Secret History
While the United States government claims to be horrified every time there are reports of a chemical attack that was allegedly carried out by the Syrian government, history serves as a reminder that the U.S. is responsible for carrying out a number of chemical attacks on thousands of unsuspecting Americans, and some of the innocent victims are still suffering from the effects today.
In 1977, the U.S. Army admitted that it secretly conducted at least 239 germ warfare tests in the open air in cities across the country between 1949 and 1969. The areas where the lethal germs were simulated on the public were typically in major cities such as Washington D.C., San Francisco, New York City, Key West and Panama City, according to a report the Army submitted to the Senate Health Subcommittee.
In the report, the Army insisted that the purpose of the tests was to study how biological warfare affects the public, in case it needs to defend against it. Calling tests "essential," the Army claimed it needed to "substantiate theories and fill knowledge gaps and to determine vulnerability to attack."
In fact, if you were to travel back to the very beginnings of our species and select a random group of humans, they would look unlike anyone living today in Africa or elsewhere. What's more, they would show extraordinary physical variation - greatly exceeding that in modern human populations. Far from becoming more diverse as we have adapted to life in different parts of the planet, Homo sapiens is more homogeneous today than our ancestors were.
This is a real puzzle. It simply doesn't fit with the long-held idea that we arose from a single population in a corner of East Africa. In fact, mounting evidence from fossils, archaeological remains and genetic analysis points in a new direction. Now researchers, including myself, are trying to work out what it all means: why our African forebears were so physically different from each other, and how our species lost the huge variety it once had.
Comment: See Also:
- Debunked: 'Out of Africa thing completely disproved by genetics'
- Out of Europe, Not Africa? 5.2 Million years old pre-human footprint found in Greece
- "Mosaic" skulls linked to mysterious Denisovan humans who became extinct in last ice age
- Part human, part virus: The body's intimate relationship with viral DNA

Above-ground tombs at the cemetery site of Yuraq Qaqa, Colca Valley, Peru.
Like Chinese foot binding, the practice may have been a marker of group identity. Its period of popularity in what is now Peru, before the expansion of the Inca empire, was marked by political upheaval, ecological stress and the emergence of new cultural practices. In a study published in the February edition of Current Anthropology, Matthew Velasco, assistant professor of anthropology, explores how head-shaping practices may have enabled political solidarity while furthering social inequality in the region.
Velasco analyzed hundreds of human skeletal remains from multiple tombs in the Colca Valley of highland Peru and discovered that before 1300 most people did not have modified heads. He found that the number of individuals with cranial modifications increased over time, from 39.2 percent to 73.7 percent during the later portion of the Late Intermediate Period.

Preserved in dry sand for more than 500 years, more than a dozen children were revealed over the course of a day by archaeologists. The majority of the ritual victims were between eight and 12 years old when they died.
More than 140 children and 200 young llamas appear to have been ritually sacrificed in an event that took place some 550 years ago on a wind-swept bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, in the shadow of what was then the sprawling capital of the Chimú Empire.
Scientific investigations by the international, interdisciplinary team, led by Gabriel Prieto of the Universidad Nacional de Trujillo and John Verano of Tulane University, are ongoing. The work is supported by grants from the National Geographic Society.
While incidents of human sacrifice among the Aztec, Maya, and Inca have been recorded in colonial-era Spanish chronicles and documented in modern scientific excavations, the discovery of a large-scale child sacrifice event in the little-known pre-Columbian Chimú civilization is unprecedented in the Americas-if not in the entire world.
The faded images in Tennessee's Cumberland Plateau are believed to be the most widespread collection of such art ever found in the U.S.
Recently archaeologists have discovered America's oldest cave and rock art that has remained hidden for more than 6,000 years in Tennessee. The faded images were found in Tennessee's Cumberland Plateau and they are believed to be the most widespread collection of such art ever found in the U.S. Cumberland Plateau contains 280 caves - 21 of which are described as 'extensive' in size. Researchers claim there are 71 known prehistoric cave art sites in the greater south-eastern USA.

