Secret HistoryS


Archaeology

Ancient bones reveal Irish are not Celts after all


Irish Central
Sun, 29 Mar 2020 20:28 UTC
ancient bones ireland
The chance discovery of ancient bones under an Irish pub in County Antrim in the mid-2000s has cast doubt over whether Irish people are actually related to the ancient Celts at all.

In 2006, Bertie Currie was clearing land to make a driveway for McCuaig's Bar on Rathlin Island off Antrim when he noticed a large, flat stone buried beneath the surface.

Currie realized that there was a large gap underneath the stone and investigated further.

"I shot the torch in and saw the gentleman, well, his skull and bones," Currie told the Washington Post.
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Info

Scientists uncover faint stencils in Timor-Leste cave which sheds light into human colonisation of Australia

James Urquhart
Cosmos Magazine
Mon, 30 Mar 2020 19:03 UTC
Lene Hara Cave
© CD STANDISH ET AL 2020, (COPYRIGHT ELSEVIER 2020)The Lene Hara Cave in Timor-Leste where the stencils were found.
Outlines of human hands painted in a Timor-Leste cave might be from the time of the last Ice Age, possibly offering insight into human colonisation of Australia from Asia around 65,000 years ago.

Previously, all known rock art in Timor-Leste - also called East Timor - was thought to be from the Holocene, which began around 11,650 years ago.

Now, a study published in Archaeological Research in Asia reports 16 hand stencils within Lene Hara Cave on Timor-Leste's eastern tip. Archaeologists think they were painted in the Pleistocene epoch, dubbed the "Ice Age", before the Holocene began.

"It was thrilling to rediscover this suite of hand stencils - perhaps the most interesting rock art motifs to study," says the report's lead author Christopher Standish, from the University of Southampton, UK.

"The stencils provide a tangible link to the people who created them; you're looking at the outline of a real person's hand who lived thousands of years ago."

Produced on a mineral crust that has flaked away, the faded patterns are in poor condition and almost imperceptible to the untrained eye. Standish's team was able to identify the hand motifs, however, along with more pigment splatters that were too fragmented to ascertain as stencils.
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Archaeology

3,400-year-old Mesoamerican ball court sheds light on the mythic origins of the game

Kiona N. Smith
Ars Technica
Wed, 25 Mar 2020 18:19 UTC
aztec mayn ball game wall painting
© University of OregonBefore sports were cancelled — The site suggests highland communities played a role in developing the game.
Millennia ago, a stone court would have hosted teams of players wearing belts and loincloths using their hips to knock a hard rubber ball toward goals at either end of the court. The ball game, which re-enacted a creation story recorded in the Maya religious text Popul Vuh, was a major part of political, religious, and social life for the Maya and the Aztec, and for the Olmec before them. But archaeologists don't yet know much about where people first started playing the game or how it became a cultural phenomenon that spread across the area that now includes Guatemala, Belize, Mexico, Honduras, and El Salvador.

Layers of ball courts

The ball court — a stone-floored alley about 50 meters (165 feet) long, bounded by steep stone walls and earthen mounds — once occupied a place of honor in the heart of the ancient city. But sometime between 1174 and 1102 BCE, the people of Etlatongo dismantled parts of the court and ritually "terminated" its life. That ceremony left burned bits of plant, mingled with broken Olmec-style pottery, animal bones, shells, and a few human bones (which may or may not have come from a later cemetery) scattered on the carved bedrock floor of the court and atop the earthen mounds that ran the length of its sides.

Comment: More on the Mayans, Aztecs and the Popul Vuh:

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Brick Wall

The eugenicists were mostly the Woke people of their day


Uncommon Descent
Sun, 29 Mar 2020 00:01 UTC
the guarded gate
Opponents were mostly the unWoke — Catholics, anti-Darwinists, and such.

