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How compassionate capitalism flourished in medieval Cambridge

Donna Ferguson
The Guardian
Sat, 02 May 2020 15:35 UTC
Chapel
© East Anglia Images/Alamy
Cambridge's rich families helped to fund places like the city's Leper Chapel, which still stands off Newmarket Road.
It is the most unequal city in the land - a place of college spires and glamorous May balls, where homelessness and food poverty are rife and the lowest-paid workers cannot afford their rent.

Now newly discovered historical documents reveal that Cambridge has also achieved a more egalitarian economic feat: as the birthplace of compassionate capitalism in the UK.

A fascinating manuscript about the property dealings of Cambridge's wealthiest medieval families shows that they consistently gave their profits and assets away to improve the welfare of their local community. The find has provided the earliest evidence of this kind of systematic philanthropy ever uncovered in Britain.

Comment: This was also around the time of the great cathedral builders in France so perhaps much of this generosity wasn't a cynical attempt to 'buy a ticket into heaven' but was instead a sincere act of faith: Also check out SOTT radio's:

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Colosseum

Brochs: Scotland's enigmatic Iron Age circular stone structures

Theresa Machemer
Smithsonian Mag
Tue, 28 Apr 2020 12:00 UTC
Mousa Broch
© Arterra / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
A tourist visits Mousa Broch, the tallest known Iron Age broch and one of Europe's best-preserved prehistoric buildings
In 2013, archaeologist Kenneth McElroy and builder Iain Maclean co-founded the Caithness Broch Project in hopes of reviving an Iron Age architectural style unique to Scotland.

In the years since, the charity, which derives its name from the circular stone towers at the heart of its mission, has prioritized the preservation of existing brochs across the region. But as Libby Brooks reports for the Guardian, the organization was just weeks away from launching its "flagship experiment" — using authentic Iron Age building techniques to construct a modern replica of the formidable structure — when Great Britain went on lockdown due to COVID-19. For now, at least, it appears the rebirth of Scotland's brochs will have to wait.

Brochs are unique to northern and western Scotland, with the majority found in Caithness county, according to the Scotsman. A replica tower could help archaeologists understand how Iron Age masons created the structures without using mortar to hold the stones together.

Comment: Could they have had a similar function as Ireland's round towers? Or Bologna's towers? The following 30 minute documentary has some good footage of the Brochs:



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People 2

Hunter-gatherer skeleton damage hints that some women may have fought in battles

Bruce Bower
Science News
Mon, 27 Apr 2020 09:00 UTC
Mongolia skeleton
© C. Lee
Skeletons of two people buried in an ancient tomb in Mongolia include a woman (left) who may have been a horse-riding, bow-and-arrow-wielding warrior, scientists say.
Women's reputation as nurturing homebodies who left warfare to men in long-ago societies is under attack. Skeletal evidence from hunter-gatherers in what's now California and from herders in Mongolia suggests that women warriors once existed in those populations.

Two research teams had planned to present these findings April 17 at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. That meeting was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic. The results have been provided to Science News by the scientists.

Sexual divisions of labor characterized ancient societies, but were not as rigidly enforced as has often been assumed, the new studies suggest. "The traditional view [in anthropology] of 'man the hunter and woman the gatherer' is likely flawed and overly simplistic," says forensic anthropologist Marin Pilloud of the University of Nevada, Reno.

Comment: In the evidence provided above, and generally throughout known history, most gender based roles seem to be relatively similar and stable throughout the world and its cultures. There do seem to be exceptions but they're exceptions, outliers to the norm. However, it's also worth noting that there is at least one role in history that we know of that seems to have changed from one gender to the other more significantly, and that's the role of shaman. This was a role more traditionally occupied by women which then, at some period, and throughout many cultures, shifted, towards being a position occupied mainly by men:

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Apple Red

10 apple varieties, thought long gone, have been found in abandoned pioneer-era orchards across Pacific Northwest


TIME
Wed, 15 Apr 2020 02:37 UTC
lost apple species
© Gillian Flaccus/AP
In this Oct. 23, 2019, photo, apples collected by the Lost Apple Project rest on the ground in an orchard at an abandoned homestead near Genesee, Idaho.
A team of retirees that scours the remote ravines and windswept plains of the Pacific Northwest for long-forgotten pioneer orchards has rediscovered 10 apple varieties that were believed to be extinct — the largest number ever unearthed in a single season by the nonprofit Lost Apple Project.

