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Mysteries of Americas earliest inhabitants revealed deep inside Yucatan caves

Doyle Rice
Phys.org
Wed, 08 Jul 2020 12:00 UTC
Q Roo
© CINDAQ.ORG
A diver from Centro Investigador del Sistema Acuífero de Q Roo (CINDAQ A.C.) collects charcoal samples in the oldest ochre mine ever found in the Americas, used 10,000-12,000 years ago by the earliest inhabitants of the Western hemisphere to procure the ancient commodity. The charcoal is thought to come from wood burned to light the cave for the ancient miners. The mine holds some the best-preserved evidence of the earliest inhabitants of the hemisphere and was found in a cave that is now underwater in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula.
It was all about the ochre.

Thousands of years ago, the first inhabitants of the Americas journeyed deep into caves in present-day Mexico to mine red ochre, a highly valued, natural clay earth pigment used as paint.

Now, according to a new study, scientists and divers have discovered the first evidence of this mining operation deep within underwater caves in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula.

"What is remarkable is not only the preservation of the mining activity, but also the age and duration of it," said study lead author Brandi MacDonald of the University of Missouri. "We rarely, if ever, get to observe such clear evidence of ochre pigment mining of Paleoindian age in North America, so to get to explore and interpret this is an incredible opportunity for us.

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

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Info

Genome studies support influence of Native Americans on Polynesians


Cosmos Magazine
Wed, 08 Jul 2020 20:27 UTC
Easter Island
© Andres Moreno-Estrada
The Tongariki site on Rapa Nui (Easter Island).

Native Americans had a genetic and cultural influence on Polynesia more than five centuries before the arrival of Europeans in the region, a new study suggests.

And it didn't all start in the obvious place - Rapa Nui (Easter Island) - according to the international team of researchers.

They say evidence shows first contact was on one of the archipelagos of eastern Polynesia, such as the South Marquesas, as proposed by the late Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl, who made his famous drift voyage from Peru to Polynesia on the raft Kon-Tiki in 1947.

The new study, which is described in a paper in the journal Nature, was led by Andrés Moreno-Estrada, from Stanford University, US, and Alexander Ioannidis from Mexico's National Laboratory of Genomics for Biodiversity.

With colleagues they examined the genomes of more than 817 people from 17 island populations and 15 Pacific coast Native American groups and found "conclusive evidence" for contact around 1200 CE, "contemporaneous with the settlement of remote Oceania".

"Our analyses suggest strongly that a single contact event occurred in eastern Polynesia, before the settlement of Rapa Nui, between Polynesian individuals and a Native American group most closely related to the indigenous inhabitants of present-day Colombia," they write.
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Better Earth

The art of Burganov: A lasting reminder of US - Russia friendship

Edward Lozansky
Washington Times
Tue, 07 Jul 2020 20:25 UTC
Lincoln Tsar

President Abraham Lincoln and Russian Tsar Alexander II.
For many open-minded Americans and Russians it has become a tradition to congratulate each other on their independence days, which are June 12 for Russia and July 4 for America.

This year we decided to note some Russian artistic works, which in the current political atmosphere might speak better than words when sending best wishes to America.

We are talking about sculptures of famous Americans located in Moscow and produced by well known Russian artist Alexander Burganov. As a side note, his sculpture of Russia's most famous poet Alexander Pushkin is located on the campus of George Washington University, at the corner of 22nd and H streets, NW.

Comment: See also: The international dimensions of 1776 and how an age of reason was subverted

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Sherlock

A historical reminder of what defines the United States, as told by a former slave

Cynthia Chung
Strategic Culture Foundation
Sun, 05 Jul 2020 23:16 UTC
Frederick Douglass
© Wikimedia
Frederick Douglass
We live in tumultuous days... one could say "the end of an era".

It is clear that there is a storm coming, however, the question is will it be the sort of storm that provides sustenance and relief to drought-stricken and barren lands, or will it be the sort of storm that destroys indiscriminately and leaves nothing recognizable in its wake?

There is such a heavy tension in the air, the buildup we are told of centuries of injustice, oppression and murder. It feels like the entire world's burden has laid itself upon one culprit and that it is high time that that villain pay for past blood spilled.

That villain is the United States.

