Secret HistoryS


Cow Skull

El Algar: Life in hilltop Iberian Bronze Age societies revealed in new analysis


Popular Archeology
Wed, 11 Mar 2020 12:00 UTC
La Bastida
© Dani Méndez-REVIVESA 3D reconstruction of La Bastida, one of the ancient sites from which samples were studied. The economy of La Bastida would have been more productive than other Argaric sites due to their fields being fertilised regularly by the grazing of livestock. The site's layout provide strong evidence of a marked social hierarchy
The El Algar society thrived in complex hilltop settlements across the Iberian Peninsula from 2200-1550 cal BCE, and gravesites and settlement layouts provide strong evidence of a marked social hierarchy.

Knipper and colleagues conducted carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis at two different El Algar hilltop settlements: the large fortified urban site La Bastida (in present-day Totana, Murcia), and the smaller settlement Gatas (Turre, Almería). Their sample included remains of 75 human individuals from across social strata, 28 bones from domestic animals and wild deer, charred barley (75 grains total), and charred wheat (29 grains) from the middle and late phases of El Algar civilization across the two sites.

Comment: The Daily Mail provides a few more details:
The three individuals found in the two wealthiest tombs at La Bastida - two women and one man - yielded a larger proportion of meat and dairy products in the analysis.

'La Bastida practised more intensive land management, combining agriculture and animal husbandry, and this allowed them to increase their farming economy and feed a considerably numerous population - one thousand people at that time,' said Cristina Rihuete at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

The team studied the Spanish El Algar community, one of the first 'complex' societies in Europe, who lived in hilltop settlements from 2,200 to 1,500 BCE.

The study also found that weaning human infants away from their mother's milk during the Bronze Age in the Iberian Peninsula occurred before the age of two.

Analysis of infant remains indicates that between 18 and 24 months, all infants had culminated the process of substituting breastfeeding with a diet mainly based on cereal pap.

The team say their study, published in PLOS ONE, shows the importance of analysing remains across the food chain - animal and cereal remains, as well as human - to reconstruct a prehistoric human diet.

WHAT WAS EL ARGAR?

The El Argar civilisation ruled southern Spain between 2200 and 1550 BC.

The civilisation was a centre of activity in the Iberian Peninsula during the Bronze Age.

The settlement covers much of modern-day southeast Spain.

El Agar settlements can be characterised by large protected hill settlements and distinctive metal and pottery production.

The beginning of El Argar marked the introduction of news means of production and tools, including moulds, anvils and grooved hammers.

The end of the civilisation is disputed, but it could have been due to an economic collapse from a subsistence crisis caused by the over-exploitation of their surrounding environment.
It's notable that, even though the sample size is small and therefore not conclusive, the authors themselves emphasize that they cannot see any clear divide between an 'elite' (other than those 3 skeletons) and the rest of society. It remains to be seen whether this will hold up in further research.

In earlier Neolithic societies in Iberia it has been shown that dietary and cultural practices differed quite markedly depending on whether you were living in the hills or in the valley, see: Two megalithic groups in Spain found to have different diets, child-rearing and burial practices

See also:

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Attention

The Long Roots of Our Russophobia

Jeremy Kuzmarov
Counter Punch
Fri, 06 Mar 2020 00:00 UTC
russophobia
How Russia was portrayed to past generations
For the last five years, the American media has been filled with scurrilous articles demonizing Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Putin has been accused of every crime imaginable, from shooting down airplanes, to assassinating opponents, to invading neighboring countries, to stealing money to manipulating the U.S. president and helping to rig the 2016 election.

Few of the accusations directed against Putin have ever been substantiated and the quality of journalism has been at the level of "yellow journalism."

In a desperate attempt to sustain their political careers, centrist Democrats like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton accused their adversaries of being Russian agents - again without proof.

And even the progressive hero Bernie Sanders - himself a victim of red-baiting - has engaged in Russia bashing and unsubstantiated accusations for which he offers no proof.

Comment: Behind the Headlines: Fake American Democracy, Imperial Hubris Russophobia and Outrageous Lies

See also Guy Mettan's comments on Syria from 2017:

Swiss politician, journalist Guy Mettan gets it right: US still can't get over the fact that its plans for Syria were a dismal failure

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Info

The Great Lake Tahoe comet tsunami


Cosmic Tusk
Sat, 07 Mar 2020 02:25 UTC
Lake Tahoe
© Epoque
One of the best things about the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis is finding catastrophic features that may date to the event, but have not yet been directly connected with it. Today I submit one of the finest examples: The Great Lake Tahoe Comet Tsunami.

Its is a well-published and uncontroversial fact that in the recent prehistoric past a gargantuan rock shelf on the western shore of Lake Tahoe collapsed. FIVE SQUARE MILES of rock and sediment slipped into the gin-clear waters of the deep alpine lake and vomited a 300′ high tsunami wave that raced across the lake in five minutes, crashed on the eastern shore, ran up a 1000 feet high, and retreated leaving scars on the landscape visible today. The oscillating "seiche waves," rocked back and forth and in and out of the lake for half an hour of lacustrine hell.

