Secret HistoryS


Bad Guys

How Britain forcefully depopulated an entire archipelago - then covered it up

John Pilger
Al Jazeera
Thu, 28 Feb 2019 11:24 UTC
Chagos archipelago
© ReutersDiego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos archipelago in the Indian Ocean, is the site of a major US military base and was leased from Britain in 1966
There are times when one tragedy tells us how a whole system works behind its democratic facade and helps us understand how much of the world is run for the benefit of the powerful and how governments often justify their actions with lies.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the British government of Harold Wilson expelled the population of the Chagos Islands, a British colony in the Indian Ocean, to make way for an American military base on Diego Garcia, the largest island. In high secrecy, the Americans offered the British payment for the islands in the form of a discount on the Polaris nuclear submarine system.

The truth of this conspiracy did not emerge for another 20 years when secret official files were unearthed at the Public Record Office in London by lawyers acting for the former inhabitants of the coral archipelago. Historian Mark Curtis described the enforced depopulation in Web of Deceit, his 2003 book about Britain's post-war foreign policy.
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Info

Chilean petroglyphs may have been used for star-gazing

Gabriella Bernardi
Cosmos Magazine
Wed, 27 Feb 2019 17:40 UTC
engraved stones
© BERNARDI, ET ALOne of the engraved stones on the elevated site at La Silla, thought to be part of an ancient star-observing platform.
The complex astronomical measurements that underpinned many aspects of the Inca civilisation may have an ancient forerunner of 10 centuries earlier and 2000 kilometres distant, a prominent archeoastronomer suggests.

Steven Gullberg, of the University of Oklahoma, US, and chair of the International Astronomical Union Working Group for Archaeoastronomy and Astronomy in Culture, is the latest scientist to comment on the origin and purpose of some mysterious stones and engravings, known as petroglyphs, at a site known as La Silla, in Chile.

The complex designs etched in rock, together with a set of standing stones, were first studied in depth by researchers - including this writer - in 2012.

It was suggested that the artefacts were set up to mark the positions of two very brilliant stars, Canopus and Hadar, and were the work of the El Molle, a pre-Columbian culture that occupied the region for five centuries from about 300 CE.

Curiously, La Silla is today the site of a facility built and operated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), an important part of the global infrastructure for astronomers.

If the tentative conclusions about the petroglyphs and standing stones are correct, the site has been a critical place for star-gazers for at least 1700 years.
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Info

Disagreement erupts over Neanderthal posture

Dyani Lewis
Cosmos Magazine
Tue, 26 Feb 2019 04:40 UTC
Neanderthal Posture
© 4x6/Getty ImagesThe image of Neanderthals as hunched ape-men was dispelled decades ago, but some scientists fear recent research might go some way towards reviving it.
Recent spinal reconstructions have focussed debate on Neanderthal posture and, by implication, whether standing fully upright is the sole preserve of Homo sapiens.

Gone are the depictions of Neanderthals as hulking imbeciles. But echoes of prejudices against our prehistoric cousins persist in analyses of Neanderthal remains, according to the authors of a new spinal reconstruction of La Chapelle-aux-Saint 1, arguably the most famous Neanderthal fossil to have been unearthed.

The new reconstruction, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, takes in the spinal vertebrae, as well as the pelvis and a cast of the right hip bone. The actual hip bone is missing, misplaced sometime in the 1970s.

Measurements of the angle of the pelvis in relation to the spine and how the vertebrae stack one atop the other suggest that the Neanderthal spine was curved much like our own - sweeping inwards from the lower back towards the waist.

"The posture of the Neanderthals is very human-like," says Martin Häusler from the University of Zurich, Switzerland, who led the study.
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Doberman

Prehistoric Siberians may have traveled 1,500 kilometers by dogsled

Ruth Schuster
Haaretz
Mon, 25 Feb 2019 12:00 UTC
obsidian
© USGSFlow banding of light pumice and glassy black obsidian, which is created when hot lava smashes into water and cools on the spot
The discovery of obsidian tools on Zhokhov island indicates the existence of a vast trading network in prehistoric deep Arctic 9,000 years ago.

Prehistoric Siberians living on an island in the Arctic Circle around 8,000 to 9,000 years ago possessed obsidian tools that hailed from 1,500 kilometers (932 miles) away, Russian archaeologists reported in the journal Antiquity last week.

To people living on icy Zhokhov Island, the closest known source of obsidian - a shiny glassine volcanic rock that shatters to create extremely sharp blades - is near Lake Krasnoye in the lower reaches of the Anadyr River in Chukotka.

