Secret HistoryS


Blue Planet

Discovery of up to 25 Mesolithic pits in Bedfordshire astounds archaeologists

mesolithic pits
© MolaThree pits in alignment at Linmere. The discovery could offer extraordinary insights into the period.
Found in Linmere, they date from the Mesolithic period, 12,000 to 6,000 years ago, a time from which few clues into the lives of our hunter-gatherer ancestors survive.

The pits could offer extraordinary new insights. They are in alignments and clustered around former stream channels, suggesting a spiritual significance.

Such is the scale of this site that it has more such pits in a single area than anywhere else in England and Wales, including Stonehenge. Radiocarbon dating revealed they are from 7,700 to 8,500 years ago.

Archaeologists from the Museum of London Archaeology (Mola), who are conducting the research, said: "This date makes the site incredibly significant because there are very few Mesolithic sites in the UK that are this substantial. Evidence from this period is often slim, only consisting of flint tools and occasional butchered animal remains."

Comment: See also:


Better Earth

Abrupt shift in tropical Pacific climate during Little Ice Age revealed by researchers

Lake Bulusan
© Department of Environment and Natural Resources, Philippines & Aggrupation of Advocates for Environmental Protection Bulusan, Inc.Taking samples on Lake Bulusan in the northern Philippines.
An El Niño event has officially begun. The climate phenomenon, which originates in the tropical Pacific and occurs in intervals of a few years, will shape weather across the planet for the next year or more and give rise to various climatic extremes. El Niño-like conditions can also occur on longer time scales of decades or centuries.

This has been shown to have occurred in the recent past by an international research team led by Ana Prohaska of the University of Copenhagen and Dirk Sachse of the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ). Their analysis of biomarkers — organic molecules or molecular fossils from vascular plants — in the sediments of a lake in the Philippines indicates an unusually dry phase in the region during the Little Ice Age between 1600 and 1900 A.D.

The results have now been published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment. They show how important the understanding of past dynamics of the tropical Pacific ocean-atmosphere climate is for the improvement of climate models and the prediction of future climate changes.

Comment: It's also notable that in our own time a change in temperature has been observed to be occurring in the Pacific, as well as heating elsewhere:


USA

An archaeology of Nineteenth Century American expansion

mapusa
© BibliOdyssey via Picryl.comDissected outline map of the United States of America 1880
Last week, context was added to Murray Rothbard's assertion in Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy that American foreign policy underwent an abrupt shift during the second Cleveland administration (1893-1897). I argued that American foreign policy from that period on, far from being a radical departure from what had come before, was the natural outgrowth or logical extension of previous expansionist policies. In this reading, the drive to conquer the best of the North American continent, having been declared officially settled in 1890, was simply turned abroad in a series of actions, confrontations, and conflicts over Hawaii (1893), Venezuela (1895), Cuba (1898), Samoa (1900), and dozens more.

These apparently sudden, aggressive attempts to seize strategically important overseas territories, install friendly or client regimes, and intimidate rivals can be better understood by examining their antecedents, located in the 1840s and 1850s. For having acquired Louisiana from France (1803), established a northern boundary via treaty with the British (1818), and acquired recognition of claims to the Pacific coast via the treaty with Spain that additionally saw Florida ceded (1819), the years prior to war with Mexico (1846-48) were spent much as the twenty years between the end of the Civil War and onset of the period of imperial expansion of interest to Rothbard were spent: settling and asserting control over newly acquired territories before moving on the next.

Blue Planet

Enigmatic Anglo-Saxon ivory rings discovered in elite burials came from African elephants 4,000 miles away

Anglo-Saxon
© Hemer et al/Journal of Archaeological Science: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0The ivory rings have been found in more than 700 early Anglo-Saxon graves across England, but are too large to fit a finger. Archaeologists now think they were used to hold open cloth bags tied to the waist. (Image credit:
Hundreds of elite Anglo-Saxon women were buried with mysterious ivory rings. Now, researchers know the ivory came from elephants living about 4,000 miles away from England.

Enigmatic "ivory rings" found in dozens of Anglo-Saxon burials in England have long baffled archaeologists, who weren't sure of the rings' origin and which animal they came from — elephants, walruses or mammoths. But now, scientific techniques have revealed that these rings likely came from African elephants living about 4,000 miles (6,400 kilometers) away, a new study finds.

The finding indicates a trading network brought the objects from eastern Africa and across post-Roman Europe to England — perhaps one of the longest trade route distances known from that time.

Comment: The evidence shows that complex trade networks have been established, and severed, over millennia, alongside the rise and fall of civilisations:


X

John F Kennedy broke the rules of the zero sum game. Will his nephew learn how this was done?

JFKDULLES
© UnknownFormer US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy • Former CIA Director Allen W. Dulles
"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 John F. Kennedy, 1961 Inaugural Address
Recently, presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy Jr delivered an interview to Gateway Pundit where he called upon Joe Biden to follow through on the promise to declassify all reports relating to his uncle's 1963 assassination which Biden himself had voted to support when the 1992 Kennedy Records Declassification Act was passed by Congress.

RFK Jr was referring to the 5000 documents pertaining to John F. Kennedy's murder which remain illegally classified and many more have been so redacted that they are all but useless for anyone seeking the truth of the murder and coverup of the martyred president.

While it is very good that the aspiring president Kennedy wishes to shed light on the shadow creatures which took over the USA over the murders of his uncle and father, there are still many blind spots which the well-meaning RFK Jr suffers from which both his martyred family members would be disappointed with if they were alive.

As detailed in my recent interview with Space Commune's Fox Green, these blind spots include an incompetence on the basics of energy science evidenced by RFK Jr's support for Green New Deals and government-enforced global decarbonization schemes which unfortunately fall into the Great Reset Agenda. RFK Jr's ideological commitment to end nuclear power on the earth, which remains the only viable energy source that emits no carbon while at the same time NOT forcing the reduction of the human population, is another fatal mental block.

