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How and why Stone Age humans unlocked the glucose in plants

pesel
© José-Manuel Benito Álvarez/Wikimedia commons, licenced under CC BY-SA 2.5Ground stones were a 'major evolutionary success' as they allowed people to unlock the energy in plants by making flour.
Early cave paintings of hunting scenes may give the impression our Stone Age ancestors lived mainly on chunks of meat, but plants - and the ability to unlock the glucose inside - were just as key to their survival.

Plants rich in starch helped early humans to thrive even at the height of the last Ice Age, researchers say.

While the evidence around meat eating is clear, the role of plant foods is less understood. Animal bones can last millions of years and still show cuts made by human butchering tools, whereas almost all plant remains disintegrate.

But new studies into the remains of plants that do exist are uncovering why and how our ancestors ate them.

Comment: Most of the research suggests that the primary source of nutrition for the majority of humanity throughout history has preferably been from animals, however it seems that a number of factors converged to force an increased consumption of vegetables which, as noted above, led to a deterioration in health:


Blue Planet

5,000 year old cultic area for warrior-god uncovered in Iraq

Girsu
© S. Rey/Tello/Girsu ProjectThe sacred plaza, seen here, was at the heart of Girsu. A cultic area that had over 300 broken ceremonial objects was recently uncovered near its entrance.
Archaeologists recently unearthed a 5,000-year-old cultic area that held fiery feasts, animal sacrifices and ritual processions dedicated to Ningirsu, a Mesopotamian warrior-god, at the site of Girsu (also known as Tello) in Iraq.

In an area of Girsu known as the Uruku (a name which means "the sacred city"), archaeologists excavated more than 300 broken ceremonial ceramic cups, bowls, jars and spouted vessels along with a large number of animal bones. The items were within or near a "favissa" (ritual pit) that was 8.2 feet (2.5 meters) deep, said Sebastien Rey, director of the British Museum's Tello/Ancient Girsu Project, and Tina Greenfield, a zooarchaeologist at the University of Saskatchewan who works on the project. Greenfield presented the team's findings at the American Schools of Oriental Research annual meeting held in San Diego in November 2019.

One of the most striking objects the archaeologists found was a bronze figurine shaped like a duck, with eyes made out of shell. The object may have been dedicated to Nanshe, a goddess associated with water, marshlands and aquatic birds, Rey and Greenfield told Live Science in an email. The researchers also uncovered a fragment of a vase that has an inscription dedicated to Ningirsu.

Comment: See also:


Gear

Spanish conquerors used indigenous technology to build their weapons

indigenous
© traveler1116/DigitalVision Vectors/Getty Images
During the invasion of Mesoamerica in the early 16th century, Spanish armies may have wielded the more powerful weapons, and yet when push came to shove, their troops had no clue how to actually replenish their armoury.

A new analysis of historical archives, local knowledge, and archeological discoveries in El Manchón, Mexico supports the idea that Spanish invaders, desperate for bronze artillery, bargained, bribed, and subjugated local indigenous peoples, to gain specialised knowledge on metallurgy that the conquerors themselves lacked.

"We know from documents that the Europeans figured out that the only way they could smelt copper was to collaborate with the indigenous people who were already doing it," says archaeologist Dorothy Hosler from MIT.

Propaganda

The history of Bioterror False Flags during last 20 years

Bio Terror False Flag
Anthrax, bird flu and even the deadly 1918 Spanish flu are being toyed around with in secret government biological weapons programs. How safe do you feel?

Comment: See also:


Beaker

Lead levels detected in ancient ice cores may track the rise and fall of medieval kings

medieval castle
© Robjem/iStockIn medieval times, the picturesque region around Peveril Castle in the U.K.'s Peak District was a center of lead mining and an “industrial landscape.”
In the Peak District of the United Kingdom, the picturesque village of Castleton nestles at the foot of a limestone outcrop crowned by a medieval castle. Today, hikers flock to the natural beauty of this region, home to the United Kingdom's first national park. But 800 years ago, the wild moors and wooded gorges were "covered in toxic lead pollution," says archaeologist Chris Loveluck of the University of Nottingham. "The royal hunting forest near the castle was an industrial landscape."

Here, farmers mined and smelted so much lead that it left toxic traces in their bodies — and winds blew lead dust onto a glacier 1500 kilometers away in the Swiss Alps. Loveluck and his colleagues say the glacier preserves a detailed record of medieval lead production, especially when analyzed with a new method that can track deposition over a few weeks or even days.

Info

New discovery makes homo erectus much older

Re-assembled cranium
© ANDY HERRIES, JESSE MARTIN AND RENAUD JOANNES-BOYAUThe re-assembled cranium with stylised projection of the outline of the rest of the skull.
It continues to be a big week for archaeological revelations.

Yesterday Cosmos reported on three new papers that provide clues to our past, including one that shed new light on the evolution of brain growth and organisation.

Now an international team led by Australia's La Trobe University reports the discovery of the earliest known skull of Homo erectus, the first of our ancestors to be nearly human-like in its anatomy and aspects of its behaviour.

The two-million-year-old fossil - believed to be of a child just two or three years old - was reconstructed from more than 150 fragments excavated over five years from the Drimolen cave system north of Johannesburg in South Africa.

It suggests that Homo erectus existed 100,000 to 200,000 years earlier than previously thought.

