Welcome to Sott.net
Wed, 29 Sep 2021
The World for People who Think

Secret History
Map

Cow

Milk and Mongolia: What bacterial cultures reveal about ours

Virginia Gewin
Sapiens
Thu, 06 Feb 2020 10:19 UTC
Mongolia
© Heirloom Microbes Project.
Herder Dalaimyagmar and her husband, Byambaa, demonstrate how to press whey from curds in creating aaruul, a staple dairy product in Mongolia.
Dairying is one of the great puzzles of history. An archaeologist set out to unravel it and, in the process, discovered Mongolia's hidden wealth of endangered microbes.

In the remote northern steppes of Mongolia, in 2017, anthropologist Christina Warinner and her colleagues were interviewing local herders about dairying practices. One day, a yak and cattle herder, Dalaimyagmar, demonstrated how she makes traditional yogurt and cheeses.

In spring, as livestock calve and produce the most milk, Mongolians switch from a meat-centered diet to one based on dairy products. Each year, Dalaimyagmar thaws the saved sample of the previous season's yogurt, which she calls khöröngo. She adds some of this yogurt to fresh milk, over several days, until it is revived. With this "starter culture," she is then able to make dairy products all summer.

Comment: It's notable that dairying, agriculture and particular cooking practices came into use around the same time, and in turn we see a deterioration in the health of people; one wonders what part environmental pressures played in this relatively sudden shift?

      Read More...
Blue Planet

9,900-year-old skeleton of horribly disfigured woman from mysterious isolated group found in Mexican cave

Laura Geggel
Live Science
Wed, 05 Feb 2020 12:00 UTC
Coahuila
© Eugenio Acevez
Divers discovered the ancient woman's remains in the Chan Hol cave, near Tulum, Mexico. The underwater survey was led by Jerónimo Avilés, a speleologist (cave explorer and researcher) at the Museum of the Desert of Coahuila.
Cave divers have discovered the eerie underwater grave of an ancient woman with a deformed skull who lived on the Yucatán Peninsula at least 9,900 years ago, making her one of the earliest known inhabitants of what is now Mexico.

The woman's skull had three distinct injuries, indicating that something hard hit her, breaking the skull bones. Her skull was also pitted with crater-like deformations, lesions that look like those caused by a bacterial relative of syphilis, a new study finds.

"It really looks as if this woman had a very hard time and an extremely unhappy end of her life," study lead researcher Wolfgang Stinnesbeck, a professor of biostratigraphy and paleoecology at the Institute for Earth Sciences at Heidelberg University in Germany, told Live Science in an email. "Obviously, this is speculative, but given the traumas and the pathological deformations on her skull, it appears a likely scenario that she may have been expelled from her group and was killed in the cave, or was left in the cave to die there."

Comment: See also: Also check out SOTT radio's:

      Read More...
Archaeology

5,000 year old tomb named 'Dwarfie Stane' cut into rock on the Island of Hoy, Scotland


Archaeology World
Wed, 05 Feb 2020 00:00 UTC
Rock-Cut Tomb - Island of Hoy
© Unknown
An ancient and huge piece of red sandstone called "Dwarfie Stane" is 5,000 years old and was surrounded by mystery. There is no record who, in what manner and for what purpose or purposes, the stone was cut into and chambers excavated.

The curious stone formation lies in a steep-sided and remote valley between Quoys and Rackwick on the island of Hoy, in Orkney, Scotland and is believed to be Britain's only example of a rock-cut tomb.
      Read More...
Archaeology

Rare fossil of bone-crushing Triassic-era crocodile cousin found in Brazil

Jill Langlois
National Geographic
Wed, 05 Feb 2020 22:52 UTC
Dynamosuchus collisensi triassic reptile
© Illustration by Márcio L. Castro
This newly discovered species of prehistoric reptile, called Dynamosuchus collisensi, lived 230 million years ago during the Triassic period. Its back was protected by two rows of dermal bones.
The prehistoric reptile likely played a surprising but vital role in its Triassic ecosystem.

Rodrigo Müller was working a block of rock and dirt at the base of Agudo Hill, an hour from Porto Alegre, when he first saw an unusual set of osteoderms, bony deposits that form plates on the skin of a reptile or amphibian.

"It was a surprise, because we had never seen anything like this in Brazil before," Müller, a paleontologist at the Federal University of Santa Maria, says of what was otherwise an ordinary visit to the Janner dig site, once home to some of the earliest dinosaurs to roam Earth.

As he continued his delicate work, he brushed dirt from an intact cranium and several other fossilized bones. Together, the collection formed a well-preserved and almost complete skeleton of a rare Ornithosuchidae reptile, a family considered cousins to today's crocodiles and alligators that had been previously recorded only in Argentina and Scotland.
      Read More...
Sherlock

Ötzi the iceman, the multiple mosses, and his final days

Grennan Milliken
Glacier Hub
Thu, 30 Jan 2020 20:18 UTC
Otzi first discovered
© Paul HANNY/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
Ötzi, freshly discovered, in situ, in 1991.
After 5,300 years, Ötzi the Iceman continues to divulge secrets. Archaeobotanists recently identified seventy-five different species of mosses and liverworts (a non-vascular plant similar to moss) that were sprinkled on the neolithic man's clothing, sequestered in his gut, and buried in the icy gully where he lay for millennia after his murder by the Schnalstal/Val Senales glacier in the Ötzal Alps. Many of these bryophtyes — another term for mosses and liverworts — are not local to the spot where the Iceman was found, and reveal information about his movements in the final forty-eight hours of his life. A study detailing the new findings was published this past fall in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

When the Iceman (also nicknamed Ötzi after the Ötzal Alps where he was found) was discovered by two hikers in South Tyrol, Italy in 1991, he was laying face down in a frozen gully. He had been killed over five thousand years prior — shot through the back with an arrow — but the glacier's ice preserved his corpse. Also captured in the ice around his shriveled body was a menagerie of neolithic plants and fungi.

