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Who were the Mongols?

Erin Blakemore
National Geographic
Mon, 01 Jul 2019 10:49 UTC
Genghis Khan
© Photograph by James L. Stanfield, Nat Geo Image Collection
A modern mural in Inner Mongolia depicts the inauguration of Genghis Khan.
Under Genghis Khan, the Mongol army became a technologically advanced force and and created the second-largest kingdom in history.

Known for warfare, but celebrated for productive peace. Led by humble steppe dwellers, but successful due to a mastery of the era's most advanced technology. The Mongol Empire embodied all of those tensions, turning them into the second-largest kingdom of all time.

At its peak, the Mongol Empire covered the most contiguous territory in history. Led at first by Genghis Khan, the empire lasted from 1206 until 1368. During that time, it expanded to cover most of Eurasia, thanks to advanced technology and a massive horde of nomadic warriors.

The Beginning of Modern Warfare

Comment: It's certainly curious that, like Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan oversaw great changes which resulted in the betterment of society - if only temporarily - and yet official history portrays them both in a particularly negative light: Also check out SOTT radio's:

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Dig

East Asians may have been reshaping their skulls 12,000 years ago

Bruce Bower
Science News
Wed, 03 Jul 2019 06:00 UTC
cone head
© Q. Wang
STRETCH MARKS: Oddly shaped human skulls discovered in northeastern China, including this approximately 6,000-year-old example from a child, point to millennia of intentional cranial reshaping in East Asia, researchers say.
Ancient tombs in China have produced what may be some of the oldest known human skulls to be intentionally reshaped.

At a site called Houtaomuga, scientists unearthed 25 skeletons dating to between around 12,000 years ago and 5,000 years ago. Of those, 11 featured skulls with artificially elongated braincases and flattened bones at the front and back of the head, says a team led by bioarchaeologist Quanchao Zhang and paleoanthropologist Qian Wang.

Skull modification occurred over a longer stretch of time at the site than at any other archaeological dig, the researchers report online June 25 in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

Comment: See also:

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People 2

"Overwhelming evidence" Vatican 'hid art that showed female priests'

Sarah Mac Donald
Independent.ie
Wed, 03 Jul 2019 02:30 UTC
Lateran

A mosaic at the Lateran Baptistery in Rome showed Mary as a bishop until it was painted over white
There is "overwhelming evidence" that women served as clergy in the early years of Christianity - and some of the evidence was deliberately hidden by the Vatican, according to ground-breaking new research.

Experts in theology and the early history of the Catholic Church heard Dr Ally Kateusz, research associate at the Wijngaards Institute for Catholic Research, outline the findings at a conference hosted by the International Society of Biblical Literature at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome yesterday.

Dr Kateusz, the author of 'Mary and Early Christian Women: Hidden Leadership', bases her research findings on the depiction of women as clergy in ancient artefacts and a mosaic in a Roman church in which Mary, the mother of Jesus, is depicted as a bishop.

Comment: Ancient coins suggest there may have been a female pope: Legends of a medieval female pope may be true

See also: And check out SOTT radio's:

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Info

Lost Bronze Age palace unearthed in Iraq

Mindy Weisberger
Live Science
Tue, 02 Jul 2019 20:28 UTC
Kemune Palace
© University of Tübingen/eScience Center/Kurdistan Archaeology Organization
An aerial view of Kemune Palace from the west, near the Tigris River in Iraq.
When a drought dried up the water in Iraq's Mosul Dam reservoir, it exposed ruins from an ancient city dating to the Bronze Age.

The city included a palace with walls preserved to heights of 22 feet (7 meters); inside were chambers that had once been decorated with painted murals, archaeologists recently said in a statement.

The scientists dated the site — named Kemune — to the time of the Mittani Empire, a kingdom of the Near East that ruled portions of Syria and northern Mesopotamia from the 15th century to the 14th century B.C. Only three other sites from this period contain Mittani palaces, and all of them were found in the outer reaches of the empire. Kemune alone offers insights into life at the center of the kingdom, according to the statement.

Low water levels in the Mosul Dam in 2010 first revealed tantalizing glimpses of the submerged structure, "but we couldn't excavate here until now," Hasan Ahmed Qasim, co-leader of the excavation and an archaeologist with the Kurdistan Archaeology Organization (KAO) in Duhok, Iraq, said in the statement.

