Secret History

Giant, 300,000 year-old handaxes found at rare Ice Age site in Kent, UK

University College London
Popular Archaeology
Thu, 06 Jul 2023 12:00 UTC

Researchers at the UCL Institute of Archaeology have discovered some of the largest early prehistoric stone tools in Britain.

The excavations, which took place in Kent and were commissioned in advance of development of the Maritime Academy School in Frindsbury, revealed prehistoric artifacts in deep Ice Age sediments preserved on a hillside above the Medway Valley.

The researchers, from UCL Archaeology South-East, discovered 800 stone artifacts thought to be over 300,000 years old, buried in sediments which filled a sinkhole and ancient river channel, outlined in their research, published in Internet Archaeology.

Amongst the unearthed artifacts were two extremely large flint knives described as "giant handaxes". Handaxes are stone artefacts which have been chipped, or "knapped," on both sides to produce a symmetrical shape with a long cutting edge. Researchers believe this type of tool was usually held in the hand and may have been used for butchering animals and cutting meat. The two largest handaxes found at the Maritime site have a distinctive shape with a long and finely worked pointed tip, and a much thicker base.

Comment: See also: The Golden Age, Psychopathy and the Sixth Extinction

26,000-foot Himalayan mountain summit crumbled around 1190 CE, leaving evidence in the plains below

Rahul Rao
Popular Science
Thu, 06 Jul 2023 12:30 UTC

Earth is home to 14 "eight-thousanders," summits that top off at more than 8,000 meters, or 26,247 feet, above sea level. All of these grand mountains tower over the Himalayas, the highest place in the world.

But our planet is dynamic — could there have been additional peaks like these, since lost? "We wanted to know whether, 830 years ago, the Earth and the Himalayas had one more," says Jérôme Lavé, a geomorphologist at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the University of Lorraine in France.

The answer, according to Lavé and his colleagues, appears to be yes. In a new paper, published in the journal Nature on July 6, they've found evidence of an ancient landslide that reshaped South Asia's geography — and linked that to the collapse of a peak that would have once been one of the tallest mountains on Earth.

Lavé says his team first spotted the fingerprints of this medieval landslide not in the Himalayas, but far to the south, near the India-Nepal border, in the flat plains around the Narayani River.

Comment: As Laura Knight Jadcyzk writes in Meteorites, Asteroids, and Comets: Damages, Disasters, Injuries, Deaths, and Very Close Calls, there is evidence and reports of other disasters and catastrophic events occurring around the same time elsewhere on our planet:

1000 - Alberta, Canada - The date of this meteor strike is estimated.
"What local hunters in Whitecourt thought for years was a sinkhole is actually the crater left behind by a meteor that fell to earth 1,000 years ago and is now attracting international attention from researchers. ... The crater is 36 metres wide and six metres deep, which is small as far as most craters go, ... Herd thinks the meteor came from the asteroid belt and measured one metre across. However, researchers have so far found 74 different pieces of the original meteor - which is called a meteorite once it hits the ground - scattered around the crater, some up to 70 metres away." LINK
1064 - Chang-chou, China - Daytime fireball, meteorite fall; fences burned.

1160-1177 - Iran - Hossein Alizadeh Gharib, after discovering several young impact craters in Iran, searched the historical records and found this:
The result of my search through a vast collection of Persian chronicles and works of meteorological, astronomical and literary (mostly still in manuscript form) was the discovery of more than 100 cases of fireball phenomena, falls and meteorite showers, along with the following accident which caused the death of people. Mohammad Ebn Mahmoud Tousi, in his great work entitled Ajayeb-ol-Makhlooghat ("miraculous phenomena"), which is an encyclopedia of miracles recorded in the years 556-573 AH (1160-1177 AD), in the chapter entitled "About falling stones," he writes, "... and we set to write another chapter about rains of stones and whether stones may fall out of the sky or not ..." Then he mentions several cases of meteorite falls and gets to this phenomenon: "... and I heard from a trustworthy person, who told me: "I was sitting in the shade in Qazvin (100 km south of the Caspian Sea) when it appeared a cloud with a thunder and in a shadow a stone fell then another one, both identical. I was curious as to where they came from. Then came the news that in Hoosam (called today Rud Sar, a city in northern Iran at the Caspian Sea) stone rain fell and a large number of people were killed."

