Secret HistoryS


Info

Traces of South America's earliest people found under ancient dirt pyramid

Huaca Prieta
© Tom Dillehay Huaca Prieta in northern Peru contains evidence of human occupation stretching back nearly 15,000 years.
About 600 kilometers north of Peru, an imposing earthen mound looms over the sea. People began building the ceremonial structure, called Huaca Prieta, about 7800 years ago. But according to a new study, the true surprise lies buried deep beneath the 30-meter-tall mound: stone tools, animal bones, and plant remains left behind by some of the earliest known Americans nearly 15,000 years ago. That makes Huaca Prieta one of the oldest archaeological sites in the Americas and suggests that the region's first migrants may have moved surprisingly slowly down the coast.

The evidence of early human occupation stunned Tom Dillehay, an archaeologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville who led the new study. Initially, he was interested in examining the mound itself. But geologists on his team wanted to study the landform under the mound, so "we just kept going down," he says. The deepest pit, which took 5 years to excavate, reached down 31 meters. Shockingly, those deep layers contained telltale signs of human occupation, Dillehay's team reports today in Science Advances: evidence of hearth fires, animal bones, plant remains, and simple but unmistakable stone tools. Radiocarbon dates from charcoal place the earliest human occupation at nearly 15,000 years ago.

Mars

Essay by Winston Churchill on 'alien life' discovered at Missouri museum

Winston Churchill
© Fox Photos/StringerWinston Churchill (shown here at his daughter's wedding in September 1935) wrote an essay on alien life in 1939 when Europe was on the brink of war, shortly before he became prime minister of the United Kingdom.
Winston Churchill was known for his leadership during World War II, but a newfound essay on alien life reveals another side of him, one that was deeply curious about the universe.

"I, for one, am not so immensely impressed by the success we are making of our civilization here that I am prepared to think we are the only spot in this immense universe which contains living, thinking creatures," he wrote in the newly uncovered essay, "or that we are the highest type of mental and physical development which has ever appeared in the vast compass of space and time."

Besides being prime minister of the United Kingdom during the tumultuous years of World War II, the British statesman was also a prolific writer and proponent of science. In fact, he was the first prime minister to have a science advisor. Those traits converged in the newfound 11-page essay about the search for alien life, discovered at the Churchill Museum in Fulton, Missouri. It was first written in 1939 and was slightly revised in the late 1950s.

The museum's director, Timothy Riley, showed the document to astrophysicist Mario Livio, who described the work and Churchill's approach to science in an article published today (Feb. 15) in the journal Nature. Churchill's essay was titled "Are We Alone in the Universe?".

Comment: See also: Churchill demanded UFO briefing: secret files


Info

Out of Europe rather than out of Africa, new study suggest

Upper PreMolar
© Wolfgang Gerber, University of TübingenThis is a 7.24 million year old upper premolar of Graecopithecus from Azmaka, Bulgaria.
The common lineage of great apes and humans split several hundred thousand earlier than hitherto assumed, according to an international research team headed by Professor Madelaine Böhme from the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of Tübingen and Professor Nikolai Spassov from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. The researchers investigated two fossils of Graecopithecus freybergi with state-of-the-art methods and came to the conclusion that they belong to pre-humans. Their findings, published today in two papers in the journal PLOS ONE, further indicate that the split of the human lineage occurred in the Eastern Mediterranean and not - as customarily assumed - in Africa.

Present-day chimpanzees are humans' nearest living relatives. Where the last chimp-human common ancestor lived is a central and highly debated issue in palaeoanthropology. Researchers have assumed up to now that the lineages diverged five to seven million years ago and that the first pre-humans developed in Africa. According to the 1994 theory of French palaeoanthropologist Yves Coppens, climate change in Eastern Africa could have played a crucial role. The two studies of the research team from Germany, Bulgaria, Greece, Canada, France and Australia now outline a new scenario for the beginning of human history.

Fireball

Best of the Web: Graham Hancock: Why Science Should Cherish Its Rebels - The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis Is Anything But Dead

hancock carlson
© Santha FaliaGraham Hancock with catastrophist theorist Randall Carlson at Dry Falls -- a fossilised waterfall of enormous size cut by the waters of Bretz's flood and left as we see it now when the flood had run its course.
There is fierce disagreement amongst mainstream scientists - a disagreement that also divides alternative researchers - around what happened to the Earth, and to humanity, in the closing millennia of the last Ice Age between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago. Marked by intense cold, global floods and extinctions of animal species, this 1200-year interval is known to geologists as the Younger Dryas. Many of the leading investigators are convinced the agent of the mysterious earth changes, and of the extinctions, was a comet that the struck the North American ice cap with globally cataclysmic effects. But their "Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis" is still regarded as controversial by others who have sought, more than once in the scientific literature, to declare it "disproved" only to be confronted by compelling new evidence that further strengthens the case. In this article, Graham Hancock shows how scientists consistently suppress and marginalise new knowledge that conflicts with established positions and argues that a paradigm shift is underway - a shift that will require us to reconsider everything we've been taught about the peopling of the Americas and about the very origins of civilization.
In March 2017 the National Geographic Society and the Smithsonian Institution, those bastions of scientific orthodoxy, highlighted the remarkable achievements of two scientific rebels, one retired and the other deceased, confessing that multiple injustices had been done to both and that the "toxic" way in which they had been treated by their professional colleagues had "poisoned" scientific progress.

