Secret HistoryS


Blue Planet

How early Africans lived, traveled and interacted revealed in ancient DNA

Rice University
Phys.org
Wed, 23 Feb 2022 12:00 UTC
Rockshelter
© Jacob Davis.Hora Rockshelter in Malawi, where recent excavations uncovered two of the individuals analyzed in a collaborative study of ancient DNA.
A new analysis of human remains that were buried in African archaeological sites has produced the earliest DNA from the continent, telling a fascinating tale of how early humans lived, traveled and even found their significant others.

An interdisciplinary team of 44 researchers outlined its findings in "Ancient DNA reveals deep population structure in sub-Saharan African foragers." The paper was published today in Nature and reports findings from ancient DNA from six individuals buried in Malawi, Tanzania and Zambia who lived between 18,000 and 5,000 years ago.

"This more than doubles the antiquity of reported ancient DNA data from sub-Saharan Africa," said David Reich, a professor at Harvard University and investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute whose lab generated the data in the paper. "The study is particularly exciting as a truly equal collaboration of archaeologists and geneticists."
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Document

Documents reveal US gov't spent $22M promoting anti-Russia narrative in Ukraine and abroad

Alan Macleod
MintPress News
Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00 UTC
Ukrainians
© Efrem Lukatsky/APUkrainians attend a rally in central Kiev, Ukraine, Feb. 12, 2022, during a protest against the potential escalation of the tension between Russia and Ukraine.
Amid soaring tensions with Russia, the United States is spending a fortune on foreign interference campaigns in Ukraine. Washington's regime-change arm, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), has spent $22.4 million on operations inside the country since 2014, when democratically-elected President Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown and replaced by a successor government handpicked by the U.S. Those operations included propping up and training pro-Western political parties, funding pliant media organizations, and subsidizing massive privatization drives that benefit foreign multinational corporations, all in an effort to secure U.S. control over the country that NED President Carl Gershman called "the biggest prize" in Europe.

Demwashing the CIA

The National Endowment for Democracy was set up in 1983 by the Reagan administration after a series of public scandals had seriously undermined both the credibility and the public image of the CIA. That the organization was established and continues to function as a cutout group doing much of the agency's dirtiest work is not in question. "It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA," Gershman himself said, explaining its creation. "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA," NED cofounder Allen Weinstein told The Washington Post in 1991.
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Archaeology

Huge Roman mosaic unearthed in London in 'once-in-a-lifetime find'


The Independent
Tue, 22 Feb 2022 18:15 UTC
roman mosaic london
© MOLAArchaeologists said the discovery comes form ‘the heyday of Roman London’
The discovery is evidence of wealthy Romans 'living the good life', say archaeologists

Archaeologists working on a site in Southwark Street have uncovered the largest area of Roman mosaic to be discovered in London for half a century.

The precious tile work from "the heyday of Roman London" was discovered at a building site near the Shard in Southwark.

It once decorated the floor of a Roman dining room, experts believe.

Flowers and geometric patterns adorn the two embellished panels, which are thought to be almost 2,000 years old.
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Books

"The most fateful error": Why isn't America listening to the advice on NATO expansion of its foremost 20th century expert on Russia?


RT
Tue, 22 Feb 2022 22:47 UTC
George Kennan
"Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era," George Kennan said
The US diplomat George Kennan, an astute observer of Soviet Russia under Stalin, offered his observations later in life on the question of NATO expansion. The tragedy of our times is that those views are being ignored.

Winston Churchill once famously quipped that the "Americans will always do the right thing, but only after all other possibilities are exhausted." That bit of dry British humor cuts to the heart of the current crisis in Ukraine, which is loaded with enough geopolitical dynamite to bring down a sizable chunk of the neighborhood. Yet, had the West taken the advice of one of its leading statesmen with regards to reckless military expansion toward Russia, the world would be a more peaceful and predictable place today.
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Pharoah

King Tut's ancient dagger was not from Egypt

Bob Yirka
Phys Org
Tue, 22 Feb 2022 17:32 UTC
King Tut's Dagger
© Wikimedia / Olaf Tausch, CC BY 3.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)
A combined team of researchers from Japan and Egypt has found evidence that suggests a dagger found in King Tut's tomb had origins outside of Egypt. In their paper published in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science, the group describes their study of the dagger and also of the Amarna Letters tablets and what they learned by doing so.

