A new interpretation of the survey behind Domesday Book — the record of conquered England compiled on the orders of William the Conqueror in 1086 — has emerged from a major new study of the survey's earliest surviving manuscript.

Research published in the English Historical Review shows historians now believe Domesday was more efficient, complex, and sophisticated than previously thought. The survey's first draft, which covered England south of the River Tees, was made with astonishing speed — within 100 days.

It was then checked and reorganised in three further stages, resulting in the production of new documents, each carefully designed for specific fiscal and political purposes. The iconic Domesday Book was simply one of several outputs from the process.

Scientists have uncovered a pig painting in an Indonesian cave that dates back more than 45,000 years, representing perhaps the world's oldest surviving animal depiction and the most ancient known figurative artwork.

The cave painting may also provide the earliest evidence for anatomically modern humans on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, supporting the view that the first populations to settle the Wallacea islands created artistic depictions of animals and narrative scenes as part of their culture.

Indonesia has been known to harbor some of the world's oldest surviving cave art, including previously discovered paintings on its largest island, Sulawesi.

Under the Keynesian takeover of Bretton Woods Trans-Atlantic nations became increasingly dominated by bloated bureaucratic systems while plans for genuine development were undermined, Matthew Ehret writes.
It is as if the battle lines of civil war have been drawn up between masses of Americans who have been led to believe in either a false "bottom up" approach to economics, as defined by the Austrian School represented by Friedrich von Hayek, or in the "top-down" approach of John Maynard Keynes. The former sacrifices the general welfare of the whole nation for the sake of the parts (i.e. individual liberties), while the latter sacrifices the individual liberties of each citizen for the sake of the general welfare (or at least some oligarch's definition of what that should be).

In my last article, I introduced, in broad strokes, a history of the American System of political economy as advanced by Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Henry Clay, Henry Carey, Lincoln, and McKinley. We reviewed how it was derailed by McKinley's 1901 murder and was only revived 30 years later with Franklin Roosevelt's 1932 presidential victory which put a stop to the 1933 Bankers Dictatorship.

Finds of pigment pits after the deforestation of Easter Island reject the earlier presumed societal collapse.

A new study on the prehistory of Easter Island (Rapa Nui) by an international team of scientists and archaeologists from Moesgaard Museum in Denmark, Kiel University in Germany, and the University Pompeu Fabra in Spain, has discovered prehistoric pits filled with red pigment on Easter Island.

The researchers revealed that the production of reddish pigment continued as an important aspect of the cultural life of the island inhabitants, despite drastic changes to the ecosystem and environment.

An earlier hypothesis, presented by Jared Diamond in the book "Collapse" (2005), assumed that the clearance of vegetation and overpopulation, resulted in erosion, a shortage of resources and food, and finally in the collapse of the society.

The creation of false opposites has been a long-standing obstacle to human progress.

From the ancient pleasure-seeking Epicureans who argued against the logic-heavy Stoics of ancient Rome to the war of "salvation through faith vs works" that schismed western Christianity, to the chaotic emotional energy driving the Jacobin mobs of France whose passions were only matched by the radical Cartesian logic of their Girondin enemies; humanity has long been manipulated by oligarchs who knew how to set the species to war against itself. Although these operations have taken many forms, the desired effect has always been the same: divide-to-conquer bloodbaths which drowned out the saner voices of Cicero (executed in 44 BCE), Thomas More (executed in 1535 CE), or Jean Sylvain Bailly (executed in 1793 CE).

Today's polarization across the Trans-Atlantic world has reached a fevered pitch with the "right wing conservatives" shouting for liberty and less government while left wing liberals call for more government and top-down reforms of the system (with Great Reset technocrats laughing in the background).

Everyone with half a brain should be able to sense that the danger of civil war and economic meltdown hang over our destinies like a sword of Damocles, but instead of hearing calls for restoring the SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN traditions of American System banking that author Ellen Brown recently documented in her powerful new essay, we find only feuding sects that assert we must EITHER have top-down centralized planning OR bottom-up free markets laissez faire policies devoid of any government intervention.

I was recently asked by someone reading my forthcoming book with Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories, if I would explain the relationship between Marxism and the Critical Social Justice ideology we trace a partial history of in that book. The reason for the question is that Cynical Theories obviously focuses upon the postmodern elements of Critical Social Justice scholarship and activism, and yet many people, particularly among conservatives, identify obvious relationships to Marxism within that scholarship and activism that seems poorly accounted for by talking about postmodernism. This confusion makes sense because postmodernism was always explicitly critical of Marxism, naming it among the grand, sweeping universalizing explanations of reality that it called "metanarratives," of which it advised us to be radically skeptical.