Comment: For more on Ötzi, see:

      Read More...
Info

A new study says footprints in volcanic rock probably belong to Homo heidelbergensis

Kiona N.Smith
Ars Technica
Wed, 05 Feb 2020 16:56 UTC
The Devil's Path
© Ars Technica
Local residents call the tracks Ciampate del Diavolo, or the Devil's Path.
Roccamonfina volcano, about 60km northwest of Vesuvius, erupted violently around 350,000 years ago. Pyroclastic flows — deadly torrents of hot gas and volcanic ash — raced down the sides of the mountain. But within a few days, a small group of hominins trekked across the layer of ash and pumice that covered the steep mountainside. Recent analysis and some newly identified prints suggest that the intrepid (or reckless) hominins may have been Homo heidelbergensis who lived and hunted near the volcano.

Another layer of ash later covered the slope, sealing away at least 81 tracks until the early 1800s, when erosion revealed them to the local humans. The tracks record where at least five climbers, all with different foot sizes, walked down the steep, ash-covered hillside. One trail zigzags back and forth downhill, and you can easily picture climbers carefully working their way diagonally across the slope. Along another, more curving path, there are still handprints where the climbers reached out to steady themselves, and a slide mark reveals where one climber slipped.

The ash must have been cool enough to walk on but still soft enough to preserve tracks — very detailed ones, in a few cases. According to ichnologist Adolfo Panarello (of University of Cassino and Southern Latium) and his colleagues, that must have happened within a few days of the pyroclastic flow; Roccamonfina may even still have been erupting. In the 1800s, people living around the now-extinct volcano were sure that only the devil could have left those tracks.
      Read More...
Info

3800-year-old spoons made from bones found in Mongolia


AKI Press
Thu, 30 Jan 2020 20:16 UTC
Bone Spoon
© AKI Press
Spoons found in Mongolia are said to have been used during the time of ancient Egypt, and the Shang dynasty as early as 4,000 years ago, Montsame reported.

In correlation with the matter, it has been found that ancient Mongolians used to make spoons out of bones, which traces back at least 3,800 years ago, from the findings discovered by a research team of the Archeology Department of Ulaanbaatar State University.

As a result of their excavation done between 2002 and 2011, the research team had found a 7,500-year-old bone knife from the basin of Eg river in Khutag-Undur soum, Bulgan aimag, a 4,500-year-old vase pot from the basin of Bulgan river in Bulgan soum, Khovd aimag, a 3,800-year-old bone spoon from the basins of Bulgan and Eg rivers as well as others.
      Read More...
Star of David

Declassified: An expose on Israeli plot to prepare Arab lands for Jewish settlement via Martial Law


Sputnik
Fri, 31 Jan 2020 15:20 UTC
Ramla prisoners
© CC0
Ramla prisoners of war, July 12-13, 1948
Between 1948 and 1966, over 150,000 Arabs living within Israel's post-independence borders were governed by military rule, faced curfews, travel restrictions, and the threat of arbitrary arrest and expulsion.

The draconian circumstances faced by Arab-Israelis during the period of military rule were not instituted on the basis of security considerations or any real fear of an Arab uprising, but were part of a concerted plan to drive the minority from the land and to clear the way for Jewish settlement, a declassified secret supplementary to a government report has revealed.

The document, excerpts of which have been published by Haaretz, was part of a report by the Ratner Committee, a government committee established in late 1955 to examine the possibility of abolishing martial law in the Arab-majority territories of Israel.

Entitled "Security Settlement and the Land Question," the codicil discusses the provisions governing the estimated 156,000 Arabs who stayed behind in the territories which became part of Israel after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War (another 800,000 Arabs fled Israel during this period).
      Read More...
Blue Planet

Ancient skulls from Mexico surprisingly diverse, challenges assumptions about settlement of the Americas

Natalie Parletta
Cosmos Magazine
Sun, 02 Feb 2020 11:08 UTC
Skeletal
© Jerónimo Avilés
Skeletal remains found inside a submerged cave in Mexico are among the oldest found in the Americas.
Analysis of four ancient skulls retrieved from the submerged caves of Quintana Roo, Mexico, suggests that early humans populating North America were far more diverse than previously thought.

The discovery adds fresh fuel to one of the most hotly debated topics in archaeology and biological anthropology, according to a paper published in the journal PLOS ONE, as part of a quest to understand the origins of Native Americans.

The skeletons, discovered by underwater archaeologists in the expansive limestone cave system that used to be above sea level, are dated to between 13 and nine thousand years ago, during the late Pleistocene/early Holocene.

Comment: See also: Also check out SOTT radio's:

      Read More...
Fish

World's oldest cooking pots found in Siberia, created 16,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age


University of York
Sat, 01 Feb 2020 20:47 UTC
pottery
© Yanshina Oksana
Shards of pottery from a cooking pot used by Siberian hunters.
A new study shows that ancient Siberian hunters created heat resistant pots so that they could cook hot meals - surviving the harshest seasons of the ice age by extracting nutritious bone grease and marrow from meat.

The research - which was undertaken at the University of York - also suggests there was no single point of origin for the world's oldest pottery.

Academics extracted and analysed ancient fats and lipids that had been preserved in pieces of ancient pottery - found at a number of sites on the Amur River in Russia - whose dates ranged between 16,000 and 12,000 years ago.

Potential

Comment: Was it that the conditions on our planet were shifting so considerably that cookware of this kind was suddenly necessary? Also check out SOTT radio's:

      Read More...
Amazon Smile
Revolt! T-shirts