Secret HistoryS


Light Sabers

Viktor Medvedchuk: Total Western support for Zelensky tells us that the US and NATO don't want peace in Ukraine

Medvedchuk
© Serhii Nuzhnenko/ReutersVictor Medvedchuk exiled Ukrainian opposition leader
Listening to many Western politicians, it seems completely impossible to understand the essence of the current conflict in Ukraine, and the mechanisms which led us here.

Take US President Biden: He denies that American troops are directly involved in the conflict but at the same time he consistently emphasizes his country's multi-billion dollar weapons supplies. If such huge sums are diverted for military purposes in Ukraine, it should mean that Ukrainian interests are extremely important for the US.

However, there is no desire for the US army to fight there. Thus, Kiev's concerns are probably not so vital, after all. And do these weapon supplies, worth billions of dollars, amount to donations? A profitable business? Investments? Or are they for political purposes?

There are no clear answers.

Take the most recent revelations, from former German Chancellor Merkel, that the Minsk Agreements were just an attempt to give Kiev time to re-group. This revelation means that no one was ever going to establish peace in Ukraine. Which means, of course, that Russia was deceived.

But why? For the west to protect Ukraine or to to take it for themselves? And why did they need this deception if they could simply implement what was recommended by Germany? Or did Berlin deliberately suggest something that could never have been implemented? We could go as far as asking if political swindlers ought be held to account but it seems much more relevant today to start clearing the smoke from around the current situation.

What were the root causes? And how can we get out of a situation that is becoming ever more dangerous? Well, let us begin this analysis with the ultimate origins of the crisis.

Colosseum

First cousin marriages frequent in Minoan Crete, ancient DNA analysis reveals

Minoan
© Eva SkourtaniotiThe well-known figure of a Minoan goddess, artistically appropriated and depicted holding DNA chains instead of snakes. The population is born from her "ancient" body. The orange and red genealogy refers to the research finding of endogamy between first and second cousins.
An international team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, reports completely new insights into Bronze Age marriage rules and family structures in Greece. Analyses of ancient genomes show that the choice of marriage partners was determined by one's own kinship.

When Heinrich Schliemann discovered the gold-rich shaft tombs of Mycenae with their famous gold masks more than 100 years ago, he could only speculate about the relationship of the people buried in them. Now, with the help of the analysis of ancient genomes, it has been possible for the first time to gain insights into kinship and marriage rules in Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece. The results were published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Comment: As noted above, perhaps the reason for this practice is partly due to the culture and society specific to the region? Mycenaean necropolis of Trapeza reveals hierarchical society and ancestor worship

See also:


Blue Planet

5,000 year-old mass grave of decapitated skeletons found in Slovakia

mass grave
© Archaeology/Kiel UniversityProf. Dr. Martin Furholt
Archaeologists find prehistoric mass grave with headless skeletons Share Archaeologists have found a mass grave site in Vráble, Slovakia, containing 38 burials who were decapitated.

Excavations were conducted by a team from the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) at Kiel University (CAU), and the Archaeological Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, which have been conducting research on the site of Vráble-Ve'lke Lehemby, one the largest Early Neolithic settlements in Central Europe.

Vráble-Ve'lke Lehemby was occupied between 5,250 to 4,950 BC, comprising of 313 houses in three neighbouring villages. The south-western of the three settlements was surrounded by a 1.3 km-long double ditch that likely served as boundary marker rather than serving any defensive purpose.

Comment: See also: The Seven Destructive Earth Passes of Comet Venus


Blue Planet

Ceramic production came to Europe through Siberia, study of ancient pottery reveals

Caspian Sea
© ShutterstockCaspian Sea
A new study suggests that the knowledge for producing ceramic vessels arrived in Europe not only from the Middle East, but also from the Far East through Siberia and the Caspian Sea region.

Examples of pottery figurines, such as the Gravettian culture Venus of Dolní Věstonice figurine, discovered in the Czech Republic, date to around 29,000-25,000 BC, however, the earliest examples of pottery vessels come from China around 20,000 to 19,000-years-ago.

The prevailing view among scientists was that the knowledge for producing ceramic vessels arrived in Europe, with the advent of agriculture from the Far East via the Middle East.

Comment: See also: Also check out SOTT radio's:


Piggy Bank

Things we should understand: The aristocracy is eating the peasants

Bailout
© openeuropeblog.blogspot.comThe Bailout
Most people (especially most Americans) still seem to view the events of the past half-century as more or less random. Booms and busts erupting out of nowhere, impoverishing all but a handful of lucky elites. Political crises that end up dividing rather than uniting. Wars that cost fortunes and resolve nothing. Everything is bad, and nothing is related to anything else.

But of course that's not true. Each of the above events serves the same purpose: to enrich a modern aristocracy at the expense of everyone else. And the endgame is looking even worse.

To see the scam play out, let's go back to 1995. Two decades previously, in 1971, the US and by extension the world had ditched sound, gold-backed money in favor of "fiat" currencies that their governments, via their central banks, could create in infinite quantities out of thin air. The result was spiking inflation and exchange rate chaos in the 1970s and soaring government deficits in the 1980s.

Eye 2

Flashback Confession of a CIA agent: They gave us millions to dismember Yugoslavia

Robert Baer  CIA officer Yugoslavia
Robert Baer, ​​a former CIA officer: "My boss, who was formerly a US Senator, stressed repeatedly that some kind of scam would go down in Bosnia. A month before the alleged genocide in Srebrenica, he told me that the town would be headline news around the world and ordered us to call the media."
WebTribune publishes their interview with former CIA agent Robert Baer during his promotion tour in Quebec for upcoming book Secrets of the White House last week.

