Secret HistoryS


Better Earth

Neanderthals' social isolation may have sped up their extinction

Laura Baisas
Popular Science
Wed, 11 Sep 2024 00:11 UTC
neanderthal
© CopyrightThe remains of a 45,000 year old nicknamed Thorin was uncovered in a French cave system.
The teeth from a Neanderthal nicknamed Thorin were found in a cave in France. He lived about 40,000 to 45,000 years ago in an isolated community of the now extinct hominins. Ludovik Slimak Share Using DNA extracted from some roughly 45,000-year-old bones, scientists have found a new Neanderthal lineage that likely did not have a lot of interaction with others from its species. The remains belong to a man archeologists nicknamed "Thorin" after Thorin Oakenshield, one of the dwarfs from JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit. This Neanderthal Thorin lived in a small community in the present day Rhône Valley, France.

A new genetic analysis revealed that Thorin's community was isolated from other groups and diverged from more well-studied Neanderthals about 100,000 years ago. The findings are described in a study published September 11 in the Cell Press journal Cell Genomics and could shed light on the reasons behind this species' extinction.

"Until now, the story has been that at the time of the extinction there was just one Neanderthal population that was genetically homogeneous, but now we know that there were at least two populations present at that time," study co-author and University of Copenhagen population geneticist Tharsika Vimala said in a statement.

Comment: For further insight, check out the following prescient article from 2011: The Golden Age, Psychopathy and the Sixth Extinction

See also :

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Better Earth

Europe's Trypillia neolithic mega-sites were matriarchal, with sophisticated technologies, and low-levels of social inequality

Sergio Prostak
Sci.News
Tue, 02 Jul 2024 21:05 UTC
Trypillian
© Kenny Arne Lang Antonsen / CC BY-SA 4.0.Reconstruction of the Trypillian giant-settlement Maidanetske, Ukraine. The Trypillia culture flourished in western/central Ukraine, Moldova and eastern Romania for over two millennia from the end of the Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age (5400-2700 BCE).
The Trypillia culture is a Neolithic European culture that arose in Ukraine between the Seret and Bug rivers, with extensions south into modern-day Romania and Moldova and east to the Dnieper River, in the 5th millennium BCE.

Also known as the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture, it is characterized by advanced agriculture, developed metallurgy, pottery-making, sophisticated architecture and social organization.

Trypillian society was matriarchal, with women heading the household, doing agricultural work, and manufacturing pottery, textiles and clothing. Hunting, keeping domestic animals and making tools were the responsibilities of the men.

Comment: Interesting Engineering provides further insight into the Trypillia with another recent study:
6,000-year-old sites challenge history

By employing geomagnetic techniques, researchers unveiled structures beneath the earth's surface, discovering Trypillia megasites that span over 100 hectares.

The Trypillia megasites, identified as the first planned cities in history, bore no resemblance to contemporary urban centers.

[...]

In a recent publication by the Swiss Neue Zürcher Zeitung, researchers describe the astonishing remnants of what may have been "the largest city in the world," discernible today only through aerial shadows and scattered pottery shards. This site in Ukraine dates back to 4000 BCE, making it the oldest urban settlement ever discovered.

[...]

The Trypillia megasites, recognized as the earliest planned cities, had nothing in common with modern-day urban centers. According to U-krane, they were circular or oval, with houses organized in concentric rings, interrupted by boulevards or wide corridors.

"These are the first planned cities of humanity," says NZZ, noting that the most remarkable site surpasses the size of Monaco and is comparable to Central Park.

Evidence leads researchers to believe that the houses were made of wood and clay and might have been burned down in an ancient conflict. Interestingly enough, however, no grave sites have been found.

"Individual graves are something with which the group of burying people represents their role to others. This reflection of social structures does not exist here," says Müller. "If there are no graves marked in an archaeologist-friendly way, that does not mean that a cult of the dead did not exist," he adds.
For clues as to why these cities were eventually abandoned, see: See also: Mysterious 25,000-year-old circular structure built from bones of 60 mammoths discovered in Russia's forest steppe

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Sherlock

Why Everything You Know About World War II Is Wrong

Ron Unz and Mike Whitney
The Unz Review
Mon, 12 Jun 2023 00:00 UTC
Hitler FDR
© The Unz Review


"Much of the current political legitimacy of today's American government and its various European vassal-states is founded upon a particular narrative history of World War II, and challenging that account might have dire political consequences." — Ron Unz View article as PDF. Audio file 1:36:50.