Krasnoye is 1,500 kilometers as the bird flies from Zhokhov. As the sled dog trudges, it's more like 2,000 kilometers, the team headed by Vladimir Pitulko of the Russian Academy of Sciences reports.

Comment: See also:

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Blackbox

Best of the Web: Alternative History of Al-Qaeda: Anwar al-Awlaki - jihadist, spy, or both?

Tom Secker
Spy Culture
Sun, 24 Feb 2019 18:30 UTC
Awlaki
Just another coincidence... Senior Al Qaeda leader Anwar Al Awlaki was clicking glasses together at the Pentagon with American military brass just months after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Also, "coincidentally," he had in fact met at least one of the several alleged hijackers. He also, just before being liquidated by a US drone attack in 2011, allegedly funded the terror cell responsible for the recent Paris shootings.
Anwar al Awlaki rose to notoriety in the 2000s as a leading internet jihadist whose lectures and videos were very popular among the emerging Islamist movement. But his history with Al Qaeda, and in particular his contacts with the 9/11 hijackers while under investigation by the FBI, pose serious questions. Was Awlaki a terrorist, or a spy, or both? Was he working for US intelligence while acting as a spiritual leader to several of the hijackers? In this episode we take a critical look at Awlaki, his life, his FBI file and why he became the first American to be killed in a US drone strike.


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Star of David

Belarus ghetto site: Mass grave found containing 1000 bodies, site of where 28K Jews were killed by Nazis

Will Stewart
Daily Mail
Thu, 21 Feb 2019 11:10 UTC
bones/dirt
© east2west newsThe remains of at least 1,000 suspected Jewish victims of the Holocaust have been discovered close to the site of a notorious Nazi ghetto at Brest where they were executed in 1942.
A mass grave with the remains of over 1,000 Jewish people slain by the Nazis has been found in Belarus. Bones of men, women and children with gunshot wounds to their skulls have been located at a building site in the city of Brest on the Polish border.

The skeletons of around 600 have been found so far, with Belarus soldiers - deployed to undertake the macabre work - now locating the remains of some 40 people each day in the sinister burial place.

City official Anna Kondak said: 'We expect the number of victims to go over 1,000.'
Nazi soldier/Jews
© east2west newsDocumentary footage shows the appalling conditions Jews were kept in under Nazi guard at the Brest ghetto between 1941 and 1942.
excavation team
© east2west newsMembers of the excavation team in Brest, Belarus, close to the Polish border examine remains at the mass grave.
truck at site
© east2west newsThe mass grave was discovered as excavations were being carried out for a new luxury residential development.
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Sherlock

Virgin of the rocks: A subversive message hidden by Da Vinci

Kelly Grovier
BBC
Tue, 19 Feb 2019 12:00 UTC
da vinci
A palm tree in an Alpine scene prompts Kelly Grovier to follow a trail of clues that unlock a 15th-Century mystery - transforming Da Vinci masterpieces into ruminations on the Earth's geological evolution.
Some paintings are as mysterious as they are famous. Gazing at them is like diving into a deep dark sea. You never know what unsuspecting pearl your eyes might prise loose from their secretive lips - what key you might find that can unlock their power. Take Leonardo da Vinci's the Virgin of the Rocks, in which the infant Jesus finds himself in a shadowy cave on an Alpine playdate with a baby John the Baptist. Or rather, take both versions of the work that Leonardo created between 1483 and 1508: the one that hangs in the Louvre in Paris (thought to be the earlier of the two, completed around 1486) and a subsequent one that resides in the National Gallery in London (begun in 1495 and finished 13 years later).

Hiding in plain sight in both paintings is a small and previously overlooked detail that, once spotted, transforms the scene into something more complex and controversial than the vision of a sacred creche, watched over tenderly by the Virgin Mary and the archangel Uriel. They become subversive statements that challenge the Church's conception of the creation of the world. No, I'm not alluding to Uriel's sharp, shiv-like finger in the Louvre version (removed in the later painting), which Dan Brown sensationally claims, in his novel The Da Vinci Code, isn't pointing to John but slicing the neck of an invisible figure, whose phantom head Mary grips like a bowling ball in the splayed fingers of her outstretched left hand.


Comment: Just because Dan Brown interprets something incorrectly that doesn't mean that there isn't something to interpret. Evidently Da Vinci radically changed the later painting and there is likely a good reason he took 13 years to do so.