Robert Baer, ​​a former CIA officer, has authored many books which disclosed the secrets of both the CIA and the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. He has been arrested and detained several times. Mitt Waspurh, a personal friend who worked at the Senate and shared information was killed at gunpoint. As a senior CIA operative, Baer worked in Yugoslavia during the 1991-94 period and in the Middle East. He has worked on several documentaries on National Geographic, accusing the Bush administration of waging war for oil.

The interview was conducted live in Canada, during my trip a few days ago. Robert Baer is currently promoting his book The Secrets of the White House in Quebec, where we talked. In an interview we spoke of the background of the war in Yugoslavia.

Comment: Robert Baer is still at it:

CIA man's 'tell-all' book reveals more about internal agency incompetence than Russian malfeasance


Attention

Flashback British empire killed 165 million Indians in 40 years: How colonialism inspired fascism

A scholarly study found that British colonialism caused approximately 165 million deaths in India from 1880 to 1920, while stealing trillions of dollars of wealth. The global capitalist system was founded on European imperial genocides, which inspired Adolf Hitler and led to fascism.

Churchill and India
© Geopolitical Economy
British colonialism caused at least 100 million deaths in India in roughly 40 years, according to an academic study.

And during nearly 200 years of colonialism, the British empire stole at least $45 trillion in wealth from India, a prominent economist has calculated.

The genocidal crimes committed by European empires outside of their borders inspired Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, leading to the rise of fascist regimes that carried out similar genocidal crimes within their borders.

Economic anthropologist Jason Hickel and his co-author Dylan Sullivan published an article in the respected academic journal World Development titled "Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century."

In the report, the scholars estimated that India suffered 165 million excess deaths due to British colonialism between 1880 and 1920.

"This figure is larger than the combined number of deaths from both World Wars, including the Nazi holocaust," they noted.

They added, "Indian life expectancy did not reach the level of early modern England (35.8 years) until 1950, after decolonization."

Info

Lasers reveal massive, 650-square-mile Maya site hidden beneath Guatemalan rainforest

While conducting an aerial survey of northern Guatemala, researchers detected a sprawling Maya site.

Lidar Scan
© Ancient MesoamericaA complex of Maya pyramids in Guatemala as seen via lidar.
Geologists in northern Guatemala have discovered a massive Maya site that stretches approximately 650 square miles (1,700 square kilometers) and dates to the Middle and Late Preclassic period (roughly 1000 B.C. to 250 B.C.).

The findings were the result of an aerial survey that researchers conducted via airplane using lidar (light detection and ranging), in which lasers are beamed out and the reflected light is used to create aerial imagery of a landscape. The technology is particularly beneficial in areas such as the rainforests of Guatemala's Mirador-Calakmul Karst Basin, where lasers can penetrate the thick tree canopy.

Using data from the scans, the team identified more than 1,000 settlements dotting the region, which were interconnected by 100 miles (160 kilometers) of causeways that the Maya likely traversed on foot. They also detected the remains of several large platforms and pyramids, along with canals and reservoirs used for water collection, according to the study, which was published Dec. 5 in the journal Ancient Mesoamerica.

The lidar data showed "for the first time an area that was integrated politically and economically, and never seen before in other places in the Western Hemisphere," study co-author Carlos Morales-Aguilar, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin, told Live Science in an email. "We can now see the entire landscape of the Maya region" in this section of Guatemala, he said.

Info

Prehistoric population once lived in Siberia, but mysteriously vanished, genetic study finds

A genetic study has revealed the existence of a previously unknown hunter-gatherer group that lived in Siberia upwards of 10,000 years ago.

Ancient Skull
© Sergey V SemenovA skull from one of the individuals analyzed in the new study, which revealed the existence of a previously unknown group of hunter-gatherers living in Siberia more than 10,000 years ago.
Researchers investigating prehistoric DNA have discovered a mysterious group of hunter-gatherers that lived in Siberia perhaps more than 10,000 years ago.

The find was made during a genetic investigation of human remains in North Asia dating from as far back as 7,500 years ago. The study also revealed that gene flow of human DNA not only traveled from Asia to the Americas — as was previously known — but also in the opposite direction, meaning people were moving back and forth like ping pong balls along the Bering Land Bridge.

Furthermore, the team examined the remains of an ancient shaman who lived about 6,500 years ago in western Siberia. This spot is more than 900 miles (1,500 kilometers) west of the group that he had genetic ties with, according to the new genetic analysis.

North Asia, particularly the area stretching from western to northeastern Siberia, was pivotal in humanity's trek across the globe. Previous work has shown that the first people to arrive in the Americas, since at least 13,000 years ago, likely came either across or along the coast of the land bridge that once connected North Asia with North America. This corridor, known as Beringia, is now flooded by the Bering Strait.

Info

Ancient Latin texts written on papyrus reveal new information about the Roman world

Ancient Latin
© Arkeonews NetCarbonized paper, found with other images in an 1858 published book by Giacomo Castrucci.
Researchers funded by the European Union have deciphered ancient Latin texts written on papyrus. This work could reveal a lot about Roman society and education, as well as how Latin's influence spread.

Although the number of Latin texts found on papyrus dating from the first century BCE to the eighth century CE has grown as a result of new archaeological discoveries, these texts are frequently not given the attention they require. Therefore, they represent a vast untapped source of information and insight into the development of ancient Roman literature, language, history, and society.

Latin texts on papyrus in particular could provide information about the period's literary and linguistic emigration. This might also reveal more about the educational environment, and paint a clearer picture of the Roman economy and society.