Secret HistoryS


Archaeology

Locations of 11 lost cities revealed in 4,000 year old ancient tablets

clay tablet with cuneiform
© Los Angeles County Museum of Art)A clay tablet with cuneiform inscription from Anatolia circa 1875-1840 B.C. Researchers have extracted numbers from thousands of these tablets to create a database of trade in ancient Assyria.
Using numbers scrawled by Bronze Age merchants on 4,000-year-old clay tablets, a historian and three economists have developed a novel way to pinpoint the locations of lost cities of the ancient world.

The ancient city of Kanesh, located in the middle of modern-day Turkey, was a hub of trade in the Anatolian region four millennia ago. Modern-day archaeologists have unearthed artifacts from the city, including more than 23,000 cuneiform texts, inscribed in clay by ancient Assyrian merchants.

The texts themselves are mostly "business letters, shipment documents, accounting records, seals and contracts," according to the working paper by Gojko Barjamovic, Thomas Chaney, Kerem A. Cosar and Ali Hortacsu. Barjamovic is an expert in the history of Assyria, the ancient Middle Eastern kingdom founded near the Tigris River in what is present-day Iraq. His co-authors are economists from, respectively, the Paris Institute of Political Studies, the University of Virginia and the University of Chicago.

A typical passage from the clay tablets, translated by the team, reads something like this:
From Durhumit until Kaneš I incurred expenses of 5 minas of refined (copper), I spent 3 minas of copper until Wahšušana, I acquired and spent small wares for a value of 4 shekels of silver

Bizarro Earth

Researchers find 260-million-year-old fossil trees in Antarctica

Antartica tree fossil
© Erik GulbransonA 280-million-year-old tree stump still attached to its roots in Antarctica. Plants grew on what is today the iciest continent from 400 million to 14 million years ago.
Antarctica wasn't always a land of ice. Millions of years ago, when the continent was still part of a huge Southern Hemisphere landmass called Gondwana, trees flourished near the South Pole.

Now, newfound, intricate fossils of some of these trees are revealing how the plants thrived - and what forests might look like as they march northward in today's warming world.

"Antarctica preserves an ecologic history of polar biomes that ranges for about 400 million years, which is basically the entirety of plant evolution," said Erik Gulbranson, a paleoecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Trees in Antarctica?

It's hard to look at Antarctica's frigid landscape today and imagine lush forests. To find their fossil specimens, Gulbranson and his colleagues have to disembark from planes landed on snowfields, then traverse glaciers and brave bone-chilling winds. But from about 400 million to 14 million years ago, the southern continent was a very different, and much greener place. The climate was warmer, though the plants that survived at the low southern latitudes had to cope with winters of 24-hour-per-day darkness and summers during which the sun never set, just as today.

Archaeology

Cremated human remains in unearthed in China may belong to the Buddha

Buddha
© Associated PressAn inscription on a box found in Jingchuan County, China says the human remains within belong to Buddha, though archeologists have not yet confirmed the finding.
Cremated human remains found inside a ceramic box in Jingchuan County, China, might be those of the Buddha, though archeologists have not confirmed that.

An inscription says the remains were buried June 22, 1013, and belong to the Buddha, who is said to have lived from 563 B.C. to 483 B.C.

More than 260 Buddhist statues were found buried near the remains, but researchers are not certain they were buried at the same time since the inscription does not mention them.

Researchers noted this isn't the first time remains of the Buddha - also known as Gautama Buddha or Siddhārtha Gautama - have purportedly been found.

Palette

Top 10 most expensive works of art sold at auction - Pictures

Salvator Mundi Da Vinci
Salvator Mundi, the long-lost Leonardo da Vinci painting of Jesus Christ has sold at Christie's in New York for $450.3m, shattering the world record for any work of art sold at auction. Here are the other nine most expensive works to go under the hammer

Da Vinci Salvator Mundi
© Julie Jacobson/APBidding representatives react after Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi sold for $400 million at Christie’s ($450.3m, including auction house premium)

Palette

200 years of grime removed from oil painting in seconds during incredible restoration (VIDEO)

The restoration revealed magnificent details underneath the varnish Credit: Philip Mould & Co
© Credit: Philip Mould & CoThe restoration revealed magnificent details underneath the varnish
An art dealer's incredible restoration of an oil painting covered in varnish for 200 years has left viewers mesmerised.

Philip Mould, who presents BBC art show Fake or Fortune?, shared footage with his Twitter followers showing the careful removal of a yellowish brown protective varnish from the painting.

"A remarkable Jacobean re-emergence after 200 years of yellowing varnish ... what a transformation!" he captioned the clip.

Comment: One almost gets used to seeing very old pictures with those dulled tones which can fool us into thinking that's how things actually appeared; seeing them cleaned up really does bring them to life.

