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Why did Stone Age villagers so far from the sea suffer "surfers ear"?

Colin Barras
New Scientist
Mon, 04 Jun 2018 12:00 UTC
Mystery of why Stone Age villagers spent so much time underwater Abnormal ear bones are a hallmark of time spent underwater
© Ozgur Ayaydin/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Mystery of why Stone Age villagers spent so much time underwater Abnormal ear bones are a hallmark of time spent underwater
It's a Stone Age mystery: why did one-third of the people living in an ancient village far from the sea develop a condition typically seen today in avid surfers?

There is no obvious answer - but the weird prevalence of "surfer's ear" in the ancient community might shed new light on the way humans lived just before the farming revolution.

Körtik Tepe, a site in eastern Turkey, was first occupied between 12,400 and 11,250 years ago. This was a time of massive social change, when roaming hunter-gatherers first began living in permanent villages.


Comment: Of Flash Frozen Mammoths and Cosmic Catastrophes


We know very little about the lives of those early villagers, other than that they continued to hunt and gather food rather than farming the land. To find out more, a team led by Yılmaz Erdal at Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey, examined 128 skeletons buried at the site.

Comment: Interestingly, according to Wiki:
Irritation from cold wind and water exposure causes the bone surrounding the ear canal to develop lumps of new bony growth which constrict the ear canal. Where the ear canal is actually blocked by this condition, water and wax can become trapped and give rise to infection. The condition is so named due to its prevalence among cold water surfers. Warm water surfers are also at risk for exostosis due to the evaporative cooling caused by wind and the presence of water in the ear canal.

[...]

The majority of patients present in their mid-30s to late 40s. This is likely due to a combination of the slow growth of the bone and the decreased participation in activities associated with surfer's ear past the 30's. However surfer's ear is possible at any age and is directly proportional to the amount of time spent in cold, wet, windy weather without adequate protection.[3]
So it's not just exposure to cold water, but also wind, and could that include rain? Because as the article notes, great changes were afoot at that time, changes that led people all over the planet to abandon hunter gatherer lifestyles and begin to adopt agriculture. Mounting evidence is showing that devastating climate shifts were occurring during this period, particularly planetary wide cooling, and, perhaps, this is one clue that could help solve the mystery:

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Boat

Have humans been sailing the seas for a million years?

Colin Barras
New Scientist
Wed, 30 May 2018 12:00 UTC
painting sea
© Simon Pemberton
Have humans been sailors for a million years?

IT WASN'T supposed to end this way. The 23-metre-long Nale Tasih 1, made with Stone Age tools and materials, was meant to recreate one of the truly epic prehistoric journeys: the first human crossing from Indonesia to Australia some 65,000 years ago. The voyage, in 1998, should have taken more than a week, but water sloshing around the crew's feet on the first day was a clear sign. The team had to tow the doomed raft back to shore.

The very first humans to travel the oceans would have faced a daunting task, both physical and mental. By attempting to recreate their voyages, experimental archaeologists are helping to define the scale of that challenge. The Nale Tasih 1 expedition, however, was meant to help prove a grander theory. Its leaders say humans have been building and using watercraft to reach new lands for the best part of a million years. In other words, early humans - potentially including Neanderthals, Denisovans and Homo erectus - weren't diehard landlubbers. They were mariners.

It is still a minority view, but one with profound implications. The ancient mariners theory could completely change our perspective on how early humans behaved and communicated with each other.

Comment: When we consider that the 'Out of Africa' theory is still only a theory and that the planet may have been very different to how it is today, it's clear that this issue of whether human's were capable sea-farers becomes a lot more interesting:

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Star of David

'Demographic threat': The real reason Israel turned the Gaza Strip into an open-air prison

Justin Schwegel
Mondoweiss
Mon, 18 Jun 2018 11:55 UTC
Gaza greenhouse roses
Erase memory and you wash away the blood from the perpetrator's hands, you undo the done deed, make it disappear from history. Erase memories of atrocities and you tempt future perpetrators with immunity

- Miraslov Volf
In recent weeks, as Israeli bombs and artillery have slammed into the tiny strip of land that is home to nearly 2 million Palestinians in Gaza, the propaganda war has been raging with equal vigor. Israeli spokespersons have consistently denied any blame for civilian victimsand even claimed that civilians are acting as human shields for Hamas operations, blaming the victims of this humanitarian catastrophe for their own suffering.

