Secret HistoryS


Colosseum

Best of the Web: JFK's death marked the end of the American Republic

Image
© Unknown
On occasion of the publication of his latest book, German author Mathias Broeckers talks about the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963, which he sees as a coup d'etat that was never rolled back.

Lars Schall: Mr. Broeckers, a writer who authors a book about the assassination of John F. Kennedy that does not follow the verdict of official history faces the problem of being condemned on an instant basis as a "conspiracy theorist" who engages in "conspiracy theories." May I ask you at the beginning of this interview to explain to our readers that those critics - consciously or unconsciously - are acting exactly according to the "playbook" of the CIA?

Mathias Broeckers: In January 1967, shortly after Jim Garrison in New Orleans had started his prosecution of the CIA backgrounds of the murder, the CIA published a memo to all its stations, suggesting the use of the term "conspiracy theorists" for everyone criticizing the Warren Report findings. Until then the press and the public mostly used the term "assassination theories" when it came to alternative views of the "lone nut" Lee Harvey Oswald. But with this memo this changed and very soon "conspiracy theories" became what it is until today: a term to smear, denounce and defame anyone who dares to speak about any crime committed by the state, military or intelligence services. Before Edward Snowden anyone claiming a kind of total surveillance of internet and phone traffic would have been named a conspiracy nut; today everyone knows better.

Info

Ancient mound in Greece fuels heady speculation

Alexander the Great
© historyofmacedonia.org
Athens - Greece's Culture Ministry has warned against "overbold" speculation that an ancient artificial mound being excavated could contain a royal Macedonian grave or even Alexander the Great.

Site archaeologist Aikaterini Peristeri has voiced hopes of finding "a significant individual or individuals" within.

Greek websites enthused that it could hold the long-sought grave of 4th-century B.C. warrior-king Alexander the Great - thought to lie in Egypt.

A Culture Ministry statement Thursday said the partly-excavated mound has yielded a "very remarkable" marble-faced wall from the late 4th century B.C.

It is an impressive 500 meters (yards) long and three meters high.

But the ministry warned it would be "overbold" to link the site near ancient Amphipolis, 370 miles (600 kilometers) north of Athens, with "historic personages" before the excavation is completed.

Source: Associated Press

Info

Archaeologists uncover first use of spices in European cuisine

Spice
© (left) Sannse/Creative Commons; (top right): Saul et al., PLoS ONE (2013); (bottom right): Hardyplants/ Wikimedia CommonsOld spice. Discovery of tiny bits of plant-produced silica called phytoliths (upper right) from the seeds (right) of the garlic mustard plant (Alliaria petiolata, left) suggest that Stone Age cooks were using spices up to 6100 years ago.
Bits of silica stuck in charred residues scraped from pots reveal that chefs in northern Europe were cooking with spices at least 6 millennia ago. Although researchers have previously noted the use of strong-flavored ingredients such as onions by cooks in this region during the same era, the new find is the first to report the use of an ingredient that didn't also have nutritional value - which means that the spice, ground seeds from a plant called garlic mustard, was almost certainly used solely for its flavor.

The clues researchers used in the new study are microscopic bits of silica called phytoliths (from Greek, meaning "plant stones"). Plants produce these rugged structures from dissolved minerals in ground water that is pulled into their roots and then distributed throughout the organism, says Hayley Saul, a bioarchaeologist at the University of York in the United Kingdom. While some phytoliths are deposited inside a plant's cells, others are created in spaces between cells or in special tissues. In many cases, phytoliths are characteristic of certain species, and can, due to their minerallike nature, persist long after a plant's soft tissues have decomposed.

Cow Skull

First colonisers of the Faroe Islands were not the Vikings

Image
© Unknown
The Faroe Islands were colonised much earlier than previously believed, and it wasn't by the Vikings, according to new research.

New archaeological evidence places human colonisation in the 4th to 6th centuries AD, at least 300-500 years earlier than previously demonstrated.

The research, directed by Dr Mike J Church from Durham University and Símun V Arge from the National Museum of the Faroe Islands as part of the multidisciplinary project "Heart of the Atlantic", is published in the Quaternary Science Reviews.

The research challenges the nature, scale and timing of human settlement of the wider North Atlantic region and has implications for the colonisation of similar island groups across the world.

The Faroes were the first stepping stone beyond Shetland for the dispersal of European people across the North Atlantic that culminated on the shores of continental North America in the 11th century AD, about 500 years before Columbus made his famous voyage.

Map

Oldest globe to depict the New World may have been discovered

Engraved Globe
© The Washington Map SocietyEurope, North Africa and the Middle East on the meticulously engraved globe.
View Gallery
An Austrian collector has found what may be the oldest globe, dated 1504, to depict the New World, engraved with immaculate detail on two conjoined halves of ostrich eggs.

The globe, about the size of a grapefruit, is labeled in Latin and includes what were considered exotic territories such as Japan, Brazil and Arabia. North America is depicted as a group of scattered islands. The globe's lone sentence, above the coast of Southeast Asia, is "Hic Sunt Dracones."

" 'Here be dragons,' a very interesting sentence," said Thomas Sander, editor of the Portolan, the journal of the Washington Map Society. The journal published a comprehensive analysis of the globe Monday by collector Stefaan Missinne. "In early maps, you would see images of sea monsters; it was a way to say there's bad stuff out there."

The only other map or globe on which this specific phrase appears is what can arguably be called the egg's twin: the copper Hunt-Lenox Globe, dated around 1510 and housed by the Rare Book Division of the New York Public Library. Before the egg, the copper globe had been the oldest one known to show the New World. The two contain remarkable similarities.