Reader Terry Scambray has kindly submitted his review of a history of the eugenics movement, earlier published at New Oxford Review:

A review of The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law that Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America, by Daniel Okrent (Scribner, 2019. 402 pp.)

Daniel Okrent has marshalled a compendium of damning statements and information which demonstrates the ignominy of the eugenics movement and how its advocates desperately sought to limit immigration to the United States. Though this tale is not new, Okrent's telling of it is clear, well organized and full of the smaller stories and details that enrich a narrative.

Comment: See also:

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Bizarro Earth

The Black Death, social distancing and summer holidays

James Hankins
Quillette
Sat, 28 Mar 2020 12:00 UTC
black death
© Wellcome Images“Bring Out Your Dead”
One of the comforts of studying history is that, no matter how bad things get, you can always find a moment in the past when things were much, much worse. Some commentators on our current crisis have been throwing around comparisons to earlier pandemics, and the Black Death of 1347 — 50 inevitably gets mentioned. Please. The Black Death wiped out half the population of Europe in the space of four years. In some places the mortality was far swifter and deadlier than that. The novelist Giovanni Boccaccio, who gave us the most vivid picture of the Black Death in literature, estimated that 100,000 people died in Florence in the four months between March and July 1348. The population of the city in 1338, according to one contemporary chronicler, stood at 120,000.

Boccaccio at the time was a city tax official and saw the whole thing at ground level. Every morning bodies of the dead — husbands, wives, children, servants — were pushed out into the street where they were piled on stretchers, later on carts. They were carried to the nearest church for a quick blessing, then trundled to graveyards outside the city for burial. As the death toll rose, traditional burial practices were abandoned. Deep trenches were dug into which bodies were dumped in layers with a thin covering of soil shoveled on top. Boccaccio writes that "no more respect was accorded the dead than would today be shown to dead goats."

Comment: While the coronavirus is provably nothing like the Black Death, plagues are documented throughout recorded history - and even further back - and they seem to occur when civilization is on terminal decline, much like we see today, and so it behooves us to educate ourselves on the essentials for when a plague really does strike: Also check out SOTT radio's: The Health & Wellness Show: The Truth about Tobacco and the Benefits of Nicotine

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Shamrock

Archaeologists call find at Brú na Bóinne World Heritage Site 'another Newgrange'

Frances Mulraney
Irish Central
Sat, 28 Jul 2018 03:04 UTC
rock art Ireland Brú na Bóinne megalith
© Dr Ciarán McDonnell/TwitterMegalithic art at Brú na Bóinne World Heritage Site, Co. Meath, Ireland
The Brú na Bóinne World Heritage Site has added to its importance with further megalithic burial chambers discovered.

Archaeologists in Ireland made a major new discovery in July 2018, revealing a 5,500-year-old megalithic passage tomb cemetery that is being described as a "find of a lifetime."

Following research carried out by agri-technology company Devenish and University College Dublin School of Archaeology, two burial chambers have been discovered within the western part of the main passage tomb beside the 18th-century Dowth Hall in Co. Meath. The chambers were covered by a large stone cairn which was around 131 foot (40 meters) in diameter.
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Dig

Prehistoric artifacts suggest a Neolithic Era independently developed in New Guinea


Popular Archaeology
Wed, 25 Mar 2020 12:00 UTC
neolithic new guinea
© Ben ShawThe first pestle found during initial spade pitting, the find that started it all.
New artifacts uncovered at the Waim archaeological site in the highlands of New Guinea - including a fragment of the earliest symbolic stone carving in Oceania - illustrate a shift in human behavior between 5050 and 4200 years ago in response to the widespread emergence of agriculture, ushering in a regional Neolithic Era similar to the Neolithic in Eurasia.

The location and pattern of the artifacts at the site suggest a fixed domestic space and symbolic cultural practices, hinting that the region began to independently develop hallmarks of the Neolithic about 1000 years before Lapita farmers from Southeast Asia arrived in New Guinea.

