Secret HistoryS


Blue Planet

Our human relatives butchered and ate each other 1.45 million years ago

Brian Handwerk
Smithsonian Magazine
Mon, 26 Jun 2023 16:12 UTC
cannibalism
© Jennifer ClarkSmithsonian National Museum of Natural History paleoanthropologist Briana Pobiner came across this hominin tibia in Kenya’s Nairobi National Museum. The magnified area shows cut marks.
Craving the meatiest chunk of the lower leg, a Paleolithic butcher struck again and again with a sharp stone blade, removing flesh from bone with practiced skill. When the job was done, this unknown ancient relative of ours was rewarded with a satisfying feast — from the body of another early human.

A recent discovery in a Kenyan museum — previously unnoticed cut marks on a 1.45-million-year-old shin bone — may be the oldest evidence of ancient human relatives butchering and presumably eating each other. Nine distinctive marks, oriented in the same direction, show repetitive cuts in the place where calf muscle attaches to bone, revealing a stone tool methodology typically used to remove meat. Two bite marks show a big cat also chomped on the bone at some point.

Because only the shin bone survives, researchers can't say just which ancient species of Homo sapiens relative was cut up and devoured. They also don't know whether the same species or a different relative stripped and presumably ate the calf muscle. If the two were the same species, the find may represent the earliest known example of cannibalism. If not, the grizzly tableau still represents one evolutionary cousin having another for dinner — and not as a guest.

Comment: See also:

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Book 2

New docs link CIA to medical torture of indigenous children and black prisoners

Orisanmi Burton
Truthout
Thu, 22 Jun 2023 00:00 UTC
mindcontrol
While we may never know the full truth, we owe it to those harmed and killed to illuminate their stories.

The documentary record of "mind control" experiments conducted by the United States and other governments during the Cold War is just the tip of the iceberg, and our collective ignorance is by design. In early 1973, as the fallout from the Watergate scandal exposed the need for greater congressional oversight of U.S. intelligence agencies, the head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) ordered the destruction of all documents related to MK Ultra.

Launched in the wake of the Nuremberg Trials, which exposed the extent of Nazi atrocities carried out in the name of science, MK Ultra involved a range of grotesque experiments on unwitting test subjects within and beyond U.S. borders. Newly revealed evidence exposes previously hidden links between MK Ultra experiments on Indigenous children in Canada and imprisoned Black people in the U.S.

On April 20, 2023, a group of Indigenous women known as the Kanien'kehà:ka Kahnistensera (Mohawk Mothers) achieved a milestone in their ongoing lawsuit against several entities, including McGill University, the Canadian government and the Royal Victoria Hospital in Quebec. The parties reached an agreement whereby archeologists and cultural monitors would begin the process of searching for unmarked graves, which the Mohawk Mothers believe are buried on the grounds of the hospital.
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Treasure Chest

1st-century coins from Jewish revolt against the Romans discovered near the Black Sea

Owen Jarus
Live Science
Fri, 23 Jun 2023 21:27 UTC
Apsaros
© Piotr JaworskiThe remains of the fortress of Apsaros at Colchis in western Georgia, where archaeologists found Roman-era coins.
Decades after fighting Jewish rebels in the Holy Land, a Roman military unit traveled to what is now the country of Georgia, leaving coins minted in what is now Israel at one of their camps there, new research reveals.

Archaeologists discovered the Roman-era coins at Colchis, in western Georgia near the Black Sea. An analysis revealed that some of the coins were brought to the site by Legio X Fretensis, a military unit that took part in fighting Jewish rebels during the first Jewish revolt. However, it's unlikely that the Roman soldiers who fought the Jews were the same ones who left the coins at Colchis. Instead, the coins likely stayed in the unit as new soldiers joined it.

The first Jewish revolt against the Romans started around A.D. 66 and saw the Roman sack of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple in A.D. 70. The revolt continued until the Roman siege of Masada, which ended with many of the nearly 1,000 remaining Jewish defenders taking their own lives around A.D. 73 or 74, to avoid enslavement or death at the hands of the Romans.

Most of the coins used in the analysis were discovered between 2014 and 2022 by a Polish-Georgian team at the fort of Apsaros at Colchis, Piotr Jaworski, an archaeologist at the University of Warsaw who is a coin expert on the team, told Live Science in an email. The researchers found that a few of the coins were actually minted by Jewish rebels and that the Romans continued to use the currency. During the revolt, the Jewish rebels minted coins of their own that were inscribed with a variety of images, including pomegranates and chalices.
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Info

Archaeologists find 4,000-year-old sanctuary in Netherlands

Oğuz Büyükyıldırım
Arkeonews Net
Thu, 22 Jun 2023 00:56 UTC
Tiel Site
© Alexander van de Bunt
Archaeologists discovered a 4,000-year-old sanctuary during excavations of the model industrial estate in the town of Tiel, located 72 kilometers from the Hague in the Netherlands.

