Secret HistoryS


Cheeseburger

You say what you eat: How diet changed language

Linda Pyne
Archeology.org
Thu, 01 Aug 2019 00:00 UTC
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.

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Bomb

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

Dave Lindorff
RT
Fri, 09 Aug 2019 15:56 UTC
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.

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Dig

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


RT
Sat, 10 Aug 2019 13:51 UTC
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.
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Cow Skull

Ancient Maya practiced 'total war' well before climate stress

Tim Vernimmen
National Geographic
Fri, 09 Aug 2019 10:30 UTC
Maya
© Photograph by DEA/G. DAGLI ORTI/De Agostini/GettyScholars have widely assumed that the Maya practiced "total war"—that is, devastating violence that involved the destruction of cities—only after they began to compete for food resources during a series of droughts beginning in the 9th century A.D.
Scholars have widely assumed that the Maya practiced "total war" — that is, devastating violence that involved the destruction of cities — only after they began to compete for food resources during a series of droughts beginning in the 9th century A.D.

A long-standing idea about the ancient Maya is that for most of the civilization's 700-year-long Classic period, which lasted from 250 to 950 A.D., warfare was more or less ritualized. Perhaps the royal family might be kidnapped, or some symbolic structures torn down, but large-scale destruction and high numbers of civilian casualties were supposedly rare.

Researchers have generally believed that only towards the very end of the Classic period, increasing droughts would have reduced food supplies, in turn escalating tensions between Maya kingdoms and resulting in violent warfare that is believed to have precipitated their decline. Research presented today in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, however, is adding to the evidence that violent, destructive warfare targeting both military and civilian resources (often referred to as "total warfare") was taking place even before a changing climate imperiled Maya agriculture.

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Red Flag

Best of the Web: Why are Western leaders gawd awful bad and China's so darn competent?

Jeff Brown
China Rising
Wed, 07 Aug 2019 20:30 UTC
macron xi jinping
In the first part of this essay, I showed why Western leaders are generally so bad. The one sentence answer is they are almost always suborned to serve the interests of the 1% at the expense of the 99%.

There is a corollary explanation for this. European cultures and their spinoffs in the rest of Eurangloland, including Israel are founded on violence and theft. If you don't believe this goes back to the Jewish Torah/Christian Old Testament, here is a quick review of Westerners' predilection for killing, destroying, plundering first and asking questions later ( and).

I created a comparative Excel table using Wikipedia's pages on Conflicts in Europe, United States and China. Europe's list has 760 entries, the US's 250 and China's 315. Europe's long list really starts in 1,100BC and does not include all of the genocidal horrors in the Torah/Old Testament before that. The US's only starts in 1775, which is wishful propaganda. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz clearly proves in her book, A Native Peoples' History of the United States, genocidal wars to exterminate the many millions of First Nations' peoples started Day One with the colonial landing at Jamestown in 1607. And the killing has never stopped. China's goes back to 2,500BC, so is over twice as long as Europe's and, compared to the US, almost ten times longer.

Comment: We're not sure what to make of China really, but one sometimes gets the impression it's a couple thousand years more 'evolved' than everywhere else.

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Ark

Lest we forget? Western amnesia about Soviet role in WWII victory has some disturbing aspects...


RT
Wed, 07 Aug 2019 16:12 UTC
Sofia Red Army
© SputnikResidents of liberated Sofia greeting Red Army soldiers. 09.09.1944
In the autumn of 1944, 75 years ago, the Red Army reached the borders of the German Reich; cities such as Minsk, Vilnius, and Brest having been liberated in July as Soviet forces swept West.

Today, the Russian Federation celebrates these victories with the same emotion and pride as Western allies celebrate the Normandy landings and the subsequent battle for France, which occurred at the same time.

Yet, certain EU countries, notably the Baltic states, have called these Russian celebrations "a provocation." They even summoned Russian ambassadors in protest, saying the Red Army had not brought liberation but instead just another occupation. Their attitude is in stark contrast to that of successive German governments whose most senior representatives have been happy to be associated with the Allies' celebrations for years, even though their country was not only occupied after 1945 but also divided into two mutually-hostile states.

Comment: See also: Also check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: Untold History of the U.S. - Interview with Peter Kuznick

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Bomb

Bombing Hiroshima changed the world, but it didn't end WWII

Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick
LA Times
Thu, 26 May 2016 04:30 UTC
the Trinity Test
© Associated PressA photo taken July 16, 1945 shows an aerial view after the first atomic explosion at the Trinity Test site in New Mexico.