Comment: Below are some comments to the names, ordered after the question they first appear. On the whole there are so many articles...

1) Hitler evokes comparison in political debate Below are some articles that have more of a historic angle 2) Some articles about Winston Churchill 3) Recently the topic of the role of Churchill in WWII was brought up in a Tucker Carlson interview with historian Darryl Cooper. In his post on X.com from 7:00 PM · Sep 2, 2024, Carlson wrote in his Tweet:
Darryl Cooper may be the best and most honest popular historian in the United States. His latest project is the most forbidden of all: trying to understand World War Two. (1:20) History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (12:39) The Jonestown Cult (32:10) World War Two (45:04) How Would You Assess Winston Churchill? (1:17:17) How History Is Rewritten and Propagandized (1:24:39) Mass Immigration in Europe (1:42:25) The Civil Rights Movement and BLM (1:48:17) Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump (1:58:30) Christianity (2:10:58) Hate Blinds You
The interview drew a lot of attention, at least judging from the number of views, by now 34 million. For some commentary see: The Churchill Meltdown and Its Lessons - L.P. Koch

4) The Wiki for Deborah Lipstadt, who appeared in several paragraphs of the article, is a prominent and influential person also today:
In 1994, President of the United States Bill Clinton appointed her to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, and she served two terms.[3] On July 30, 2021, President Joe Biden nominated her to be the United States Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism.[4][5] She was confirmed by voice-vote on March 30, 2022, and sworn in on May 3, 2022.[6][7] Lipstadt was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.[8]
Deborah Lipstadt is mentioned in a couple of older SOTT articles. They connect to what she has written and said in recent years:
Back in February, Rep. Ilhan Omar made her "Benjamins" crack followed by the comment about people who have "allegiance to a foreign country", and one good thing to come out of the controversy was a discussion between [Forward Senior Columnist] Peter Beinart and Deborah Lipstadt at the Forward about the dual loyalty charge against Jews and Israel. I listened to it for the first time yesterday, and Beinart is as usual, intellectually brave.

Beinart says dual loyalty is inherent in the ways in which American Jews support Israel.
After a two-week campaign, the Yale University Episcopal chaplain was forced to resign over a letter to the New York Times in which he explained that actions such as the recent Israeli war on Gaza were breeding anti-Semitism in Europe and elsewhere.

The Rev. Bruce Shipman, in a three-sentence letter that was published in the Times on August 26, responded to an Op-Ed article by scholar Deborah Lipstadt discussing European anti-Semitism.
The above quote brings history up to the present, as if the ghosts of the Holocaust haunt the present.

5) There are many articles on SOTT about WWII. For a few headlines taken from the first few pages of a search gives: Minor notes:
Pearl Harbour
These SOTT articles mention Pearl Harbour in the text, but it also appears in the title of:
Is Pelosi's trip to Taiwan the 'Pearl Harbour moment' Jake Sullivan called for?
Flashback John Pilger: America's plan for a new Pearl Harbour

Postwar Germany
These SOTT articles mention "Postwar Germany" in the text and the following in the summary: Germany Knew Eichmann's Hiding Place Years Before His Capture

The video with David Irving (Wiki) may not be viewable in all countries. His talk is probably a summary of content that can be found in his first book about Winston Churchill: John T. Flynn, brought up in The Purge of Antiwar Intellectuals was more an observer of events, but his name has been mentioned before: Also purged or subdued was the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (Wiki):
The Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA) was a U.S.-based organization operating from 1937 to 1942, composed of social scientists, opinion leaders, historians, educators, and journalists.
[...]
After war was declared on Nazi Germany the neutral stance of propaganda analysis was untenable and the IPA folded in January 1942 with the final issue of its bulletin:
The association was not revived after the war. Is it then a surprise we 80+ years later have an article with a title like the above: "Why Everything You Know About World War II Is Wrong"

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Blue Planet

Easter Islanders procreated with Native Americans centuries before arrival of Europeans, new genome analysis reveals

Adam Kovac
Gizmodo
Wed, 11 Sep 2024 22:18 UTC
easter island rapa nui
© my LifeShow via FlickrThe new study also indicates the Polynesian people who settled Rapa Nui mixed with indigenous South Americans centuries before the arrival of Europeans. The prevailing narrative of what happened to the people of Rapa Nui may be completely false.
Shortly after Europeans first came to the remote Pacific territory they called Easter Island, a narrative arose around the people they found there. According to the story, the people had depleted the island's resources, which drove them into cannibalism and a severe population collapse, often referred to as ecological suicide. New analysis of DNA from some of the island's historic residents tells a very different story.

