Secret History

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What are some possible locations for the lost continent of Lemuria

Brad Yoon
Ancient Origins
Mon, 26 Feb 2018 20:31 UTC

The Lost Continent of Lemuria or Mu, (used interchangeably) has long lived under the shadow of its more well-known relation, Atlantis. Therefore, it may come as a surprise that for a brief moment in history, Lemuria gained a greater acceptance within the scientific and scholarly community. In fact, Lemuria was not originally an idea originating from the occult world, or from lost Ancient Egyptian sources as was Plato's Atlantis, but from the minds of leading scientific thinkers.

Lemurian Footprints Crossing the Pacific?

In the 19th century, just when Darwin's theory of evolution had achieved widespread acceptance, zoologists and evolutionary biologists observed a curious phenomenon: Across Madagascar, India, and the islands of the Pacific - lands separated by hundreds of miles of impassable oceans - lemurs were encountered.

In the late 1800s, Philip Sclater, an English zoologist and lawyer, was the first to make this observation, and proposed a theory that has since taken on a life of its own. Sclater, in concurrence with many other thinkers of the time, proposed that these landmasses, now separated by oceans, had once been a part of a larger continent in the Indian Ocean, submerged beneath the ocean. Sclater named this hypothetical missing continent 'Lemuria' after the lemur, and the name has stuck since then.

Excavation reveals ancient society buried disabled children like kings

Laura Geggel
Live Science
Tue, 13 Feb 2018 20:24 UTC

About 34,000 years ago, a group of hunters and gatherers buried their dead - including two boys with physical conditions - using the utmost care. However, these dead were buried in fairly different ways, a new study finds.

The roughly 10- and 12-year-old boys were buried head to head in a long, slender grave filled with riches, including more than 10,000 mammoth ivory beads, more than 20 armbands, about 300 pierced fox teeth, 16 ivory mammoth spears, carved artwork, deer antlers and two human fibulas (calf bones) laid across the boys' chests, the researchers said.

In contrast, the remains of a roughly 40-year-old man, an individual who would have had more time and physical ability to contribute to the group, had far fewer treasures: about 3,000 mammoth ivory beads, 12 pierced fox canines, 25 mammoth ivory arm bands and a stone pendant.

"From the point of view of the mortuary behavior, the burial of the adult is, in fact, very different from the burial of the children," study co-lead researcher Erik Trinkaus, a professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, told Live Science.

Primeval navigation indicates language began 1.5M years earlier than thought

Ashley Cowie
Ancient Origins
Fri, 09 Mar 2018 03:53 UTC

Were our primeval ancestors skilled mariners who sailed thousand of miles to distant islands using language, or did they grunt at each other while holding onto tree trunks being blown randomly on the waves of tsunamis? That is the big question!

Having emerged in Africa more than 1.8 million years ago, Homo erectus fossils discovered as far afield as China, Indonesia and Southern Europe tell us it was the first archaic human to leave the continent. Some scientists even believe that the little hominid Homo floresiensis, discovered on the island of Flores in 2003, could be descended from H. erectus, but others fiercely disagree.

Revitalizing winds have been blown into the glowing embers of this centuries long debate after Daniel Everett, professor of global studies at Bentley University and author of How Language Began, addressed a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Austin, saying of Erectus. "He travelled all over the world, travelled to the island of Flores, across one of the greatest ocean currents in the world," as was reported in Archeology New Network .

Further antagonizing the old brigade Everett continued, "They sailed to the island of Crete and various other islands. It was intentional: they needed craft and they needed to take groups of twenty or so at least to get to those places." Accepting that 200,000 year old primates developed sea going vessels and had developed what must have been advanced sailing skills, one must also assume that they also had language. And this is where things get controversial.

Bayeux revisited: A tale of medieval art and Victorian censorship (VIDEO)

Huffington Post
Mon, 16 Apr 2012 10:12 UTC

Regional museums: a delightful hotch-potch, a veritable Granny's-Front-Room with accompanying cafe, shop and starry-eyed curator.

We pottered off to Reading Museum: a random outpouring of stories old and quaint. It is a Regional Curator's task to put the beloved claptrap of centuries into context.

On the first floor, one exhibit dominates all the others; and this is its story.

Allow me to transport you back to the nineteenth century, the heyday of florid romanticism, when Tennyson was altering the historical evidence with every line of poetry he wrote and Dickens was keepin' it real.

William Morris was at the centre of a craft revolution: 1861 saw the opening of his epoch-making firm Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co, which among many fortes boasted the design of tapestries. The influence of the mediaeval was strong here: much as Tennyson adored the ancient stories, Morris borrowed and created a 19th century interpretation of mediaeval times.

Comment: The above mentioned censorship was made into a short 3 minute video by the BBC.

Why did Victorians censor the Bayeux Tapestry

Bayeux Tapestry nudity censored by Victorian English

There's a copy of the Bayeux Tapestry in Reading, Berkshire.

But why did the Victorians who made the copy of the famous French tapestry censor it?

This video was inspired by the BBC series Civilisations. Video journalist: Adam Paylor

It seems that all too frequently our understanding of the past is thrown into disarray when curious artefacts are discovered that don't fit our expectations of life at the time. Mainstream historians admit that we're very much in the dark about how life was for people in the middle ages - aka the dark ages - but there are pieces of evidence here and there that demonstrate that while they were able to create masterful works, whether they be the great feats of engineering and art seen in the cathedrals of Europe or the eras painters and poets, for some at least, they were also a people in touch with the wonder of life all the while also allowing space for humour and fun.

It appears we have lost not only the skills of that time but also that sense of self - censored in the Victorian era only to become a caricature in our own.

