Secret HistoryS


Dig

'Ghosts' of 2 unknown extinct human species found in modern DNA

denisovans
© João Teixeira
When modern humans started emerging from Africa and spreading throughout Eurasia, they found many places already occupied by older hominins such as Neanderthals and Denisovans. As humans do, we got rather friendly with our new neighbours: evidence of that hanky panky lives on in our DNA today.

But we're also starting to find glimpses of something strange in our neighbourhoods - traces of ancient, unknown hominins that we've never seen before.

"Each of us carry within ourselves the genetic traces of these past mixing events," said biologist João Teixeira of the University of Adelaide.

"These archaic groups were widespread and genetically diverse, and they survive in each of us. Their story is an integral part of how we came to be."

After closely analysing the existing literature, Teixeira and his colleague biologist Alan Cooper have identified two such 'ghost' ancestors in modern DNA. The first, identified in Eurasian DNA with the help of artificial intelligence, was widely reported earlier this year.

The second, however, was reported last year, a detail that flew under the radar in a larger paper: a mysterious, and inconclusive, genetic signature exclusively found in the population of Flores, Indonesia. It appears to be as divergent from modern human DNA as Neanderthal or Denisovan DNA is.

Bizarro Earth

The genocide pit at Sacred Ridge, Colorado

Sacred Ridge
© via Science NewsGenocide at Sacred Ridge: Excavations at an ancient Pueblo site uncovered crushed skulls (one shown) and other bones from at least 35 victims.
"Mutilated and processed" is not a phrase that you ever hope to read in any context whatsoever. But it fits good to Sacred Ridge in Colorado, an ancient Native American settlement consisting of 22 pit houses.

One day, as archeologists were cataloging the usual pots and tools and petrified turds and such, they stumbled straight into a problem: scientists didn't have enough room on their checklist for the huge amount of two-headed axes spattered in human blood that they were finding.

And the pit homes were absolutely filthy with "mutilated and processed" human bodies.

So what happened here?

Attackers with a deadly plan climbed a knoll to a Pueblo village called Sacred Ridge around 1,200 years ago. What happened next was anything but sacred.

Comment: The area is home to numerous of unusual and unexplained discoveries:


Biohazard

Biowarfare, Nazi scientists and the creation of Lyme Disease in the US

Plum Island Lab
Plum Island Lab
"Pentagon May Have Released Weaponized Ticks That Helped Spread of Lyme Disease: Investigation Ordered" was the Newsweek headline last month. The article below it was about the U.S. House of Representatives having "quietly passed a bill requiring the Inspector General of the Department of Defense to conduct a review into whether the Pentagon experimented with ticks and other blood-sucking insects for use as biological weapons between 1950 and 1975."

The article continued: "If the Inspector General finds that such experiments occurred, then, according to the bill, they must provide the House and Senate Armed Services committees with a report on the scope of the research and 'whether any ticks or insects used in such experiments were released outside of any laboratory by accident or experimental design'...potentially leading to the spread of diseases such as Lyme."

The measure was introduced by Representative Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican, "who was 'inspired' by several books and articles claiming that the U.S. government had conducted research at facilities such as Fort Detrick, Maryland, and Plum Island, New York, for this purpose."

One of the books, published earlier this year, was Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons by Stanford University science writer Kris Newby. It includes interviews with Willy Burgdorfer who is credited with having discovered the pathogen that causes Lyme disease and earlier developed bioweapons for the Department of Defense. Said Smith on the House floor:
"Those interviews combined with access to Dr. Burdorfer's lab files suggest that he and other bioweapons specialists stuffed ticks with pathogens to cause severe disability, disease — even death — to potential enemies. With Lyme disease and other tick-borne diseases exploding in the United States...Americans have a right to know whether any of this is true."

Comment: See also: Note to the quote from The Belarus Secret:
The quote does not appear in every copy from the 1980s'. In the updated version, America's Nazi Secret, one finds:

"An updated, declassified and uncensored version of the original work, The Belarus Secret Original Manuscript censored by the US Government in 1981, 1982, and again in 1983."

"Files declassified 2009-2010, Central Intelligence Agency"

For a discussion of the information and the censoring, see this page: "from Leslie Feinberg August 2011 transgenderwarrior.org my research notes on the medical politics driving the "Lyme Wars" - "Part 35: Ex-U.S. prosecutor publicly charged Nazi scientist tested 'poison ticks' on Plum Island."

