Secret HistoryS


Binoculars

Skeleton discovered in Alexander the Great-era tomb in Amphipolis may belong to Hephaestion

Alexander the Great-era tomb in Amphipolis
Alexander the Great-era tomb in Amphipolis
A skeleton has emerged from the Alexander the Great-era tomb in Amphipolis in northern Greece, according to a news announcement by the Greek Ministry of Culture on Wednesday.

At least one archaeologist has suggested that the remains, if male, could belong to Hephaestion, a close friend and possible lover of Alexander the Great -- or someone like him.

Archaeologists led by Katerina Peristeri found the human remains in a box-shaped grave. The 10.6 by 5.1-foot limestone burial was found at about 5.3 feet beneath the floor of the third chamber in the massive tomb site.

Within the limestone grave, the archaeologists unearthed the remains of a wooden coffin, along with iron and copper nails, bone and glass fragments - most likely decorative elements of the coffin.

Question

Study claims drought, overpopulation contributed to collapse of Assyrian Empire

map assyrian empire
The Assyrian Empire once dominated the ancient Near East. At the start of the 7th century BC, it was a mighty military machine and the largest empire the Old World had yet seen.


But then, before the century was out, it had collapsed. Why? An international study now offers two new factors as possible contributors to the empire's sudden demise - overpopulation and drought.

Adam Schneider of the University of California, San Diego and Selim Adalı of Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey, have just published evidence for their novel claim.

"As far as we know, ours is the first study to put forward the hypothesis that climate change - specifically drought - helped to destroy the Assyrian Empire," said Schneider, doctoral candidate in anthropology at UC San Diego and first author on the paper in the Springer journal Climatic Change.

Books

Natives: Lies history books tell

Image
© everydayfeminism.com
Do history books written by white folks tell the truth about Natives? We think not. Here are just some of the lies they tell.

Columbus NEVER landed in the Upper 48 - Ever

Every year across the country countless elementary school students recite: "In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue" and many perform a play about him discovering Indians in America. The thing is Columbus never landed in what would become the United States, he actually landed in the Caribbean.

Comment: A history lesson indeed! Make sure the history you are spoon fed, like the celebration of Thanksgiving, is accurate!"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" - George Santayana.

An excellent book on the lies American's are spoon fed in standard education:

Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong - by James W. Loewen
High school students hate history. When they list their favorite subjects, history always comes in last. They consider it the most irrelevant of twenty-one school subjects; bo-o-o-oring is the adjective most often applied.

James Loewen spent two years at the Smithsonian Institute surveying twelve leading high school textbooks of American History. What he found was an embarrassing amalgam of bland optimism, blind patriotism, and misinformation pure and simple, weighing in at an average of four-and-a-half pounds and 888 pages.

In response, he has written Lies My Teacher Told Me, in part a telling critique of existing books but, more importantly, a wonderful retelling of American history as it should - and could - be taught to American students. Beginning with pre-Columbian American history and ranging over characters and events as diverse as Reconstruction, Helen Keller, the first Thanksgiving, and the My Lai massacre, Loewen supplies the conflict, suspense, unresolved drama, and connection with current-day issues so appallingly missing from textbook accounts.
The audio book is available here


Sherlock

Alaska's Tanana River archaeological site yields remains of Ice Age infants

Ice age infants
© Ben Potter Stone projectile points and associated decorated antler foreshafts from the burial pit at the Upward Sun River site. The remains of two Ice Age infants, buried more than 11,000 years ago at a site in Alaska, represent the youngest human remains ever found in northern North America, according to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
An archaeology team has discovered the ancient burial site of a pair of infants near the Tanana River, a find that researchers say offers a new glimpse into life in Interior Alaska during the Ice Age.

The remains date back about 11,500 years and represent the youngest human remains ever found in northern North America. The site also gives insight into ancient burial practices, including grave offerings that included decorated stone weapons.

The discovery occurred in 2013 but is detailed for the first time by University of Alaska Fairbanks researcher Ben Potter in a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Potter's team led the dig at a site known as the Upward Sun River, located near the Tanana River southeast of Fairbanks.

Archaeologists have explored a large sand dune in the area for nearly a decade and previously found the partly cremated remains of a 3-year-old child at the site in 2010. That discovery established a new milestone as the oldest human remains ever found in Alaska.

Clipboard

Letter written by J. Edgar Hoover to Martin Luther King discovered: Reveals psychopathic nature of 7-decades-long FBI boss

Image

Beverly Gage is a Yale University professor who finds ways to tell us about our present by looking at the past. She is married to a friend of mine, Dan Perkins, who is better known as the cartoonist Tom Tomorrow.

In her first book, Gage re-examined a somewhat forgotten episode of New York history - a 1920 bombing of Wall Street that had eery echoes for the terrorist attacks that hit the city 81 years later.

Now, she's working on a book about J. Edgar Hoover, and as she was poring over documents at the National Archives about the former FBI Director, she ran across something of an American history Holy Grail.

It was an uncensored copy of a letter that was sent to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in November 1964, just as he was about to become the youngest ever recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

In her piece about the letter in the New York Times Magazine this morning, Gage explains that since 1961, King had been on a collision course with Hoover, who had started out investigating a former member of the Communist Party in King's inner circle, which led to an investigation of King himself. King, meanwhile, denounced the FBI's practices in the South, "accusing Hoover of failing to enforce civil rights law and of indulging the racist practices of Southern policemen."

Comment: Wow, what a hate-filled psychopathic rant. What the FBI was hoping to accomplish with this is anyone's guess but it obviously didn't work. Note how Hoover's description of King was precise in only one respect: it perfectly described HIS OWN inner landscape.