Using radiocarbon dating and genome sequencing, a research team, which included J. Víctor Moreno-Mayar, a geneticist from the University of Copenhagen, concluded that the population of Rapa Nui, as the island is now known, never experienced such a dramatic decline. The team also found some surprising information about the ancestors of Rapa Nui's people, which could have a major impact on our understanding of how how pre-colonization populations mixed and interacted.

Comment: Research has shown that migrations to the Americas have happened a number of times, by different peoples, from different departure points. For example, as noted in America Before by Graham Hancock - Book review:
[..] the discovery of henge-like geoglyphs across the Amazon (perhaps the most fascinating topic in the book for me) and genetic links between indigenous Australians and Amazonians.
See also: And check out SOTT radio's:

The following snippet featuring Graham Hancock touches on the subject of ancient civilizations' mapping the planet, as well as the incredible seafaring capabilities of the Polynesians:




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Info

Madagascar's enigmatic rock-cut architecture may have been of Zoroastrian origin

Leman Altuntaş
Arkeonews Net
Fri, 13 Sep 2024 00:41 UTC
circular rock-cut niches.
© G. Schreurs et al.
An international team of researchers found an enigmatic rock-cut architecture at Teniky, a site in the remote Isalo Massif in southern Madagascar, that has no parallels on the island or the East African coast.

The research was initiated under Guido Schreurs, associate professor at the Institute of Geological Sciences at the University of Bern in Switzerland.

Researchers have documented many newly discovered archaeological structures, including terraces, stone walls, stone basins, and rock-cut structures in various sizes, shapes, and forms constructed in the late first/early second millennia AD.

Archaeological excavations and field prospecting at Teniky reveal a much larger and more important archaeological landscape than previously known.

Surprisingly, the closest stylistic parallels to this architecture can be found thousands of kilometers away, in present-day Iran, specifically in the Fars region. The rock-cut niches at Teniky show similarities to those known from various sites throughout Iran, dated to the first millennium or older and related to Zoroastrian funerary practices.
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Magnify

Maori cannibalism widespread but ignored, academic says


Stuff
Fri, 30 Jan 2009 20:38 UTC
A cannibal feast on Tanna
© Bonhams
Maori cannibalism was widespread throughout New Zealand until the mid 1800s but has largely been ignored in history books, says the author of a new book released this week.

Paul Moon said his new book, This Horrid Practice, looked at the Maori tradition of eating each other in what was a particularly violent society before Europeans arrived in New Zealand.

Cannibalism lasted for several hundred years until the 1830s although there were a few isolated cases after that, said Professor Moon, a Pakeha history professor at Te Ara Poutama, the Maori Development Unit at the Auckland University of Technology.

He also said infanticide was also widely practised because tribes wanted men to be warriors and mothers often killed their female daughters by smothering them or pushing a finger through the soft tissue of the skull to kill them immediately.
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Info

16,000-year-old skeleton, crystals and stone tools discovered in Malaysian caves

Tom Metcalfe
Live Science
Tue, 10 Sep 2024 14:30 UTC
Archaeologists think the earliest skeleton from the Malaysian excavation may be up to 16,000 years old.
Gua Chalan site
© Z. Ramli/Nenggiri Valley Rescue ExcavationsThese two ancient skeletons buried at the Gua Chalan site were discovered by archaeologists excavating a limestone cave there before it is flooded by a hydroelectric lake.
Archaeologists investigating caves in Malaysia ahead of their flooding for a hydroelectric reservoir have discovered more than a dozen prehistoric burials they think are up to 16,000 years old.

The caves, in the remote Nenggiri Valley about 135 miles (215 kilometers) north of Kuala Lumpur, will be underwater if the reservoir fills as planned in mid-2027, creating a 20-square-mile (53 square km) lake to feed a 300-megawatt hydroelectric power station.

Zuliskandar Ramli, an archaeologist at the National University of Malaysia, told Live Science that most of the skeletons seemed to be from the pre-Neolithic culture of the region.

Some scholars suggest this was a branch of the hunter-gatherer Hoabinhian culture, who made distinctive stone tools found in other parts of Southeast Asia, from southwest China to Indonesia. Scientists also think the Hoabinhian peoples used many wild plants — including pepper, broad beans and betel nut — that are domesticated in the region today.