The Vietnam veteran and former FBI agent who make up the nonprofit recently learned of their tally from last fall's apple sleuthing from expert botanists at the Temperate Orchard Conservancy in Oregon, where all the apples are sent for study and identification. The apples positively identified as previously "lost" were among hundreds of fruits collected in October and November from 140-year-old orchards tucked into small canyons or hidden in forests that have since grown up around them in rural Idaho and Washington state.

"It was just one heck of a season. It was almost unbelievable. If we had found one apple or two apples a year in the past, we thought were were doing good. But we were getting one after another after another," said EJ Brandt, who hunts for the apples along with fellow amateur botanist David Benscoter. "I don't know how we're going to keep up with that."
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Magnify

Skull shaping immigrants integrated into Hungarian village as Roman Empire fell

Michelle Starr
Science Alert
Wed, 29 Apr 2020 19:03 UTC
cranial modification
© (Knipper et al., PLOS One, 2020)
As the Roman Empire drew to a dramatic collapse towards the end of the 5th century, ripples were felt across its former territories. Balances shifted as new powers rushed to fill the vacuums Rome's retreats left behind.

The changes to the everyday lives of the people are far less well documented, but a cemetery in Pannonia Valeria - in what is now Hungary - is shedding light on the cultural upheaval. And it seems that the founders of that community welcomed newcomers - and even adopted their customs, including modifying the shape of their skulls.

During this time, "the population decreased and the settlement structure changed drastically. Communities fled to the western provinces with the promise of safety, while others sought refuge in forts and cities looking for protection," the researchers wrote in their paper.

Comment: See also:

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MindMatters: The Holy Grail, Comets, Earth Changes and Randall Carlson

Harrison Koehli, Corey Schink, Elan Martin
Sott.net
Wed, 29 Apr 2020 00:00 UTC
holy grail
Is the legend of the Holy Grail a warning about earth changes told in story form? Randall Carlson argues that it is - and now is the time to have this secret revealed.

We're all familiar with the story of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, the legend of the Holy Grail - and the famous symbology that these narratives contain. Dozens of stories over many centuries have expanded on these ideas, and much has been written in academia about what meaning could be derived from them - their literary and cultural origins, their psycho-spiritual meaning. But one angle - perhaps the most important - has remained neglected.

This week on MindMatters we have a look at Randall Carlson's take on all these themes as they relate to cyclical catastrophism, esoteric cosmology and spiritual growth - in his series of articles on the symbolism of the Grail. Is it possible that all these long-lasting tales contained some essential truths about our reality? Were they designed to hold historical facts to be communicated in popular form, as in Gurdjieff's concept of a 'legominism'? And lastly, do they contain veiled warnings to those who would read them far into the future - as in right now? Join us as we discuss Carlson's series of articles on the topic, and more.


Running Time: 00:59:40

Download: MP3 — 54.6 MB

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Bad Guys

America's real historical enemy is not Russia, but England

Eric Zuesse
The Saker
Tue, 28 Apr 2020 16:55 UTC
Russia US civil war ally North Lincoln
© Harpers Weekly/Archive image
Russian battleships in New York to prevent attacks by Southern raiders supported by Great Britain, in Oct. 1863.
Historically, Russia has been perhaps America's main Ally; England remains America's top enemy, just as during the American Revolution

America's sole enemy during the Revolutionary War (1775-1783) was England. Ever since being defeated in that war, England (controlled by the British aristocracy) has tried various ways to regain its control over America. The British aristocracy's latest attempt to regain control over America started in 1877, and continues today, as the two countries' "Deep State" — comprising not only the lying CIA and the lying MI6, but the entire joint operation of the united aristocracies of Britain and the U.S. These two aristocracies actually constitute the Deep State, and control the top levels of both intelligence agencies, and of both Governments, and prevent democracy in both countries. The aristocracy rules each of them. The 1877 plan was for a unification of the two aristocracies, and for the then-rising new world power, American industry, and its Government, to become controlled by the wealthiest individuals in both countries. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had tried to break the back of that intended global-imperialist combine, but he tragically died before he achieved this goal.
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Recycle

Pompeii's recycling centres

Dalya Alberge
The Guardian
Sun, 26 Apr 2020 10:00 UTC
Pompeii painting market
© DEA/G Dagli Orti/De Agostini via Getty
A reproduction of the market square, from The Houses and Monuments of Pompeii, by Fausto and Felice Niccolini, 1854-96.
They were expert engineers, way ahead of the curve on underfloor heating, aqueducts and the use of concrete as a building material. Now it turns out that the Romans were also masters at recycling their rubbish.

