Secret HistoryS


Sherlock

Virgin with laughing child: Scholars unveil Leonardo da Vinci's "only surviving sculpture"

da vinci sculpture
© Victoria & Albert Museum, LondonThe Virgin with the Laughing Child, said to be Leonardo da Vinci's only extant sculpture.
The curators of an exhibition in Florence have this week unveiled what they claim is the only surviving sculpture by Leonardo da Vinci.

It's always been part of Leonardo's legend that he made sculptures, including a giant horse, but not a single extant three-dimensional work by him had been identified.

The Virgin with the Laughing Child is the miraculous exception, according to the curators of the exhibition Verrocchio: Master of Leonardo, at Palazzo Strozzi, where it has just gone on display. It has an unambiguous label: Leonardo da Vinci. He is said to have created it around 1472, when he was 19 or 20 and a pupil of the Florentine artist Andrea del Verrocchio.

The UK has a special interest in the find, which has belonged to the V&A since 1858 but had long been credited to another artist, Antonio Rossellino. That is because scholars had been bamboozled by the posthumous authority of the late art historian and British Museum director John Pope-Hennessy, according to Francesco Caglioti, the Italian academic who is leading the new attribution.

Comment: If true, it wouldn't be the first time Leonardo's work was said to contain "blasphemous" details: Also check out SOTT radio's:


Dig

Ancient DNA research shines spotlight on Iberian Peninsula

Bronze Age site of Castillejo de Bonete in Spain
© Luis Benítez de Lugo Enrich/José Luis Fuentes Sánchez/OppidaA man and woman buried side by side at the Bronze Age site of Castillejo de Bonete in Spain had different genetic ancestries.
The largest study to date of ancient DNA from the Iberian Peninsula (modern-day Portugal and Spain) offers new insights into the populations that lived in this region over the last 8,000 years. The most startling discovery suggests that local Y chromosomes were almost completely replaced during the Bronze Age.

Starting in 2500 B.C. and continuing for about 500 years, the analyses indicate, tumultuous social events played out that reshaped Iberians' paternal ancestry continuing to today.

"This is one of the strongest pieces of evidence in ancient-DNA research of sex bias in the prehistoric period," said Iñigo Olalde, a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of David Reich at Harvard Medical School and first author of the study.

Boat

Nile shipwreck discovery proves Herodotus' puzzling description of large trading boat right

shipwreck
© Christoph Gerigk/Franck Goddio/Hilti FoundationAn archaeologist at work on a wreck in the waters around the sunken port city of Thonis-Heracleion.
In the fifth century BC, the Greek historian Herodotus visited Egypt and wrote of unusual river boats on the Nile. Twenty-three lines of his Historia, the ancient world's first great narrative history, are devoted to the intricate description of the construction of a "baris".

For centuries, scholars have argued over his account because there was no archaeological evidence that such ships ever existed. Now there is. A "fabulously preserved" wreck in the waters around the sunken port city of Thonis-Heracleion has revealed just how accurate the historian was.

"It wasn't until we discovered this wreck that we realised Herodotus was right," said Dr Damian Robinson, director of Oxford University's centre for maritime archaeology, which is publishing the excavation's findings. "What Herodotus described was what we were looking at."

Comment: See also: Also check out SOTT radio's: The Truth Perspective: Interview with Russell Gmirkin: What Does Plato Have To Do With the Bible?


Info

A new generation of people in Arctic and Northwest Coast communities are reviving indigenous tattooing

Tattoo Artist at Work
© NahaanNahaan, a Tlingit-Inupiaq-Paiute tattoo artist, inks a woman’s face.
To celebrate her graduation from the University of Alaska Fairbanks' Alaska Native Studies program in 2012, Marjorie Kunaq Tahbone got a tattoo. Tahbone is Inupiat, an Alaska Native people, and the design was a traditional Inupiat pattern: three solid lines that spread downward from underneath the middle of her lower lip to her chin.

Tahbone was unsure, however, how the people in her home village would react. Nome is a town of about 3,800 people on Alaska's northwestern coast, only reachable by plane or, in the warmer months, boat. Although many people there are Alaska Natives, traditional tattoos were a rare sight at that time.

Within days of receiving her tattoo, people started to notice. In a local store, a village elder reached out and touched her tattoo. In the weeks to follow, on two different occasions, babies, whom Tahbone was holding and playing with, fingered the pattern on Tahbone's face.