It is common to hear that this nation was created under the hubristic banner of "Freedom from Empire", while it brutally owned slaves and committed genocide on the indigenous people. That the "Declaration of Independence" and the "U.S. Constitution" are despicable displays of the highest degree of grotesque hypocrisy, and that in reality the U.S. was to replace one system of empire with another and far worse.
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Info

Mysterious Stone Age flint artefacts may be crude sculptures of humans say archaeologists

Michael Marshall
New Scientist
Tue, 07 Jul 2020 19:37 UTC
The potential flint figurines
© Kharaysin archaeological team
The potential flint figurines.
More than 100 distinctive flint artefacts from a Stone Age village in Jordan may be figurines of people used in funeral rituals, according to a team of archaeologists. However, other researchers aren't convinced that the objects represent people at all.

Since 2014, Juan José Ibáñez at the Milá and Fontanals Institution for Humanities Research in Spain and his colleagues have been excavating a site called Kharaysin in Jordan. It was occupied from around 9000 BC until at least 7000 BC. At this time, people who were previously hunter-gatherers were taking up settled farming. Kharaysin is one of the oldest examples of a village where people built houses and lived year-round.

"We were excavating funerary areas, a cemetery," says Ibáñez. This is where the researchers found the flint objects, each with the same distinctive shape and with two pairs of notches carved into it on either side.

"We know very well the tools that are made at that period," says Ibáñez. These artefacts didn't look like any of them.

The objects don't seem to have been used as tools, as they show no signs of wear from use. This suggests they were decorative or symbolic, says Ibáñez.
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Archaeology

Ancient tools unearthed: May rewrite understanding of human history in Central Africa

Sarah Cascone
artnet News
Tue, 30 Jun 2020 17:34 UTC
ancient stone tools congo basin 620,000 yo
© Richard Oslisly
Tool cut on pebble from the alluvial terrace of Elarmékora in the historic Epona complex of the Lopé-Okanda World Heritage Site in Gabon.
Archaeologists have dated stone tools from Lopé National Park in Gabon to 620,000 to 850,000 years ago, making them the earliest known evidence of a human presence in the Congo Basin.

"In the African chronology, we always thought Central Africa was reserved for gorillas and the great apes, but in fact that's false — there was a human presence," said archaeologist Richard Oslisly of France's Research Institute for Development, in a video produced by the organization.

He made his first trip to the region in 1987, when he noticed what appeared to be a carved terrace, suggesting ancient agricultural activity. There, Oslisly found stone tools that could have been used to cut meat. The initial carbon dating suggested the artifacts were nearly 400,000 years old, but that technology was limited in the 1980s.
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Heart - Black

The international dimensions of 1776 and how an age of reason was subverted

Matthew Ehret
Strategic Culture Foundation
Sun, 05 Jul 2020 21:41 UTC
franklin independence painting
This July 4th, a larger-than-usual shadow is cast upon America which has come face-to-face with some serious historic reckonings. While the existence of an oligarchy and international "deep state" should not be ignored as a political force of history - arranging wars, assassinations and promoting economic enslavement of people and nations throughout the centuries - the guilt cannot entirely be placed on this apparatus. As Shakespeare's Cassius once said to Brutus, "our fate... is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings."

The mob which Shakespeare mocked as a mindless instrument of tyrants in his play Julius Caesar has again been deployed in America where George Soros' funding has turned this social-justice beast against the very republic itself (ironically under the banner of "Freedom from Tyranny" of course).

Instead of hearing calls to save America, break up the Wall Street banks or return America back to its anti-colonial heritage, today we hear only calls for tearing down monuments, and to undo the Constitution as a fraud wrapped in a lie built upon hypocrisy and white privilege, with no redeeming value anywhere to be found.
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Colosseum

Climate change and the rise of the Roman Empire

Bess Connolly
Yale
Mon, 22 Jun 2020 12:00 UTC
Okmok
© Christina Neal — Alaska Volcano Observatory, USGS via Wikimedia Commons
Alaska's Okmok volcano
The assassination of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March in 44 B.C.E. triggered a 17-year power struggle that ultimately ended the Roman Republic leading to the rise of the Roman Empire. To the south, Egypt, which Cleopatra was attempting to restore as a major power in the Eastern Mediterranean, was shook by Nile flood failures, famine, and disease. These events are among the best known and important political transitions in the history of western civilization. A new study reveals the role climate change played in these ancient events.