The sanctuary is made up of a number of raised mounds, the largest of which has a diameter of 20 meters. It also has a shallow ditch with a number of passage openings that line up with the sun on the summer and winter solstices.

For 800 years, the site was used for sacrificial festivals, rituals, and celebrations. People also buried their dead there.

The site was excavated in 2017, but its significance has only now become clear. The complex, which covers an area of about four football fields, is described as a unique discovery.

"What a spectacular archaeological discovery! Archaeologists have found a 4,000-year-old religious sanctuary on an industrial site. This is the first time a site like this has been discovered in the Netherlands," the town of Tiel said on its Facebook page.
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Info

Neanderthals created Europe's oldest 'intentional' engravings up to 75,000 years ago, study suggests

Kristina Killgrove
Live Science
Wed, 21 Jun 2023 01:18 UTC
Neanderthals likely made Europe's oldest engravings in a French cave as long as 75,000 years ago, a study suggests.
Cave Art France
© Kristina Thomsen; (CC-BY 4.0)Study researchers Trine Freiesleben and Jean-Claude Marquet discuss the fingerprints and where to take optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) samples so they can date the artwork.
The oldest-known engravings in Europe, discovered in a French cave sealed up for tens of thousands of years, likely weren't crafted by modern humans but rather Neanderthals, a new study finds.

Within the cave of La Roche-Cotard 150 miles (240 kilometers) southwest of Paris, the researchers analyzed a series of non-figurative markings thought to be made by ancient human fingers, according to a study published Wednesday (June 21) in the journal PLOS One.

The cave had been sealed up by sediments until the late 19th century. Modern excavations at the site have yielded numerous stone tools whose style is associated with the Neanderthals, suggesting they created the art.

Ancient figurative art, including wall paintings, is well-known from European sites, with drawings of horses, lions and handprints representing famous examples of Upper Paleolithic culture dating back 35,000 years. For decades, researchers thought that these creations were hallmarks of modern human behavior, but recently, researchers have unearthed older examples of non-utilitarian objects and art in Europe and in other areas of the world, such as a 51,000-year-old chevron-engraved bone in Germany created by Neanderthals; however, Homo sapiens are credited with a 45,500-year-old drawing of a warty pig in Indonesia and a 73,000-year-old hashtag drawing in South Africa.
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Boat

Divers are about to pull a 3,000-year-old shipwreck from the ocean depths


Smithsonian Magazine
Fri, 16 Jun 2023 16:21 UTC
hand sewn boat croatia underwater wreck
© Philippe Groscaux / Mission Adriboats / CNRS / CCJMarine archaeologists first learned of the wreck from local fishermen in 2008.
Found off of Croatia, the hand-sewn vessel will be the subject of extensive study once it's back on dry land

Some 3,000 years ago, a hand-sewn boat sank off the coast of what is now Croatia. Now, researchers plan to pull the wreck from the depths in hopes of learning more about historical shipbuilding techniques.

Marine archaeologists began studying the 39-foot-long vessel — nicknamed the "Zambratija boat" because of its location in the Bay of Zambratija — after hearing reports from local fishermen in 2008. Researchers were surprised to learn the vessel dated to between the 12th and 10th centuries B.C.E, which they say makes it the oldest entirely hand-sewn boat in the Mediterranean.
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Bomb

A shocking claim about the Baghdad bombings of 1950 and 1951

Justin Marozzi
The Spectator
Sat, 17 Jun 2023 00:00 UTC
Avi Shlaim
© Getty ImagesAvi Shlaim
Avi Shlaim's family led the good life in Baghdad. Prosperous and distinguished members of Iraq's Jewish minority, a community which could trace its presence in Babylon back more than 2,500 years, they had a large house with servants and nannies, went to the best schools, rubbed shoulders with the great and the good and sashayed elegantly from one glittering party to the next. Shlaim's father was a successful businessman who counted ministers as friends. His much younger mother was a socially ambitious beauty who attracted admirers, from Egypt's King Farouk to a Mossad recruiter. For this privileged section of Iraqi society, it was a rich, cosmopolitan and generally harmonious milieu. And for the young Shlaim, born in Baghdad in 1945, these were halcyon days.