Lake Tahoe was a bad place on a bad day.

When was the bad day? As determined in the most recent detailed study by James Moore et al. (2014) link below, the youngest estimate for the catastrophic event is our favorite geological and cultural milestone of 12,000 years ago, and the outer limit is 21,000. This range is supported by two sets of data. The older limit is defined by dating a glacial moraine no older than 21,000 years, which was breached by the debris flow. (If it happened today, and was studied thousands of years in the future, it would also be constrained by this early date).
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Bad Guys

How the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms became corrupt and abusive

Sam Jacobs
Ammo.com
Mon, 09 Mar 2020 23:10 UTC
ATF Lyndon Johnson
It's unlikely that there is a single federal alphabet organization less popular among the readership of this website than the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. These are the people who gave us both the Siege at Ruby Ridge and the Siege of Waco. What's more, they may well be engaged in an entirely unconstitutional exercise: monitoring and patrolling the gun ownership of law-abiding citizens.

There's also a solid case to be made that the ATF is a rogue organization, the most corrupt of the federal alphabet agencies. This can be seen through a number of scandals beginning with Ruby Ridge, threading through the siege at Mount Carmel in Waco, and continuing to the notorious "Fast and Furious" scandal.

While firearms owners, weapons enthusiasts and Second Amendment advocates might have a special bone to pick with the ATF, we believe that all freedom-loving Americans should be concerned about the overreach, lawlessness and lack of accountability in this organization. Roman poet Juvenal once posed an important (and famous) question about powerful justice officers: "Quis custodiet ipsos custodies?" - Who is to guard the guardians?

All told, there are over 20,000 firearms laws and regulations on the books at the state and federal level. Many of these contradict each other or are written with a lot of room for interpretation. Gun owners and gun dealers are easy prey for a corrupt and lawless federal agency that wants to twist its arms outside the bounds of the law.

It's also worth considering what overreach and lack of accountability other federal organizations are responsible for that we don't know about, simply because they do not have the same spotlight on them as the ATF - a reminder that the scandals mentioned above are just the ones that we know about.

We recommend reading this article in concert with our other articles on the ATF: Waco, Ruby Ridge and Fast and Furious. Each of these contains familiar tropes with regard to the ATF: Entrapment, "lost" evidence, a total lack of accountability, aggressive policing tactics where discretion would probably have saved lives, and a vengeful manner of doing business.

Comment: Abolish the ATF

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Boat

"Open, iceless seas" in the North Pole described by Dutch sailors in wooden ships in 1665

Harry Hardrada
Electroverse
Sun, 08 Mar 2020 12:00 UTC
north pole
I [Harry Hardrada] recently unearthed an intriguing piece of literature from a 19th century periodical named 'Ho! For the Pole!' in Littell's Living Age, Volume 66 (1860).

The paper highlights various voyages to the North Pole throughout the 17th-18th centuries with meticulous detail. It appears, according to the article, that many wooden ships penetrated as far north as the 89th latitude in 'open iceless seas' during this time — as in 1665 and 1675.

A bit far-fetched?

Perhaps, on the face of it... but there is some good evidence out there which may suggest otherwise.

Comment: See also:

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Archaeology

Intern unearths spectacular, 2,000-year-old Roman dagger in Germany

Katherine J. Wu
Smithsonian Magazine
Mon, 02 Mar 2020 17:46 UTC
roman dagger sheath
© LWL / Eugen MüschThe restored dagger and sheath, following nine months of sandblasting and grinding.
As far as internships go, Nico Calman arguably had an especially good one.

During his stint with the Westphalie Department for the Preservation and Care of Field Monuments in Germany last year, 19-year-old Calman unearthed a 2,000-year-old silver dagger that may have helped the Romans wage war against a Germanic tribe in the first century A.D.

Discovered still in its sheath in the grave of a soldier at the archaeological site of Haltern am See (Haltern at the Lake), the weapon was nearly unrecognizable thanks to centuries of corrosion. But nine months of meticulous sandblasting revealed a spectacularly ornamented 13-inch-long blade and sheath that once hung from a matching leather belt, reports Laura Geggel for Live Science.
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Info

Prehistory revisited - Agriculture first versus Göbekli Tepe

Dr. Martin Sweatman
Ancient Origins
Thu, 05 Mar 2020 17:13 UTC
Discovering the origin of civilisation is the holy grail of anthropology and archaeology. Essentially, this means understanding how man transformed from un-civilised Palaeolithic hunter gatherers to civilised Neolithic specialists dependent on agriculture. It used to be thought that agriculture itself was the key to this transition, as it enabled larger communities to settle in one place and develop the specialities that signal the arrival of civilisation. No longer was the desperate search for food an all-consuming activity that forced people to continually migrate like animals. And since agriculture is thought to have developed first in a region of the Near East known as the Fertile Crescent, around 10,000 to 11,000 years ago, the Fertile Crescent, it was believed, must hold the key to the origin of civilisation.
Göbekli Tepe
© Brian Weed/ Abode StockAncient Site of Göbekli Tepe in Southern Turkey.
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Fireball 5