Comment: Please note this article dates back to 2016.


President Obama's visit to Hiroshima on Friday has rekindled public debate about the U.S. atomic bombings of Japan — one largely suppressed since the Smithsonian canceled its Enola Gay exhibit in 1995. Obama, aware that his critics are ready to pounce if he casts the slightest doubt on the rectitude of President Harry S. Truman's decision to use atomic bombs, has opted to remain silent on the issue. This is unfortunate. A national reckoning is overdue.

Most Americans have been taught that using atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 was justified because the bombings ended the war in the Pacific, thereby averting a costly U.S. invasion of Japan. This erroneous contention finds its way into high school history texts still today. More dangerously, it shapes the thinking of government officials and military planners working in a world that still contains more than 15,000 nuclear weapons.

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Snowflake

The Dyatlov Pass incident: Who or what killed the Russian hikers? RT investigates


RT
Fri, 02 Aug 2019 12:24 UTC
Dyatlov Pass
© RuptlyDyatlov Pass
Exactly 60 years after the mutilated and half-naked bodies of seven hikers were found on the snowy slopes of the Ural Mountains, a Ruptly crew travels to the Dyatlov Pass to try and shed a new light on the coldest of cold cases.

CAUTION: STORY CONTAINS DISTURBING IMAGES

As it greets the cameras, the landscape of what has long been known by local Mansi tribesmen as Deadly Mountain is as bleak and snow-covered as it was when the seven men and two women under the command of Igor Dyatlov planted their tent here in inclement weather on February 1, 1959.

After all these years, the surroundings still betray no signs of what terror unfolded on these slopes, other than a plaque dedicated to the dead hikers. But even when the first victims were discovered here, weeks after they had perished, nature's clues were already conspicuous by their absence.
Plaque
© RuptlyPlaque dedicated to the victims
It was as if a macabre puzzle had been left there, waiting to be solved.


Comment: FWIW, our insider sources told us it was a transdimensional scientific expedition gone wrong. The hikers were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The 'science project' was interested in the location, not the people. When they 'returned' the hikers, the amateurs apparently messed everything up. Happens all too frequently.

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Dig

Who were the mysterious Neolithic people that enabled the rise of ancient Egypt?

Joel D. Irish
The Conversation
Thu, 01 Aug 2019 14:48 UTC
Neolithic skull
Neolithic skull
To many, ancient Egypt is synonymous with the pharaohs and pyramids of the Dynastic period starting about 3,100BC. Yet long before that, about 9,300-4,000BC, enigmatic Neolithic peoples flourished. Indeed, it was the lifestyles and cultural innovations of these peoples that provided the very foundation for the advanced civilisations to come.

But who were they? As it turns out, they haven't actually been studied much, at least relative to their successors. But our excavations of six burial sites - with some of the analyses recently published - have now provided important insights into their mysterious ways of life.

One reason why we know so little about Neolithic Egypt is that the sites are often inaccessible, lying beneath the Nile's former flood plain or in outlying deserts. What's more, if you were an archaeologist what would you rather study - a pyramid near Cairo or a possible rock alignment in some remote desert?

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Cupcake Pink

Iron Age Celtic woman wearing fancy clothes buried in tree coffin in Switzerland

Laura Geggel
Live Science
Tue, 30 Jul 2019 06:43 UTC
tree coffin
© Amt für Städtebau, Stadt Zürich Office for Urban Development, city of ZurichThis illustration shows what the woman's grave might have looked like in 200 B.C.
During the late Iron Age, Celts laid one of their own to rest in a "tree coffin," but not before they dressed her to the nines; she wore a fine woolen dress and shawl, a sheepskin coat and a beautiful necklace strung with glass and amber beads, according to the Office for Urban Development in Zurich.

After studying the 2,200-year-old burial, archaeologists learned that the woman was about 40 years old when she died and had probably performed little physical labor during her lifetime. Moreover, an analysis of her teeth suggested this woman liked to eat starchy or sweetened foods.

Even her coffin was remarkable; the woman was buried in a hollowed-out tree trunk, which still had bark on its exterior.

The woman's remains were originally found in March 2017, during a construction project at the Kern school complex in Aussersihl, a district in Zurich. Since then, an interdisciplinary examination by the city of Zurich's archaeology department has illustrated much about this woman's life in 200 B.C. For instance, an isotope analysis of the woman's bones showed that she was a local who grew up in Zurich, likely in Limmat Valley. (An isotope is an element with a different number of neutrons than usual.)

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