They were not to last. In 1950, during a series of bombings targeting the Jewish population in the Iraqi capital, he and his family fled their ancient homeland to begin new lives in the fledgling state of Israel. His father, by then in his fifties, could not speak Hebrew and was completely undone by the move. After a couple of failed attempts to start a business, he never worked again. Shlaim's vivacious mother was forced to take up the slack, exchanging the gilded life of a society hostess in Baghdad for a mundane job as a telephonist in Ramat Gan, east of Tel Aviv, where they lived in much diminished circumstances. The couple drifted apart and divorced, and Shlaim's father died in 1970.

Comment: The book is called Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew and will be released next month.

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Blackbox

Did black people own slaves?

Henry Louis Gates Jr.
American Renaissance
Mon, 04 Mar 2013 02:05 UTC
black slaveowners
One of the most vexing questions in African-American history is whether free African Americans themselves owned slaves. The short answer to this question, as you might suspect, is yes, of course; some free black people in this country bought and sold other black people, and did so at least since 1654, continuing to do so right through the Civil War. For me, the really fascinating questions about black slave-owning are how many black "masters" were involved, how many slaves did they own and why did they own slaves?

The answers to these questions are complex, and historians have been arguing for some time over whether free blacks purchased family members as slaves in order to protect them — motivated, on the one hand, by benevolence and philanthropy, as historian Carter G. Woodson put it, or whether, on the other hand, they purchased other black people "as an act of exploitation," primarily to exploit their free labor for profit, just as white slave owners did. The evidence shows that, unfortunately, both things are true. {snip}

In a fascinating essay reviewing this controversy, R. Halliburton shows that free black people have owned slaves "in each of the thirteen original states and later in every state that countenanced slavery," at least since Anthony Johnson and his wife Mary went to court in Virginia in 1654 to obtain the services of their indentured servant, a black man, John Castor, for life.

Comment: See also:

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Blue Planet

Polar bears survived 1,600 years of ice-free summers in the early Holocene, new evidence suggests


Polar Bear Science
Mon, 19 Jun 2023 09:52 UTC
polar bear
New evidence indicates that Arctic areas with the thickest ice today probably melted out every year during the summer for about 1,600 years during the early Holocene (ca. 11.3-9.7k years ago), making the Arctic virtually ice-free. As I argue in my new book, this means that polar bears and other Arctic species are capable of surviving extended periods with ice-free summers: otherwise, they would not be alive today.

Money quote: Here we show marine proxy evidence for the disappearance of perennial sea-ice in the southern Lincoln Sea during the Early Holocene, which suggests a widespread transition to seasonal sea-ice in the Arctic Ocean. [Detlef et al. 2023: Abstract]

Last Ice Area and Lincoln Sea

An illustration of the Last Ice Area in the Arctic, which is currently covered in perennial ice (2-4m thick) that does not melt out every summer (Moore et al. 2019) from the press release for a paper by Newton and colleagues (2021):

Comment: This data is supported by observations in our own time: Antarctica's Adélie penguins happier with less sea ice, research shows ice is growing

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USA

Flashback America's Republic: How the great experiment came about (and how we keep it)

Lawrence W. Reed
FEE Stories
Fri, 09 Nov 2018 06:54 UTC
Statue of Liberty
I am an economist and a historian, not a lawyer nor a politician nor a constitutional scholar, but I revere America's founding documents and the people who crafted them. In the long struggle of men and women against tyranny, what that generation accomplished stands without comparable precedent.

Judge Them within Context

As we survey what they did, I caution you from the outset to avoid the sin of intertemporal bigotry — judging those of the late 18th Century by standards and conventions of the early 21st. This ought to be seen as fair and commonsensical, yet I see people commit that sin all the time. The more extreme say, "Thomas Jefferson was a bad man and shouldn't be listened to because he owned slaves," for instance.

Every time I hear that, I think to myself, "Just like this critic, Thomas Jefferson wasn't perfect but he did more for liberty in a week than that forgettable critic will likely do in his lifetime." It may make you feel good for the moment to engage in some self-righteous breast-beating or sanctimonious virtue-signaling, but you betray your ignorance by displaying such bigotry.

Imagine if we could bring the Wright Brothers back to life for an hour so the critic could berate them. He would say, "You dummies! You two made this rickety flying machine and didn't even install seat belts and tray tables, let alone in-flight movies. What good were you?!"

Comment: See also:

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