The researchers also uncovered the oldest known skull of the species Paranthropus, and their analysis reveals that in fact three hominin genera - Australopithecus being the third - were living as contemporaries in the area two million years ago.

Info

Three new studies give more clues to our past

Homo antecessor
© JOSÉ MARÍA BERMÚDEZ DE CASTROSkeletal remains of Homo antecessor.
It's been quite a day for learning about our ancestry, with the publication of not one but three major studies.

They include new information about some of our most significant fossil finds, and a report on the retrieval of the oldest-ever human genetic data set. Where to start?

In the first paper, in the journal Science Advances, researchers describe taking brain imprints of fossil skulls of the species Australopithecus afarensis (famous for "Lucy" and the "Dikika child'') that shed new light on the evolution of brain growth and organisation.

The international team, led by Philipp Gunz and Simon Neubauer from Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, scanned the Dikika child using synchrotron microtomography at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France.

The results show that the brain of A. afarensis, which lived more than three million years ago, was organised like that of a chimpanzee but had prolonged brain growth like humans. That means it had a mosaic of ape and human features, a hallmark of evolution.

The study also resolves a longstanding question of whether this species had a prolonged childhood, a period of time unique to humans that allows us to learn and grow.

"As early as three million years ago, children had a long dependence on caregivers," says senior author Zeray Alemseged, who discovered Dikika in 2000 and now runs the Dikika Research Project in Ethiopia.

Syringe

Flashback Population control: The covert decades-long use of abortion-causing vaccines around the world

abortion vaccines
Woe unto them that seek deep to hide their counsel from the Lord, and their works are in the dark, and they say, Who seeth us? and who knoweth us? (Isaiah 29:15)
In our article Abortion-causing Vaccines Openly Promoted in Pro-Vaxx Circles, we showed the push for vaccines that cause spontaneous abortions in the name of population control. In this article, we cover how such vaccinations have been reportedly used — covertly — around the world. We will begin with a fairly recent incident in Kenya.

Population control in Kenya

In 2014, there were allegations by Kenya's Catholic bishops that an anti-tetanus vaccine that causes miscarriages was clandestinely used on millions of girls. According to LifeSiteNews in November 6, 2014:
Kenya's Catholic bishops are charging two United Nations organizations with sterilizing millions of girls and women under cover of an anti-tetanus inoculation program sponsored by the Kenyan government.

According to a statement released Tuesday by the Kenya Catholic Doctors Association, the organization has found an antigen that causes miscarriages in a vaccine being administered to 2.3 million girls and women by the World Health Organization and UNICEF. Priests throughout Kenya reportedly are advising their congregations to refuse the vaccine.

"We sent six samples from around Kenya to laboratories in South Africa. They tested positive for the HCG antigen," Dr. Muhame Ngare of the Mercy Medical Centre in Nairobi told LifeSiteNews. "They were all laced with HCG."

Dr. Ngare, spokesman for the Kenya Catholic Doctors Association, stated in a bulletin released November 4, "This proved right our worst fears; that this WHO campaign is not about eradicating neonatal tetanus but a well-coordinated forceful population control mass sterilization exercise using a proven fertility regulating vaccine. This evidence was presented to the Ministry of Health before the third round of immunization but was ignored."[1]

Comment: So the WHO or World Health Organization (or those pulling its strings) has a long track record of giving vaccines with hidden ingredients known to be detrimental to those who would receive it. Consider this the next time some vaccine is created that everyone "must" have. Behind it may be a very malevolent agenda.


Archaeology

Ancient bones reveal Irish are not Celts after all

ancient bones ireland
The chance discovery of ancient bones under an Irish pub in County Antrim in the mid-2000s has cast doubt over whether Irish people are actually related to the ancient Celts at all.

In 2006, Bertie Currie was clearing land to make a driveway for McCuaig's Bar on Rathlin Island off Antrim when he noticed a large, flat stone buried beneath the surface.

Currie realized that there was a large gap underneath the stone and investigated further.

"I shot the torch in and saw the gentleman, well, his skull and bones," Currie told the Washington Post.

Info

Scientists uncover faint stencils in Timor-Leste cave which sheds light into human colonisation of Australia

Lene Hara Cave
© CD STANDISH ET AL 2020, (COPYRIGHT ELSEVIER 2020)The Lene Hara Cave in Timor-Leste where the stencils were found.
Outlines of human hands painted in a Timor-Leste cave might be from the time of the last Ice Age, possibly offering insight into human colonisation of Australia from Asia around 65,000 years ago.

Previously, all known rock art in Timor-Leste - also called East Timor - was thought to be from the Holocene, which began around 11,650 years ago.

Now, a study published in Archaeological Research in Asia reports 16 hand stencils within Lene Hara Cave on Timor-Leste's eastern tip. Archaeologists think they were painted in the Pleistocene epoch, dubbed the "Ice Age", before the Holocene began.

"It was thrilling to rediscover this suite of hand stencils - perhaps the most interesting rock art motifs to study," says the report's lead author Christopher Standish, from the University of Southampton, UK.

"The stencils provide a tangible link to the people who created them; you're looking at the outline of a real person's hand who lived thousands of years ago."

Produced on a mineral crust that has flaked away, the faded patterns are in poor condition and almost imperceptible to the untrained eye. Standish's team was able to identify the hand motifs, however, along with more pigment splatters that were too fragmented to ascertain as stencils.