Welcome to Sott.net
Wed, 29 Sep 2021
The World for People who Think

Secret History
Map

Colosseum

Pömmelte: Germany's 'Stonehenge'

Alexander Freund
Deutsche Welle
Wed, 08 Apr 2020 12:00 UTC
Pömmelte

Pömmelte
Starting in April, an about-4,000-year-old settlement will be excavated to provide insights into Early Bronze Age life. Settlements of this size have not yet been found at the related henges in the British Isles.

Pömmelte is a ring-shaped sanctuary with earth walls, ditches and wooden piles that is located in the northeastern part of Germany, south of Magdeburg. The site is very much reminiscent of the world-famous monument Stonehenge, and it is likely that the people there performed very similar rituals to those of their counterparts in what is now Britain 4,300 years ago.

In the immediate vicinity of the sanctuary, archaeologists from the State Office for Monument Conservation and Archaeology, together with fellow experts from the University of Halle, have found numerous remains of a settlement going back thousands of years during their last two excavation campaigns there. Starting in April, this settlement is to be uncovered as completely as possible.

Comment: See also:

      Read More...
Blue Planet

Largest group of Early Neolithic pottery ever found in London reveals beginnings of farming


Heritage Daily
Sat, 11 Apr 2020 12:00 UTC
pottery
© MOLA
A new radiocarbon dating technique, reported today in Nature, has been used to confirm the age of the most noteworthy group of Early Neolithic pottery ever found in London.

Our archaeologists found the extraordinary trove, comprising 436 fragments from at least 24 separate vessels and weighing nearly 6.5 kilos, while excavating at Principal Place in Shoreditch - the location of the new Amazon UK HQ - for Brookfield Properties.

It is extremely rare to find archaeology from this time in central London - let alone still in situ - and only a few individual fragments of pottery and stone axes have been uncovered to date, so the find fills a key gap in London's prehistory.

Using their brand new radiocarbon dating technique on traces of milk fats extracted from within the fabric of the pottery fragments, researchers from the University of Bristol were able to narrow the timeframe for the pottery collection to a window of just 138 years, to around 3,600BC.

Comment: See also:

      Read More...
People 2

Rheumatic diseases: The cost of survival during the Little Ice Age

University of the Basque Country
Archaeology News Network
Sat, 11 Apr 2020 18:00 UTC
skeletons
© UPV/EHU
One of the skeletons found at the medieval site of San Miguel de Ereñozar
Between the 14th and 19th centuries, there was a period of climate instability known as the Little Ice Age that mainly affected the northern hemisphere. This period saw an increase in storm activity and a fall in temperature of between 1º and 2º C, which, despite not being particularly severe, had devastating consequences. The mild climate throughout the previous centuries, which had brought about considerable population growth, turned into a harsher one that led to harvest failures and the death of animals; in short, hunger. And with the famines, the health of the populations became weaker and diseases spread. It is sufficient to recall the black death pandemic that ravaged Europe in the 14th century, resulting in the death of about one-third of the population.

Did the climate change and resulting diseases influence human genetics? In today's European population, the mitochondrial DNA lineage that is transmitted matrilinearly is more frequently of the H haplogroup. Why is that?

Comment: See also:

      Read More...
Eye 2

The secret history of Fort Detrick, the CIA's base for mind control experiments and biological warfare

Stephen Kinzer
Politico
Sun, 15 Sep 2019 00:00 UTC
Building 470 on the campus of Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md. Building 470 on the campus of Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md.
© AP Photo/Timothy Jacobsen
Building 470 on the campus of Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md.
Today, it's a cutting-edge lab. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was the center of the U.S. government's darkest experiments.

In 1954, a prison doctor in Kentucky isolated seven black inmates and fed them "double, triple and quadruple" doses of LSD for 77 days straight. No one knows what became of the victims. They may have died without knowing they were part of the CIA's highly secretive program to develop ways to control minds — a program based out of a little-known Army base with a dark past, Fort Detrick.

Suburban sprawl has engulfed Fort Detrick, an Army base 50 miles from Washington in the Maryland town of Frederick. Seventy-six years ago, however, when the Army selected Detrick as the place to develop its super-secret plans to wage germ warfare, the area around the base looked much different. In fact, it was chosen for its isolation. That's because Detrick, still thriving today as the Army's principal base for biological research and now encompassing nearly 600 buildings on 13,000 acres, was for years the nerve center of the CIA's hidden chemical and mind control empire.

Detrick is today one of the world's cutting-edge laboratories for research into toxins and antitoxins, the place where defenses are developed against every plague, from crop fungus to Ebola. Its leading role in the field is widely recognized. For decades, though, much of what went on at the base was a closely held secret. Directors of the CIA mind control program MK-ULTRA, which used Detrick as a key base, destroyed most of their records in 1973. Some of its secrets have been revealed in declassified documents, through interviews and as a result of congressional investigations. Together, those sources reveal Detrick's central role in MK-ULTRA and in the manufacture of poisons intended to kill foreign leaders.