Think about that: a PSYCHOPATH ran the FBI for 7 decades.


Magnify

Unique Roman relief discovered: Depiction of unknown god in Turkey

Image
© Forschungsstelle Asia MinorBasalt stele with the depiction of an unknown god.
Münster archaeologists excavated a unique Roman relief depicting an unknown god in an ancient sanctuary in Turkey.

According to a first assessment, the one and a half metre (five feet) high basalt stele which was used as a buttress in the wall of a monastery shows a fertility or vegetation god, as classical scholar and excavation director Prof. Dr. Engelbert Winter and archaeologist Dr. Michael Blömer of the Cluster of Excellence "Religion and Politics" said after their return from the sacred site of the god Jupiter Dolichenus close to the ancient city of Doliche in Southeast Turkey. "The image is remarkably well preserved. It provides valuable insights into the beliefs of the Romans and into the continued existence of ancient Near Eastern traditions. However, extensive research is necessary before we will be able to accurately identify the deity."

In the field season 2014, the 60-strong excavation team uncovered finds from all periods of the 2,000-year history of the cult site, such as the thick enclosing wall of the first Iron Age sanctuary or the foundations of the main Roman temple of the god Jupiter Dolichenus, who became one of the most important deities of the Roman Empire in the 2nd century A.D. His sanctuary is situated close to the town of Gaziantep on the 1,200 metres (3,900 feet) high mountain of Dülük Baba Tepesi. The archaeologists found the stele in the remains of the Christian monastery, which was erected on the site of the ancient sanctuary in the Early Middle Ages.

Magnify

Archaeologists unearth 5,000-year-old footprints in Denmark

Image
© Lolland-Falster MuseumThe Stone Age impressions were remarkably well preserved
The discovery was made during the excavation of the Femern Bælt tunnel

Archaeologists working on the excavations for the Femern Bælt Tunnel have discovered several well-preserved footprints dating back to the Stone Age.

The prints were left by fishermen looking to safeguard their weirs (river barriers used for fishing) in a storm 5,000 years ago, announced Lolland-Falster Museum.

"It is quite surreal to have found human footprints," said archaeologist Terje Stafseth in a press release.

"We normally find historical clues in the form of human waste, but here we have found an entirely different clue and a first in Danish archaeology: a physical print left behind by a human."

Bomb

Different era, same mental instability: 'Best Brit Ever' Winston Churchill wanted to wipe Moscow off the map with atomic bomb, FBI memo reveals

Image
© RIA NovostiThe Yalta (Crimea) Conference of Allied leaders (February 4-11, 1945). First row, sitting: British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and U.S.S.R. Marshal Josef Stalin before a meeting.
A secret memo from the FBI's archives has revealed that Britain's Winston Churchill once urged the US to drop an atomic bomb to "wipe out" the Kremlin. He reportedly thought it was the only remedy against the spread of communism to the west.

Churchill, Britain's prime minister during World War II and again during the Cold War 1950s, made his views known to a visiting American politician in 1947, The Daily Mail reported in a preview of a new book, When Lions Roar: The Churchills and The Kennedys by investigative journalist Thomas Maier. The book containing the secret FBI memo is to be published next month.

Britain and the Soviet Union had been allies during WW2. However, according to the memo written by an FBI agent, Churchill asked a Right-wing Republican senator, Styles Bridges, to help persuade then-President Harry Truman to launch a nuclear attack which would make the former USSR easy to deal with.

The FBI memo claims Churchill insisted that the "only salvation for the civilization of the world would be if the President of the United States would declare Russia to be imperiling world peace and attack Russia."

Comment: How little our so called leaders value human life that the consideration of "wiping out" millions of people could be considered an easy solution. The pursuit of maintaining and spreading Western civilization is no more than upholding a dominant psychopathic reality that has kept humanity from true progress.


Magnify

Giant armored dinosaurs breathed through "Krazy Straw" airways

Image
© Leonello Calvetti / ShutterstockArmored ankylosaurs
Carrying around an exoskeleton of bony armor is hard work. But armored ankylosaurs figured out a way to shoulder the load and stay cool. These Cretaceous dinosaurs had "Krazy Straw" nasal passages that helped them air-condition their brains, according to a new study.

"These heads are just covered with bone - they just look like rocks with eyes. And yet, when you look inside, they have these noses that go all over the place," said Jason Bourke, a doctoral student at Ohio University who is presenting his findings on ankylosaurus noses today (Nov. 8) at the annual meeting of the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology in Berlin.

Bourke and his colleagues were intrigued by the "roller-coaster" paths taken by the nasal passages of tank-like ankylosaurs, which become well-preserved fossils because they are so bizarrely bony. The convoluted airways are flanked by small tunnels where blood vessels would have run, suggesting that the setup may have had to do with heat exchange, Bourke told Live Science.

Ankylosaurs and other large dinosaurs had small brains, which were at risk of overheating easily, Bourke said. If cool air from the nose could cool the blood in the head, it might help prevent the brain from sweltering, he added.

Magnify

Roman pond discovered in England

Image
© West Sussex County CouncilThe pond, ditches and Roman artefacts date back to about AD100
An ancient pond and Roman artefacts have been discovered in a West Sussex village by archaeologists.

The objects, dating back to AD100 show there was a Roman settlement in the village of Barnham, West Sussex County Council says.

Over the last six weeks, Roman pottery, ancient rubbish pits and ditches have been found at the site.

It is thought the settlement may have started in the late Iron Age before the Roman conquest in AD43.

The excavation work has been carried out as a condition of planning permission for the development of the county council's land at the former Angels and Hyde Nursery.