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Oldest human cremation discovered in the Near East

Laura Geggel
Live Science
Wed, 12 Aug 2020 17:49 UTC
The Beisamoun pyre fields
© Mission Beisamoun
The Beisamoun pyre fields, where the cremated burial was discovered, during the crepuscular hours.
The oldest known person to be intentionally cremated in the Near East took their last breath about 9,000 years ago, and their body went up in flames shortly thereafter, a new study finds.

The body wasn't simply thrown in a fire, however; whoever arranged the funeral pyre did so with care, archaeologists found by sifting through the body's burnt remains. It appears that the deceased was placed in a seated position, with their knees bent to their chest in a kiln-like pit. Then, a fire was ignited next to or under the deceased.

Until now, the earliest known cremation in the Near East dated to the sixth millennium B.C. Meanwhile, the oldest known human cremation in the world — the so-called "Mungo Lady," whose burned remains were found near Lake Mungo in New South Wales, Australia in 1969 — is much older, dating to about 40,000 years ago, according to a 2003 study in the journal Nature.

Researchers discovered the extraordinary burial in 2013, while excavating the Neolithic (the last age of the Stone Age) village of Beisamoun, in the Upper Jordan Valley of northern Israel. The burial pit contained 355 bone fragments, many of which were scorched, said study lead researcher Fanny Bocquentin, an archaeo-anthropologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).
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Dig

Europe's earliest bone tools found at Britain's Boxgrove "Horse Butchery Site"

Matt Pope
The Conversation
Wed, 12 Aug 2020 13:45 UTC
stone tools britain
© UCL Institute of Archaeology, Author provided
Tool made out of horse bone.
Boxgrove in Sussex, England, is an iconic, old stone age site. This is where the oldest human remains in Britain have been discovered - fossils of Homo heidelbergensis. Part of an exceptionally preserved 26km-wide ancient landscape of stone, it provides a virtually untouched record of early humans almost half a million years ago.

The most perfectly preserved area of the site is known as the "Horse Butchery Site", a spot where a large horse was slaughtered and processed some 480,000 years ago. Since 1994, we've worked on bone and stone artefacts from here - some of which are the earliest in Europe - as part of a multidisciplinary team led by the UCL Institute of Archaeology. This has has given us important insights into the lives of the mysterious Homo heidelbergensis, which we have just released in a book.

My own research focused on the stone artefacts - more than 1,750 pieces of knapped flint. The tools, along with bones from a single large female horse, were discovered more than a quarter of century ago, and the location of where each artefact was plotted to the nearest millimetre.

Comment: The BBC provides some additional information:
Europe's earliest bone tools found in Britain By Paul Rincon Science editor, BBC News website Image copyright UCL Institute of Archaeology Image caption One of the oldest organic tools in the world. A bone hammer used to make the fine flint bifaces from Boxgrove. The bone shows scraping marks used to prepare the bone as well as pitting left behind from its use in making flint tools

They were made by the species Homo heidelbergensis, a possible ancestor for modern humans and Neanderthals.

Researchers found a shin bone belonging to one of them - it's the oldest human bone known from Britain.

stone tools britain
© UCL Institute of Archaeology
The horse butchery site being excavated in 1990
The researchers were able to reconstruct the precise type of stone tool that had been made from the chippings left at the site.

However, the humans must have taken the tools with them - as they had not been recovered.

At the inter-tidal marshland, which was on what would have been Britain's southern coastline, there was a nearby cliff that was starting to degrade, producing good rocks for knapping - the process of creating stone tools. Silt from the sea had also built up here, forming an area of grassland.

"Grassland means herbivores and herbivores mean food," explained Dr Pope.

Dr Pope added that it was still unclear how the horse ended up in this landscape.

"Horses are highly sociable animals and it's reasonable to assume it was part of a herd, either attracted to the foreshore for fresh water, or for seaweed or salt licks. For whatever reason, this horse - isolated from the herd - ends up dying there," Dr Pope told BBC News.

"Possibly it was hunted - though we have no proof of that - and it's sat right next to an intertidal creek. The tide was quite low so it's possible for the humans to get around it.

Simon Parfitt said: "These are some of the earliest non-stone tools found in the archaeological record of human evolution. They would have been essential for manufacturing the finely made flint knives found in the wider Boxgrove landscape."

She explained that "it provides further evidence that early human populations at Boxgrove were cognitively, social and culturally sophisticated".

This might explain how it was so completely torn apart: the Boxgrove humans even smashed up the bones to get at the marrow and liquid grease.
See also:

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Bullseye

Humans have been making poison arrows for over 70,000 years

TESSA KOUMOUNDOUROS
Science Alert
Sat, 08 Aug 2020 12:00 UTC
Kalahari
© Lombard, J. Archaeol. Sci. Rep, 2020/KwaZulu-Natal Museum
150-year-old hunting kit of the Kalahari San people
From slaying centaurs to biblical mentions, poison-tipped arrows are a staple of cultural stories in the west. But they've also proved highly effective in reality, so much so that indigenous peoples around the world are still making use of them today, to successfully feed themselves and their families.