The palace once stood just 65 feet (20 meters) from the Tigris, overlooking the river from an elevated position on the bank, and a sloping terrace wall supported the palace's western side. To the north lay the rest of the city, according to archaeological surveys conducted around the palace ruins.
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Sherlock

Latin America's recurring tragedy: Why Bolívar has more in common with Guaido than Chavez

Alejandro Rodríguez
Sott.net
Mon, 01 Jul 2019 22:03 UTC
In Latin Americans' collective consciousness, the figure of Simón Bolívar is seen as a symbol of resistance and the fight for peoples' liberation from the yoke of bloody and thieving monarchies. The very name by which he is known, The Liberator, reinforces the belief that Bolívar was simply responding heroically to a deep-seated need that consumed an entire continent.

Juan guaido venezuela bolivar
© Agence France-Presse
Juan Guaidó, the head of Venezuela's opposition, tried and failed to oust Nicolás Maduro in April, 2019.
Within this context, Hugo Chavez used Bolívar as an archetype for his revolution, called for this reason the Bolívarian revolution, which would bring to Venezuela (and the entire region, if Chavez had been successful) the "socialism of the 21st century." Sadly, the reason why Chavez Frias' effort was destined to fail is the same reason why choosing Bolívar as the exemplary figure was a terrible mistake.
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Info

Romans may have 'trapped more flies' with honey says new study

Morgan Sherburne
University of Michigan News
Tue, 25 Jun 2019 19:00 UTC
Ancient Roman fresco
© Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
An ancient Roman fresco from the Necropolis of Esquilino, dated c. 300-280 BC, depicts a handshake between a Roman and a non-Roman.
Ann Arbor-Romans are depicted as slashing and burning their way across countries in order to secure their empire. But a University of Michigan archeologist suggests that the Romans may have trapped more flies with honey.

At its peak-about the year 117-the Roman Empire ringed the Mediterranean Sea, encompassing present-day Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Eastern Europe, Turkey, Syria and a swath across northern Africa. Since the Middle Ages, historians have described this expansion as a military conquest. But for all its reach, the Roman conquest yielded little evidence of warfare or a disruption of power within excavated settlements across Italy, according to author Nicola Terrenato.

Instead, Terrenato thinks that elite Roman landowners and politicians offered positions of political power to non-Roman nobles in order to woo them into their empire. A wealth of recently digitized inscriptions shows local aristocrats surviving the conquest unscathed. Some of these aristocrats even thrived as politicians in Rome.

"It seems the Romans said, 'Come quietly and be a part of this, and you will not only preserve local power, but also have the chance to play the big game in Rome,'" said Terrenato, author of the book The Early Roman Expansion into Italy.
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Boat

'Undisturbed' Roman shipwreck discovered off Cyprus coast - loaded with ancient goods

Venus Upadhayaya
The Epoch Times
Sat, 29 Jun 2019 15:56 UTC
roman shipwreck Cyprus
© Department of Antiquities, Government of Cyprus
Ancient shipwreck in the sea off Protaras, eastern Cyprus.
Archaeologists have discovered an undisturbed Roman shipwreck loaded with ancient-era products, the study of which is expected to bring new understandings about ancient trade in the region.

The discovery was made in the sea off Protaras, a town of resorts popular among the tourist for its beaches in the Mediterranean, according to a statement from the Department of Antiquities in the Republic of Cyprus.

The Department of Antiquities says that the ship belongs to the time after Romans annexed the island in 58 B.C. and is loaded with "transport amphorae."
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Dig

4,000-year-old burial revealed on Britain's 'island of druids'

Tom Metcalfe
Live Science
Fri, 28 Jun 2019 06:57 UTC
burial mound
© Adam Stanford, Aerial-Cam
The latest excavations have revealed a Bronze Age burial mound that was built around 1,000 years after the Neolithic passage tomb of Bryn Celli Ddu.
Archaeologists are excavating a 4,000-year-old burial mound on a British island linked in mythology to the mysterious order of magical priests known as the Druids.

And although the burial mound is much older than the Druids - who lived about 2,000 years ago, if they existed at all - the excavations have cast new light on the ancient inhabitants of the island of Anglesey.