Comment: See also:

Comment: See:

      Read More...
Blue Planet

Ancient skulls from the Yucatán Peninsula show striking diversity of Early America Settlers

Alejandra Manjarrez
The Scientist
Tue, 07 Apr 2020 18:00 UTC
Quintana Roo
© EUGENIO ACEVEZ
Underwater speleologist Jerónimo Avilés dives inside the Chan Hol cave in Quintana Roo, Mexico.
Each year, more than 1 million people visit Xplor, a subaquatic theme park located a few kilometers south of Playa del Carmen, a popular tourist town on the Caribbean coast of southeast Mexico. Visitors swim in submerged caves, tear through the jungle in all-terrain vehicles, and zip line on hammocks — all of them likely oblivious to the human remains locked away in a laboratory on site and the scientists who are scrutinizing those remains for clues to the people and animals that lived in this very region around 10,000 years ago.

This field laboratory, associated with the Museo del Desierto in Coahuila, Mexico, is led by Jerónimo Avilés, an underwater speleologist and director of the Instituto de la Prehistoria de América AC. It's the first place where items from underwater archaeological discoveries by his team are analyzed before they are sent to other laboratories in Mexico. In one room, for example, fossils go through a dehumidification process to prevent any fungal colonization, not uncommon in such a tropical climate.

The lab mostly houses 3-D printed replicas of skeletal remains found in the submerged caves in the state of Quintana Roo. Among them are copies of the skulls of humans who inhabited the Yucatán Peninsula during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, roughly 13,000-8,000 years ago.

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

      Read More...
Cut

Oldest ever piece of string was made by Neanderthals 50,000 years ago

Michael Le Page
New Scientist
Thu, 09 Apr 2020 12:00 UTC
string
© M-H Moncel
The string is extremely fine but can be seen under the microscope
A piece of 50,000-year-old string found in a cave in France is the oldest ever discovered. It suggests that Neanderthals knew how to twist fibres together to make cords - and, if so, they might have been able to craft ropes, clothes, bags and nets.

"None can be done without that initial step," says Bruce Hardy at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. "Twisted fibres are a foundational technology."

His team has been excavating the Abri du Maras caves in south-east France where Neanderthals lived for long periods. Three metres below today's surface, in a layer that is between 52,000 and 41,000 years old, it found a stone flake, a sharp piece of rock used as an early stone tool.

Comment: Whilst in recent years evidence has come to light showing Neanderthals to have been slightly more sophisticated than once thought by mainstream science, it would seem they never came close to humans in terms of innovation, creativity and social cohesion, and so it's highly unlikely that, as stated in the article, Neanderthals taught humans how to make string. As Laura Knight-Jadczyk writes in The Golden Age, Psychopathy and the Sixth Extinction:
We can examine the society of Neanderthal to see what Cro-Magnon was distinctly not! Proto-human gangs - Neanderthals - were small, cohesive bands dominated by violence. The strong dominated the weak, but they needed to be cohesive to survive. It was rude and vulgar competition and conflict for resources, both food and females. The cohesion was enforced, a sort of rule by thuggery. Such an environment is not conducive to any kind of innovation such as the creation and development of tools or the ideas that would lead to tools. Studying the history of Neanderthal man suggests that this was, indeed, life in the Neanderthal camp. Two hundred thousand years of the same old recycled tool kits with never an innovation.

Innovative individuals, as we know them in our own societies, are very often not physically strong or aggressive. Perhaps they think because they are less able to act in the world physically or perhaps they become less aggressive because they think so much. Either way, such individuals would not survive in a rule-by-thugs society because the thugs would not only steal their innovations from them, (and be unable to reproduce them themselves) but would not feed them either, so such a dog-eat-dog society is not a place where creativity and innovation can flourish.

Cro-Magnon societies included communal hearths, communal activities, and the sites show that areas were set aside where groups of people performed different tasks for the good of the group as a whole. And thus it is suggested by Marxist social anthropologist, Yuri Semenov, that communism (the real kind as practiced by the early Christians, not the Soviet version which was totalitarianism with the name of 'communism' attached) was something practiced by the earliest true humans - the thing that made them human, or at least expressed their humanity - and something which was the essence of life itself.
See also:

      Read More...
Blue Planet

5,000-year-old "luxury" ostrich eggs reveal unknown interconnectedness of ancient world


University of Bristol
Thu, 09 Apr 2020 17:59 UTC
ostrich egg

Decorated eggs from the Isis Tomb
An international team of specialists, led by the University of Bristol, is closer to cracking a 5,000-year-old mystery surrounding the ancient trade and production of decorated ostrich eggs.

