Secret HistoryS


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New genomic portrait of pre-Columbian civilisations.


Cosmos Magazine
Thu, 07 May 2020 19:38 UTC
Machu Picchu in Peru
© CRAIG HASTINGS / GETTY IMAGESThe ancient Andes we all recognise: Machu Picchu in Peru.
An international team has conducted what it says is the first in-depth, wide-scale study of the genomic history of ancient civilisations in the central Andes mountains and coast before European contact.

The findings, published in the journal Cell, reveal early genetic distinctions between groups in nearby regions, population mixing within and beyond the Andes, surprising genetic continuity amid cultural upheaval, and ancestral cosmopolitanism among some of the region's most well-known ancient civilizations.

Led by Harvard Medical School and the University of California, Santa Cruz, the study team was drawn from a number of disciplines and countries, including Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Chile, Germany, Peru, the UK and the US.

Together they analysed genome-wide data from 89 individuals who lived between 500 and 9000 years ago. Of these, 64 genomes, ranging from 500 to 4500 years old, were newly sequenced - more than doubling the number of ancient individuals with genome-wide data from South America.

Their analysis included representatives of civilisations in the Andes from whom no genome-wide data had been reported before, including the Moche, Nasca, Wari, Tiwanaku and Inca.

And it represents "a major step toward redressing the global imbalance in ancient DNA data", according to Harvard's David Reich, a professor of genetics.
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Dig

Macabre death rituals in the Viking Age


Archaeology News Network
Mon, 04 May 2020 21:25 UTC
skull
© Rogvi N. Johansen/Moesgaard MuseumThe skull of a man, 25-40 years, with his face cut off with a sharp weapon. The head was found in a well outside
a pit house from the 9th century in Aarhus, Denmark
New research has put a question mark on the popular stereotype perpetuated in literature and cinema that Vikings were burned in boats or burial mounds together with valuable items on their way to Valhalla, the fabled hall where fallen warriors rest.

According to new research, Vikings kept bits of skulls and even dead infants in their homes, among other things, under doorways and floors, national broadcaster NRK reported.

Archaeologist Marianne Hem Eriksen at the University of Oslo has studied 40 archaeological finds of skull remains around Scandinavia from the Iron Age, found from about 250 BC until about 1050 AD, which corresponds to the end of the Viking Age.

Comment: While the burial rituals aren't entirely clear from the findings, it's notable that at Çatalhöyük, a community that thrived in Turkey 9,000 years ago, burials were also kept close to home:
These dwellings also played an important role in their funerary practices: Residents buried the dead under their homes. At its peak, the town housed as many as 8,000 people, who supported themselves through agriculture and raising livestock.
See also:

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Info

Infectious disease modeling study casts doubt on the Justinianic Plague's impact


SESYNC
Fri, 01 May 2020 19:48 UTC
Justinianic Plague’s Impact
© SESYNC
Annapolis, MD — Many have claimed the Justinianic Plague (c. 541-750 CE) killed half of the population of Roman Empire. Now, historical research and mathematical modeling challenge the death rate and severity of this first plague pandemic.

Researchers Lauren White, PhD and Lee Mordechai, PhD, of the University of Maryland's National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, examined the impacts of the Justinianic Plague with mathematical modeling. Using modern plague research as their basis, the two developed novel mathematical models to re-examine primary sources from the time of the Justinianic Plague outbreak. From the modeling, they found that it was unlikely that any transmission route of the plague would have had both the mortality rate and duration described in the primary sources. Their findings appear in a paper titled "Modeling the Justinianic Plague: Comparing hypothesized transmission routes" in PLOS ONE.

"This is the first time, to our knowledge, that a robust mathematical modeling approach has been used to investigate the Justinianic Plague," said lead author Lauren White, PhD, a quantitative disease ecologist and postdoctoral fellow at SESYNC. "Given that there is very little quantitative information in the primary sources for the Justinianic Plague, this was an exciting opportunity to think creatively about how we could combine present-day knowledge of plague's etiology with descriptions from the historical texts."

White and Mordechai focused their efforts on the city of Constantinople, capital of the Roman Empire, which had a comparatively well-described outbreak in 542 CE. Some primary sources claim plague killed up to 300,000 people in the city, which had a population of some 500,000 people at the time. Other sources suggest the plague killed half the empire's population. Until recently, many scholars accepted this image of mass death. By comparing bubonic, pneumonic, and combined transmission routes, the authors showed that no single transmission route precisely mimicked the outbreak dynamics described in these primary sources.
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Bullseye

Escobar: Deeper roots of Chinese demonization

Pepe Escobar
Asia Times
Sat, 02 May 2020 00:00 UTC
I. Kant
© Google ImagesImmanuel Kant was the first thinker to actually come up with a theory of the yellow race.
Fasten your seat belts: the US hybrid war against China is bound to go on frenetic overdrive, as economic reports are already identifying Covid-19 as the tipping point when the Asian - actually Eurasian - century truly began.

The US strategy remains, essentially, full spectrum dominance, with the National Security Strategy obsessed by the three top "threats" of China, Russia and Iran. China, in contrast, proposes a "community of shared destiny" for mankind, mostly addressing the Global South.

The predominant US narrative in the ongoing information war is now set in stone: Covid-19 was the result of a leak from a Chinese biowarfare lab. China is responsible. China lied. And China has to pay.

The new normal tactic of non-stop China demonization is deployed not only by crude functionaries of the industrial-military-surveillance-media complex. We need to dig much deeper to discover how these attitudes are deeply embedded in Western thinking - and later migrated to the "end of history" United States. (Here are sections of an excellent study, Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment's Encounter with Asia , by Jurgen Osterhammel).
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Pistol

Flashback 50 years ago today: Kent State massacre cover-up continues


RT
Sat, 04 May 2013 10:25 UTC
Kent State shootings
Kent State shootings
Abby Martin talks to Mickey Huff, Director of Project Censored, about the Kent State massacre and subsequent cover-up by the federal government.


Comment: An eyewitness account:


A discussion of the recording:


TV coverage at the time:


Enhanced audio home movie of the shooting:



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Blue Planet

Possible lost henge discovered online as lockdown shuts onsite excavations

Esther Addley
The Guardian
Tue, 28 Apr 2020 16:52 UTC
Swarkestone
© HandoutA Google Earth image of what could possibly be the site of a newly discovered henge in the village of Swarkestone in south Derbyshire.
It was around the time the lockdown began and his wedding photography jobs were drying to a drought that Chris Seddon spent a few hours idly looking through maps and images of the area close to his home in southern Derbyshire.

He was following the line of the River Trent when he noticed an unusual feature close to the village of Swarkestone "and I thought, what's that? It looks a bit odd, and a bit round."

Aerial photos of the ploughed field were unremarkable, but a Lidar image - a topographical scan using laser light - showed something that maybe, just maybe, appeared to be the ghostly image of a lost henge.

Comment: See also:

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Cross

How compassionate capitalism flourished in medieval Cambridge

Donna Ferguson
The Guardian
Sat, 02 May 2020 15:35 UTC
Chapel
© East Anglia Images/AlamyCambridge'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 ImagesA 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. LeeSkeletons 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/APIn 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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