And so while I sincerely hope that the last living Kennedy (potentially) qualified to become president makes an intellectual leap in understanding on this core issue, I thought it prudent to write the following evaluation of the presidency of John F Kennedy, the man, the world that shaped him, and how he chose, in turn to shape that world.

Blue Planet

New evidence of plant food processing in Italy during Neanderthal-to-Homo sapiens period

agriculture
© Quaternary Science ReviewsLocation of the sites.
Long before the invention of agriculture, humans already knew how to process cereals and other wild plants into a flour suitable for food — and now there's new evidence they did so long before scientists was previously thought.

Published in Quaternary Science Reviews, an Italian-led study of five ancient grindstones from around 39,000 to 43,000 years ago shows that milling for food dates back to the transitional period between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens.

"This pushes back by several thousand years the earliest evidence of plant processing and flour production," said study co-author Julien Riel-Salvatore, an Université de Montréal professor who chairs the anthropology department.

"One pestle from Riparo Bombrini, a site in northern Italy that I and my University of Genoa colleague Fabio Negrino have been working on for over 20 years, shows Neanderthals also engaged in this behavior, which is something completely new, to our knowledge. "So it's a pretty major discovery."

Comment: See also:


Target

The Bolshevik Color Revolution of 1917 and Prighozin's 2023 Gambit: Trotsky, Russell, and the war on civilization

Trotsky Milner
© Unknown
Amidst this week's strange attempt to instigate a military coup from the head of Russia's Wagner Group, President Putin took a loud stand calling out the operation as a foreign directed insurgency with parallels drawn from the chaotic revolution of 1917.

Just as in 1917, the nation was at war with an enemy on the verge of defeat, and just as 1917, foreign manipulations using fifth columnists resulted in sucking the nation into Civil War.

Putin stated:
"Exactly this strike was dealt in 1917 when the country was in WW1, but its victory was stolen. Intrigues and arguments behind the army's back turned out to be the greatest catastrophe, destruction of the army and the state, loss of huge territories, resulting in a tragedy and a civil war... Russians were killing Russians, brothers killing brothers. But the beneficiaries were various political chevaliers of fortune and foreign powers who divided the country and tore it into parts. We will not let this happen."
Now I don't know if the events catalyzed by Prigozhin's attempted coup are part of a 'game within a game' designed to flush out fifth columnists while providing a headfake to western strategists... OR if this was an authentic coup. But what I do know is that there are historical processes at play which too few recognize and which President Putin understands very well.

Some might think Putin's comparison to the 1917 revolution to be hyperbole, or a disrespect for the glorious Soviet revolution. They would be mistaken.

Colosseum

Pompeii fresco find possibly depicts 2,000-year-old form of pizza

Pompeii
The newly-uncovered fresco was found on a half-crumbled wall in what was the hallway of a house in Pompeii
A striking still life fresco resembling a pizza has been found among the ruins of ancient Pompeii, although the dish seems to lack two essential ingredients - tomato and mozzarella - and includes an item that looks suspiciously like a pineapple.

The fresco, which dates back 2,000 years, emerged during excavations in the Regio IX area of Pompeii's archaeological park, which is close to Naples, the birthplace of pizza. The painting was on a wall in what is believed to have been the hallway of a home that had a bakery in its annexe.

The fresco appears to depict a round focaccia bread on a silver tray serving as a support for various fruits, including a pomegranate and possibly a date.

However, the "pineapple" on the plate seems likely to be something else entirely, as the first European to encounter the fruit was Christopher Columbus, in Guadeloupe in 1493.

Comment:


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Blue Planet

Ocomtún: Another long-lost Maya city discovered deep in the Mexican jungle

maya city
© Ivan Šprajc/INAHLIDAR imagery showing the settlement.
With satellite imagery and other modern tools, much of the globe is comprehensively mapped out at this point - but there are still plenty of secrets hidden in the most remote and inaccessible parts of the world.

A team of archaeologists has been rewarded for trekking some 60 kilometers (37 miles) into the dense Yucatan Peninsula jungles of southern Mexico: they've discovered a long-lost ancient Maya city that there are no previous records of.

The new city has been named Ocomtún, which means "stone column". The sprawling site includes plazas, large pyramid-style buildings, stone columns, and other structures arranged in patterns of concentric rings.

Colosseum

Evidence of ancient hydraulic engineering discovered along Nile River

Nile Valley
© Matthew DaltonResearchers have documented a vast network of stone walls in the Nile Valley. A 600-mile-long network of stone walls along the Nile served as an ancient water management system.
A vast number of stone walls spread across more than 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) of the Nile River were constructed over a period of 3,000 years and "functioned as flood and flow control structures," new research reveals.

The walls, called "groynes," stretch from the first cataract of the Nile River, in what is now Egypt, to the fourth cataract, in what is now Sudan. To study the groynes, researchers used a mix of satellite and aerial photography, as well as ground survey and archaeological excavation. They looked at aerial photographs of the region taken decades ago to document groynes that are now heavily damaged or destroyed, as well as interviewed local people. In total, the researchers documented more than 1,200 groynes, the team wrote in a paper published May 27 in the journal Geoarchaeology.

The groynes appear to have been built over a span of thousands of years. Some examples found near the ancient site of Amara West, in modern-day Sudan, date back more than 3,000 years, but others are only decades old. Some may have been constructed when ancient Egypt controlled the area, while others were built at a time when the Kingdom of Kush, or various other states flourished in the region.

Comment: See also: Barbegal water mills: Unique hydraulics of 'world's earliest known industrial plant' revealed