Long before Fabergé, ornate ostrich eggs were highly prized by the elites of Mediterranean civilisations during the Bronze and Iron Ages, but to date little has been known about the complex supply chain behind these luxury goods.

Examining ostrich eggs from the British Museum's collection, the team, led by Bristol's Dr Tamar Hodos, were able to reveal secrets about their origin and how and where they were made. Using state-of-the-art scanning electron microscopy, Dr Caroline Cartwright, Senior Scientist at the British Museum was able to investigate the eggs' chemical makeup to pinpoint their origins and study minute marks that reveal how they were made.

Comment: See also:

      Read More...
Info

Early Amazonian humans created 'forest islands'


University of Exeter
Wed, 08 Apr 2020 19:44 UTC
Forest Islands Amazon
© Umberto Lombardo
Forest islands seen from above.
The earliest human inhabitants of the Amazon created thousands of artificial forest islands as they tamed wild plants to grow food, a new study shows.

The discovery of the mounds is the latest evidence to show the extensive impact people had on the area. From their arrival 10,000 years ago they transformed the landscape when they began cultivating manioc and squash.

This led to the creation of 4,700 of the forest islands in what is now Llanos de Moxos in northern Bolivia, the team has found. This savannah area floods from December to March and is extremely dry from July to October, but the mounds remain above the water level during the rainy season allowing trees to grow on them. The mounds promoted landscape diversity, and show that small-scale communities began to shape the Amazon 8,000 years earlier than previously thought.

The research confirms this part of the Amazon is one of the earliest centres of plant domestication in the world. Using microscopic plant silica bodies, called phytoliths, found well preserved in tropical forests, experts have documented the earliest evidence found in the Amazon of manioc -10,350 years ago, squash - 10,250 years ago, and maize - 6,850 years ago. The plants grown on the forest islands were chosen because they were carbohydrate-rich and easy to cook, and they probably provided a considerable part of the calories consumed by the first inhabitants of the region, supplemented by fish and some meat.

The study, in the journal Nature, was conducted by Umberto Lombardo and Heinz Veit from the University of Bern, Jose Iriarte and Lautaro Hilbert from the University of Exeter, Javier Ruiz-Pérez from Pompeu Fabra University and José Capriles from Pennsylvania State University.
      Read More...
Blue Planet

Complex brain surgery found in "spectacular" high status ProtoByzantine grave site

Adelphi University
Eureka Alert
Tue, 07 Apr 2020 12:00 UTC
trephination
© Anagnostis P. Agelarakis/Adelphi University
Ectocranial view of palaeopathological specimen: a) red arrow points to orifice on the mastoid process, and b) surgical preparation dimensions peripheral to trephination.
New research from Adelphi University has revealed the first forensically-assessed archeological discovery of remains of a group of domineering mounted archer-lancers and their kin of the Eastern Roman Empire from the turbulent ProtoByzantine period, which spanned the fourth to seventh centuries.

Ten skeletal remains -- four women and six men likely of high social standing -- were discovered in the Paliokastro site on Thasos island in Greece. Their bones illuminated their physical activities, traumas, and even a complex form of brain surgery.

"The burial place and architecture of the funerary monumental church and the construction of the graves is spectacular," said lead researcher and anthropologist Anagnostis Agelarakis, PhD, who added that it indicates the high social standing of the individuals buried there.

Comment: See also:

      Read More...
Blackbox

'Serpent Mound' in Peru?


Sputnik News
Thu, 09 Apr 2020 19:29 UTC
Snake Mount Peru
© Twitter/@NewsBop
Southern Peru is famous for UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site the Nazca Lines, which represent a group of giant and ancient geoglyphs. However, something even more mysterious and unexplainable have now been spotted close to the site by one curious Google Earth user.

Some cryptic shapes and patterns were spotted by Google Earth enthusiast 30-40 kilometres North East from the famous Nazca Lines in Peru. The user published a video of his mysterious discovery on YouTube, and the image immediately attracted thousands of views in just several days, with observers rushing to express their astonishment with the finding.

The patterns spotted by the Google Earth admirer included strange "football pitch"-sized circles in a deserted mountain ridge nearby Uchumarca, as well as a cryptic snake-like structure, which he described as a "serpent". He also noted in the video that it was difficult to understand whether the pattern was occurring naturally or was a human-designed structure.
"The 'serpent' just really jumped right out at me", the Google Earth user wrote on YouTube after his video was published. "It's either a very large natural formation or a manmade artificial site like the serpent mound in Ohio. Other than that - I got nothin'. Very interesting".
      Read More...
Amazon Smile
Revolt! T-shirts