Secret HistoryS


Boat

Another huge ancient ship graveyard found off Greece archipelago

Rossella Lorenzi
Seeker
Tue, 12 Jul 2016 06:30 UTC
Fourni island shipwreck
A joint Greek-American archaeological expedition has found 23 ancient wrecks around the small Fourni archipelago, confirming the Greek site is the ancient shipwreck capital of the world.

Discovered last month, the 23 shipwrecks add to other 22 identified last September, bringing the total to 45 wrecks in the last nine months. "These shipwrecks demonstrate the truly exceptional significance of the archipelago and establish the project as one of the most exciting currently in archaeology," Peter Campbell, of the University of Southampton and co-director from U.S.-based RPM Nautical Foundation, told Discovery News.

A collection of 13 islands and islets located between the eastern Aegean islands of Samos and Icaria, the Fourni archipelago had a critical role both as a navigational and anchorage point. The archipelago lies right in the middle of a major east-west crossing route, as well as the primary north-south route that connected the Aegean to the Levant.

Ships traveling from the Greek mainland to Asia Minor, or ships leaving the Aegean for the Levant had to pass by Fourni. Archaeologists from the Greek Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities and RPM Nautical Foundation surveyed the seabed along the coastline to depths up to 213 feet.

Comment: 22 Shipwrecks found in single location in Greece

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Magnify

After 30-year dig, 'first Philistine cemetery' may turn ancient knowledge upside down


RT
Mon, 11 Jul 2016 06:03 UTC
Philistine cemetery
© Amir Cohen/ReutersAmerican archaeology students unearth a skeletons and clay jars during excavation works at the first-ever Philistine cemetery at Ashkelon National Park in southern Israel.
The discovery of the first ever Philistine cemetery outside the walls of the biblical city of Ashkelon in Israel may finally help "unlock the secrets" of the origins of the ancient Philistines.

"After decades of studying what Philistines left behind, we have finally come face to face with the people themselves," Daniel M. Master, professor of archaeology at Wheaton College and one of the leaders of the excavation, told AP. "With this discovery we are close to unlocking the secrets of their origins," he added.

The Philistines left behind a lot of pottery, but little biological trace of them had been discovered, however. In 2013, archaeologists found what is said to be the first Philistine cemetery ever unearthed, containing the remains of over 200 people.

The discovery by the Leon Levy Expedition, a team of archaeologists from Harvard University, Boston College, Wheaton College in Illinois and Troy University in Alabama, was made public on Sunday following a 30-year excavation. The team is currently busy performing DNA tests on bone samples, dating back to between the 11th and the 8th centuries B.C., AP reported.
Skeleton at Philestine cemetary
© Amir Cohen/ReutersA skeleton is seen as it is unearthed during excavation works at the first-ever Philistine cemetery at Ashkelon National Park in southern Israel.
Although a few human remains at Philistine sites have been unearthed in the past, they provided too small a sample to make any conclusions, Master told AP. He added the archaeologists kept their landmark discovery a secret for as long as three years, until the end of their dig, in order not to attract ultra-Orthodox Jewish protesters.
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Sherlock

178,000 years of Chinese history? That's really something to chew over

Stephen Chen
South China Morning Post
Mon, 11 Jul 2016 15:25 UTC
Discovery of three ancient human teeth in a cave in Guizhou adds piece to puzzle of Chinese origins
Discovery of three ancient human teeth in a cave in Guizhou adds piece to puzzle of Chinese origins
After removing several metres of sediment from an ancient, underground river bed deep inside a limestone cave in Bijie, Guizhou, a team of researchers led by Professor Zhao Lingxia discovered three human teeth.

Anatomically, they resembled those of modern humans, but dating of the sediment showed they were buried 112,000 to 178,000 years ago, before the first modern humans walked out of Africa, around 75,000 years ago.

There is overwhelming evidence from fossil records that China was populated with humans before the arrival of African settlers.

The team's discovery three years ago, detailed in a paper in the journal Acta Anthropologica Sinica earlier this year, added a new piece to the puzzle of Chinese origins but not the full picture, in the absence of DNA analysis.

Over the past decade, ancient human fossils have been found in almost every province in southern China, many of them from sediments dating back 100,000 years or more but with anatomical features little different to the Chinese people living today.

However, analysis of the evolutionary history of the male Y chromosome has traced the origin of all Chinese men to an "Adam" from Africa who arrived in Southeast Asia about 60,000 years ago. The thinking has been that when he and his sons moved north to what is now China, they either encountered a zone devoid of others humans or killed all they found, otherwise the modern Chinese man would have more than one father among his ancestral roots.