When archaeologists opened King Tut's tomb in the early 1900s, they found among other things a dagger with an iron blade. The finding was interesting because the Iron Age had not yet started. Humans had not yet learned how to heat native iron to sufficient temperatures for smelting. Thus, it was assumed the dagger blade had been made by pounding metal from a meteorite found somewhere nearby. Humans were making many implements from iron from meteorites thousands of years before the beginning of the Iron Age, thus the finding in Tut's tomb was not that unusual.
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Colosseum

Why have so many English medieval works been lost whilst many Irish and Icelandic survived?

University of Oxford
Phys.org
Thu, 17 Feb 2022 15:27 UTC
suit armour
© Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain
New research released today finds that while the Knights of the Round Table have won global fame, most medieval English heroic or chivalric stories have been lost. Meanwhile, more than three quarters of medieval stories in Icelandic and Irish survive to the present, in an unusual pattern suggesting island "ecosystems" helped preserve culture.

The findings come from an international research team, including Oxford experts, which has applied statistical models used in ecology to estimate the loss and survival of precious artifacts and narratives from different parts of Europe. This ecological approach offers a new perspective on the loss of cultural heritage, complementing past research. Their findings are published in the journal Science, with Mike Kestemont (University of Antwerp) and Folgert Karsdorp (KNAW Meertens Institute) as the main authors.

Comment: Is it possible that some of these missing manuscripts - English or otherwise - were intentionally destroyed, and still more weren't lost, they simply never existed in the first place?

Laura Knight-Jadczyk in Dark Ages and Inquisitions, Ancient and Modern - Or Why Things are Such a Mess On Our Planet and Humanity is on the Verge of Extinction writes:
Regarding the idea that ancient manuscripts were created out of whole cloth to support the questions of the thinkers of the Renaissance, as Europe emerged from the Dark Ages, I agree that this is certainly possible - even probable. The question is: was there some sort of memory of that ancient time that infused these ideas with life? Lee McIntyre writes:
The Dark Ages are one of the most intriguing periods of human history. They mark a nearly 600-year blank spot in the progress of human civilization in which the knowledge of antiquity almost completely disappeared from the West. It was a time when few people received any sort of education whatsoever, and life was governed by the superstitions and fears fueled by ignorance. (McIntyre, 2006)
Do any of us really 'remember' anything from 500 years ago other than what we are taught in history classes? Is there some kind of 'folk memory' of the Renaissance itself, for example? No, probably not. Can we rely on the story we are told about this, that some ancient manuscripts survived here and there? Possibly. But scientific analyses of these documents makes their provenance very questionable. Form criticism and other techniques also raise troubling questions about them. It's probably safer to just think that the thinkers of the Renaissance came to these ideas themselves - brute force cogitation - and the alleged ancient sources that 'thought the same things, asked the same questions' were just cooked up to give traditional validity to ideas that were in contradiction to the views of reality promoted by the Roman Church.
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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Arrow Up

UK commanders in Ukraine met neo-Nazi-linked national guard to 'deepen military cooperation'

Matt Kennard
Declassified UK
Tue, 15 Feb 2022 00:00 UTC
Brits in Kyiv
© NGUBritish commanders meet with senior officials from Ukraine’s National Guard in Kyiv
September 2021
Ukraine's National Guard says that in meeting last year the UK military agreed to start training its forces, which include a thousand-strong neo-Nazi unit. The UK Ministry of Defence disputes the claim.

Details and photos of the meeting in the capital, Kyiv, were posted in Ukrainian on the website of Ukraine's National Guard (NGU) last year.

Declassified understands the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) believed the September 2021 meeting to be private and should not have been publicised. There is no mention of the meeting in any UK records that are publicly available.