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Boat

Most scientists now believe earliest Americans arrived on the continent by boat

coastal route first Americans
Researchers are embracing the kelp highway hypothesis in “a dramatic intellectual turnabout.”
It's been one of the most contentious debates in anthropology, and now scientists are saying it's pretty much over. A group of prominent anthropologists have done an overview of the scientific literature and declare in Science magazine that the "Clovis first" hypothesis of the peopling of the Americas is dead.

For decades, students were taught that the first people in the Americas were a group called the Clovis who walked over the Bering land bridge about 13,500 years ago. They arrived (so the narrative goes) via an ice-free corridor between glaciers in North America. But evidence has been piling up since the 1980s of human campsites in North and South America that date back much earlier than 13,500 years. At sites ranging from Oregon in the US to Monte Verde in Chile, evidence of human habitation goes back as far as 18,000 years.

Comment: See also: First Americans took coastal route to get to North America


Binoculars

JFK files reveal CIA blocked access to Jim Angleton's files, obscuring CIA crimes and possible assassination info

CIA Angleton
CIA counterspy James Jesus Angleton
The CIA delayed responding to requests for information about its longtime counter-espionage chief, James Angleton, as it tried to minimize the disclosure of his activities related to Soviet defectors and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, newly released documents show.

"Don't answer his initial request any sooner than necessary," said a May 31, 1979, internal CIA memo about a Freedom of Information Act request from author David Martin, who is now a CBS News correspondent. "When we do, deny release of any of the information, maintaining it is still classified and involves protection of sources and methods."

Martin was seeking information about the agency's handling of Yuri Nosenko, a former KGB agent who defected to the United States in 1964. Angleton and some of his colleagues in the CIA and FBI considered Nosenko a possible double agent.

The CIA memo was one of dozens about Angleton included in the 13,213 files released last week by the National Archives. They show the concerns and frustrations about the work Angleton did during his CIA tenure and the difficulty investigators had in getting access to his files at the agency.

Angleton was the agency's main conduit of information to the Warren Commission, the seven-member panel appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the assassination. Angleton did not tell the commission about the CIA's involvement in attempts to overthrow or kill Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro, which factored into later conspiracy theories.

Comment: Angleton was also the CIA's Mossad liaison. Thanks to him, Israel is a rogue nuclear state: The goy and the golem: James Angleton and the rise of Israel


Palette

Admiral Lord Nelson's facial scarring and missing eyebrow revealed in portrait restoration

lord Nelson portrait
© Philip Mould & CompanyA painting of Admiral Lord Nelson, showing his facial scarring and missing eyebrow following restoration to remove the paint concealing them
It is not uncommon for prominent figures to have their imperfections airbrushed out of history.

But Admiral Lord Nelson's facial scarring and missing eyebrow will now be presented in all their glory, after the the discovery and painstaking restoration of a "lost" painting, which included the removal of paint that had covered up to maritime hero's blemishes.

Part of a series of portraits of the famous admiral painted by Italian artist Leonardo Guzzardi in 1799, the painting was last publicly seen in a newspaper article in 1897.

The painting was rediscovered from an American private collection by art dealer and presenter of BBC programme Fake or Fortune, Philip Mould. On discovering the painting, he found Nelson's missing eyebrow, and some of the scarring he sustained at the Battle of the Nile in 1798 had been painted over.

Bad Guys

Project MK-Ultra & Dr. Ewen Cameron "stole my mother away from me"

'They stole my mother from me. They used her as a human guinea pig. They stripped her of her emotions'

Alison Steel
© Christinne Muschi/Postmedia NetworkAlison Steel holds a photo of her mom, Jean Steel, in her home in Knowlton, Quebec November 10, 2017.
On October 9, 1957, Dr. Ewen Cameron, a Scottish-born psychiatrist and director of the Allan Memorial Institute at McGill University in Montreal noted that his 33-year-old patient, Jean Steel, was on her 23rd day of drug-induced sleep.

Steel had undergone four electroconvulsive shock-therapy treatments. Several more were planned. In previous days, while awake, she had shown some aggressiveness toward staff, behaviour Cameron felt needed to be "broken up."

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Archaeology

14th century mass graves discovered in Czech Republic

Czech Republic mass graves
© Jan Frolik
Archaeologists in the Czech Republic have uncovered some 1,500 skeletons from 30 mass graves dating back to the 14 and 15th centuries, in what is being described as the largest discovery of its kind in central Europe.

The graves, each filled with 50-70 people believed to be victims of famine and plague epidemics, were unearthed on a plot of a historical ossuary in Kutna Hora, according to Jan Frolik from Prague's Institute of Archaeology.

"It is the biggest group of medieval mass graves in central Europe, and probably in the whole [of] Europe," said Frolik to RT.com. The skeletons are a "perfect sample for [the] study of [the] medieval population in [an] important medieval Czech town," he added.