Ramli, who led the excavations at the Nenggiri Valley, said his team had found a total of 16 individuals buried in 13 limestone caves at four sites.
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Bullseye

The real barbarians: How the French and British 'civilized' Africa

Maxwell Boamah Amofa
RT
Sun, 08 Sep 2024 09:44 UTC
africans carrying stuff
© Art Media/Print Collector/Getty Images
Both colonizers, despite their differences, aimed at squeezing profit for their imperial centers.

The colonial footprints in Africa paint a bitter picture of socioeconomic exploitation and political repression, and at its heart are Britain and France. These countries operated different complex yet similar systems of colonial governance. To this end, unmasking their colonial games is necessary for a better understanding of how this complex chain of mechanisms impact the continent today.

Britain's web

The 15th and 16th century marked an influx of colonial powers to Africa. By the early 16th century, the British under Queen Elizabeth I had deployed its 'sea dogs' (a group of notorious pirates) led by John Hawkins, whose duty initially was to attack and loot Spanish ships sent to Africa.

By 1564, the gang had changed its focus to capturing and selling Africans as slaves to the West Indies to work on plantations, the final products of which were sent to Britain in a triangular form of trade - a system of trade which became known as the transatlantic slave trade.
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Cross

From Jesus to Nyerere: Africa's fight against Western spiritual colonialism

Moussa Ibrahim
RT
Thu, 05 Sep 2024 10:37 UTC
church guy
© Minasse Wondimu Hailu/Anadolu Agency/Getty ImagesEthiopian Orthodox Christians attend the Timkat celebrations at Medhane Alem Cathedral in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia • January 18, 2021
The future of Christian churches on the continent depends on the ability to develop an authentic African Christianity, moving away from its Westernized forms.

In May 2024, the United Methodist Church (UMC) held its General Conference in North Carolina in the US, where a controversial vote was passed to end a ban on openly practicing homosexual clergy. The conference was marred by controversy, as a large proportion of the African delegates, known for their opposition to this inclusion, were unable to obtain visas due to late invitations - a situation the African clergy had warned about in advance.

African congregations, deeply rooted in values such as family cohesion and the teachings of early African Christian missionaries, expressed strong opposition to the decision. In response, the entire UMC branch in Ivory Coast, representing nearly 1 million members, announced its departure from the denomination - a move that received scant attention in American UMC media. Now, other African branches of the UMC (South Africa, the Republic of the Congo, DRC, Zimbabwe, Ghana, and Nigeria) are contemplating similar actions, though financial constraints (as most funding comes from the US) and the UMC's power structures pose significant challenges to their potential exits.

Christianity in Africa is as old as the religion itself. From the earliest days of the faith, Africa has played a pivotal role in the development and spread of Christianity. Yet today, many African Christians find themselves practicing a version of the faith that is largely divorced from its historical roots on the continent. This modern, Westernized Christianity often comes with a set of values, practices, and power structures that are alien to Africa's spiritual and cultural identity. It is high time we recognize the importance of developing and supporting an authentically African Christianity - one that is rooted in our own history, values, and aspirations.
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Better Earth

Matching dinosaur footprints found on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean


Southern Methodist University
Fri, 23 Aug 2024 17:21 UTC
dinosaur
© Ismar de Souza Carvalho.A long ornithopod trackway at Passagem das Pedra, Sousa Basin preserved in floodplain deposits of Lower Cretaceous. An international team of researchers led by SMU paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs has found matching sets of Early Cretaceous dinosaur footprints on what are now two different continents.
An international team of researchers led by SMU paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs has found matching sets of Early Cretaceous dinosaur footprints on what are now two different continents.

More than 260 footprints were discovered in Brazil and in Cameroon, showing where land-dwelling dinosaurs were last able to freely cross between South America and Africa millions of years ago before the two continents split apart.

"We determined that in terms of age, these footprints were similar," Jacobs said. "In their geological and plate tectonic contexts, they were also similar. In terms of their shapes, they are almost identical."

Comment: One might recall the following find: Gigantic dinosaur footprints are found on the roof of a cave
The tracks were made 166 million to 168 million years ago, when three dinosaurs traversed the shoreline of a sea. The site was then at the planet's surface, but geological processes have buried and tilted the sediments, and the prints are now on the cave's roof, 500 metres underground.

Dinosaur footprints have often been discovered in mines and railway tunnels, but they are rarely found in natural caverns.
See also:

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