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8,500-year-old skull with traces of trepanation discovered in central Turkey

Leman Altuntaş
Arkeonews Net
Sat, 23 Dec 2023 02:17 UTC
Ancient Skull
© Anadolu Agency
Traces of trepanation (skull drilling operation) were found on a skull found in the 9,000-year-old Çatalhöyük, near the modern city of Konya in central Turkey.

Millennia before the rise of Mesopotamian cities to the south, the proto-city Çatalhöyük thrived in central Anatolia. Sprawled over 34 acres and home to as many as 8,000 people, it was the metropolis of its day. People lived in this community continuously for almost 2,000 years.

In their statement to the Anadolu Agency (AA), archaeologists said that they came across an interesting grave containing 7 individuals during the excavations last year.

During the studies carried out on human skeletons excavated on the floor of a house, a hole with a diameter of 2.5 centimeters was found on the skull bones of a young male individual.

Çatalhöyük Excavation head and Anadolu University Faculty Member Associate Professor Ali Umut Türkcan said in his statement;
There has been a settlement throughout 16 stratifications. It is a unique region in the world. It is a settlement where the culture progressed very slowly and was abandoned. Our work continues especially in the neighborhood we found on the long street next to the exhibition area, which we call 'northern Korugan'. We opened a new area towards the slope of the settlement. While opening that area, we found the second neighborhood.

We identified a large building in the new area. We concentrated the work on the building of approximately 80 square meters, with 5 chambers. Last year, we came across a grave covered with a vulture's claw in a house here. The anthropologists of the excavation made detailed examinations of the grave containing 7 individuals. A young man "The drilling process in the individual's skull caught our attention. In Çatalhöyük, we saw a clear example of trepanation for the first time.
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Info

Analysis of ancient Scythian leather samples shows that the leather was made from human skin

Leman Altuntaş
Arkeonews Net
Wed, 20 Dec 2023 04:38 UTC
leather object fragments
© PLOS ONE (2023)A selection of the leather object fragments analyzed in this study: 1. Ilyinka kurgan 4 burial 2; 2. Ilyinka kurgan 4 burial 3; 3. Vodoslavka kurgan 8 burial 4; 4. Orikhove kurgan 3 burial 2; 5. Zelene I kurgan 2 burial 3; 6. Kairy V kurgan 1 burial 1; 7. Ol’hyne kurgan 2 burial 1; 8. Bulhakovo kurgan 5 burial 2; 9. Zolota Balka kurgan 13 burial 7 (Image: M. Daragan). The units of the scale bars are cm.
The ancient Scythians' history as fearsome warriors dates back more than 2,000 years, and now research from a multi-institutional team of anthropologists confirms that they are pitiless warriors. Researchers have discovered that Scythian warriors carried their arrows in leather quivers made from the skin of their defeated enemies.

The Scythians (6th to 3rd centuries BC) were a nomadic people known for their fierce nature and mastery of horsemanship in the ancient Eurasian steppes. Their lives were deeply intertwined with the wild, expansive landscapes they roamed. Living in harmony with the harsh environment, they developed a formidable reputation as warriors and skilled riders.

Their nomadic lifestyle meant they were in constant movement, adapting to the ever-changing conditions of the steppe. They were expert archers, able to shoot accurately from horseback while galloping at high speeds — a skill that made them formidable in battle.

In their project, reported on the open-access site PLOS ONE, the researchers tested an account by the Greek historian Herodotus regarding certain behaviors of ancient Scythian warriors.
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Star of David

How Israel's genocidal war against Palestinians is a colonial tradition

Joseph Massad
Middle East Eye
Mon, 18 Dec 2023 13:05 UTC
Flag
© Clodagh Kilcoyne/ReutersAn Israeli flag planted by Israeli forces flies among debris in northern Gaza following Israeli bombardment on 12 December 2023.
Palestinian resistance must always be situated within the history of anti-colonial struggle just as Israel's genocidal war should be recognised as a continuation of this colonial lineage...

The horror that Israel and its western sponsors have felt since the 7 October Hamas retaliatory operation stems from their racist contempt for the indigenous Palestinians, which led them to believe that Israel could never be successfully attacked militarily.

But this sense of western humiliation that a colonised, "racially inferior" non-European people can resist and defeat their colonisers is not unprecedented in the annals of colonial history.