Teeth
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Eye 1

Battle of the Somme: Social Darwinism & General Haig's "Great Push Forward"

Dr. Jacques R. Pauwels
Global Research
Sun, 10 Jul 2016 12:01 UTC
General Douglas Haig
General Douglas Haig
Exactly 100 years ago today, General Douglas Haig, commander-in-chief of the British Army fighting on the continent during World War I, launched a major offensive in a part of northern France that is known as the Département de la Somme. A département is an administrative district, and this one is named after the Somme, the river that meanders lazily through the area from the east to the coast of the English Channel in the west; during World War I, it thus crossed the line of the Western Front, which ran from the Swiss border in the southeast to the North Sea coast in Belgium to the northwest.

The Somme département corresponds more or less to the ancient province of Picardy, whose capital city is Amiens. Most of the ensuing fighting of what would become known as the "Battle of the Somme" was witnessed by the area to the east of Amiens, between the small town of Albert, which was held by the allies, and the towns of Bapaume and Péronne, which were behind the German lines.

The objective of Haig's offensive was twofold. An immediate aim was to reduce the hellish pressure exerted on the French who were desperately trying to halt a major German offensive aimed at seizing the historic city of Verdun. But Haig also perceived an opportunity to succeed where British and French offensives had failed in 1915, and to win the war by breaking through the strongly defended German lines. He spoke optimistically of the offensive he planned as the "Great Push Forward" or, short and sweet, the "Big Push." The British military supremo was convinced that God had chosen him personally to guide his country and its allies to victory; of his offensive, he would later say that he "felt that every step in [his] plan had been taken with the Divine help."
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Target

The founding of NATO: What is it really?

Eric Zuesse
Strategic Culture Foundation
Thu, 07 Jul 2016 00:00 UTC
NATO inception
When NATO was founded, that was done in the broader context of the US Marshall Plan, and the entire US operation to unify the developed Atlantic countries of North America and Europe, for a coming Cold War allegedly against communism, but actually against Russia - the core country not only in the USSR but also in Eastern Europe (the areas that Stalin's forces had captured from Hitler's forces).

NATO was founded with the North Atlantic Treaty in Washington DC on 4 April 1949, and its famous core is:
«Article 5: The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area».
However, widely ignored is that the Treaty's preamble states:
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Cowboy Hat

Rare Noah's Ark mosaic uncovered in ancient synagogue in Israel

Kacey Deamer
Live Science
Fri, 08 Jul 2016 07:15 UTC
mythological mosaic
© Baylor UniversityA mosaic floor panel depicts soldiers being swallowed by large fish, surrounded by overturned chariots in the parting of the Red Sea
Mosaics depicting prominent Bible scenes were uncovered during annual excavations of an ancient synagogue in Israel's Lower Galilee.

During the excavation in June, archaeologists found two new panels of a mosaic floor in a Late Roman (fifth-century) synagogue at Huqoq, an ancient Jewish village. One panel showed Noah's ark with pairs of animals, such as lions, leopards and bears. The other panel depicted soldiers being swallowed by large fish, surrounded by overturned chariots in the parting of the Red Sea.

Such images are extremely rare for the time period, according to excavation director Jodi Magness, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, whose work was funded by the National Geographic Society.

Comment: Further reading:

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Book

Hitler - Committed suicide or escaped to Latin America?


Sputnik News
Thu, 07 Jul 2016 18:49 UTC
Adolf Hitler bunker complex
© Flickr/Marcus WinterAdolf Hitler bunker complex.
Officially, Adolf Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945, shooting himself in Führerbunker in Berlin. His wife Eva Braun is also said to have committed suicide together with him by poisoning herself with cyanide.

But what if Hitler had not committed suicide and lived in South America for many years? What, in this case, was the fate of Eva Braun? Was the couple having fun and travelling across Colombia, Brazil and Argentina while everybody believed they were dead?

In his book Hitler in Exile (El exilio de Hitler), a new edition of which was recently published in Argentina, historian Abel Basti has offered his version of the events.

As Basti said in an interview with Sputnik, in 1945, Adolf Hitler could have escaped from Germany to Argentina, where he then lived for ten years. In 1955, like many other Nazis, Hitler went to Paraguay, where he lived under the protection of the dictator Alfredo Stroessner who had German roots.

