An eight-mile wall of prehistoric rock art featuring animals and humans has been discovered in the Chiribiquete National Park, Colombia, in the Amazon rainforest.

Dubbed the "Sistine Chapel of the ancients", the 12,500-years-old artwork was uncovered by a British-Colombian team of archaeologists under the leadership of José Iriarte, professor of archaeology at Exeter University, and was funded by the European Research Council.

Experts have dated the rock art based on the portrayal of animals that are now extinct, such as a mastodon — a prehistoric relative of the elephant, known to have inhabited North and Central America about 12,000 years ago. Among other animals portrayed in the rock art are fish, turtles, lizards and birds and people dancing and holding hands, reported The Observer.

Although the discovery was made about a year ago, the drawings were first unveiled for an upcoming documentary series by Channel 4: Jungle Mystery: Lost Kingdoms of the Amazon. The series is scheduled to hit the screens on 5 December.

Ella Al-Shamahi, an explorer and paleoanthropologist who presents the series, called the images "breathtaking" and said the discovery at Serranía de la Lindosa is "so new" that "they haven't even given it a name yet".

This year's archaeological season at the oldest salt mining center in Europe, which dates back to the 5 - 4th millennium BC and became the first prehistoric town on the continent, is now over. The site is located near the present town of Provadia (northeastern Bulgaria) and has been studied for years. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, archaeologists' work began later this summer, but the season was extremely successful.

The latest find by Prof. Vasil Nikolov and his team is a mass grave. Days ago, while exploring the bottom of an evaporation pool, archaeologists came across 6 skulls, including children's. It is not known whether the people buried there were killed in some of the attacks against the fortress city, or whether it was an internal conflict over salt, which was used as currency at the time.

Excavation work at settlements in the archaeological site of Karahantepe, located in Turkey's southeastern Şanlıurfa province, continues diligently. According to the latest data from the archaeological teams at the site, a new settlement that may be older than the prehistoric site of Göbeklitepe - which is crowned the world's first temple and "zero point" of history - will be unearthed soon.

The surface survey works at Karahantepe, which is an alternative site nearby for tourists visiting Göbeklitepe, started in 1997. As part of the search, some T-shaped obelisks were detected that resembled the ones bearing wild animal figures in Göbeklitepe. Following the discovery, the first excavations in the region started with permission obtained from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism's General Directorate of Cultural Heritage and Museums. The excavations have uncovered 250 obelisks featuring animal figures to date.

With idle tales this fills our empty ears;
The next reports what from the first he hears;
The rolling fictions grow in strength and size,
Each author adding to the former lies.
Here vain credulity, with new desires,
Leads us astray, and groundless joy inspires;
The dubious whispers, tumults fresh designed,
And chilling fears astound the anxious mind.

-Ovid's Metamorphosis

While the foundations of the USA tremble under the force of unprecedented vote fraud, color revolutionary operations, and the danger of a renewed fascist takeover of the Wall Street-Big Tech-NSA/FBI/CIA combine, certain facts must be separated from fiction.

• Despite the mainstream media announcements of Biden's victory, the fact is that things are far from certain as President Trump has made the point that he will fight all cases of blatant vote fraud which have appeared across 8 states.
• Despite mainstream media assertions to the contrary, there are indeed growing mountains of evidence that vote fraud has occurred among democrat-controlled swing states which have either given tens of thousands of Trump votes to Biden via "glitches", blocked republican observers, used rosters replete with dead voters, modified dates on ballots or hundreds of thousands of mystery ballots appearing out of thin air in the middle of the night tipping the scales for Biden.
• Every opposing narrative to this political lie is being surgically shut down, such as the immense censoring of the President's Twitter account and cancelling of the "Stop the Steal" Facebook group that garnered over 350 000 members in only 24 hours. Meanwhile MSNBC, CBS, NPR and NBC have decided to take the unprecedented action of censoring the President's press conference of Nov. 5 which raised serious questions about the legitimacy of the fraudulent votes.

While more cases of fraud can be listed here, and here, and here, and here, and here, the political situation is so tumultuous that I think it is important to take another approach to the historic moment we are currently living through by reviewing a parallel moment of great potential which was squandered three centuries ago.

Pullman, Washington — The ancient inhabitants of the American Southwest used around 11,500 feathers to make a turkey feather blanket, according to a new paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. The people who made such blankets were ancestors of present-day Pueblo Indians such as the Hopi, Zuni and Rio Grande Pueblos.