In the late 19th century, the British suffered a most illustrious colonial defeat at the hands of the Zulu kingdom's army. During the January 1879 Battle of Isandlwana in southern Africa, the 20,000-strong lightly-armed Zulu army humiliated the British colonial forces, despite their superior weaponry, killing 1,300 (700 of whom were African) out of a total of 1,800 invading soldiers and 400 civilians. The battle left between 1,000 and 3,000 Zulu forces dead.
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Eye 1

SOTT Focus: Hitler, the Ultimate Rorschach Test

L.P. Koch
LucTalks
Sun, 17 Dec 2023 07:17 UTC
hitler
We can't help but view history through the lens of our most deeply held beliefs.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in how people look at Hitler and the Third Reich: we slap our priors on a hyper-complex era permitting a nigh-infinite number of angles, and as if by magic, the whole thing sorts itself out into a neat little narrative.

And so, leftists will claim that Hitler was just a conservative on steroids, and see, that's where conservatism inevitably leads.

Marxists will make the case that the Nazis were really just Capital's reaction to the otherwise inevitable proletarian revolution, therefore postponing the communist utopia by way of collusion between industrialists, Junkers and Western bankers.

Conservatives argue that akshually, Nazism was just communism, because dontcha know, there's an "S" in "NSDAP."1

Revisionists give this a further twist by claiming that the real bad guy in this whole story wasn't Hitler, but Stalin: it was he who started WWII by forcing Hitler's hand.
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Star of David

The price of 'victory': How Israel created one of its own worst enemies


RT
Sun, 17 Dec 2023 10:45 UTC
composite
Ariel Sharon • Menachem Begin
The Jewish state triumphed in the 1982 Lebanon War, but years later the victory appears pyrrhic...

The battle for Gaza adds yet another page to Israel's long list of military operations in Arab nations and enclaves. We are shocked by the brutal fighting going on today, but history has seen many similar military operations where it was impossible to draw the line between war and terrorism. The 1982 Lebanon War is one such example. Israel may have won that war, but as a result it only acquired a fiercer enemy.

Setup for slaughter

By the mid-1970s, Israel had defeated the regular armies of several opposing Arab nations. However, the Jewish state still had an irreconcilable enemy: the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) headed by Yasser Arafat. The PLO was initially based in Jordan, but when it came into conflict with the local authorities, it was forced to move to Lebanon.
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Blue Planet

'Unique' cave art discovered in Madagascar hints at connections with ancient Egypt and Borneo

David Burney
The Conversation
Sun, 17 Dec 2023 15:17 UTC
Andriamamelo cave
© David BurneyAndriamamelo cave art panel
The art is the first ancient pictorial art, which depicts images of nature with human-like and animal-like figures, to be found in Madagascar.

Unique, prehistoric rock art drawings have been discovered in the Andriamamelo Cave in western Madagascar.

I was part of a team that discovered and described these ancient treasures. They're the first truly pictorial art, depicting images of nature with human-like and animal-like figures, to be seen on the island. Until recently, rock art in Madagascar had only yielded a few sites with basic symbols.

The dramatic discoveries contained several surprises, including hints at some remarkable cultural connections.

Comment: Recent discoveries have revealed extensive trade networks across vast swathes of the planet in the Bronze Age, and early Medieval Age, and which were previously thought to have been improbable.

At the same time, with regards to certain symbolism, there is data showing that it may have been inspired by people observing phenomena in the skies, and sometimes the slight differences to similar symbols has been shown to be due to the oberserver's geographic location and thus their vantage point: Depicting plasma? Ancient 'mantis-man' petroglyph discovered in Iran

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Dig

31,000-year-old artifacts reveal use of advanced projectile weapon millennia earlier than previously thought

Christopher Plain
The Debrief
Wed, 13 Dec 2023 00:00 UTC
drawing
© ULiège/TraceoLabSpearthrowers/ Artist's rendering shows fracture patterns on 31,000-year-old points from the Maisières-Canal archaeological site
A forensic examination of 31,000-year-old artifacts has revealed the potential use of advanced spearthrowers by Stone Age Europeans, according to the results of a controversial new study.

Archaeologists previously believed that spearthrowers, which are sometimes called atlatls, were first put into use sometime around 17,000 or 18,000 years ago based on evidence of their use found in European caves, primarily located in southern France.

However, the results of the recent study appear to put those original findings in doubt by showing that these advanced weapons may have been in use millennia earlier than previously believed.

'ARCHAEOLOGICAL FRACTURE SIGNAL' ANALYSIS OF 31,000-YEAR-OLD FLINT ARTIFACTS

A spear thrower is a long shaft with a cup or notch at one end. When used properly, the device functions like an extra extension to the human arm, allowing the thrower to generate significantly more thrust than simply throwing a spear by hand.