Feinberg begins:
"Former U.S. Justice Department prosecutor John Loftus makes a very serious charge in the preface of his 1982 book, "The Belarus Secret: : The Nazi Connection in America," Loftus stated that scientists conducted open-air testing of ticks weaponized with diseases at the Plum Island artillery range in the early 1950s. (Hardcover, Paragon House: 1982; reprinted by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, 1989)"

"In the Preface to the "The Belarus Secret" Loftus wrote: "Even more disturbing are the records of the Nazi germ warfare scientists who came to [North] America. "They experimented with poison ticks dropped from planes to spread rare diseases." Loftus continued, "I have received some information suggesting that the U.S. tested some of these poison ticks on the Plum Island artillery range off the coast of Connecticut during the early 1950s. ... "Most of the germ warfare records have been shredded, but there is a top secret U.S. document confirming that 'clandestine attacks on crops and animals' took place at this time." (Preface, p. xviii) Unlike former corporate attorney Michael Christopher Carroll, John Loftus' charge is an "insider" accusation."

The central point also appears on page 13 of the hard cover edition of Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory by Michael Christopher Carrol from 2004. Carrol had, according to the acknowledgements, help from John Loftus.


Magic Hat

'Sorcerer's treasure trove' uncovered in Pompeii by archaeologists

pompeii sorcerer
© EPAMost of the artefacts would have belonged to women - possibly slaves or servants
Archaeologists working in the buried Roman city of Pompeii say they have uncovered a "sorcerer's treasure trove" of artefacts, including good-luck charms, mirrors and glass beads.

Most of the items would have belonged to women, said Massimo Osanna, director of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii.

A room with the bodies of 10 victims, including women and children, was excavated in the same house.

Pompeii was engulfed by a volcanic eruption from Mt Vesuvius in AD 79.

Comment: For more on Pompeii, check out:


Binoculars

Flashback Myth of pristine Amazon rainforest busted as old cities reappear

amazon rainforest
© Mario Tama/GettyDreamscape: the Amazon was once lined with fields and plazas
The first Europeans to penetrate the Amazon rainforests reported cities, roads and fertile fields along the banks of its major rivers. "There was one town that stretched for 15 miles without any space from house to house, which was a marvellous thing to behold," wrote Gaspar de Carvajal, chronicler of explorer and conquistador Francisco de Orellana in 1542. "The land is as fertile and as normal in appearance as our Spain."

Such tales were long dismissed as fantasies, not least because teeming cities were never seen or talked about again. But it now seems the chroniclers were right all along. It is our modern vision of a pristine rainforest wilderness that turns out to be the dream.

What is today one of the largest tracts of rainforest in the world was, until little more than 500 years ago, a landscape dominated by human activity, according to a review of the evidence by Charles Clement of Brazil's National Institute of Amazonian Research in Manaus, and his colleagues.

Comment: Well now, doesn't that throw a few spanners in a few 'settled sciences'?

If what they're saying is hitting the mark, the Amazon is actually an overgrown graveyard, and not some conservationist cudgel to beat Latin American governments over the head with.

If they want to clear the land for development, LET THEM! It's not as if Europeans, in their mania for 'doing stuff', didn't fell almost every tree from Virginia to the Rockies.

Finally, newsflash to global warmists, eco-warriors, and carbon financializers: this planet has seen (and shaken off) COUNTLESS civilizations before ours...

See also:


Info

350,000 years old stone axes discovered in Karain Cave, Turkey

Ancient Stone Tool
© Arkeolojik Haber
350,000 years old axes, found at Antalya's Karain Cave to unearth more ancient historical facts

Archaeologists in Turkey have discovered the world's second oldest axe, at Antalya's Karain Cave, believed to be 350,000 years old.

The Paleolithic archaeological site is located at Yagca Village 27 kilometers (17 miles) northwest of Antalya city in the Mediterranean region of Turkey.

Harun Taskiran, a professor at the Department of Archeology in Ankara University, said during the excavation process, they have found a sharp, two sided axe, equaling more or less to the size of a human hand, in the middle Paleolithic era layers of the cave.

He said that the axe must have been used for hunting. Another similar axe was found in the same cave last year.

Info

Humans occupied Ethiopian highlands more than 30,000 years ago - Lowlands had become too dry

Boulders in Harcha Valley, Ethiopia
© H VEITBoulders were deposited by a glacier in the Harcha Valley, in Ethiopia’s Bale Mountains, during the last glacial period.
A rock shelter located in the hostile environment of southern Ethiopia's Bale Mountains has pushed back high-altitude living into the middle stone age.