A team led by Washington State University archaeologists analyzed an approximately 800-year-old, 99 x 108 cm (about 39 x 42.5 inches) turkey feather blanket from southeastern Utah to get a better idea of how it was made. Their work revealed thousands of downy body feathers were wrapped around 180 meters (nearly 200 yards) of yucca fiber cord to make the blanket, which is currently on display at the Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum in Blanding, Utah.

The researchers also counted body feathers from the pelts of wild turkeys purchased from ethically and legally compliant dealers in Idaho to get an estimate of how many turkeys would have been needed to provide feathers for the blanket. Their efforts show it would have taken feathers from between four to 10 turkeys to make the blanket, depending on the length of feathers selected.

"Blankets or robes made with turkey feathers as the insulating medium were widely used by Ancestral Pueblo people in what is now the Upland Southwest, but little is known about how they were made because so few such textiles have survived due to their perishable nature," said Bill Lipe, emeritus professor of anthropology at WSU and lead author of the paper. "The goal of this study was to shed new light on the production of turkey feather blankets and explore the economic and cultural aspects of raising turkeys to supply the feathers."

The Barbegal watermills in southern France are a unique complex dating back to the second century AD. The construction and its 16 waterwheels represent the first attempt in Europe to build a machine complex on an industrial scale. The complex was created when the Roman Empire was at the height of its power. However, little is known about technological advances, particularly in the field of hydraulics and the spread of knowledge at the time. A team of scientists led by Professor Cees Passchier from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has now gained new knowledge about the construction and principle of the water supply to the mills in Barbegal. The research results were published in Scientific Reports.

With recurring zigzags, spirals, and other simple geometric patterns, ancient rock art is sometimes surprisingly similar across the globe. One hypothesis is that the artists were all using psychoactive compounds, which nudged the brain toward certain patterns. Now, a new find from a roughly 500-year-old cave used by Native Americans suggests such compounds may indeed have been an important component of their rock art. But the art itself may not have depicted the experience of tripping.

"They have broken away from the ludicrous school of thought ... which saw all rock art as trance imagery produced by shamans," says Paul Bahn, an archaeologist at Archaeological Institute of America who was not involved in the research.

"Man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe...."
President Kennedy, 1961 Inaugural Address

Where China and Russia are currently leading a new paradigm of cooperation and development around a multipolar alliance, it is too easily forgotten that America itself had once embodied this anti-colonial spirit under the foreign policy vision of John F. Kennedy. Even though the young leader died in office before the full effect of his grand vision could take hold, it is worth revisiting his fight and stated intention for a post-colonial world governed by win-win cooperation. This exercise is especially important now that we are coming to the anniversary of the murder of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.

FDR's Death and the Emergence of the New Rome

America didn't become an imperial "dumb giant" after WWII without a major fight.

With FDR's death, the USA began acting more and more like an empire abroad and a racist police state under McCarthyism within its own borders. During this time, those allies of FDR who were committed to Roosevelt's anti colonial post war vision, rallied around former Vice President Henry Wallace's 1948 Presidential bid with the Progressive Party of America. When this effort failed, an outright police state took over and those same fascists who had sponsored WWII took control of the reins of power.

The almost perfectly preserved remains of two men have been unearthed in an extraordinary discovery in the ancient Roman city of Pompeii.

The bodies of what are thought to be a wealthy man and his slave, believed to have died as they were fleeing the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79, were found during excavations at a villa in the outskirts of the city, Pompeii archaeological park officials said yesterday.

Massimo Osanna, the park's director, said the find was "truly exceptional", while culture minister Dario Franceschini said it underlined the importance of Pompeii as a place for study and research.

Former Ambassador Joe Wilson — who found himself and his then-wife Valerie Plame in the middle of a political firestorm when he contradicted President George W. Bush's rationale for the 2003 invasion of Iraq — has died at the age of 69.

Plame, a former CIA operative who was outed in apparent revenge after Wilson blew the whistle on Bush, said the cause was organ failure. Wilson and Plame ended their marriage in 2017.

A veteran, 23-year diplomat, Wilson had been assigned by the CIA as a private citizen to go to Niger in 2003 and investigate reports that Iraq had been sold uranium yellowcake by the African country in the 1990s. Wilson found nothing — and said as much in a New York Times op-ed headlined, "What I Didn't Find in Africa" in July 2003. He wrote in the column:

"If my information was deemed inaccurate, I understand (though I would be very interested to know why). If, however, the information was ignored because it did not fit certain preconceptions about Iraq, then a legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses."

Wilson's words contradicted Bush's contention in his January 2003 State of the Union that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.