While it will take time and independent investigation to determine if the Israeli Defense Forces' claims that Hamas is using civilians as human shields turn out to be as baseless as past IDF human shielding allegations against Hamas and Hezbollah, other claims made by Israel supporters can be easily dispelled now.
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Dig

1700 year old mummified Hun warrior finally in museum with his bow and 'whistling arrows'


Siberian Times
Tue, 12 Jun 2018 12:00 UTC
siberian archer hun
© Kokorya Museum
'Keep this head, do not give it to anybody, and one day your museum will be famous'.
Mummified archer turns up in remote museum after locals refused to hand him over to the Hermitage in St Petersburg.

The ancient warrior was buried in fur and lay on a wooden 'bed' in his burial chamber at a remote Altai Mountains site near the modern day village of Kokorya, some 314 kilometres south of regional capital Gorno-Altaisk. Next to the warrior was placed his weaponry.

His bow in its heyday was some two metres in length; alongside its remnants were half a dozen well-preserved arrow shafts made of birch.

They were painted in black and white - so he knew which one to pull from the fur-lined quiver for each prey.

The arrows originally had iron tips.

Comment: See also:

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Smoking

3500 year old pipe reveals Americans were smoking tobacco much earlier than previously thought

Michael Price
Science Mag
Fri, 15 Jun 2018 16:50 UTC
Scientists found 3500-year-old traces of nicotine inside this limestone pipe.
© Stephen Carmody
Scientists found 3500-year-old traces of nicotine inside this limestone pipe.
In the late 1930s, archaeologists in northern Alabama rushed to excavate a now-submerged Native American site at the confluence of the Flint and Tennessee rivers, racing the rising tide brought on by the newly built Guntersville Dam. Dozens of artifacts were discovered, then sealed up in paper bags and kept at the Alabama State Repository. There they gathered dust until 70 years later, when a team of archaeologists and chemists came looking for a particular item noted in the repository catalog: FS74, an engraved smoking pipe or "medicine tube," carved from limestone.

With the support of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, the researchers had been examining ancient Native American pipes for years, using a chemical analysis technique called mass spectrometry to look for traces of plant material left behind. Their hunt, which was meant to shed light on the religious and ritualistic history of smoking, had already yielded tobacco and jimsonweed residue in pipes dating back a few hundred years.

Comment: One could assume that since they had created a tool for the use of tobacco that they may have actually been using it for much longer. For more on the history and beneficial properties of smoking organic tobacco, see: Also check out SOTT radio's:

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Star of David

Israel's secret history of assassinations

Rod Such
The Electronic Intifada
Wed, 13 Jun 2018 00:00 UTC
Meir Dagan
© Middle East Eye
Former head of Mossad, Meir Dagan, principle source for "Rise and Kill First"
Israeli television recently aired a video of two Israeli soldiers filming themselves in the act of shooting a Palestinian protester at the Gaza boundary while cheering. Filming one's own crimes against humanity - shooting Palestinians for sport - suggests a sense of security in never being held accountable.

Even more evidence of this impunity is apparent in Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations by veteran Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman, staff writer for The New York Times Magazine.

Prosecutors at the International Criminal Court might want to consider this book Exhibit A if Israeli government and military officials are ever indicted for war crimes. It contains open admissions of guilt in plotting and executing extralegal assassinations in violation of international law.

"Since World War II, Israel has assassinated more people than any other country in the Western world," Bergman writes. In many cases, these so-called targeted killings over the last two decades also involved the deaths of nearly a thousand bystanders, according to Bergman's calculations - those numbers, however, fail to include the tens of thousands killed in overt acts of war and collective punishment that mostly go unmentioned in this book.
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SOTT Logo Radio

The Truth Perspective: Lord of the Underworld: The Secret Life of Carl Jung


Sott.net
Sat, 16 Jun 2018 16:00 UTC
carl jung

C. G. Jung
Carl Jung is a giant of 20th century history and thought, widely regarded as a pioneer of the psychology of the unconscious. His defection from Freud and his ideas like the archetypes of the unconscious are widely known, even if many have not read his works. But there is a hidden side to the man that few are aware of. From visions of the gods to an acceptance of polygamy and a plan to revitalize civilization by returning to the paganism of the past, Jung privately held some ideas that don't appear in his published works - and which may come to many as a shock.