In the case of The Smithsonian the focus was on Canadian archaeologist Jacques Cinq-Mars, ostracised in the 1990's because his excavations at Bluefish Caves in the Yukon "directly challenged mainstream thinking" with evidence that the peopling of the Americas had begun many thousands of years earlier than had previously been thought.1

We will have more to say about the case of Dr Cinq-Mars in the second half of this article.

Comment: Loyal SOTT readers will hardly be surprised at this summary of the latest YDB research. After all, we've been covering the issue of historical comet bombardments since before the YDB impact hypothesis. But it's great to see it all collected here and brought up to date. And speaking of paradigm shifts, here's another one that is quite relevant to the topics discussed, particularly on the nature of comets and climate change: Earth Changes and the Human-Cosmic Connection, by Pierre Lescaudron with Laura Knight-Jadczyk.


War Whore

The FBI - No legal basis but lots of kompromat

FBI Logo
© UnknownIllegal entity?
I made the mistake of listening to NPR last week to find out what Conventional Wisdom had to say about Trump firing Comey, on the assumption that their standardized Mister-Rogers-on-Nyquil voice tones would rein in the hysteria pitch a little. And on the surface, it did—the NPR host and guests weren't directly shrieking "the world is ending! We're all gonna die SHEEPLE!" the way they were on CNN. But in a sense they were screaming "fire!", if you know how to distinguish the very minute pitch level differences in the standard NPR Nyquil voice.

The host of the daytime NPR program asked his guests how serious, and how "unprecedented" Trump's decision to fire his FBI chief was. The guests answers were strange: they spoke about "rule of law" and "violating the Constitution" but then switched to Trump "violating norms"—and back again, interchanging "norms" and "laws" as if they're synonyms. One of the guests admitted that Trump firing Comey was 100% legal, but that didn't seem to matter in this talk about Trump having abandoned rule-of-law for a Putinist dictatorship. These guys wouldn't pass a high school civics class, but there they were, garbling it all up. What mattered was the proper sense of panic and outrage—I'm not sure anyone really cared about the actual legality of the thing, or the legal, political or "normative" history of the FBI.

Black Magic

Africa's Auschwitz: Death Island, the concentration camp erased from history

Namibia holocaust
Perhaps no atrocity has been more extensively covered than the Holocaust carried out by the Third Reich in Germany. Yet few Americans are aware that there was a holocaust committed by the Second Reich 40 years prior.

While Adolf Hitler is a household name, synonymous with evil, his predecessor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, is far less recognizable — although many of his crimes were just as bad, if not worse, than Hitler's.

Wilhelm II was crowned in 1888 and launched a "New Course" in German foreign relations. His policies ultimately resulted in Germany's involvement and eventual defeat in World War I. Despite his notable involvement in World War I, little else is taught about Wilhelm's reign, in American schools.

Books

The murderous history of North Korea

North Korean people holding flags
© Damir Sagolj / Reuters
More than four decades ago I went to lunch with a diplomatic historian who, like me, was going through Korea-related documents at the National Archives in Washington. He happened to remark that he sometimes wondered whether the Korean Demilitarised Zone might be ground zero for the end of the world. This April, Kim In-ryong, a North Korean diplomat at the UN, warned of 'a dangerous situation in which a thermonuclear war may break out at any moment'. A few days later, President Trump told Reuters that 'we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea.' American atmospheric scientists have shown that even a relatively contained nuclear war would throw up enough soot and debris to threaten the global population: 'A regional war between India and Pakistan, for instance, has the potential to dramatically damage Europe, the US and other regions through global ozone loss and climate change.' How is it possible that we have come to this?

How does a puffed-up, vainglorious narcissist, whose every other word may well be a lie (that applies to both of them, Trump and Kim Jong-un), come not only to hold the peace of the world in his hands but perhaps the future of the planet? We have arrived at this point because of an inveterate unwillingness on the part of Americans to look history in the face and a laser-like focus on that same history by the leaders of North Korea.

Colosseum

Built to last, Roman roads withstand the passage of time

roman road/modern road
© Ancient Origins
The Romans were renowned as great engineers and this is evident in the many structures that they left behind. One particular type of construction that the Romans were famous for is their roads. It was these roads, which the Romans called viae, that enabled them to build and maintain their empire. How did they create this infrastructure that has withstood the passing of time better than most its modern counterparts?

