Scientists screened 1,785 ancient human genomes from the last 45,000 years for parental relatedness.
At present-day, more than ten percent of all global marriages occur among first or second cousins. While cousin-marriages are common practice in some societies, unions between close relatives are discouraged in others. In a new study, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and the University of Chicago investigated how common close parental relatedness was in our ancestors.

The researchers re-analyzed previously published DNA data from ancient humans that lived during the last 45,000 years to find out how closely related their parents were. The results were surprising: Ancient humans rarely chose their cousins as mates. In a global dataset of 1,785 individuals only 54, that is, about three percent, show the typical signs of their parents being cousins. Those 54 did not cluster in space or time, showing that cousin matings were sporadic events in the studied ancient populations. Notably, even for hunter-gatherers who lived more than 10,000 years ago, unions between cousins were the exception.

To analyze such a large dataset, the researchers developed a new computational tool to screen ancient DNA for parental relatedness. It detects long stretches of DNA that are identical in the two DNA copies, one inherited from the mother and one from the father. The closer the parents are related, the longer and more abundant such identical segments are. For modern DNA data, computational methods can identify these stretches with ease. However, the quality of DNA from bones that are thousands of years old is, in most cases, too low to apply these methods. Thus, the new method fills the gaps in the ancient genomes by leveraging modern high-quality DNA data. "By applying this new technique we could screen more than ten times as many ancient genomes than previously possible", says Harald Ringbauer from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, the lead researcher of the study.

An international collaboration has identified what may be the oldest work of art, a sequence of hand and footprints discovered on the Tibetan Plateau. The prints date back to the middle of the Pleistocene era, between 169,000 and 226,000 years ago - three to four times older than the famed cave paintings in Indonesia, France and Spain.

To answer the question, "is it art?" the team turned to Thomas Urban, research scientist in the College of Arts and Sciences and with the Cornell Tree Ring Laboratory.

"The question is: What does this mean? How do we interpret these prints? They're clearly not accidentally placed," said Urban, a co-author of the paper, "Earliest Parietal Art: Hominin Hand and Foot Traces from the Middle Pleistocene of Tibet," published Sept. 10 in Science Bulletin.

"There's not a utilitarian explanation for these. So what are they?" Urban said. "My angle was, can we think of these as an artistic behavior, a creative behavior, something distinctly human. The interesting side of this is that it's so early."

The project was led by David Zhang of Guangzhou University in collaboration with researchers from Bournemouth University, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Education University of Hong Kong, Institute of Geology and University of Minnesota.

Archaeologists have unearthed evidence of alcohol consumption 9,000 years ago at an ancient burial site in southern China, shedding light on what could be one of the earliest known instances of ritual beer drinking to honour the dead.

According to the researchers, including Jiajing Wang from Dartmouth College in the US, this kind of ritual drinking 9,000 years ago may have played an important role in "maintaining social relationships and paving the way for the rise of complex farming societies four millennia later".

In the study, published last week in the journal PLOS ONE, the scientists unearthed some of "the earliest known painted pottery in the world", of which some were also decorated with abstract designs.

The ugly truth behind the Great Reset and the thing masquerading as a global pandemic is an intention to cataclyze a complete reform of human civilization...

Today, the Canadian political landscape is being remoulded by a nest of technocratic ideologues who aim to lead the nation into a post-nation state Great Reset.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was among the earliest public figures who celebrated this new age stating in 2015 that Canada is "the world's first post-national state". Once the COVID pandemic had been used to justify the shutdown of the world economy, the same Trudeau stated in November 2020 that

"this pandemic has provided an opportunity for a reset. This is our chance to accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts to reimagine economic systems that actually address global challenges like extreme poverty, inequality, and climate change."

As Canada moves into an election on September 20, 2021 with the Liberal government of Chrystia Freeland seeking a majority rule (and un-challengeable authority), the question remains: How did this all happen? How did a party which was once renowned during WW2 and the two ensuing post-war decades as a champion of progress led by such figures as C.D. Howe and Prime Minister St. Laurent become a party devoted to technocratic management of a post-industrial/post-truth world order?

An 8 part tweet stream by Pepe Escobar and posted with his permission

Pepe has two requests as follows:

• Please retweet as much as possible
• Please alert the Saker community - because at least parts of this thread may be "disappeared", post-Allende-style, in no time. These are the parts that totally destroy the official narrative.

9/11: A U.S. DEEP STATE INSIDER SPEAKS Old school. Top clearance. Extremely discreet. Attended secret Deep State meetings on 9-11. Tired of all the lies. The following is what's fit to print without being redacted.

Part 1 THE PHONE CALL. Up next.

The release of a White House report put together the year before the 9/11 attacks reveals there was a growing fear of terrorist attack during this period. And it begs the question why more wasn't done to prevent one.

A previously secret report authored in January 2000 by senior members of the White House's then-national security team, which concluded that US intelligence was ill equipped and ineffective in the face of a major and ever-growing domestic terror threat, has at last been declassified.

Dubbed the 'Millennium Alert After Action Review', it was compiled at the behest of the National Security Council's Counterterrorism Security Group, by representatives of each of the US government's counterterrorism and security agencies, after a major planned terror attack was thwarted at the end of 1999.

Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian living in Canada, was caught attempting to cross the border into Washington state in a car laden with explosives. He later admitted to the FBI that he'd been trained at an Al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan and intended to bomb Los Angeles Airport on New Year's Eve.

The Bureau made dozens of arrests, questioned an enormous number of individuals and placed hundreds under surveillance countrywide over the course of the ensuing investigation, although proving the targets in question were terrorists, let alone had terrorist connections, proved elusive. A feared wave of incendiary attacks during millennium celebrations that year didn't materialise, although the sense that a major incident of some kind was inevitable pervaded the White House, leading to the review's compilation.

As the 20th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, the fascinating stories of three spies who infiltrated Al-Qaeda for Western intelligence are worth reexamining. Why was more not made of the information they could have provided?

The conventional wisdom, oft-repeated in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, is that it is extremely difficult to recruit informers and deploy infiltrators against Al-Qaeda, due to its extremely compartmentalised cell structure. In reality, in the run-up to 9/11, British, French and American intelligence all had spies capable of penetrating Al-Qaeda's inner circle, including its training camps in Afghanistan.

Omar Nasiri was born in Morocco in the 1960s, but grew up in Belgium. In the early 1990s, he got involved in gun smuggling for the GIA - an Algerian Islamist militia which was slaughtering tens of thousands in the Algerian Civil War. After getting into trouble for stealing money from the gang he approached French intelligence, who recruited him as a spy inside the GIA.

Nasiri continued working as an arms trafficker, providing the weapons used in the 1994 GIA hijacking of an Air France flight, which aimed to crash the plane into the Eiffel Tower. That plot was thwarted when French special forces stormed the plane, but Omar carried on providing weapons to the gang. He even drove a car laden with explosives through France and Spain to deliver it to a GIA operative in Morocco. His French handler, Gilles, approved the mission and when a huge car bombing took place in Algiers a few weeks later, Gilles didn't appear to care.

These details came out years later when Nasiri wrote an autobiography and gave an extensive interview to the BBC.

Two carved stone balls have been discovered buried in an ancient Orkney tomb that is being lost to the sea.
Archaeologists are on site at Tresness, Sanday, are excavating the burial tomb, which dates from around 3,500BC and is thought to be one of Scotland's earliest monuments.

Two stone balls are among finds made at the site.

The objects are unique to Scotland and, although many theories exist as to their purpose, it is believed they were used as weapons - and perhaps thrown at people's heads - during the Neolithic in Orkney.

Just over 500 carved stone balls have been found in Scotland in total, mainly in Orkney and the North East, with only a small number found in burial sites.

If ever there was a man who displayed on his face the evil in his mind, it was Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security advisor for President Jimmy Carter when the US plot to start the war against the Soviet Union on the Afghan front was hatched in 1979. "Now we can lure the Russians into the Afghan trap," he wrote Carter in a secret note of February 1979. In July of that year he followed with the directive Carter signed in secret to supply arms to the mujahideen "to induce a Soviet military intervention". In December 1979 Brzezinski told Carter: "we should not be too sanguine about Afghanistan becoming a Soviet Vietnam". Later he used to boast that had been precisely his intention and also his crowning achievement.

Brzezinski's lips are sealed now because he's been dead for four years.

Carter is still alive. In 1979 he kept the evil on his mind secret behind the smile on his face. His lips are sealed now, since the retreat from Afghanistan began by the US Army, and after the rout last month in Kabul. The mainstream American press are not reporting they have asked Carter for comment, or that he has refused. Not even the alt-media investigators have pursued him.

This essay is written from the point of view of a physician, medical educator, and bioethicist who sees the deplorable fact of physician involvement in the Shoah as an opportunity to highlight enduring moral lessons for the medical professions. Medicine and law are intimately connected to one another, and, since the professionalization of medicine in the United States and Europe in the latter half of the 19th century, even more so. One discipline that connects both is moral philosophy; for both law and medicine involve reason and the will, directed toward the good of the person. Thus, the story of the Holocaust is a tragedy that unfolded because of the corruption of moral philosophy first, and medicine and law second.

Why is this important? The reason is that there are those who argue against the contemporary application of lessons learned from the horrors of Nazi medicine. Some say that "Nazi medicine" was not real medicine or science: We cannot even call what the Nazis did "medicine," since medicine contains within it an assumption of rigor and beneficence. This is an objection I hear from medical scientists, who point to safeguards such as the Nuremberg Code (1947), the Declaration of Helsinki (1964), and the Belmont Report (1978) as proof of the radically different nature of science today. But this argument is circular. It defines science as "good science," (relegating anything unethical to "bad science" or "pseudoscience") when in fact these very safeguards were born out of abuses from what was then the most scientifically advanced country in the world. Medicine then, as now, is not somehow immune from this abuse, as the horrific postwar abuses at Tuskegee and elsewhere make clear.

Other scholars have suggested that the real cause of the Holocaust was an economic, political, or racial one — not a moral one — and that, since the United States has a radically different political, economic, and cultural system, the use of the "Nazi analogy" should be restricted. Medical abuses today are somehow less likely because economic, political, and cultural considerations are highly specific. One prominent bioethicist, for example, noted:

A key component of Nazi thought was to rid Germany ... of those deemed economic drains on the state ... a fear rooted in the bitter economic experience after the First World War. ... [These themes] have little to do with contemporary debates about science, medicine, or technology.