Perhaps it was the same incident as described by an unknown author in Sovara-ol-Aghalim ("Faces of lands"), which is a geographical description of the medieval world written in 748 AH (1347 AD), in the fourth chapter of his book: "... and a man told that he had seen in Qazvin that the stone fell to the ground with lightning ..." ("A Fatal Meteorite Shower in the 12th Century Iran," Meteorite! magazine, 1999 November issue)
According to Wikipedia, the city of Rudsar had a mosque in the year 979, that the city "was ruined due to unknown reasons" and reconstructed between the years 1393-1435. [Entry added 3/3/2013]

1178 - 18 June on the Julian calendar, 25 June, Gregorian
In this year, on the Sunday before the Feast of St. John the Baptist, after sunset when the moon had first become visible a marvelous phenomenon was witnessed by some five or more men who were sitting there facing the moon. Now there was a bright new moon, and as usual in that phase its horns were tileted toward the east; and suddenly the upper horn split in two. From the midpoint of the divisin a flaming torch sprang up, spewing out, over a considerable distance, fire, hot coals, and sparks. Meanwhile the body of the moon which was below writhed, as it were, in anxiety, and, to put it in the words of those who reported it to me and saw it with their own eyes, the moon throbbed like a wounded snake. Afterwards it resumed its proper state. This phenomenon was repeated a dozen times or more, the flame assuming various twisting shapes at random and then returning to normal. Then after these transformations the moon from horn to horn, that is along its whole lengthe, took on a blackish appearance. The present writer was given this report by men who saw it with their own eyes, and are prepared to stake ther honour on an oath that they have made no addition or falsification in the above narrative. (Gervase of Canterbury)

Genetic analysis reveals a woman dubbed 'Ivory Lady' as the highest-ranking individual in Copper Age Spain

Leman Altuntaş
Arkeonews Net
Thu, 06 Jul 2023 01:57 UTC

According to a study published Thursday (July 6) in the journal Scientific Reports, the highest-status individual in ancient Copper Age society in Iberia was a woman, not a man as previously thought.

Since its discovery in 2008, the skeleton of a high-ranking individual buried inside a tomb in the Iberian Peninsula between 3,200 and 2,200 years ago was thought to be the remains of a man. However, a new analysis reveals that this person was actually a woman.

Archaeologists in Spain dubbed the woman the "Ivory Lady" based on the bounty of grave goods found alongside her skeleton, including an ivory tusk surrounding her skull, flint, an ostrich eggshell, amber, and a rock crystal dagger.

For more than a decade, archaeologists believed that this individual was a man, even nicknaming him the "Ivory Merchant." As well as being a rare example of a single occupancy burial, the grave contained a large number of valuable goods, suggesting that this individual — originally thought to be a young male aged between 17 and 25 years. — held a high status within society.

Archaeologists may have found ruins of fabled entrance to Zapotec underworld

Jennifer Ouellette
Ars Technica
Thu, 06 Jul 2023 18:01 UTC

Spanish missionaries deemed Lyobaa to be a "back door to hell" and sealed all entrances.

© Marco M. Vigato/ARX Project
Seismic tomography scan of the Church Group at the frequency of 4.76 Hz, revealing areas of low velocity (in blue) that could indicate the presence of underground chambers or natural cavities.

In 1674, a priest named Francisco de Burgoa published his account of visiting the ruins of the Zapotec city of Mitla in what is now Oaxaca in southern Mexico. He described a vast underground temple with four interconnected chambers, the last of which featured a stone door leading into a deep cavern. The Zapotec believed this to be the entrance to the underworld known as Lyobaa ("place of rest"). Burgoa claimed that Spanish missionaries who explored the ruins sealed all entrances to the temple, and local lore has long held that the entrance lies under the main altar of a Catholic church built over the ruins.