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Better Earth

Decline of megafauna began 50,000 years ago, humans might be partly to blame

Aarhus University
Phys.org
Thu, 14 Dec 2023 00:03 UTC
megafauna
© First printed in Bryant & Gay, 1883. Wood carving by E. Bayard.Prehistoric people are attacking an elephant. New research shows that humans and not the climate caused a sharp decline in almost all megafauna on Earth 50.000 years ago.
For years, scientists have debated whether humans or the climate have caused the population of large mammals to decline dramatically over the past several thousand years. A new study from Aarhus University confirms that climate cannot be the explanation.

About 100,000 years ago, the first modern humans migrated out of Africa in large numbers.


Comment: Except that's not supported by the data: Ancient Chinese relics point to unbroken cultural links that began a million years ago, further discrediting Out of Africa theory say researchers


They were eminent at adapting to new habitats, and they settled in virtually every kind of landscape — from deserts to jungles to the icy taiga in the far north.

Comment: Could it be that both cosmic catastrophes, in addition to human activity, had noticeable impacts on the populations of megafauna?

There's a variety of evidence showing that cometary bombardment and the accompanying environmental shifts wrought havoc on our planet, and life on it changed (repeatedly) as a result. At the same time, it's likely that human migrations and population centres would have sought to benefit from, and control, their environment; which would have involved hunting, but also possibly alongside other measures - such as controlled culls - that sought to ameliorate living alongside such massive, and potentially lethal, creatures.

It seems that the drastic changes in the environment was the strongest driver behind the megafauna extinctions, but is it possible that this genetic data hints at some of the impact that human activity had?

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Blue Planet

How early farmers in Scandinavia dealt with thousands of years of dramatic climate changes

Jan Steffen
Phys.org
Wed, 13 Dec 2023 23:51 UTC
scandanavia
© Quaternary Science Reviews (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.quascirev.2023.108391Radiocarbon-dated settlement sites and summer temperature records across southern Scandinavia, southern Norway and Arctic Norway. The map displays a total of 1,734 settlement sites with a corresponding 6268 reliable 14C dates. Summer temperature records are based on marine, lacustrine, bog and speleothem records.
As the world faces the challenges of present-day climate change, scientific inquiry is, among other objectives, exploring how human societies navigate environmental variations at large. Investigating the past provides valuable insights into this.

A new study, published by researchers from the ROOTS Cluster of Excellence at Kiel University, together with colleagues from Oslo, Tromsø, and Stavanger (Norway), in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews presents an unprecedentedly extensive set of archaeological and environmental data revealing connectivities between climate changes, population dynamics and cultural changes in present-day Northern Germany and Scandinavia during the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age (approximately 4100 to 1100 before common era).

Comment: As revealed above, and in contradiction to the global boiling fanatics, the climate on our planet is cyclical in nature, and periods of warming, including pronounced warming, have a positive effect on population growth.

Unfortunately for us, all the data points to our own era as having left a brief warming spell and that we have now entered a period of cooling. And there is a wealth of evidence already showing that, as a result, the food chain is suffering, civilization is struggling to adapt, and this is alongside a number of other phenomena that often seem to accompany these shifts in climate:

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Info

'The Holodomor': How Ukraine distorted the history of a tragic Soviet famine to help build its modern national myth

Dmitry Plotnikov
RT
Mon, 11 Dec 2023 15:24 UTC
'The Holodonor'
© RT
Official Kiev has been talking about an alleged "genocide of Ukrainians by Russia" for more than 30 years

At the end of November, Ukraine commemorates the victims of the great Soviet famine of the 1930s. According to different estimates, the tragedy claimed from four to nine million lives throughout the country - in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine.

The exact number of deaths is hard to determine due to a lack of records, but the general Western consensus is that most deaths happened in the Russian and Ukrainian republics, with slightly more overall in the latter. However, per capita, the biggest effect was in Kazakhstan (where it is called the Asharshylyk), which lost over a third of its entire population.

From the very first years of Ukraine's independence, this event - known as the Holodomor (death by hunger) in the Ukrainian language - was politicized and served as a basis for constructing the country's new national identity.

Comment:
Genocide claims and counterclaims is not a new topic, below are other articles, and many more could have been found:

Africa related Africa - Rwanda related Americas Around the world Europe
Armenia related Europe - Britain and France Europe - WW2 holocaust Former Yugoslavia Israel and Palestine The future? Understanding some of the causes of genocides, and what to do about it. A genocide is not something that happened once and will never happen again. History makes this quite clear. What I found interesting while collecting the links is, that the powers that fuel the Western arms and money deliveries to Ukraine have such a rich history of having perpetrated genocides all over the globe, and in fact are very much at ease with having sponsored them since WWII. Moreover, it is ongoing, as we read and write. There is not even a guarantee that some of us will not be next in line.

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