Comment: For fascinating insight on Da Vinci and what he was encoding in his work check out the link in the comment of: The mystery of Leonardo's two Madonnas

See also: And be sure to check out SOTT radio's:

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Cow

Tooth plaque shows drinking milk goes back 3,000 years in Mongolia

Carolyn Gramling
Phys.org
Sun, 17 Feb 2019 07:00 UTC
yaks mongolia
© C. WarinnerMODERN MILK Seven species of animals, including yaks (shown), are milked in Mongolia today; recent research suggests that yaks were milked in the region 3,000 years ago, too.
Ancient people living in what's now Mongolia drank milk from cows, yaks and sheep - even though, as adults, they couldn't digest lactose. That finding comes from the humblest of sources: ancient dental plaque.

Modern Mongolians are big on dairy, milking seven different animal species, including cows, yaks and camels. But how far into the past that dairying tradition extends is difficult to glean from the usual archaeological evidence: Nomadic lifestyles mean no kitchen trash heaps preserving ancient pots with lingering traces of milk fats. So molecular anthropologist Christina Warinner and her colleagues turned to the skeletons found in 22 burial mounds belonging to the Deer Stone culture, a people who lived in Mongolia's eastern steppes around about 1300 B.C.

Comment: It's notable that in the history of humanity the evidence for agriculture dates back to a relatively recent 10,000 years ago, and it would appear that our health has suffered for it ever since:

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Info

Quarrying of Stonehenge 'bluestones' dated to 3000 BC according to UK study


University College London
Tue, 19 Feb 2019 01:47 UTC
Carn Goedog
© University College LondonCarn Goedog 2016.
Geologists have long known that 42 of Stonehenge's smaller stones, known as 'bluestones', came from the Preseli hills in Pembrokeshire, west Wales. Now a new study published in Antiquity pinpoints the exact locations of two of these quarries and reveals when and how the stones were quarried.

The discovery has been made by a team of archaeologists and geologists from UCL, Bournemouth University, University of Southampton, University of the Highlands and Islands and National Museum of Wales, which have been investigating the sites for eight years.

Professor Mike Parker Pearson (UCL Archaeology) and leader of the team, said: "What's really exciting about these discoveries is that they take us a step closer to unlocking Stonehenge's greatest mystery - why its stones came from so far away."

"Every other Neolithic monument in Europe was built of megaliths brought from no more than 10 miles away. We're now looking to find out just what was so special about the Preseli hills 5,000 years ago, and whether there were any important stone circles here, built before the bluestones were moved to Stonehenge."

The largest quarry was found almost 180 miles away from Stonehenge on the outcrop of Carn Goedog, on the north slope of the Preseli hills.
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Question

Sheela-na-gigs: The naked women adorning Britain's churches

Sarah Jones
BBC
Tue, 19 Feb 2019 21:49 UTC
Sheela Na Gig
© Sheela Na Gig projectThis sheela-na-gig at Oaksey in Wiltshire boasts "pendulous breasts" and a vulva "extended almost to her ankles"
For hundreds of years carvings of naked women have sat provocatively on churches across Britain. But who created them - and why?
Look at these, my child-bearing hips

Look at these, my ruby red ruby lips...

Sheela-na-gig, Sheela-na-gig

You exhibitionist
The year is 1992 and the singer-songwriter PJ Harvey is performing Sheela-Na-Gig, the most successful single from her critically acclaimed album Dry.

But unless you're a fan of late 20th Century indie music, or an expert in Norman church architecture, there's every chance you've not been exposed to the sheela-na-gig - or have walked past one without even realising it.

[This article contains some graphic imagery]

Comment: R. G. Collingwood's book Speculum Mentis may be able to provide some insight into what kind of people produced these gargoyles, grotesques and Sheela-na-gigs:
The men of the middle ages, as we look back on them, appear to us half children and half giants. In the narrowness of their outlook, the smallness of the problems they faced, their fanciful and innocent superstition, their combination of qualities and activities which a reflective or critical society would find intolerably contradictory, they are children, and it is difficult for us to believe that human beings could be so simple. But in the solid magnitude of their achievements, their systems of law and philosophy, their creation and organization of huge nation-states, their incredible cathedrals, and above all their gradual forging of a civilized world out of a chaos of barbarism, they seem possessed by a tenacity and a vastness of purpose that we can only call gigantic. They seem to be tiny people doing colossal things.

[...]

The medieval mind feels itself surrounded, beyond the sphere of trial and danger, by a great peace, an infinite happiness. This feeling, so clear in the poets, is equally clear, to those who have eyes to see, in the illuminations of a missals and the detail of stonework, in the towers of Durham and the Vine window at Wells. But this happiness, characteristically present in the medieval modern. mind, is characteristically absent from the modern. And if our art, our religion, our philosophy, are dark with foreboding and comfortless in their message, this is not altogether unconnected with the fact that the medieval man could be happy because his church or guild told him what to do and could give him work that he liked; while the modern man is unhappy because he does not know what to do.
See also:

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