The Wilbour Plaque is named for the early American Egyptologist Charles Edwin Wilbour (1833–1896), who acquired it in Egypt in 1881. This sculptor’s model depicts Akhenaten and Nefertiti – wearing the khat headdress and ovoid cap crown respectively – and shows the royal couple as equals; which is proof of the extraordinary status enjoyed by the Amarna queen.
The Tomb of Ankhkheperure?

An artist’s reconstruction, based on recently discovered footprints, of prehistoric humans in present-day New Mexico hunting a giant ground sloth.
A paper in this week's issue of Science Advances offers tantalizing evidence of that grim process in action. Archeologists working at White Sands National Monument, in New Mexico, found a series of fossilized footprints made by giant ground sloths, lumbering behemoths that once roamed North and South America. The tracks date to between ten thousand and fifteen thousand years ago, when the region was much wetter than it is today. The giant sloth was herbivorous but nonetheless a fearsome creature-eight feet tall when standing on its hind legs, with long arms, and long claws extending from its padded feet.
Comment: The results aren't conclusive, because as the paper states timing is off and clearly much is open to interpretation - but if the meat was tasty, why wouldn't our ancestors have barbecued sloth?
For more on the happenings of that time, see: Of Flash Frozen Mammoths and Cosmic Catastrophes
Also See:
- Mexico: Flooded cave yields ancient human and animal remains
- Mounting evidence suggests prehistoric people were inhabiting the Americas well over 20,000 years ago
- Ancient Mega-Sloths dug massive tunnels in South America
- Mammoths Wiped Out By Multiple Killers
- Why are so many fossils of woolly mammoths young males?
- Scandinavian Stone Age society more reliant on fishing than previously thought - particularly aquatic mammals
Sure, mummies are spooky (especially when they're locked in a tomb that promises to curse anyone who disturbs it), but they're less intimidating when you realize that their births and deaths were closer to us than they were to the ancient Shigir idol.
Unearthed in 1894 by gold miners in the Ural Mountains of Russia, the Shigir Idol was originally dated to be about 9,900 years old.
It's estimated to have originally been about 15 feet tall, though chunks of it are missing, and anthropologists noted that there were five faces carved on different parts of its human-like 'body', including the one on its head.

Poppies, shown here with seed pods, have been used to produce opium in the Near East for some 5000 years.
Now, new techniques for analyzing residues in excavated jars and identifying tiny amounts of plant material suggest that ancient Near Easterners indulged in a range of psychoactive substances. Recent advances in identifying traces of organic fats, waxes, and resins invisible to the eye have allowed scientists to pinpoint the presence of various substances with a degree of accuracy unthinkable a decade or two ago.
For example, "hard scientific evidence" shows that ancient people extracted opium from poppies, says David Collard, senior archaeologist at Jacobs, an engineering firm in Melbourne, Australia, who found signs of ritual opium use on Cyprus dating back more than 3000 years. By then, drugs like cannabis had arrived in Mesopotamia, while people from Turkey to Egypt experimented with local substances such as blue water lily.
Comment: They wouldn't be the first civilisation to use hallucinogenic drugs to attempt (and most likely fail to achieve) contact with positive higher realities, and yet, their use probably wasn't always necessary.
Laura Knight-Jadczyk in Witches, Comets and Planetary Cataclysms writes:
My work is all about following the lines of Pagan/shamanistic ideas and teachings back to the Ice Ages - the cave painters, the Northern European origins - to find the most original, fundamental, common foundation of all of them. The idea that there was a time when man was directly in contact with the Celestial Beings is at the root of many of the myths of the Golden Age. Myths tell us of a time when the 'gods withdrew' from mankind. As a result of some 'happening', i.e., 'The Fall', when the communications were broken off and the Celestial Beings withdrew to the highest heavens.
- The Existence of Female Shamans: Solving the Mystery of a 35,000-Year-Old Statue
- Dark side of New Age drug tourism: Shaman's herbal hallucinogen ayahuasca a fatal lure for naive experience junkies
- Crazy, or unsuccessful healer? A shaman's view of mental illness
- Shamanism As Evolutionary Medicine










Comment: And this is to say nothing of what the US has and is now doing around the world:
Pentagon Biological Weapons Program Never Ended: US Bio-labs Around The World