Secret HistoryS


Snowflake Cold

Little Ice Age lessons: A tumultuous history of resilience and surprises

Dagomar Degroot
Aeon
Thu, 14 Nov 2019 23:49 UTC
Avercamp ice age
© Rijksmuseum, AmsterdamWinter Landscape with Ice Skaters (c1608), by Hendrick Avercamp. Avercamp was deaf and mute and specialised in painting scenes of the Netherlands in winter.
Midway through the 17th century, Dutch whalers bound for the Arctic noticed that the climate was changing. For decades, they had waited for the retreat of sea ice in late spring, then pursued bowhead whales in bays off the Arctic Ocean islands of Jan Mayen and Spitsbergen. They had set up whaling stations and even towns in those bays, with ovens to boil blubber into oil. Europe's growing population demanded oil for lighting and cooking, and for industrial purposes that included the manufacture of soap. Now, thick sea ice kept whalers from reaching their ovens even in mid-summer. Climate change, it seemed, had doomed their trade.

Yet in the frigid decades of the late-17th century, the Dutch whaling industry boomed. Whalers discovered how to boil blubber aboard their ships or on sea ice, then learned how to transport it from the Arctic to furnaces in Amsterdam. There, labourers boiled the oil until it reached a purity never achieved in the Arctic, giving Dutch whalers a competitive edge in the European market. Shipwrights greased and reinforced the hulls of whaling vessels so that they could slide off thick ice and survive the occasional collision. The governing council of the Dutch Republic - the country that would become the Netherlands of today - allowed a corporate monopoly on whaling to expire, and thereby encouraged competition between hundreds of new whalers. Ironically, by provoking crisis, climate change spurred a golden age for the Dutch whaling industry.

Comment: See also: And, for more, check out SOTT's radio shows on the topic: As well as our monthly documentary tracking the shifts occuring: SOTT Earth Changes Summary - October 2019: Extreme Weather, Planetary Upheaval, Meteor Fireballs



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Blue Planet

Ice Age footprints of mammoths and prehistoric humans revealed for the first time using radar

Matthew Robert Bennett
The Conversation
Tue, 12 Nov 2019 12:01 UTC
mammoth
The mammoth lumbers through our imaginations when we think about the world during the most recent Ice Age. They're just one of many giant creatures that our ancestors lived alongside and which became extinct when the climate changed. The giant ground sloth - a large herbivore which was endemic to the Americas - is another.

We can study these extinct animals from their bones - but also from the preserved footprints they left in mud. But these footprints are often hard to find - and while they can tell us about the presence of an animal, they don't always tell us much about the animal itself, like how it walked, for instance. The giant ground sloth was unusual in that it walked on the outside of its feet.

Comment: See also:

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Black Magic

Best of the Web: Reporter uncovers history-changing Manson family connections to CIA, mind control and Hollywood

John Vibes
The Mind Unleashed
Sat, 09 Nov 2019 15:25 UTC
Charlie Manson book Chaos
The crimes of the Manson family resulted in one of the most famous murder trials in history, but new research has come to light that could totally change the history of the case.

Much of what was believed to be true about the Manson murders and the cult that carried them out comes from a narrative that was spun by prosecutor Vince Bugliosi, both during the trial and in his book Helter Skelter — the best selling true crime novel of all time.


Comment: And even that is fake!


Nothing about the murders made any sense. There was a strange cult of hippies that were killing celebrities for apparently no reason, and the young people carrying out the crimes seemed to be under the spell of a charismatic lunatic and failed musician named Charles Manson. Bugliosi created a narrative that Manson and his followers had no personal motive in the killings, but were attempting to instigate a race war by framing the Black Panthers for the crimes.

However, in the years since, many researchers have had trouble making sense of the story that was established by Bugliosi. Manson was certainly a racist and problematic in a variety of other ways, but there is ample evidence that the story we have come to accept about the cult and their crimes is a total fabrication.

Comment: For an in-depth look at how the CIA infiltrated, influenced and controlled the culture of the California music scene at the same time as the Manson family's exploits, see the extensive series on Laurel Canyon. After doing so, you'll likely never view hippies, rock music or the CIA in quite the same way again.

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Monkey Wrench

The Great Pretender: Stanford psychology professor cherry-picked data in famous study of psychiatric institutions

Susannah Cahalan
New York Post
Sat, 02 Nov 2019 21:12 UTC
David Rosenhan
© Denver Post via Getty ImagesStudents loved professor David Rosenhan for his golden voice and charismatic teaching style, but his ability to embroider a story infected his research.
Stanford psychology and law professor David Rosenhan could transfix an audience in a crowded lecture hall with just a few words.