Researchers at Pompeii, the city buried under a thick carpet of volcanic ash when Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, have found that huge mounds of refuse apparently dumped outside the city walls were in fact "staging grounds for cycles of use and reuse".

Professor Allison Emmerson, an American academic who is part of a large team working at Pompeii, said rubbish was piled up along almost the entire external wall on the city's northern side, among other sites. Some of the mounds were several metres high and included bits of ceramic and plaster, which could be repurposed as construction materials.

Comment: See also:

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Info

100 million years ago, the Sahara was the most dangerous place


University of Portsmouth
Fri, 24 Apr 2020 19:33 UTC
Kem Kem group animals
© UNIVERSITY OF PORTSMOUTH
Artist's illustration of Kem Kem group animals.
100 million years ago, ferocious predators, including flying reptiles and crocodile-like hunters, made the Sahara the most dangerous place on Earth.

This is according to an international team of scientists, who have published the biggest review in almost 100 years of fossil vertebrates from an area of Cretaceous rock formations in south-eastern Morocco, known as the Kem Kem Group.

The review, published in the journal ZooKeys, "provides a window into Africa's Age of Dinosaurs" according to lead author Dr Nizar Ibrahim, an Assistant Professor of Biology at the University of Detroit Mercy and Visiting Researcher from the University of Portsmouth.
This was arguably the most dangerous place in the history of planet Earth, a place where a human time-traveller would not last very long.

Dr Nizar Ibrahim, Visiting Researcher
About 100 million years ago, the area was home to a vast river system, filled with many different species of aquatic and terrestrial animals. Fossils from the Kem Kem Group include three of the largest predatory dinosaurs ever known, including the sabre-toothed Carcharodontosaurus (over 8m in length with enormous jaws and long, serrated teeth up to eight inches long) and Deltadromeus (around 8m in length, a member of the raptor family with long, unusually slender hind limbs for its size), as well as several predatory flying reptiles (pterosaurs) and crocodile-like hunters. Dr Ibrahim said: "This was arguably the most dangerous place in the history of planet Earth, a place where a human time-traveller would not last very long."
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Info

Hidden geometric pattern found at Göbekli Tepe

Ariel David
Haaretz
Sun, 26 Apr 2020 14:51 UTC
Gobekli Tepe Carvings
© DICK OSSEMAN
Cryptic carvings at Gobekli Tepe, 'world's oldest temple'.
The enigmatic monoliths built some 11,500 years ago at Göbekli Tepe have been puzzling archaeologists and challenging preconceptions about prehistoric culture since their discovery in the 1990s. Chiefly, how could hunter-gatherers with a supposedly primitive societal structure build such monumental stone circles on this barren hilltop in what is today southeastern Turkey? How could a largely nomadic society at the dawn of agriculture marshal the resources and know-how to create what its discoverers have dubbed the oldest known temple in the world?

If anything, a discovery by Israeli archaeologists suggests the Göbekli Tepe construction project was even more complex than previously thought, and required an amount of planning and resources thought to be impossible for those times. Their study of the three oldest stone enclosures at Göbekli Tepe has revealed a hidden geometric pattern, specifically an equilateral triangle, underlying the entire architectural plan of these structures.

This implies that, in contrast to the prevailing assumption among Göbekli researchers until now, these three circles were planned as a single unit and possibly built at the same time, say archaeologists Gil Haklay and Avi Gopher of Tel Aviv University.

Thus, thousands of years before the invention of writing or the wheel, the builders of Göbekli Tepe evidently had some understanding of geometric principles and could apply them to their construction plans, concludes the study published in January in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal.
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