Today on the Truth Perspective we'll be taking a closer look at the hidden Jung: his encounter with the deranged Otto Gross, his libertine views on sexuality, his modelling of psychoanalysis on ancient mystery cult initiations, his interest in mediumship, and his trance-induced visions of the underworld. If you thought you know Jung, chances are you didn't. Tune Saturday, June 16, 12 pm EDT.

Running Time: 01:29:45

Download: OGG, MP3


Listen live, chat, and call in to future shows on the SOTT Radio Network!
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Dig

Genetic studies show previous models of ancient populations in the Americas as 'unrealistically simple'


Ancient Origins
Sat, 16 Jun 2018 15:00 UTC
ancient migration north america
© Page Museum/Travis S./CC BY-NC 2.0
First Americans, photo of mural in the Page Museum, Los Angeles
A new genetic study of ancient individuals in the Americas and their contemporary descendants finds that two populations that diverged from one another 18,000 to 15,000 years ago remained apart for millennia before mixing again. This historic "re-convergence" occurred before or during their expansion to the southern continent.

The study, reported in the journal Science, challenges previous research suggesting that the first people in the Americas split into northern and southern branches, and that the southern branch alone gave rise to all ancient populations in Central and South America.
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Water

'Enhanced interrogation': It was only torture when the Commies did it

James Henry
WhoWhatWhy
Thu, 14 Jun 2018 17:23 UTC
waterboarding
© Getty Images
Back when the existential competition between the communist USSR and the capitalist USA was reaching its fevered pitch, the CIA published a report on Communist bloc interrogation techniques - which it denounced as "police tactics which would not be condoned in a democratic country."

The 1956 CIA study was commissioned amid Cold War hysteria surrounding reports of the Communists' seeming ability to "brainwash" prisoners - coaxing them to "confess" to all manner of things that were untrue.

"The Communists," the report's authors explain, "do not look upon these assaults as 'torture.'" Instead, interrogators, "in a typical legalistic manner," use methods that allow them to conform to Communist theory which demands that "no force or torture be used in extracting information from prisoners."

What were those nefarious techniques favored by the Communists? Well, they were not the waterboarding, forced rectal feeding, sexual threats, or mock burials almost universally considered torture that were deployed during the Bush-Cheney administration's "enhanced interrogation" program.

Instead, the Communists' "brain washing" featured some of the CIA's milder (still terrible) interrogation techniques, including the systematic use of stress positions, "isolation, anxiety, fatigue, lack of sleep, uncomfortable temperatures, and chronic hunger" - with the ultimate goal of making the prisoner "docile and compliant," according to the 1956 report titled: "Brainwashing: From A Psychological Viewpoint."

The Communist interrogation regime was designed with the goal of "breaking the will" of prisoners, and to get high-profile prisoners to admit to their own guilt - regardless of actual culpability - during "show trials" and the like.

"But these [Soviet] methods do constitute torture," the CIA's author declares, "and physical coercion should never be considered otherwise [emphasis added]."

Comment: They were right, such tactics would not be condoned in any real democratic country. So what does that say about the U.S.?

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Hammer

Recent geological study suggests humans traversed Alaska's southern coast to spread into the Americas


Ancient Origins
Thu, 31 May 2018 00:00 UTC
Rock analysis migration americas
© Jason Briner
University at Buffalo Ph.D. candidate Alia Lesnek works at Suemez Island.
When and how did the first people come to the Americas?

The conventional story says that the earliest settlers came via Siberia, crossing the now-defunct Bering land bridge on foot and trekking through Canada when an ice-free corridor opened up between massive ice sheets toward the end of the last ice age.

But with recent archaeological evidence casting doubt on this thinking, scientists are seeking new explanations. One dominant, new theory: The first Americans took a coastal route along Alaska's Pacific border to enter the continent.

A new geological study provides compelling evidence to support this hypothesis.
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