Overlooking the Irish Sea from the northwest corner of Wales, Anglesey is dotted with numerous Neolithic and Bronze Age stone monuments. The most famous is the 5,000-year-old passage tomb of Bryn Celli Ddu (Welsh for "the mound in the dark grove"), which has an entrance passage that aligns with the rising midsummer sun. It was archaeologically excavated in 1928 and 1929, and later reconstructed.

Comment: Regarding the druids, in Where Troy Once Stood: The Mystery of Homer's Iliad & Odyssey Revealed Laura Knight-Jadczyk writes:
Iman Wilkens idea of why the Celts didn't write things down is one of the flaws of the book. He suggests that this was how the Druids "kept their power". (I already mentioned that he seems to be looking at things through the Judeo-Christian lens.)

But, if we look at what Caesar said was the reason for the ban on writing, we find that it was really quite logical. The Druids were concerned that their pupils should not neglect the training of their memories, i.e. the Frontal Cortex, by relying on written texts.

It is worth noting that, in the nineteenth century, it was observed that the illiterate Yugoslav bards, who were able to recite interminable poems, actually lost their ability to memorize once they had learned to rely on reading and writing.

So, it seems that the Druids were actually concerned more about the accurate transmission of their knowledge than "holding power."

Although the Druids prohibited certain things from being written down, it's clear that they DID write. Celtic writings in Ogamic script have been found on many ancient stones. Caesar tells us that the Celts were using the Greek alphabet when the Romans arrived in Gaul in the first century BC.
See also:

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Info

Latest evidence shows that resin was used by Neandertals in central Italy

Daniel Strain
University of Colorado Boulder
Wed, 26 Jun 2019 02:43 UTC
Neanderthals
© NASA
Archaeologists working in two Italian caves have discovered some of the earliest known examples of ancient humans using an adhesive on their stone tools-an important technological advance called "hafting."

The new study, which included CU Boulder's Paola Villa, shows that Neanderthals living in Europe from about 55 to 40 thousand years ago traveled away from their caves to collect resin from pine trees. They then used that sticky substance to glue stone tools to handles made out of wood or bone.

The findings add to a growing body of evidence that suggests that these cousins of Homo sapiens were more clever than some have made them out to be.

"We continue to find evidence that the Neanderthals were not inferior primitives but were quite capable of doing things that have traditionally only been attributed to modern humans," said Villa, corresponding author of the new study and an adjoint curator at the CU Museum of Natural History.

That insight, she added, came from a chance discovery from Grotta del Fossellone and Grotta di Sant'Agostino, a pair of caves near the beaches of what is now Italy's west coast.
Flints bearing traces of resin
© Degano et al. 2019, PLOS ONE
Flints bearing traces of pine resin. The letter "R" indicates the presence of visible resin, and the arrows point to spots where researchers sampled material for chemical analysis.
Those caves were home to Neanderthals who lived in Europe during the Middle Paleolithic period, thousands of years before Homo sapiens set foot on the continent. Archaeologists have uncovered more than 1,000 stone tools from the two sites, including pieces of flint that measured not much more than an inch or two from end to end.

In a recent study of the materials, Villa and her colleagues noticed a strange residue on just a handful of the flints-bits of what appeared to be organic material.

"Sometimes that material is just inorganic sediment, and sometimes it's the traces of the adhesive used to keep the tool in its socket" Villa said.
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Archaeology

Paleontologists discover 12-foot bird that lived alongside early human relatives in Europe

Jenny Howard
National Geographic
Wed, 26 Jun 2019 19:34 UTC
Pachystruthio dmanisensis
© ANDREY ATUCHIN
The giant flightless bird Pachystruthio dmanisensis, seen here in an illustration, lived in what is now the Black Sea region almost two million years ago and may have been a source of food for early human relatives.
Almost two million years ago, giant hyenas, saber-toothed cats, and camels roamed across the European continent, perhaps sometimes clashing with a few of our early human relatives. Now, in a surprise to paleontologists, it seems these Pleistocene mammals and our hominin cousins also shared their domain with an enormous bird that was almost 12 feet tall.

The discovery, described today in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, represents the first giant flightless bird known to have lived in the Northern Hemisphere. The extinct animal, dubbed Pachystruthio dmanisensis, weighed in at a whopping 990 pounds-almost three times as much as its closest living relative, the ostrich.

"We think of [giant birds] in Madagascar, New Zealand, and Australia, but this is very solid evidence that they were also in the European region," says Helen James, curator of birds at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, who was not involved in the new study.
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