Roads of All Kinds

It has been calculated that the network of Roman roads covered a distance of over 400,000 km (248,548.47 miles), with more than 120,000 km (74,564.54 miles) of this being of the type known as 'public roads'. Spreading across the Romans' vast empire from Great Britain in the north to Morocco in the south, and from Portugal in the west to Iraq in the East, they allowed people and goods to travel quickly from one part of the empire to another.

Roman roads x2
© CC by-SA 3.0/Francisco Valverde~commonswikiTwo examples of ancient Roman roads: one at Leptis Magna, Libya (top), and another at Santa Àgueda, Minorca (Spain) (bottom)
The Romans classified their roads into several types. The most important of these were the viae publicae (public roads), followed by the viae militares (military roads), then the actus (local roads), and finally the privatae (private roads). The first of these were the widest, and reached up to 12 meters (39.37 ft.) in width. Military roads were maintained by the army, and private roads were built by individual landowners.

Constructing Roads to Last

There was no 'one-size-fits-all' Roman technique for building roads. Their construction varied depending on the terrain and the local building materials that were available. For example, different solutions were required to build roads over marshy areas and steep ground. Nevertheless, there are certain standard rules that were followed.

Roman roads consisted of three layers - a foundation layer on the bottom, a middle layer, and a surface layer on the top. The foundation layer often consisted of stones or earth. Other materials used to form this layer included: rough gravel, crushed bricks, clay material, and even piles of wood when roads were being built over swampy areas. The following layer would be composed of softer materials such as sand or fine gravel. This layer may have been formed by several successive layers. Finally, the surface was made using gravel, which was occasionally mixed with lime. For more prominent areas, such as those close to cities, roads were made more impressive by having the surface layer built using blocks of stone (which depended on the local material available, and may have consisted of volcanic tuff, limestone, basalt, etc.) or cobbles. The center of the road sloped to the sides to allow water to drain off the surface into drainage ditches. These ditches also served to define the road in areas where enemies could use the surrounding terrain for ambushes.

To read the rest of this article, go here.

Comment: What you 'put into it,' is what you get out of it.


Document

New documents claim UK 'ignored' Zimbabwe massacre to further own interests

Robert Mugabe,Margret Thatcher
© AP/Dave Caulkin
A Freedom of Information (FOI) request has revealed that British officials turned a blind eye to the massacre of thousands of dissidents in Zimbabwe in order to protect the UK's economic and political interests.

Thousands of documents obtained under a Freedom of Information request by Dr. Hazel Cameron, a lecturer in international relations at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, has uncovered that British officials in London and Zimbabwe were aware of the atrocities in the 1980s.

In an interview with the Guardian, Dr. Cameron said that the British could have stopped some of the things that were taking place in Zimbabwe; instead they decided to further their own interests.

Info

Chaco Canyon's ancient civilization continues to puzzle

Chaco society
© Science NewsIN NEW LIGHT - Recent research suggests that the ancient Chaco society of the U.S. Southwest was founded by locals and run by a female lineage for hundreds of years. The best-known Chaco structures are great houses, massive, multilevel buildings represented here by the remains of Pueblo del Arroyo.
Chaco Canyon is a land of extremes. Summer heat scorches the desert canyon, which is sandwiched between sandstone cliffs nearly two kilometers above sea level in New Mexico's northwestern corner. Bitter cold sweeps in for winter. Temperatures can swing as many as 28 degrees Celsius during the course of a day. Through it all, Chaco Canyon maintains a desolate beauty and a craggy pride as home to one of ancient America's most enigmatic civilizations.

Scientists have struggled to understand Chaco society since its first excavations in the late 1800s. Who first settled Chaco Canyon around 1,200 years ago is still a mystery. Many researchers suspect that it took a few hundred years for a fledgling city-state run by an elite social class to emerge. Political and cultural ties between the ancient society and Chaco-style communities outside the canyon also perplex. Then there's the puzzle of how people survived from about 800 to around 1300 on the rough, parched terrain.

A new generation of Chaco studies and discoveries is under way, partly thanks to a young researcher's skeleton reassembly project. This jigsaw job required a lot of travel, but not to Chaco Canyon.

That's because bones of people excavated at Chaco in the 1890s and 1920s were packed away in boxes and drawers at museums in New York City, Chicago and Washington, D.C. Kerriann Marden visited all of these places to retrieve far-flung body parts from one site in particular — Pueblo Bonito, the oldest and largest of a dozen huge stone great houses in Chaco Canyon. The structure was built, along with a range of smaller structures, between about 800 and 1130.

Pueblo Bonito was massive, rising at least five stories with around 650 rooms. It has yielded more human bones and artifacts than any other Chaco site. Research has focused on this great house presumably reserved for Chaco's elite families; the lives of workaday folk have been largely unexplored, even in the latest studies.

During Chaco society's heyday, other civilizations peaked elsewhere in the Americas, including the Maya in Central America. Just as present-day Maya groups trace their ancestry back to that ancient civilization, today's Pueblo tribes, such as the Hopi and Zuni, consider Chaco people to have been their forebears. Navajo Nation also claims an ancestral tie to Chaco society.