The Kalahari San of southern Africa hunt with small bone- or iron-tipped arrows that may look quite dainty, but when coated with poison, they also prove quite lethal. The hunter-gatherers daub their weapons with larvae entrails of a beetle called Diamphidia nigroonata. The larvae contain a diamphotoxin poison that is capable of bringing down an adult giraffe.

Some of the earliest solid evidence of poison use is traces of the highly toxic compound ricin on 24,000-year-old wooden applicators, found in South Africa's Border cave. However, archaeologists have long suspected this hunting technique is much older, and new evidence now suggests humans have been shooting poison arrows through the last 72,000 years.

Comment: See also: And check out SOTT radio's: MindMatters: America Before: Comets, Catastrophes, Mounds and Mythology

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Fire

The Long, Hot Summer of 1967: A Forgotten Season of Riots and Urban Unrest Across America

Sam Jacobs
Ammo.com
Mon, 10 Aug 2020 03:29 UTC
new jersey riots newark 1968 national guard

The NJ National Guard, with bayonets fixed on guns sent to quell riots in Newark
A forgotten season of riots and urban unrest across America

The Book of Ecclesiastes says that there is nothing new under the sun. And while many have spoken of the "unprecedented" nature of the rioting in the early summer of 2020, it is actually quite precedented.

The Long, Hot Summer of 1967 was the peak of urban unrest and rioting in the United States in the lead up to the 1968 election. While there are certainly a number of key differences, there are also a number of striking parallels that make the topic worthy of discussion and examination.

The long-term impact of the urban unrest of the summer of 2020 is unclear, but the long-term impact of the Long, Hot Summer of 1967 and related urban rioting was a victory for Richard Nixon in 1968, and a landslide re-election in 1972. One must resist the temptation to make mechanistic comparisons between the two, and we will refrain from doing so here. But the reader is encouraged to look for connections between these events and more recent ones.
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Info

8,000 years old fluted stone tools discovered in Arabia


Max Plank Institute
Wed, 05 Aug 2020 19:23 UTC
Manayzah Site
© Joy McCorriston, OSU
Manayzah Rockshelter during excavation.
A new paper published in the journal PLOS ONE examines fluted projectile points from southern Arabia, detailing production methods and technical aspects that indicate differences in function from the technology of the Americas, despite similarities in form. Findings from experimentation and comparative analysis suggest that highly-skilled, convergent technologies can have varying anthropological implications.

A new study led by archaeologists from the CNRS, the Inrap, the Ohio State University and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, reports on fluted points from the archaeological sites of Manayzah in Yemen and Ad-Dahariz in Oman. Fluted stone tools are a distinctive, technologically advanced form of projectile points, including spearheads and arrowheads. Fluting is a specific technique that involves the extraction of an elongated flake along the length of a projectile point, leaving a distinctive groove or depression at the base of the spearhead or arrowhead.

Fluting is a distinct technological tradition invented by early human cultures that spread across the Americas. Fluted point technology is very well known in North America, evidenced by finds across the continent dating from 13,000 to 10,000 years ago. As lead author Dr. Rémy Crassard of the CNRS notes, "Until the early 2000s, these fluted points were unknown elsewhere on the planet. When the first isolated examples of these objects were recognized in Yemen, and more recently in Oman, we recognized that there could be huge implications."
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Info

Nested 'DNA' of ancestor that mated with humans discovered

Stephanie Pappas
Live Science
Thu, 06 Aug 2020 19:08 UTC
Unidentified Ancestor
© Shutterstock
An unidentified ancestor that interbred with humans may have been Homo erectus (skull shown here).
Today's humans carry the genes of an ancient, unknown ancestor, left there by hominin species intermingling perhaps a million years ago.

The ancestor may have been Homo erectus, but no one knows for sure — the genome of that extinct species of human has never been sequenced, said Adam Siepel, a computational biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and one of the authors of a new paper examining the relationships of ancient human ancestors.

The new research, published today (Aug. 6) in the journal PLOS Genetics, also finds that ancient humans mated with Neanderthals between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago, well before the more recent, and better-known mixing of the two species occurred, after Homo sapiens migrated in large numbers out of Africa and into Europe 50,000 years ago. Thanks to this ancient mixing event, Neanderthals actually owe between 3% and 7% of their genomes to ancient Homo sapiens, the researchers reported.