While scientists have known that wetland agriculture originated in the New Guinea highlands between 8000 and 4000 years ago, there has been little evidence for corresponding social changes like those that occurred in other parts of the world.

Comment: See also: And check out SOTT radio's:

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Fireball 5

Scientists agree: Younger Dryas impact event wiped out ancient civilization


Sacred Geometry International
Sat, 21 Mar 2020 15:10 UTC
Meteor
© iStockphoto
The Earth was hit by a fragmented comet around 13,000 years ago at the end of the Pleistocene Era and scientists are now starting to agree.

A new research paper has been published in Scientific Reports regarding an ancient civilisation in what is modern-day Syria that was wiped out by the cataclysm, as academics finally come round to the idea that yes this event did happen.

Even the sceptic Michael Shermer, who famously debated Graham Hancock on the Joe Rogan podcast has tweeted Graham saying:

"Ok Graham, I shall adjust my priors in light of more research like this, and modify my credence about your theory."

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Arrow Up

Pepe Escobar - A meeting of Chinese and Greek/Latin stoicism

Pepe Escobar
Asia Times
Sat, 21 Mar 2020 20:35 UTC
Piazza Capitaniato, Padua
© AFP / Roberto Silvino / NurPhotoStoics would approve: Following a decree issued by Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte on March 9, all commercial activities have been required to close after 6 pm with the exception of food shops. The squares of Italian cities have emptied; bars, restaurants, cafes and covered markets are now deserted. Movement is allowed only for business purposes and home deliveries and for close personal reasons. The streets are patrolled by police forces. This photo was taken at Piazza Capitaniato, Padua, on Monday.
Earlier this week a delegation of Chinese medics arrived at Malpensa airport near Milan from Shanghai on a special China Eastern flight carrying 400,000 masks and 17 tons of equipment. The salutation banner the visitors rolled out on the tarmac, in red and white, read, "We're waves from the same sea, leaves from the same tree, flowers from the same garden."

In a stance of supreme cross-cultural elegance, this was inspired by the poetics of Seneca, a Stoic. The impact, all over Italy, where people still study the classics, was immense.

The Chinese were consulted in advance and they preferred Seneca to a Chinese saying. After all, for China, a 5,000-year-old civilization-state that has confronted perhaps more than its share of instances of luan ("chaos"), there's nothing more rejuvenating than post-chaos.

China is donating coronavirus test kits to Cambodia. China sent planeloads of masks, ventilators - and medics - to Italy and France. China sent medics to Iran, which is under unilateral, illegal US sanctions - and to Iraq, which the Pentagon is bombing again. China is helping across the (Eurasian) board, from the Philippines to Spain.

President Xi Jinping, in a phone call with Italy's Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, pledged in the wake of Covid-19 to establish a Health Silk Road, a companion to the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative.

Thus, finally, there's the Philosophical Silk Road celebrated at an Italian airport, a meeting of Greek/Latin stoicism with Chinese stoicism.
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Health

How the Soviet Union defeated a smallpox epidemic in a matter of 19 days

Boris Egorov
Russia Behind the Headlines
Sat, 21 Mar 2020 16:40 UTC
russia smallpox epidemic
© Getty Images, Mikhail Grachev/МАММ/МDF, Archive photo
It took the city emergency services a little more than two weeks to prevent the deadly virus from escaping beyond Moscow and spreading throughout the entire Soviet Union.

On December 23, 1959, a man stepped off an airplane arriving in Moscow from Delhi, who would soon inadvertently place the capital of the USSR in great danger. Artist Alexei Kokorekin could not have imagined that he had brought smallpox from India.

Variola vera, natural or smallpox, was one of the deadliest diseases to have ever affected humankind. It wiped out entire villages, cities and even entire countries. In the 8th century, it killed 30 percent of the population of Japan and in the 16th century, millions of native Americans, who contracted the virus from conquistadors.
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