Three British commanders of Operation Orbital - the UK military's training mission in Ukraine - are pictured, alongside three NGU officers. They sit around a table taking notes. The MoD refused to give Declassified the names of the UK personnel who attended the meeting, citing operational and personnel security issues. However, the NGU report names Lt Col Andy Cox, deputy commander of Orbital, while two other British officers are pictured, one with his name tag prominently displayed.

Orbital, which was launched in 2015, has so far only trained Ukraine's regular armed forces. Expanding it to include the National Guard would be controversial due to sensitivities around the far-right sympathies of some of its units.
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Eye 1

The modern weaponization of our national security system is the lasting legacy of Barack Obama and Eric Holder

Sundance
The Last Refuge
Fri, 29 Oct 2021 00:00 UTC
ObamaHolder
© CNN.comFormer US President Barack Obama • Former Attorney General Eric Holder
In anticipation of the Tucker Carlson documentary The Patriot Purge: The True Story Behind 1/6, I have been requested to repost some lengthy research we presented about the Fourth Branch of Government. There is a distinct connection and similarity between how 9/11/01 was used and how the January 6th DC event is being used. That similarity is not accidental. In many ways what we are seeing is a replay by the same DC elements only they are two decades apart.

Barack Obama and Eric Holder did not create a weaponized DOJ and FBI; instead, what they did was take the preexisting system and retool it so the weapons only targeted one side of the political continuum. This point is where many people understandably get confused.

In the era shortly after 9/11, the DC national security apparatus was constructed to preserve continuity of government and simultaneously view all Americans as potential threats. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) were created specifically for this purpose.
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Chess

The dubious paternity of Ukraine's modern borders

David Stockman
Contra Corner blog
Thu, 17 Feb 2022 17:05 UTC
Russland badge
We do think, however, that the entire Ukrainian crisis is a Washington-confected con job. And we came to that conclusion without relying on a single scrap of information peddled by Russki propagandists appearing on Strategic Culture Foundation or Zero Hedge.


Comment: Neither of the sites he refers to are 'Russki propagandists'. But it's telling that even analysts who buy parts of the mainstream narrative see clearly through US lies.


Actually, we thought it up all by our lonesome! Well, we'll grant we did have a fair amount of help from Google, which insofar as we know works for the CIA, not the Russian SVR (foreign intelligence service).

In any event, at the very center of the crisis is the Washington claim that the rule of law and the sanctity of sovereign borders are on the line in Ukraine and that, therefore, Russia must not be allowed to encroach a single inch into sacrosanct Ukrainian territory.

Comment: For further insight into Ukraine and its recent history, see: The Saker interviews Dmitry Orlov

See also: What Poland Has to Hide About The Origins of World War II

Also check out SOTT radio's: NewsReal: Ukraine Gambit - US Attempting to Destroy Russia



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Better Earth

Incredible 5,000-year-old stone 'drum' found in prehistoric grave of 'cuddling' children

Chris Jewers
Daily Mail
Fri, 11 Feb 2022 02:03 UTC
prehistoric drum
The 5,000-year-old grave for three children, buried in an embrace with the eldest child holding the two youngest - whose hands were also touching - was unearthed in 2015 along with a carved stone drum, a chalk ball and a polished bone pin (pictured)
The discovery of an ancient burial ground where children were placed with sentimental objects by their parents has been hailed by the British Museum as the 'most important' discovery of pre-historic art in Britain in over a century.

The 5,000-year-old grave holding three children, buried in an embrace with the eldest child holding the two youngest — whose hands were also touching — was unearthed in 2015 in Burton Agnes, in East Yorkshire.

Archaeologists also discovered a carved stone drum, a chalk ball and a polished bone pin, with the 'talismanic' drum in particular being celebrated for its significance.

Seemingly created as a sculpture or talisman rather than a functional musical instrument, the object is one of only four known examples from a time when Stonehenge was only just starting to be built.


Comment: There's good reason to believe that Stonehenge is actually thousands of years older.


Comment: See also: And check out SOTT radio's:


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