The Fincha Habera site, 3500 metres above sea level, shows evidence of human occupation at least 31,000 years ago and as far back as 47,000 years ago, according to a new study published in the journal Science.

The Bale Mountains, like other high-altitude regions, including the Tibetan Plateau and the Chilean Andes, are unforgiving places. Oxygen levels are low, resources are scarce, and the climate can be cold and dry.

For a long time, this led scientists to believe that high altitude living - more than 2500 metres above sea level - is a relatively recent phenomenon. But discoveries in Tibet and elsewhere have been challenging this notion.

Stone tools on the Tibetan Plateau, for instance, were left by prehistoric people some 30,000-40,000 years ago, and the jaw of an ancient Denisovan hominin found in a cave on the edge of the Tibetan plateau is at least 160,000 years old.

The Fincha Habera site is noteworthy because objects found at the site indicate more than just a passing presence of early humans.

Animal remains, stone tools and fossilised poo - coprolites - suggest that whoever used the rock shelter did so for extended periods of time.

But it probably wasn't a permanent residence, according to archaeologist Götz Ossendorf from the University of Cologne in Germany, who led the excavations.

"They definitely were not continuously living there, because they were mobile hunter gatherers," he says. Instead, Fincha Habera "was probably one important site in the annual subsistence circuit".

Comment: Evidence detailed in an article from Phys.org shows that a driving factor behind the migration to the inhospitable highlands may have been due to a lack of water in the lowland regions:
People in Ethiopia did not live in low valleys during the last ice age. Instead they lived high up in the inhospitable Bale Mountains. There they had enough water, built tools out of obsidian and relied mainly on giant rodents for nourishment. This discovery was made by an international team of researchers led by Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) in cooperation with the Universities of Cologne, Bern, Marburg, Addis Ababa and Rostock. In the current issue of Science, the researchers provide the first evidence that our African ancestors had already settled in the mountains during the Palaeolithic period, about 45,000 years ago.

Habera
© Götz OssendorfThe Fincha Habera rock shelter in the Ethiopian Bale Mountains served as a residence for prehistoric hunter-gatherers.
At around 4,000 metres above sea level, the Bale Mountains in southern Ethiopia are a rather inhospitable region. There is a low level of oxygen in the air, temperatures fluctuate sharply, and it rains a lot. "Because of these adverse living conditions, it was previously assumed that humans settled in the Afro-Alpine region only very lately and for short periods of time," says Professor Bruno Glaser, an expert in soil biogeochemistry at MLU. Together with an international team of archaeologists, soil scientists, palaeoecologists, and biologists, he has been able to show that this assumption is incorrect. People had already begun living for long periods of time on the ice-free plateaus of the Bale Mountains about 45,000 years ago during the Middle Pleistocene Epoch. By then the lower valleys were already too dry for survival.

For several years, the research team investigated a rocky outcrop near the settlement of Fincha Habera in the Bale Mountains in southern Ethiopia. During their field campaigns, the scientists found a number of stone artefacts, clay fragments and a glass bead. "We also extracted information from the soil as part of our subproject," says Glaser. Based on the sediment deposits in the soil, the researchers from Halle were able to carry out extensive biomarker and nutrient analyses as well as radiocarbon dating and thus draw conclusions as to how many people lived in the region and when they lived there. For this work, the scientists also developed a new type of palaeothermometer which could be used to roughly track the weather in the region — including temperature, humidity and precipitation. Such analyses can only be done in natural areas with little contamination, otherwise the soil profile will have changed too much by more recent influences. The inhospitable conditions of the Bale Mountains present ideal conditions for such research since the soil has only changed on the surface during the last millennia.

Using this data, the researchers were not only able to show that people have been there for a longer period of time; the analyses may also have uncovered the reasons for this, too — during the last ice age the settlement of Fincha Habera was located beyond the edge of the glaciers. According to Glaser, there was a sufficient amount of water available since the glaciers melted in phases. The researchers are even able to say what people ate: giant mole rats, endemic rodents in the region the researchers investigated. These were easy to hunt and provided enough meat, thereby providing the energy required to survive in the rough terrain. Humans probably also settled in the area because there was deposit of volcanic obsidian rock nearby from which they could mine obsidian and make tools out of it. "The settlement was therefore not only comparatively habitable, but also practical," concludes Glaser.

