'An empire within an empire,' the Pashtun are essential to understanding the complexities of Afghanistan as a nation-state today. What is the 'Pashtun universe,' and why will they always outlast those who try to govern them?
It was bound to happen: the remixed Saigon moment at Kabul airport and the stunning comeback of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, led by Pashtuns, has unleashed across the West a cheap Orientalization avalanche.

The whole of Afghanistan is now 'threatened' by the return of the 'barbarians.'

Once again, Afghan women 'need to be protected,' all Afghans 'need to be rescued,' 'terrorists will rebuild' and Afghanistan may even need to be re-invaded for the sake of 'civilization.' All because of those wild tribal Pashtun barbarians.

Imperialist pathologies never die. 'Barbarian' yields from the Greek original barbaros - as in someone who could not speak Greek, or spoke it incorrectly.

When faced with the sophisticated Persians, the concept of barbarian evolved. And then the Romans gave it its final contours, encompassing people who could not speak Greek or Latin, those who deployed military skills, were fierce or cruel to their enemies, or came from a non Graeco-Roman culture.

All this eventually coalesced into a toxic Western cultural construct deployed for centuries, the ultimate, pejorative denomination for a warrior-like Other: uncouth, uncivilized, rural, non-urban, prone to violence and cruelty, maybe not a total savage, but close.

As a contrast, Imperial China always referred to various Central Eurasian tribes and peoples as warring, civilized, urban, nomads, agrarian, but never as barbarians.

Pashtun Afghanistan is a much more sophisticated universe than the prevailing reductionism that evokes rural subsistence economy, mud-brick architecture, caravans of nomads, burqas and bearded men in sandals brandishing Kalashnikovs.

So as a tribute to the late, great Norwegian social anthropologist Fredrik Barth, let's subvert Orientalism by taking an - Orientalist! - magic carpet ride to the twists and turns of the Pashtun world.

Archaeologists have found a 13-metre roof chamber sealed off for at least 40,000 years in one of Gibraltar's World Heritage Site caves where Neanderthals are thought to have lived for 100,000 years.

Located in steep limestone cliffs on the eastern side of the Rock of Gibraltar, the four caves in the Gorham's Cave Complex have been found to contain extensive archaeological and palaeontological deposits that provide evidence of Neanderthal occupation.

The roof chamber was found at the very back of Vanguard Cave, where a project has been under way since 2012 to find out if the cave had passages and chambers that were plugged by later sediment, Gibraltar National Museum said.

Burnham describes how it is necessary that the masses believe the revolution to be beneficial to them, when in reality it is just to transition from one ruling class to the other.

"[James Burnham is] the real intellectual founder of the neoconservative movement and the original proselytizer, in America, of the theory of 'totalitarianism.'"

- Christopher Hitchens, "For the Sake of Argument: Essay and Minority Reports"

In the first part of this two part series, I went over how the roots for the World Economic Forum's Great Reset can very clearly be traced back to 80 years ago, when an American, former high-level Trotskyist who later went on to become the intellectual founding father of neo-conservatism, James Burnham, wrote a book on his vision for "The Managerial Revolution." And that it was in fact, these ideologies of Burnham that triggered Orwell to write his "1984".

A human skull fossil going back 32,000 years has been discovered at a cave site in central China's Henan Province, according to local archaeological officials.

Guanyin Township, Lushan County, is the location of the cave. Previously discovered human fossils, animal fossils, and stone tools in the region during the palaeolithic archaeological study.

"There are two caverns at the site, one of which is 9 metres long, 3 metres wide, and 3.9 metres tall, covering an area of 30 square metres," said Zhao Qingpo, an archaeologist, adding that the cave is significantly larger than previous caves discovered in the vicinity.

The discovery of a 3,500-year-old paving stone, described as the "ancestor" of Mediterranean mosaics, offers illuminating details into the daily lives of the mysterious Bronze Age Hittites.

The assembly of over 3,000 stones in natural shades of beige, red and black, and arranged in triangles and curves - was unearthed in the remains of a 15th century BC Hittite temple, 700 years before the oldest known mosaics of ancient Greece.

"It is the ancestor of the classical period of mosaics that are obviously more sophisticated. This is a sort of first attempt to do it," says Anacleto D'Agostino, excavation director of Usakli Hoyuk, near Yozgat, in central Turkey.

At the site three hours from Turkey's capital Ankara, first located in 2018, Turkish and Italian archaeologists painstakingly use shovels and brushes to learn more about the towns of the Hittites, one of the most powerful kingdoms in ancient Anatolia.