What else in history has been censored to appease the norms of the time or distorted for purposes of propaganda, and serving to disconnect us from our heritage.

See Also:

Archaeologists discover Roman military commander's sprawling residence beneath subway system

Owen Jarus
Live Science
Thu, 08 Mar 2018 18:16 UTC

© Ministero Dei Beni E Delle Attività Culturali Del Turismo
Inside the military commander's house, archaeologists found the remains of mosaic floors made with white marble and grey slate. Many of the mosaics were decorated with geometric patterns.

Archaeologists in Rome have discovered the remains of a sprawling residence of a Roman military commander dating back 1,900 years and holding several rooms covered in ornate mosaic floors with geometric patterns, along with pools and fountains.

They discovered the "domus" about 40 feet (12 meters) underground during construction work to expand the Metro C line of Rome's subway system, a team of archaeologists from Rome's Superintendency for Archaeology announced recently.

The commander's residence was uncovered alongside the remains of a military barracks used by Roman soldiers that was discovered in 2016 during this same subway construction.

Amelia Earhart mystery finally solved, claims anthropology professor

RT
Thu, 08 Mar 2018 20:18 UTC

The decades-long mystery surrounding the fate of Amelia Earhart could finally have finally been solved. Scientists studying bones discovered on a small Pacific island have identified the remains as those of to the female aviator.

Earhart's plane went missing during her 1937 attempt to circumnavigate the globe. The bones were found by a British expedition on the uninhabited island of Nikumaroro, north of Fiji, in 1940. A forensic analysis of the remains in 1941 originally linked the remains to a man, but a new study, published in the journal 'Forensic Anthropology' by Professor Richard Jantz of the University of Tennessee, rejects these findings.

Comment: Mystery deepens over bones linked to Amelia Earhart

132-year old message in a bottle found on West Australian beach - world's oldest

Western Australian Museum
Tue, 06 Mar 2018 23:10 UTC

The world's oldest known message in a bottle has been found half-buried at a West Australian beach nearly 132 years after it was tossed overboard in the Indian Ocean, 950km from the coast.

Until now, the previous world record for the oldest message in a bottle was 108 years, four months and 18 days between jettison and discovery.

The message is dated 12 June 1886 and was jettisoned from the German sailing barque Paula as part of a long-term German oceanographic experiment to better understand global ocean currents and find faster, more efficient shipping routes.

The bottle was found just north of Wedge Island, 180km north of Perth, by Tonya Illman near her son's car which had become bogged in the soft sand. Researchers believe the bottle and message probably washed up there within a year of being jettisoned but lay buried in a layer of damp sand which helped preserve it, until a storm surge or similar weather event uncovered it more than a century later.

Long-lost footage of 1906 San Francisco earthquake found at flea market

Brandon Specktor
Live Science
Tue, 06 Mar 2018 21:59 UTC

In the dawn hours of April 18, 1906, a sudden shock rattled San Francisco. Half a minute later, one of the largest quakes in California history pummeled the sleeping city awake.

Modern geologists estimate that the 1906 San Francisco earthquake measured somewhere between magnitude 7.7 and 8.3. The shock waves and subsequent fires from the quake destroyed 28,000 buildings, killed at least 700 people and rendered more than half of the city's 400,000 residents homeless.

Now, after being lost for more than 100 years, footage of the quake's devastating aftermath has turned up. Providing hope for treasure hunters everywhere, photography collector David Silver found the rare roll of nitrate film stuffed in the trunk of a car at a California flea market.

According to Silver, it was a miracle the 9-minute reel was still intact; nitrate film is delicate and extremely flammable, and the man selling the reel was "standing there looking through a length of it with a lit cigarette hanging from his lips," Silver told SFGate.com.

Unexplained booms shook New Jersey over 40 years ago

Erik Larsen
Asbury Park Press
Mon, 05 Mar 2018 07:59 UTC

About 40 years ago, something so violent shook the Jersey Shore that the order was given to evacuate the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant in Lacey.

The date was Dec. 2, 1977, and to this day and one federal investigation later, no one is absolutely certain what happened.

"Not Earthquake or Sonic Boom: Rumblings, Tremors Unexplained," was the main headline on the front page of the Asbury Park Press the next morning.

Initially, the supersonic Concorde was thought to be the culprit. A little more than a week earlier, the British-French airliner - which could travel twice as fast as the speed of sound - had started transatlantic service into John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.

How did 'Operation Merlin' poison US intel on Iran?

Garth Porter
MintPress News
Mon, 05 Mar 2018 00:00 UTC

Jeffrey Sterling, the case officer for the CIA's covert "Operation Merlin," who was convicted in May 2015 for allegedly revealing details of that operation to James Risen of the New York Times, was released from prison in January after serving more than two years of a 42-month sentence. He had been tried and convicted on the premise that the revelation of the operation had harmed U.S. security.

The entire case against him assumed a solid intelligence case that Iran had indeed been working on a nuclear weapon that justified that covert operation.

But the accumulated evidence shows that the intelligence not only did not support the need for Operation Merlin, but that the existence of the CIA's planned covert operation itself had a profound distorting impact on intelligence assessment of the issue. The very first U.S. national intelligence estimate on the subject in 2001 that Iran had a nuclear weapons program was the result of a heavy-handed intervention by Deputy Director for Operations James L. Pavitt that was arguably more serious than the efforts by Vice-President Dick Cheney to influence the CIA's 2002 estimate on WMD in Iraq.

The full story the interaction between the CIA operation and intelligence analysis, shows, moreover, that Pavitt had previously fabricated an alarmist intelligence analysis for the Clinton White House on Iran's nuclear program in late 1999 in order to get Clinton's approval for Operation Merlin.