The infants' actions had profound resonance. Among Inupiat communities, babies receive the names of the recently deceased. When the infants touched her tattoo, Tahbone felt they were tapped into the memories of the past lives of deceased Inupiat. "When I was acknowledged by babies, it was like an acknowledgment of my ancestors," she says.

Traditionally, chin tattoos among Inupiat women like Tahbone represented a number of different milestones, such as marriage, overcoming trauma, having kids, or, as in Tahbone's case, a "coming of age." According to anthropologist Lars Krutak, a research associate at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, tattoos were closely tied up in the cultural identity of many Indigenous people. "You could tell a lot about where that person was from, what clan they belonged to, maybe what family they belonged to," he says.

Thanks to people like Tahbone, herself a scholar and tattoo artist, traditional tattoos are reappearing in Arctic and Northwest Coast Indigenous communities. As she and a handful of other researchers study and revitalize these lost arts, they are both reviving a cultural artform nearly wiped out by colonialism and getting a better understanding of the ways Indigenous communities in the north used tattoos. A tradition that once served as therapy for body and mind might now, in its restoration, treat deep cultural wounds. "When we see that ink on people, we know that we are healing from the historical trauma that occurred," Tahbone says.

MIB

Mexico, 1968: When 'mystery snipers' opened fire on their own troops

mexico city massacre
In the summer of 1968, Mexico was experiencing the birth of a new student movement.

But that movement was short-lived. On Oct. 2, 1968, 10 days before the opening of the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, police officers and military troops shot into a crowd of unarmed students. Thousands of demonstrators fled in panic as tanks bulldozed over Tlatelolco Plaza.

Government sources originally reported that four people had been killed and 20 wounded, while eyewitnesses described the bodies of hundreds of young people being trucked away. Thousands of students were beaten and jailed, and many disappeared. Forty years later, the final death toll remains a mystery, but documents recently released by the U.S. and Mexican governments give a better picture of what may have triggered the massacre. Those documents suggest that snipers posted by the military fired on fellow troops, provoking them to open fire on the students.

Comment: It would be interesting to compile a list of how many times this has happened at politically delicate points in countries' histories. Ukraine in 2014 comes to mind. Egypt in 2011. Iran in 2009. Venezuela in 2002. Russia in 1993. (Those incidents, however, were all probably directed by foreign agents seeking to destabilize, not stabilize, those countries' regimes.)

Leaders of civilized Western countries would never stoop so low though. Surely?...


Brain

Best of the Web: Economist Ricardo Hausmann's 'morning after' for Venezuela: The neoliberal brain behind Juan Guaido's economic agenda

Ricardo Hausmann
© Ricardo Moraes/APRicardo Hausmann attends the World Economic Forum on Latin America in Rio de Janeiro, April 16, 2009.
While online audiences know YouTube comedian Joanna Hausmann from her videos making the case for regime change, her economist father has flown below the radar. His record holds the key to understanding what the U.S. wants in Venezuela.

If you've followed Venezuela-related news on social media, you've undoubtedly stumbled across a video released by comedian Joanna Hausmann in which she promises to tell you, What's Happening in Venezuela: Just the Facts. Despite a title designed to instill confidence in the uninformed viewer, upon closer examination the "facts" presented in Hausman's video hardly stand the test of reality.

Hausmann, for example, attempted to pass off dubious assertions that Venezuelan opposition leader "Juan Guaidó is not right wing," and that he "did not just declare himself president" of the country. She also claimed that President Nicolas Maduro "made up" the National Constituent Assembly, neglecting to mention that that governing body was clearly defined in the country's 1999 Constitution, and was ratified by 71.8 percent of the country through a democratic vote.

Hausmann's performance ended with a teary-eyed appeal for sympathy: "On a personal level... my father is exiled from going back home." For a video dedicated to "just the facts," Hausmann's rant omitted an especially pertinent piece of information: her exiled father and the rest of her family are no ordinary Venezuelans, and are, in fact, key players in the bid to bring down the elected government.

Much of Hausmann's script echoed talking points outlined by her father, Ricardo Hausmann, in a 2018 article ominously entitled "D-Day Venezuela." The piece amounted to a plea for the U.S. to depose Maduro by force, with Hausman arguing that "military intervention by a coalition of regional forces may be the only way to end a man-made famine threatening millions of lives."

But Ricardo Hausmann is much more than a prominent pundit. He is one of the West's leading neoliberal economists, who played an unsavory role during the 1980s and '90s in devising policies that enabled the looting of Venezuela's economy by international capital and provoked devastating social turmoil.