"For the first time, people felt the necessity to produce some geometric patterns and to do something different from a simple pavement," D'Agostino says.

"Maybe we are dealing with a genius? Maybe not. It was maybe a man who said 'build me a floor' and he decided to do something weird?"

The discovery was made opposite Kerkenes mountain and the temple where the mosaic is located was dedicated to Teshub, the storm god worshipped by the Hittites, equivalent to Zeus for the ancient Greeks.

"Probably here the priests were looking at the picture of Kerkenes mountain for some rituals and so on," D'Agostino adds.

The discovery was made close to the village of Khondergey in the south-west of the Republic of Tuva, close to Russia's border with Mongolia.

The stone bull was part of an Early Bronze Era burial more than 4,000 years ago, making the geoglyth one thousand years older than England's chalk-cut White Horse, and twice as old as the Nazca Lines in Peru.

Only the backside of the bull with the hind legs and a tail was preserved, the front part was unwittingly destroyed in 1940s by road construction.

This is the first such discovery not only for the Republic of Tuva, but across Central Asia.

A genetic analysis of DNA taken from ancient skeletons appears to have answered a conundrum that has captivated researchers for more than 2,000 years: the origin of the Etruscans.

The study, published in the journal Science Advances on Friday, finds that the Etruscans, a sophisticated pre-Roman civilization in central Italy, were of local origin rather than migrants from the Near East, as previously thought.

Geneticists from the Max Planck Institute, Tubingen University, and the University of Florence sequenced the DNA of 82 individuals who lived in central and southern Italy between 800 B.C.E. and 1000 C.E.Their results show that the Etruscans, despite their unique cultural expressions, were closely related to their italic neighbors, and reveal major genetic transformations associated with historical events.

Researchers from the University's Archaeogenetics Research Group used ancient DNA analysis to identify a member of a population expelled from medieval Spain known as the 'Segorbe Giant'. The results have shed light on the brutal political decision that led to a dramatic change in population following the Christian reconquest of Spain.
AN INTERNATIONAL team of researchers led by the University of Huddersfield's Archaeogenetics Research Group, including geneticists, archaeological scientists, and archaeologists, has published the genome sequence of a unique individual from Islamic medieval Spain - al-Andalus - the results of which have shed light on a brutal event that took place in medieval Spain.

The individual, who was discovered in an eleventh century Islamic necropolis from the city of Segorbe, near Valencia in Spain, is known to local archaeologists as the 'Segorbe Giant' because of his unusual height.

His skeleton had suggested that he might have some African ancestry. Most of Spain had been progressively conquered by Arabs and Berbers from Northwest Africa from the eighth century onwards, creating one of the major centres of medieval European civilisation.

Klaus Schwab, the architect of the World Economic Forum (f. 1971), a leading, if not the leading, influencer and funder for what will set the course for world economic policy outside of government, has been the cause of much concern and suspicion since his announcement of "The Great Reset" agenda at the 50th annual meeting of the WEF in June 2020.

The Great Reset initiative is a somewhat vague call for the need for global stakeholders to coordinate a simultaneous "management" of the effects of COVID-19 on the global economy, which they have eerily named as "pandenomics." This, we are told will be the new normal, the new reality that we will have to adjust ourselves to for the foreseeable future.

It should be known that at nearly its inception, the World Economic Forum had aligned itself with the Club of Rome, a think tank with an elite membership, founded in 1968, to address the problems of mankind. It was concluded by the Club of Rome in their extremely influential "Limits to Growth," published in 1972, that such problems could not be solved on their own terms and that all were interrelated. In 1991, Club of Rome co-founder Sir Alexander King stated in the The First Global Revolution (an assessment of the first 30 years of the Club of Rome) that:

"In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself."

It is no surprise that with such a conclusion, part of the solution prescribed was the need for population control.

A new academic work, Worlds Apart, provides a documentary history of relations between Washington and Tehran between 1978 and 2018. It tells an extraordinary tale of coups, secret deals, sabotage and cooperation over four decades.

To mark its release, the National Security Archive has published a number of highly illuminating declassified files on the subject, several of which have never been seen before.

The document trail begins on January 3, 1979, when insurrection had been intensifying across Iran for almost a year. With the Western-installed and backed Shah still desperately clinging to power, but only just, an informal National Security Council meeting was convened. Present were President Jimmy Carter, Vice President Walter Mondale, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, and CIA Director Stansfield Turner.