"What is abnormality?" he would ask undergraduate students, his deep and resonant golden voice building and booming. "What are we here for? Some things will be black ... Others will be white. But be prepared for shades of gray."

Rosenhan would know. His own life, as I would later find out, was filled with shades of gray.

He wasn't particularly attractive — the word often used to describe him was "balding" — but there was something magnetic, even seductive, about him, especially in front of a crowd.

His students called it a gift, describing his ability to "rivet a group of two to three hundred students with dynamic lectures that are full of feeling and poetry." One student recalled how Rosenhan opened one of his lectures while sitting on a student's lap — as a way to test the class' reaction to abnormal behavior.

His research work was also groundbreaking. In 1973, Rosenhan published the paper "On Being Sane in Insane Places" in the prestigious journal Science, and it was a sensation. The study, in which eight healthy volunteers went undercover as "pseudopatients" in 12 psychiatric hospitals across the country, discovered harrowing conditions that led to national outrage. His findings helped expedite the widespread closure of psychiatric institutions across the country, changing mental health care in the US forever.

Comment: Rosenhan is merely one in a long line of 'scientists-in-name-only' who have inflicted untold harm using suspect data and flawed analyses:

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Pharoah

Ancient Egyptian ibises were wild birds

Dyani Lewis
Cosmos Magazine
Wed, 13 Nov 2019 22:33 UTC
Egyptian Book of the Dead Depiction
© Wasef et al, 2019A scene from the Books of the Dead (The Egyptian Museum) showing the ibis-headed God Thoth recording the result of the final judgement.
An analysis of ancient DNA extracted from the mummified remains of sacred ibises suggests ancient Egyptians captured the birds from the wild rather than farming them.

In Australia, the white ibis is unceremoniously referred to as a bin chicken, for its propensity to scavenge scraps from rubbish bins.

But in ancient Egypt, its relative, the sacred ibis (Threskiornis aethiopicus), was revered.

It was seen as a living representation - or even physical manifestation - of the God of Wisdom, Thoth, perhaps because it looks like a scribe writing on water when it dips its long slender beak into the water to feed.

Archaeologists have unearthed several million mummified ibises from a roughly 800-year period between 600 BCE and 250 CE.

Unlike victual mummies, which were buried in a person's tomb to come alive in the afterlife, ibis mummies were usually what's known as votive mummies.

These would have been purchased from a temple devoted to the God Thoth and displayed as an offering, much like candles or sticks of incense in Buddhist temples today.

After a period of time, the ibis mummies - some roughly wrapped in bandages, others exquisitely decorated - were moved into catacombs, vast underground tunnels and storage rooms beneath the temple.
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Book 2

Unknown Irish translation of Ibn Sīna's Canon of Medicine discovered in spine of book in Cornwall

Alison Flood
The Guardian
Thu, 07 Mar 2019 00:00 UTC
Fragment of Ibn Sīna or Avicenna Canon of Medicine
© University College CorkThe rediscovered fragment of Ibn Sīna’s Canon of Medicine, folded into the binding of a later book.
A 15th-century vellum manuscript of the writing of the revered Persian physician Ibn Sīna, or Avicenna, has been found being used to bind a later book, revealing for the first time that his seminal Canon of Medicine was translated into Irish.

The manuscript had been trimmed, folded and stitched to the spine of a pocket-sized Latin manual about local administration, which was printed in London in the 1530s. It had been owned by the same family in Cornwall since the 16th century. When they decided to satisfy their curiosity about the unusual binding last year, they consulted University College Cork professor of modern Irish Pádraig Ó Macháin, who said he "knew pretty much straight away" that it was a significant find.

"It really was very, very exciting, one of those moments which makes life worthwhile," said Ó Macháin.

Professor Aoibheann Nic Dhonnchadha of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, an expert on medieval Irish medicine, identified the text as a fragment of Ibn Sīna's Canon of Medicine, a previously unknown Irish translation. Ibn Sīna lived between 980 and 1037 and was one of the Islamic golden age's most influential scholars.

Comment: See also: German scientists discover 11th century Persian scholar's supernova surveillance

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Info

Fossils of two new snake species found in Greece


Neos Kosmos
Thu, 07 Nov 2019 20:18 UTC
Fossilized snake bones
© Palaeontologia ElectronicaCryptobranchidae indet. from Maramena: atlas (UU MAA 7441) in anterior (1), left lateral (2), posterior (3), ventral (4), and dorsal (5) views. Abbreviations: ct, cotyle; ffsn, foramen for the first spinal nerve; op, odontoid process.
Fossilised remains of two new species of snakes found for the first time were discovered near the city of Serres in northern Greece.

Greek researcher George Georgalis from the University of Toronto named the 5.5- to 6-million-year-old snakes: periergophis micros and paraxenophis spanios.

