene of Tibet," published Sept. 10 in Science Bulletin.

"There's not a utilitarian explanation for these. So what are they?" Urban said. "My angle was, can we think of these as an artistic behavior, a creative behavior, something distinctly human. The interesting side of this is that it's so early."

The project was led by David Zhang of Guangzhou University in collaboration with researchers from Bournemouth University, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Education University of Hong Kong, Institute of Geology and University of Minnesota.

Archaeologists have unearthed evidence of alcohol consumption 9,000 years ago at an ancient burial site in southern China, shedding light on what could be one of the earliest known instances of ritual beer drinking to honour the dead.

According to the researchers, including Jiajing Wang from Dartmouth College in the US, this kind of ritual drinking 9,000 years ago may have played an important role in "maintaining social relationships and paving the way for the rise of complex farming societies four millennia later".

In the study, published last week in the journal PLOS ONE, the scientists unearthed some of "the earliest known painted pottery in the world", of which some were also decorated with abstract designs.

The ugly truth behind the Great Reset and the thing masquerading as a global pandemic is an intention to cataclyze a complete reform of human civilization...

Today, the Canadian political landscape is being remoulded by a nest of technocratic ideologues who aim to lead the nation into a post-nation state Great Reset.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was among the earliest public figures who celebrated this new age stating in 2015 that Canada is "the world's first post-national state". Once the COVID pandemic had been used to justify the shutdown of the world economy, the same Trudeau stated in November 2020 that

"this pandemic has provided an opportunity for a reset. This is our chance to accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts to reimagine economic systems that actually address global challenges like extreme poverty, inequality, and climate change."

As Canada moves into an election on September 20, 2021 with the Liberal government of Chrystia Freeland seeking a majority rule (and un-challengeable authority), the question remains: How did this all happen? How did a party which was once renowned during WW2 and the two ensuing post-war decades as a champion of progress led by such figures as C.D. Howe and Prime Minister St. Laurent become a party devoted to technocratic management of a post-industrial/post-truth world order?

An 8 part tweet stream by Pepe Escobar and posted with his permission

Pepe has two requests as follows:

• Please retweet as much as possible
• Please alert the Saker community - because at least parts of this thread may be "disappeared", post-Allende-style, in no time. These are the parts that totally destroy the official narrative.

9/11: A U.S. DEEP STATE INSIDER SPEAKS Old school. Top clearance. Extremely discreet. Attended secret Deep State meetings on 9-11. Tired of all the lies. The following is what's fit to print without being redacted.

Part 1 THE PHONE CALL. Up next.

The release of a White House report put together the year before the 9/11 attacks reveals there was a growing fear of terrorist attack during this period. And it begs the question why more wasn't done to prevent one.

A previously secret report authored in January 2000 by senior members of the White House's then-national security team, which concluded that US intelligence was ill equipped and ineffective in the face of a major and ever-growing domestic terror threat, has at last been declassified.

Dubbed the 'Millennium Alert After Action Review', it was compiled at the behest of the National Security Council's Counterterrorism Security Group, by representatives of each of the US government's counterterrorism and security agencies, after a major planned terror attack was thwarted at the end of 1999.

Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian living in Canada, was caught attempting to cross the border into Washington state in a car laden with explosives. He later admitted to the FBI that he'd been trained at an Al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan and intended to bomb Los Angeles Airport on New Year's Eve.

The Bureau made dozens of arrests, questioned an enormous number of individuals and placed hundreds under surveillance countrywide over the course of the ensuing investigation, although proving the targets in question were terrorists, let alone had terrorist connections, proved elusive. A feared wave of incendiary attacks during millennium celebrations that year didn't materialise, although the sense that a major incident of some kind was inevitable pervaded the White House, leading to the review's compilation.

As the 20th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, the fascinating stories of three spies who infiltrated Al-Qaeda for Western intelligence are worth reexamining. Why was more not made of the information they could have provided?

The conventional wisdom, oft-repeated in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, is that it is extremely difficult to recruit informers and deploy infiltrators against Al-Qaeda, due to its extremely compartmentalised cell structure. In reality, in the run-up to 9/11, British, French and American intelligence all had spies capable of penetrating Al-Qaeda's inner circle, including its training camps in Afghanistan.

Omar Nasiri was born in Morocco in the 1960s, but grew up in Belgium. In the early 1990s, he got involved in gun smuggling for the GIA - an Algerian Islamist militia which was slaughtering tens of thousands in the Algerian Civil War. After getting into trouble for stealing money from the gang he approached French intelligence, who recruited him as a spy inside the GIA.

Nasiri continued working as an arms trafficker, providing the weapons used in the 1994 GIA hijacking of an Air France flight, which aimed to crash the plane into the Eiffel Tower. That plot was thwarted when French special forces stormed the plane, but Omar carried on providing weapons to the gang. He even drove a car laden with explosives through France and Spain to deliver it to a GIA operative in Morocco. His French handler, Gilles, approved the mission and when a huge car bombing took place in Algiers a few weeks later, Gilles didn't appear to care.

These details came out years later when Nasiri wrote an autobiography and gave an extensive interview to the BBC.