"Our best conjecture is that an early group of anatomically modern humans left Africa then encountered and interbred with Neandertals, perhaps in the Middle East," Siepel told Live Science. "This lineage [of humans] would then have been lost — either gone extinct, or absorbed by the Neandertals, or migrated back to Africa."
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Whistle

Lithuania's alleged involvement in 2014 Ukraine Maidan coup

Paul Antonopoulos
Global Research
Tue, 04 Aug 2020 00:00 UTC
Maidan statue
© DELFI Š.Černiausko nuotr/KJN
Maidan memorial
New scandalous information about the 2014 Maidan coup d'état in Ukraine has emerged that implicates Lithuania's important role in instigating the violent events. David Zhvania, a former Member of the Ukrainian Parliament, revealed on his YouTube channel that the seizure of power in Ukraine was financed in "several ways."

"One of the external sources was the Lithuanian embassy, ​​through which money and weapons were transferred, and the internal channel was Diamantbank. I have documented evidence to support my words," said the former ally of Petro Poroshenko, the previous president of Ukraine.

Zhvania called on Prosecutor General Irina Venediktova to initiate criminal proceedings and to summon him for questioning. According to the former MP, "Ukrainians should finally find out the truth" on who funded Maidan and who was bribed. He then admitted he was a member of a "criminal group that carried out a coup." "To help the conspirators, I used my political influence and my position as head of the State-Building Committee," he said, adding that he would testify against himself, "but with one condition. Please guarantee my security because I know who the people of Poroshenko are. They can easily order me to be removed."

Comment: The horror that was Maidan had many factions propelling its pulse - the least of which may have been the 'struggle by the people for freedom and democracy'.

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Boat

Lost Viking waterway found in Orkney revealing Norse impact on local economy

Alison Campsie
Scotsman
Tue, 04 Aug 2020 12:53 UTC
Orkney
© St Andrews University.
The lost Viking waterway likely connected farms on Orkney Mainland to the power bases of the Norse earls on the north west coast at Birsay.
The route was discovered after a series of Old Norse place names in the centre of the mainland, which were connected to sea and boats despite being many miles from the sea, attracted interest from researchers.

Now it is believed that Vikings were using a route from Harray in the central mainland through the Loch of Banks to a portage at Twatt before reaching the Loch of Boardhouse and ultimately the coastal powerbases of the Norse Earls at the Brough of Birsay, a tidal island off the very tip of the north west coast.

The waterway network would have provided a shallow route through which the Vikings were able to haul both their boats and heavy goods, such as grain.

Comment: See also:

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Bomb

Atomic bombings at 75: John Pilger says another Hiroshima is coming - unless we stop it now

John Pilger
Consortium News
Tue, 04 Aug 2020 00:00 UTC
NY Times article Hiroshima
© New York Times
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were acts of premeditated mass murder unleashing a weapon of intrinsic criminality. It was justified by lies that form the bedrock of 21st century U.S. war propaganda, casting a new enemy, and target - China.

When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite.

I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, then I walked down to the river where the survivors still lived in shanties. I met a man called Yukio, whose chest was etched with the pattern of the shirt he was wearing when the atomic bomb was dropped.

He described a huge flash over the city, "a bluish light, something like an electrical short", after which wind blew like a tornado and black rain fell.
"I was thrown on the ground and noticed only the stalks of my flowers were left. Everything was still and quiet, and when I got up, there were people naked, not saying anything. Some of them had no skin or hair. I was certain I was dead."
Nine years later, I returned to look for him and he was dead from leukemia.
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Target

America's 'Days of Rage': A look into the extensive left-wing bombings & domestic terrorism of the 1970s

Sam Jacobs
Ammo.com
Mon, 03 Aug 2020 00:00 UTC
The Weathermen
© David Fenton—Getty Images
Leaders of the radical American student group the Weathermen, (left to right) Jim Mellen, Peter Clapp, John Jacobs, Bill Ayers, and Terry Robbins, march in 1969 at the van of a group of demonstrators during the 'Days of Rage' actions organized by the Weathermen to protest the trial of the Chicago Seven and 'to bring the war home.'
As the summer of 2020 dawned, left-wing radical groups began rioting and taking over parts of America's cities. While this specific form of left-wing violence is new, left-wing violence itself is far from new in the United States. Indeed, one of the most hidden and concealed parts of recent American history is the extensive left-wing violence that began in the late 1960s and continued into the 1980s.

At first, one might think that these were isolated incidents of small-scale "protest" or even minor violence. However, upon even brief examination, we find out that the outpouring of leftist violence over this time period was anything but minor. The most likely explanation for why you have never heard of this until now is that the events of these years have been consciously buried by those who would prefer you not know about them.

As the left once again ratchets up both its rhetoric and its physical violence, it's time to re-explore this period of American history. What started as a non-violent student movement quickly escalated into a campaign of terrorism against the American people. And while the similarities may not be terribly striking yet, astute readers of this article will quickly see the world in which we live more and more closely resembling the Days of Rage.
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