"These two new snakes have new names because they belong to a totally new species and are completely different from any other species," Dr Georgalis told the Athens Macedonia News Agency. "The strange thing is that such vertebral anatomy has not been observed anywhere else and there is nothing, either in modern or in extinct serpent species, that even comes close to the morphology of these new species."
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Comet

'They thought it was judgment day': The night in 1833 when 'stars fell' on the southern US

Donal O'Keeffe
The Irish Times
Mon, 11 Nov 2019 04:36 UTC
Leonid fireball in 1966
© Nasa/Getty ImagesA bright Leonid fireball in 1966 above Wrightwood, California.
November 1833. As the night skies exploded and the stars fell on America's Deep South, the slavers on one plantation in Tennessee - terrified of the end of the world - attempted to make restitution to those they had enslaved.

Every year, in mid-November, the Earth passes through the Leonids, a huge meteor cloud left behind by the Comet Tempel-Tuttle. Each year sees impressive displays, with certain nights offering particularly spectacular meteor showers.

It is 186 years since the Leonids put on that striking show over the US south, and it is still remembered there as "The Night the Stars Fell". The 1930s jazz standard Stars Fell on Alabama immortalised the night.

"On the night of November 12th to 13th, 1833," wrote Victorian astronomy writer Agnes Clerke, "a tempest of falling stars broke over the Earth.

"The sky was scored in every direction with shining tracks and illuminated with majestic fireballs. At Boston, the frequency of meteors was estimated to be about half that of flakes of snow in an average snowstorm. Their numbers ... were quite beyond counting; but as it waned, a reckoning was attempted, from which it was computed, on the basis of that much-diminished rate, that 240,000 must have been visible during the nine hours they continued to fall."

In Alabama, the Florence Gazette reported there were: "thousands of luminous bodies shooting across the firmament in every direction.

"There was little wind and not a trace of clouds, and the meteors succeeded each other in quick succession."

Several Native American nations noted the celestial drama, with the Lakota people resetting their calendar to commemorate the occurrence. Along the banks of the Missouri river, Mormon refugees, driven from their homes by settlers, watched as the stars fell, while Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of the Latter-Day Saints, recorded the event in his diary as a sign that the second coming of Christ was at hand.
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Hiliter

'Stone age seafarers' depicted in newly discovered rock art in Sweden

Johanna Hillgren
Phys.org
Fri, 08 Nov 2019 12:00 UTC
seafarer sweden rock art
© CC0 Public Domain
South-west Sweden's best preserved rock painting has now been dated — it is from the late Stone Age. With the aid of new technologies, researchers at the University of Gothenburg have been able to reveal a number of previously unknown motifs that are no longer visible to the naked eye. The most important of these newly discovered motifs are boats with elk-head stems. This is the first time that these kinds of boats have been documented in southern or western Scandinavia and these motifs provide further evidence of the long-distance sea voyages undertaken by Stone Age maritime hunters.

Archaeology students from the University of Gothenburg have been visiting Tumlehed on excursions for many years. There — in the Gothenburg suburb of Torslanda, on the island of Hisingen and barely 15 kms from the center of the city — lies the best-preserved and most complex prehistoric rock painting in south-west Sweden.

Comment: See also:

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Magic Wand

Centuries-old 'witch marks' in Creswell Crags, England can finally be seen thanks to 3D modeling

Mindy Weisberger
Live Science
Mon, 04 Nov 2019 04:37 UTC
Witch marks at Creswell Crags
© Creswell Crags Museum and Heritage CentreA cave at Creswell Crags in the U.K. contained hundreds of marks upon its walls, carved to ward off evil.
Mysterious "witch marks" that were carved into a cavern's walls centuries ago to ward off evil are getting a public viewing, thanks to 3D modeling and animation.

The marks were discovered earlier this year in Creswell Crags, an enclosed limestone gorge in the United Kingdom that houses a cave used by humans during the Ice Age, Creswell Crags Museum & Heritage Centre representatives said in a statement. But humans were also using the cave during the medieval period, covering its walls and ceilings with so-called witch marks as a form of protection against evil spirits and witches.

During a tour in February, a team of cavers spied marks on the cavern walls that had previously gone unnoticed, or were dismissed as modern graffiti. Further investigation revealed hundreds of marks; carved emblems such as these were common in the medieval U.K., etched around doorways, windows and fireplaces to keep evil spirits out, site representatives said in the statement.

A chamber that held the most witch marks was inaccessible to the public, but site officials partnered with researchers at Sheffield Hallam University in South Yorkshire, England, to scan the marks and create a virtual tour of the remarkable sight, university representatives said.

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