The soil samples also reveal a further detail about the history of the settlement. Starting around 10,000 years before the Common Era, the location was populated by humans for a second time. At this time, the site was increasingly used as a hearth. And: "For the first time, the soil layer dating from this period also contains the excrement of grazing animals," says Glaser.

According to the research team, the new study in "Science" not only provides new insights into the history of human settlement in Africa, it also imparts important information about the human potential to adapt physically, genetically and culturally to changing environmental conditions. For example, some groups of people living in the Ethiopian mountains today can easily contend with low levels of oxygen in the air.
See also:


Cheeseburger

You say what you eat: How diet changed language

skull overbite
© (Courtesy David Frayer, University of Kansas; Karin Wiltschke-Schrotta, Naturhistorisches Museum Wien)Edge-to-edge bite (left), Upper Paleolithic skull, Arene Candide cave, Italy; Overbite (right), Early Bronze Age skull, Hainburg, Austria
Try saying "f" and "v" and pay close attention to your lower lip and upper teeth. Would it surprise you to learn that these sounds are relatively recent additions to human languages? Languages, of course, develop over time as usage, meaning, and pronunciation change. But what about the ways our bodies have changed over the millennia? Could this also contribute to changes in language? In a new study, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and the University of Zurich have used evidence from paleoanthropology, speech biomechanics, ethnography, and historical linguistics to determine that, in fact, it is a combination of factors — both cultural and biological — that produces changes in language and has contributed to the diversity of languages that exist today.

In the Neolithic period, starting about 10,000 years ago, when the lifestyle of people in Europe and Asia changed dramatically as a result of the large-scale adoption of farming in place of hunting and gathering, their biology changed, too. Prior to this shift, the consumption of gritty, fibrous foods such as nuts and seeds, staples of the pre- Neolithic diet, put a great deal of force on children's growing mandibles and wore down their molars. In response to the biomechanical stress of chewing these tough foods, people's jawbones grew larger and larger over their lifetimes, and their molars drifted toward the front of the mouth, eliminating their childhood overbites. With the development of farming, easily chewable foods such as processed dairy products and milled grains were introduced into people's diets. As the prevalence of these foods increased, people began to retain their childhood overbites well into adulthood.

Comment: See also:



Bomb

US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not to end WWII, they were to intimidate the Soviet Union

Nagasaki
© AFPDevastated city of Nagasaki after an atomic bomb was dropped by a US Air Force B-29 on August 9, 1945.
Almost three-quarters of a century ago on August 9, 1945, the United States dropped a 22-kiloton plutonium bomb called the "Fat Man" on Nagasaki.

The total destruction of that city, and the instant incineration of 40,000 mostly civilian people, occurred just three days after the destruction of Hiroshima by a 15-kiloton uranium bomb, which instantly killed 70,000. This criminal one-two punch by the US launched the atomic age.

The bombings have always been presented to young Americans in school history texts, and to Americans in general by government propaganda, as having been "necessary" to end the war quickly and to avoid American ground troops having to battle their way through the Japanese archipelago.

But later evidence - such as frantic efforts made in vain by the Japanese government to surrender through the Swiss embassy, and later reports that Japan's real concern was not the destruction of its cities, but rather fear that Soviet forces, victorious in Europe, had joined the Pacific war and were advancing on Japan from the north and into Japanese-occupied Korea - has undermined that US mythology.

In fact, it would appear that President Truman and his war cabinet didn't really want a Japanese surrender until the two bombs that the Manhattan Project had produced had been demonstrated on two Japanese cities. The target audience of those two mushroom clouds were not Japanese leaders in Tokyo, but rather Stalin and the Soviet government.

Comment: See also:


Dig

'Sensational' find: First ever ancient male rhino skull discovered in Russia's Sinaya Balka volcano

Ancient rhino skull russia
© Azov Historical-Archaeological and Paleontological Museum-Reserve
In a "sensational" find, Russian paleontologists carrying out excavations on the Taman Peninsula have announced the first ever discovery of an ancient male rhinoceros' skull.

The Caucasian Elasmotherium skull, which is in remarkably good condition, was found encased in the ancient mud of the Sinaya Balka volcano in southern Russia's Krasnodar Region.

Its discovery was hailed by Vadim Titov, a lead researcher at the Southern Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

This year we found the remains of about a dozen elephants and three ancient rhinos, but the most interesting finding was almost a whole skull of the Caucasian Elasmotherium," Titov told RIA Novosti.