After comparing the two globes, Missinne concluded that the Hunt-Lenox Globe is a cast of the engraved ostrich egg. Many minute details, such as the lines and contours of the egg's territories, oceans and script, match those on the well-studied Hunt-Lenox Globe.

The egg's shape is slightly irregular, while the copper globe is a perfect sphere. Also, the markings around the equator of the egg, where the two halves are joined, appear quite muddled.

Info

Oldest 'bog body' found with skin intact in Ireland

Bog Body
© Ossory, Laois, and LeinsterCashel Man, discovered in central Ireland, is thought to have been a young king who was ritualistically sacrificed.
Archaeologists have unearthed the remains of a 4,000-year-old man preserved in an Irish peat bog, marking the oldest European body ever found with skin still intact.

The cool, waterlogged conditions of Northern European bogs (a type of wetland) create low-oxygen, highly acidic environments ideal for body preservation. As a result, hundreds of "bog bodies" dating back thousands of years have been uncovered in the region, but many have shriveled down to mostly skeletons and tend to be closer to 2,000 years old.

A resident of central Ireland's County Laois came across the well-preserved "Cashel Man" - named for the bog he was found in - while milling for peat moss, which is used for a variety of farm purposes, including animal-bedding and field conditioning.

Having realized that he had come across a human body, the resident notified archaeologists at the National Museum of Ireland, who later conducted a formal excavation of the site. A summary of the dig appeared in the latest edition of the Irish journal Ossory, Laois, and Leinster.

"All that was visible to start with was a pair of legs below the knees, and a torso," Eamonn Kelly, an archaeologist at the National Museum and lead excavator of the project, wrote in the report. "The body appeared to be naked. Later, it was possible to work out that the torso had been damaged by the milling machine, which also removed the head, neck and left arm."

Info

The forgotten political feud that spawned the Jersey Devil

Jersey Devil
© Illustration by Frank Cecala/The Star-Ledger
Everyone knows the story of the Jersey Devil. In 1735, a witch named Mother Leeds gave birth to a hideous "child" with a horse-like head, cloven hooves, a long tail and bat-like wings. It yelped menacingly at the ragged, dull-witted family, then flew up and out the chimney to spend eternity harassing anyone who encountered it along the lonely back roads of the Pine Barrens.

Unfortunately, everything you think you know about the Jersey Devil is wrong. It is not a monster of the woods, but of politics. It is not a devilish horse haunting our present, but a scapegoat lost to our memory.

The Leeds family does occupy the center of the story, but they were not stereotyped, superstitious rural people. They were politically active religious pioneers, authors and publishers. We have forgotten that the Jersey Devil legend - originally the Leeds Devil - began as a cruel taunt against them, not because of a monstrous birth, but because they had the cultural misfortune of joining the wrong side.

Daniel Leeds came to America in 1677 and settled in Burlington. He published an almanac and was promptly attacked by his Quaker neighbors over his use of astrology in it. Undeterred, he continued and, despite himself being a Quaker, they called him "evil."

Briefcase

Legal battle erupts over where to rebury Richard III

Image
© Unknown
He's been deposed, reviled, buried and dug up, and now a new battle looms over England's King Richard III.

A British High Court judge on Friday granted a group of Richard's relatives permission to challenge plans to rebury the 15th-century monarch in the central England city of Leicester, where his remains were found last year.

Judge Charles Haddon-Cave said the Plantagenet Alliance could take action against the government and the University of Leicester, though he hoped the dispute could be settled out of court.

"In my view, it would be unseemly, undignified and unedifying to have a legal tussle over these royal remains," the judge said, urging the opposing sides "to avoid embarking on the (legal) Wars of the Roses Part 2."

Info

Early humans lived in China 1.7 million years ago

Homo-Erectus
© Thomas Roche | Wikimedia CommonsHomo erectus, an ancestor to modern humans, arose at least 1.8 million years ago. Around that time in the fossil record, archaeologists see big shifts in brain size and body size in ancient hominins.
An extinct species of tool-making humans apparently occupied a vast area in China as early as 1.7 million years ago, researchers say.

The human lineage evolved in Africa, with now-extinct species of humans dispersing away from their origin continent more than a million years before modern humans did. Scientists would like to learn more about when and where humans went to better understand what drove human evolution.

Researchers investigated the Nihewan Basin, which lies in a mountainous region about 90 miles (150 kilometers) west of Beijing. It holds more than 60 sites from the Stone Age, with thousands of stone tools found there since 1972 - relatively simple types, such as stone flakes altogether known as the Oldowan.

Researchers suspect these artifacts belonged to Homo erectus, "thought to be ancestral to Homo sapiens," Hong Ao, a paleomagnetist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Xi'an, told LiveScience.

The exact age of these sites was long uncertain. To find out, Ao and his colleagues analyzed the earth above, below and in which stone tools at the Shangshazui site in the Nihewan Basin were found. The tools in question were stone blades potentially used for cutting or scraping.

Info

Oldest rock art in North America revealed

Rock Art
© University of ColoradoResearchers found that petroglyphs discovered in western Nevada are at least 10,500 years old, making them the oldest rock art ever dated in North America.
On the west side of Nevada's dried-up Winnemucca Lake, there are several limestone boulders with deep, ancient carvings; some resemble trees and leaves, whereas others are more abstract designs that look like ovals or diamonds in a chain.

The true age of this rock art had not been known, but a new analysis suggests these petroglyphs are the oldest North America, dating back to between 10,500 and 14,800 years ago.

Though Winnemucca Lake is now barren, at other times in the past it was so full of water the lake would have submerged the rocks where the petroglyphs were found and spilled its excess contents over Emerson Pass to the north.