An international team of archaeologists recently announced that they found evidence for this fabled underground labyrinth under the ruins — right where the legends said it should be — after conducting scans of the site using ground penetrating radar (GPR), electrical resistivity tomography (ERT), and seismic noise tomography (SNT). The team also found evidence of an earlier construction stage of a palace located in another part of the site.

Mitla is one of the most significant archaeological sites in Oaxaca Valley. It was an important religious center, serving as a sacred burial site — hence its name, which derives from Mictlan ("place of the dead" or "underworld"). The unique structures at Mitla feature impressively intricate mosaics and geometric designs on all the tombs, panels, friezes, and walls, made with small polished stone pieces fitted together without using mortar.

Leaked documents reveal Reuters helped overthrow Egyptian democracy

Kit Klarenberg
The Grayzone
Wed, 05 Jul 2023 00:00 UTC

Reuters served as a channel for the UK Foreign Office to covertly fund an Egyptian outlet that clamored for the overthrow of the country's first democratically elected leader, leaked documents show.

This July 3 marks the 10th anniversary of Egyptian army chief General Abdel Fattah Sisi's violent seizure of power in Cairo. The first democratically elected leader in 5000 years of Egyptian history, Mohamed Morsi, was swept from office, his supporters were massacred by the hundreds, and he ultimately died in prison. With US and UK support, Sisi quickly reversed any tentative democratic gains made during the country's brief, difficult transition from the rule of longtime Western-backed autocrat Hosni Mubarak.

In the decade since Sisi's coup, his government has systematically crushed opposition to his rule. Political parties and critical media have been banned en masse, activists, journalists, and civil society actors harassed, disappeared, tortured and jailed, and prisons transformed into hotbeds of systemic sexual violence, and other horrific abuse. It is estimated that half of Egypt's 120,00 inmate population are currently incarcerated for political reasons, one of the highest rates in the world.

The circumstances of Morsi's forced ejection from office, and of Egypt's regression to one of the most repressive countries on Earth under Sisi's rule, have been well-documented, despite many NGOs and news outlets fleeing the country over the years. Yet, there is a crucial component of the historical record that has not been revealed until now.

Leaked documents reviewed by The Grayzone reveal that the media giant Reuters worked closely with the British Foreign Office to drive the fateful events of July 3, 2013. What follows is the story of how Cairo's first democratically elected government in history was undermined, Sisi's blood-spattered coup whitewashed, and the military entrenched in power, through covert propaganda funded in secret by London.

Discovery of up to 25 Mesolithic pits in Bedfordshire astounds archaeologists

Dalya Alberge
The Guardian
Mon, 03 Jul 2023 09:00 UTC

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:

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

Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres
Phys.org
Tue, 04 Jul 2023 10:05 UTC

© 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:

An archaeology of Nineteenth Century American expansion

Joseph Solis-Mullen
The Libertarian Institute
Thu, 29 Jun 2023 23:11 UTC

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.

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

Tom Metcalfe
Live Science
Sat, 01 Jul 2023 14:14 UTC

© Hemer et al/Journal of Archaeological Science: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
The 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:

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

Matthew Ehret
The Last American Vagabond
Sat, 10 Jun 2023 00:00 UTC

"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.

“I don't have too much respect for people that are misbehaving in public and then acting as if they know what's right for kids," Cardona said...

VooDoo6

Who supports Biden on this stuff?

Ethan

3000 year old - Danish area - woman's outfit. [Link]

bbrebozo

And they're also smart enough to never wear a mask...

DeliciousTears

I hope Biden dies soon. I will have a good bottle of rum when that happens.

Fool on the Hill

Secret History

Giant, 300,000 year-old handaxes found at rare Ice Age site in Kent, UK

26,000-foot Himalayan mountain summit crumbled around 1190 CE, leaving evidence in the plains below

Genetic analysis reveals a woman dubbed 'Ivory Lady' as the highest-ranking individual in Copper Age Spain

Archaeologists may have found ruins of fabled entrance to Zapotec underworld

Leaked documents reveal Reuters helped overthrow Egyptian democracy

Discovery of up to 25 Mesolithic pits in Bedfordshire astounds archaeologists

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

An archaeology of Nineteenth Century American expansion

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

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

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