More evidence of cosmic impact that destroyed human settlement in Syria 12,800 years ago

Sonia Fernandez, University of California - Santa Barbara
Phys.org
Sat, 07 Mar 2020 11:27 UTC
Abu Hureyra
© DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-60867-wLocation of Abu Hureyra (adapted from Moore et al.. (a) Map of the Middle East, showing Abu Hureyra location (AH) in Syria. (b) Map of the Abu Hureyra tell, showing locations of excavation trenches labeled A-G near a back channel of Euphrates River that is now abandoned. Sediment samples from Trenches D, E, and G (blue rectangles) contain abundance peaks in YDB proxies, including spherules, nanodiamonds, meltglass, and platinum. Credit: Scientific Reports (2020).
Before the Taqba Dam impounded the Euphrates River in northern Syria in the 1970s, an archaeological site named Abu Hureyra bore witness to the moment ancient nomadic people first settled down and started cultivating crops. A large mound marks the settlement, which now lies under Lake Assad.

But before the lake formed, archaeologists were able to carefully extract and describe much material, including parts of houses, food and tools — an abundance of evidence that allowed them to identify the transition to agriculture nearly 12,800 years ago. It was one of the most significant events in our Earth's cultural and environmental history.

Abu Hureyra, it turns out, has another story to tell. Found among the cereals and grains and splashed on early building material and animal bones was meltglass, some features of which suggest it was formed at extremely high temperatures — far higher than what humans could achieve at the time — or that could be attributed to fire, lighting or volcanism.

Comment: The implications of these finds are doubly interesting. It means that a.) human civilization is far, far older than assumed for the last couple of centuries, and b.) the planet has been bombarded with comet fragments within the (now expanded) human civilizational timescale, which means that c.) it could happen again.

See also:

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Biohazard

A brief and horrific history of biological weapons and warfare

Larry Romanoff
Global Research
Fri, 07 Feb 2020 00:00 UTC
Bioweapons
The US government and its many agencies and educational and health institutions, have for many decades conducted intensive research into biological warfare, in many cases strongly focused on race-specific pathogens.

In a report to the US Congress, the Department of Defense revealed that its program of creating artificial biological agents included modifying non-fatal viruses to make them lethal, and genetic engineering to alter the immunology of biological agents to make treatment and vaccinations impossible. The military report admitted that at the time it operated about 130 bio-weapons research facilities, dozens at US universities and others at many international sites outside the purview of the US Congress and the jurisdiction of the courts.

This knowledge hasn't been a secret for a long time. In a classified 1948 report by the Pentagon's Committee on Biological Warfare, the main selling point was that:
"A gun or a bomb leaves no doubt that a deliberate attack has occurred. But if ... an epidemic slashes across a crowded city, there is no way of knowing whether anyone attacked, much less who", adding hopefully that "A significant portion of the human population within selected target areas may be killed or incapacitated" with only very small amounts of a pathogen. (1) (2)
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Arrow Down

Forced assimilation of native American children

Lindsay M.Montgomery and Chip Colwell
Sapiens Org
Thu, 05 Mar 2020 01:19 UTC
In the 19th and 20th centuries, the United States government used family separation and schools to try to erase Native American children's traditional cultures and languages. A newly published archive of photographs visually documents some Indigenous peoples' struggle for survival.

Native American Children
© DMNS BR61-285Children arrived at school at different points in the assimilation process. Many still openly embraced their traditional cultures, including some of these Lakota children on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. The order of the children is not known, but pictured here are: Thomas New, Alice Slow Fly, Harry With Horns, Standing Little Tail, and Jesse Foot.
In May 2018, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the government would begin to separate children from their families who had crossed from Mexico into the United States. More than 5,000 children were torn from their relatives. Tragically, this is not the first time the U.S. government has systematically and forcibly removed children from their loved ones.

In 1890, the U.S. government ended open warfare against Native American tribes, which had begun in the 17th century and intensified through the 19th century. The population of Native peoples — once in the millions — had plummeted to around 250,000. Many of these politically and militarily defeated communities were confined to reservations that occupied a fraction of their traditional homelands. What to do with these newly confined peoples?

The goal became assimilation: to transform Native Americans into "good Christian citizens." As one school founder said at the time, "Kill the Indian in him and save the man." This was attempted by breaking up reservations and outlawing religious practices. However, many felt that Native adults would likely never change. Real change could only come by focusing efforts on their children.

Schools had been started for Native students since the founding of the United States. However, the role of schools in assimilating children now took on new urgency. By 1900, 307 boarding schools and day schools had opened across the country, educating more than 26,000 Native students.
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