An international team of researchers, including Yale's Joe Manning, used historical accounts and climate proxy records — natural preservers of an environment's history (such as ice cores) — to uncover evidence that the eruption of Alaska's Okmok volcano in 43 B.C.E. caused global climatic changes that sparked the period's political and social unrest and ultimately changed the course of ancient history. The research was published June 22 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Comment: ArtNet provides some more details of the study:
During the civil war that followed Caesar's death, written accounts remarked on the unusual weather — the sun didn't shine, and the weather was unusually cold and wet, leading to famine. Historians have previously speculated that a volcano was to blame, and now geoscientists, historians, and archaeologists have been able to physically investigate that theory.

The study used climate models to see how Okmok's eruption would have affected the Mediterranean, and found that temperatures could have dropped up to 13.3 degrees Fahrenheit, with precipitation increasing up to 400 percent.
roman cooling timeline
© Desert Research Institute.
A timeline of events in the Roman Republic and Egyptian Ptolemaic Kingdom around the time of the Okmok eruption.
The effects of Okmok also rippled out to ancient Egypt, its dark cloud of volcanic aerosols possibly causing a drought in Africa. The resulting Egyptian famine likely made it easier for Octavian to defeat and annex the fallen Ptolemaic Kingdom as part of the nascent Roman Empire in 30 BC.
It's likely there were a number of factors driving Earth Changes as Pierre Lescaudron details in his article Volcanoes, Earthquakes And The 3,600 Year Comet Cycle.

See also: The Seven Destructive Earth Passes of Comet Venus

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Info

Ancient Aboriginal underwater archaeological site discovered off Western Australia coast


France24
Wed, 01 Jul 2020 19:40 UTC
Underwater Archaeology
© Handout FLINDERS UNIVERSITY/AFP
This handout aerial picture released by the DHSC Project and Flinders University shows a research area in the Dampier archipelago off the remote Western Australia coast where Aboriginal artefacts have been found on the seabed for the first time.

Archaeologists have for the first time found Aboriginal artefacts on the seabed off Australia, opening a door to the discovery of ancient settlements flooded since the last ice age, they reported Thursday.

Hundreds of ancient stone tools made by Australia's Indigenous people at least 7,000 years ago were discovered two metres underwater off the remote Western Australia coast, the research published in the PLOS ONE journal said.

A second site nearby revealed traces of human activity 14 metres below sea level dating back at least 8,500 years -- though researchers believe both sites may be even more ancient.

Archaeologists say the finds mark an exciting first step in uncovering more Aboriginal sites thought to have been flooded since the last ice age between 18,000 and 8,000 years ago.

Flinders University associate professor Jonathan Benjamin, who co-authored the study, said sea-level rises covered more than 30 percent of the vast continent in water.
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Better Earth

The era of Chatham House and the British roots of NATO

Matthew Ehret
Strategic Culture Foundation
Sun, 28 Jun 2020 00:00 UTC
Cecil Rhodes
© thetimes.co.uk
Cecil Rhodes
NATO secretary General Jens Stoltenberg's recent announcement of a NATO 2030 anti-nation state vision to extend the spheres of NATO's jurisdiction into the Pacific to contain China demonstrates a disturbing ideology which can lead nowhere but World War III if not nipped in the bud soon.

In my previous article NATO 2030: Making a Bad Idea Worse, I promised to shed light on the paradoxical situation of NATO's unabashed unipolar agenda on one hand and the many examples of President Trump's resistance to NATO witnessed by his removal of 9500 American personnel from Germany announced on June 11, his cutting of American participation in NATO military exercises, and his recent attacks on the military industrial complex.

The paradox: If NATO is truly a wholly owned tool of the American Empire, then why would the American Empire be at odds with itself? Of course, this only remains a paradox to the degree that one is committed to the belief in such a thing as "The American Empire".

Please do not get me wrong here. I am in no way saying that America has not acted like an empire in recent decades, nor am I romantically trying to whitewash America's historic tendencies to support colonization and defend systemic racism.

What I am saying is that there are demonstrably now, just as there have been since 1776, TWO opposing dynamics operating within America, where only one is in alignment of the ideals of the Constitution and Declaration of independence while the other is entirely in alignment with the ideals of the British Empire and hereditary institutions from which it supposedly broke away.

One America has been defended by great leaders who are too often identified by their untimely deaths while in office, who consistently advanced anti-colonial visions for a world of sovereign nations, win-win cooperation, and the extension of constitutional rights to all classes and races both within America and abroad. The other America has sought only to enmesh itself with the British Empire's global regime of finance, exploitation, population control and never-ending wars.
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