Pirates

New research suggests Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar lived near a US base in Afghanistan

Mullah Omar
© UnknownMullah Omar
The late Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar lived near a U.S. base in southern Afghanistan for years, a new book claims. Searching For An Enemy, by Dutch journalist and writer Bette Dam, says the fugitive leader never hid in Pakistan as was believed by U.S. and Afghan officials.

Dam spent five years researching and interviewing Taliban members for the biography of the one-eyed militant leader, which was published in Dutch last month. A summary of the findings was published in English by the U.S.-based Zomia think tank.

The Taliban held power in Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, when the group was toppled by a U.S.-led invasion, and has waged an antigovernment insurgency since then.

A $10 million bounty was put on Omar's head after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks in the United States that killed nearly 3,000 people.

According to Dam, Omar lived in Zabul Province's capital, Qalat, until 2004, when U.S. troops began building Forward Operating Base (FOB) Lagman, just a few minutes' walk from his hideout.

Sun

2,700-year-old giant solar storm detected in Greenland ice

Solar Storm
© Solar Dynamics Observatory/ESA/NASAFlares erupting on the Sun in 2014.
Evidence of an unusually strong solar storm that hit Earth in 660 BCE has been detected in Greenland ice cores-a finding which shows we still have lots to learn about these disruptive events.

An extreme form of solar storm, known as a solar proton event (SPE), struck our planet 2,679 years ago, according to new research published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. If an event of such magnitude were to happen today, it would likely wreak havoc on our technological infrastructure, including communications and navigation. Lund University geologist Raimund Muscheler and his colleagues presented evidence in the form of elevated levels of beryllium-10 and chlorine-36 isotopes embedded within ancient Greenland ice cores.

It's now the third massive SPE known to scientists, the others occurring 1,245 and 1,025 years ago. This latest discovery means solar storms of this variety are likely happening more frequently than we thought-perhaps once every 1,000 years-but more data is required to create more reliable estimates.

SPEs happen in the wake of a massive solar flare or coronal mass ejection on the Sun. These stellar events send streams of particles, including high-energy protons, toward Earth, where they interact with the Earth's atmosphere, triggering reactions that increase the rate of radionuclide production, including carbon-14, beryllium-10, and chlorine-36 (radionuclides are unstable atoms with excess nuclear energy). Traditionally, SPEs have been detected as spikes of carbon-14 in tree rings, but they can also be spotted as spikes of beryllium-10 and chlorine-36 in ancient ice cores. The authors of the new study said scientists tend to overemphasize carbon-14 at the expense of searching for other markers, and that "efforts to find [SPEs] based solely on [carbon-14] data likely lead to an underestimated number of such potentially devastating events for our society."

Dig

It's the Flintstones! Archaeologists find 60,000-year-old Neanderthal workshop with 17,000 flint objects

tools made out of flint
© A. Wiśniewski/ Nauka w PolsceThe archaeologists found a huge number of objects made out of flint – perhaps 17,000 – which they believe to have been left there 60,000 years ago by Neanderthals.
A flint workshop belonging to Neanderthals has been discovered in southern Poland.

The discovery, which adds to scientists' understanding of these earlier humans and challenges ideas about how they lived, was made on a riverbank in the village of Pietraszyn in Silesia, in southern Poland.

The archaeologists found a huge number of objects made out of flint - perhaps 17,000 - which they believe to have been left there 60,000 years ago by Neanderthals.

According to Dr Andrzej Wiśniewski of the University of Wrocław's Archaeology Institute, who has been involved in excavations in Pietraszyn since last year with other archeologists, this is the first workshop of this size to be found in Central Europe, excluding those in caves.

Eiffel Tower

The French genocide that has been air-brushed from history

Massacre de Machecoul
Le massacre de Machecoul by François Flameng
The Secret History

On March 4 2011, the French historian Reynald Secher discovered documents in the National Archives in Paris confirming what he had known since the early 1980s: there had been a genocide during the French Revolution.1 Historians have always been aware of widespread resistance to the Revolution. But (with a few exceptions) they invariably characterize the rebellion in the Vendée (1793-95) as an abortive civil war rather than a genocide.

In 1986, Secher published his initial findings in Le Génocide franco-français, a lightly revised version of his doctoral dissertation.2 This book sold well, but destroyed any chance he might have had for a university career. Secher was slandered by journalists and tenured academics for daring to question the official version of events that had taken place two centuries earlier.3 The Revolution has become a sacred creation myth for at least some of the French; they do not take kindly to blasphemers.