The goal of Cynical Theories is to add clarity to this admittedly complicated discussion and lay out how postmodernism is of central importance to the development of what we now call "Critical Social Justice" or "Woke" scholarship and ideology. This is actually only one part in a far broader history that certainly draws upon Marx (and thus all the German idealists he drew upon), though in a very peculiar way and through a number of fascinating and, themselves, complex historical and philosophical twists.

One of these is the development of postmodernism, upon which we write, and another is the development of "neo-Marxism," which is sometimes referred to as "Cultural Marxism." This is a development of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, and it too was explicitly highly critical of Marxism in its economic particulars, though it retained the underlying ethos and ambition of overthrowing the ruling classes and establishing some variation on communism. Clearly, a third line of thought that bears some relevance is the long and, again, complex history of "social justice" thought, which can be approached in any number of ways, including religious, liberal, communist, and, as we explain in the book, "Woke," which must be understood to be its own thing in its own context, whatever its intellectual history.

Archaeologists say the remains of a stone vessel found in a mausoleum in China's Henan Province offer near-definitive evidence that second-century A.D. emperor Liu Zhi, known posthumously as Huan, was buried there.

"Together with the previous documents about the location of the emperor's tomb, the discovery makes us almost certain that it is the tomb of emperor Liu Zhi," Wang Xianqiu, who led the excavation project, tells Lyu Qiuping, Gui Juan and Shi Linjing of state-run news agency Xinhua.

Researchers had previously guessed that the tomb, located in the city of Luoyang, belonged to the Han dynasty emperor. An inscription on the vessel dating its year of manufacture to 180 A.D. appears to confirm this suspicion. Wang, a scholar at the Luoyang City Cultural Relics and Archaeology Research Institute, says the vessel was produced around the time when Liu Zhi's successor, Liu Hong, or Ling, was building a mausoleum for the deceased emperor. The artifact is shaped like a basin and stands about ten inches tall, with a circumference of more than two feet.

Like the benchmark of Egyptology Jean-François Champollion, he is French. And like him, he managed to decipher a language that has kept its mystery for millennia. François Desset is an archaeologist. He has just decoded linear elamite. A phonetic writing, cuneiform type, found on multiple clay tablets, precisely in the ruins of the ancient city of Susa, in Iran. The country was formerly called Persia and even earlier, 4,500 years ago, kingdom of Elam, hence the name of the writing in question, linear Elamite.

This is no small discovery: it was more than a century, in other words since the discovery in 1901 of the first tablets, that this writing system was known. But no one, despite all the attempts in 119 years, has ever found the key. No one, until François Desset, 38, associate researcher at CNRS Archaeorient from Lyon and specialist in the Bronze Age and the Neolithic in Iran.

Of the lavish banquet of absurdities laid out in 2020, one of the most delectable is Time magazine's December 14 cover declaring that 2020 was the "worst year ever." You're joking, right? In history's immense tapestry of human misery, it's not even in the top 100 worst years.

Consider 1177 B.C., when many of the great civilizations of the Mediterranean Sea and Mideast collapsed, and the survivors struggled through a pre-modern Dark Ages. This book assembles what is known about this catastrophic era: 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed.

Then there's 1644 A.D., when the Ming Dynasty was overthrown by the Manchu invasion, a series of self-reinforcing misfortunes stemming from extremes of climate (a.k.a. The Little Ice Age) that left millions hungry and vulnerable to disease and the predation of roving bandit armies.

The Little Ice Age and the famine, conflicts, civil wars, coups, revolts and rebellions it launched killed between a quarter and a third of Eurasia's population. Entire villages melted away as starvation drove the survivors to desperation. The misery stretched from western Europe to China, and lasted for decades.

After 21 years of research, archaeologists have succeeded in piecing together the extraordinary story of an ultra-high-status Roman aristocrat who was buried in London, more than 16 centuries ago.

The remarkable evidence, published today, suggests that she may well have been a member of the senatorial elite which presided over the final years of Roman Britain.

"It's conceivable that she was the wife of one of Britain's last Roman rulers," said Dr Roger Tomlin, a leading authority on Roman Britain and author of a major study on its people and social history, Britannia Romana.