In his book Basti refers to statements of the witnesses who communicated with Stroessner and who could prove that Hitler and other high-ranking Nazi officials had really lived in the country.

According to Basti, Hitler died on February 3, 1971 in Paraguay.
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Dollars

Hitler was financed by the Bank of England and the US Federal Reserve

Yuri Rubtsov
Fort Russ
Sat, 14 May 2016 00:00 UTC
Hitler in Command
Translated by Ollie Richardson for Fort Russ

More than 70 years ago was the start of the greatest slaughter in history.

The recent resolution of the parliamentary Assembly of the OSCE fully equalizes the role of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany at the outbreak of the Second World War, except that it had the purely pragmatic purpose of extorting money from Russia on the contents of some of the bankrupt economies, intended to demonize Russia as the successor state to the USSR, and to prepare the legal ground for the deprivation of her right to speak out against revision of results of war.

But if we approach the problem of responsibility for the war, then you first need to answer the key question: who helped the Nazis come to power? Who sent them on their way to world catastrophe? The entire pre-war history of Germany shows that the provision of the "necessary" policies were managed by the financial turmoil, in which, by the way, the world was plunged into.

The key structures that defined the post-war development strategy of the West were the Central financial institutions of Great Britain and the United States — the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve System (FRS) — and the associated financial and industrial organizations set out a target to establish absolute control over the financial system of Germany to control political processes in Central Europe. To implement this strategy it is possible to allocate the following stages:

Comment: There is - and has always been - a strong yet hidden psychopathic element in the West that one can identify as 'Nazi' in nature. And which today works to support, nurture and grow the very worst ideologies and forces of divisiveness and destruction that the elites of today's world can muster. Take the current government of Ukraine, and the growth of ISIS to name only two.

See also: and so many more....

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12,000-year-old shaman's elaborate funeral had 6 stages

Mindy Weisberger
Live Science
Wed, 06 Jul 2016 07:27 UTC
Burial site
© Naftali HilgerBones of a mysterious woman in a burial site were surrounded by tortoise shells and other objects.
A diminutive woman buried in a cave in Israel 12,000 years ago was likely a person of importance and was interred with great ceremony, including a feast of 86 tortoises, archaeological evidence suggests.

After years of analysis, experts have reconstructed the stages of a funeral ritual performed as the body was laid to rest, piecing together the chain of events with the help of unusual objects that were found at the burial site.

The researchers described a six-step process that acknowledged the respected position that the woman held in life, and hints at the complexity of burial rituals practiced in the region thousands of years in the past.

Mysterious burial

Study lead author Leore Grosman, a professor at the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, discovered the grave in 2005, in a cave called Hilazon Tachtit, located in western Galilee in northern Israel.

The cave served as a burial ground for at least 28 people during the latter part of the Natufian period (15,000 - 11,500 B.C.), according to a study Grosman co-authored in 2008, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Comment: Further reading:

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Cow Skull

Remains in Belgian caves show more evidence of cannibalism among neanderthals

Brooks Hays
UPI
Wed, 06 Jul 2016 10:31 UTC
Cannibalized bones
© Helene Rougier, et al./Scientific ReportsMany of the Neanderthal bones excavated a Belgium dig site show signs of purposeful butchering -- evidence of cannibalism.
Neanderthal bones found in Belgium show signs of intentional butchering, evidence the human ancestors consumed their own.

Unearthed from the Goyet caves near Namur, Belgium, the bones are the first evidence of Neanderthal cannibalism north of the Alps. The discovery was made possible by the largest haul of Neanderthal bones north of the Alps. Researchers with the University of Tübingen excavated 99 bones and bone fragments, dated between 40,500 to 45,500 years old.

Cuts, notches and marks offer evidence of the butchering process. Some bones showed signs of skinning, slicing and marrow extraction. "These indications allow us to assume that Neanderthals practiced cannibalism," Hervé Bocherens, a professor at Tübingen's Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment, said in a news release. "The many remains of horses and reindeer found in Goyet were processed the same way." In addition to revealing signs of butchering, the remains featured Neanderthal bones fashioned into tools.

DNA samples were collected from the remains and analyzed, doubling the amount of late Neanderthal genetic data. Their analysis shows late Neanderthals had limited genetic diversity and were increasingly interrelated as they approached extinction some 30,000 years ago. Such findings are in line with previous DNA studies.

Comment: See also:

The Golden Age, Psychopathy and the Sixth Extinction

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