Secret HistoryS


Flashlight

Archaeologists discover hidden gallery of 14,500 year old cave paintings deep within Spanish cave

Cheyenne MacDonald
Daily Mail
Tue, 24 May 2016 18:15 UTC
cave art atxurra spain
The cave paintings were discovered by archaeologist Diego Garate and caver Iñaki Intxaurbe. They span roughly 100 meters, and largely represent horses, bison, goats, and deer. Cave paintings of horses can be seen above
Archaeologists have discovered a hidden gallery of ancient paintings deep within the Atxurra cave in northern Spain.

At least 70 cave paintings have been found at the site, which reveals the 'final moments' of the Upper Paleolithic, dating as far back as 14,500 years ago.

Images of animals cover the walls of the sanctuary, including one which shows a bison impaled by the many spears of ancient hunters.

Atxurra cave is situated 50km from the Basque city Bilbao, in a village called Berriatua.

Local officials now say that the site is considered to hold the largest number of ancient paintings in Basque Country.

The cave paintings were discovered by archaeologist Diego Garate and caver Iñaki Intxaurbe.

They span roughly 100 meters, and largely represent horses, bison, goats, and deer.
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Nuke

Hiroshima bombing changed the world - but it didn't end WWII

Oliver Stone & Peter Kuznick
Los Angeles Times
Thu, 26 May 2016 18:18 UTC
Hiroshima
© Daily Mail
President Obama's visit to Hiroshima on Friday has rekindled public debate about the U.S. atomic bombings of Japan — one largely suppressed since the Smithsonian canceled its Enola Gay exhibit in 1995. Obama, aware that his critics are ready to pounce if he casts the slightest doubt on the rectitude of President Harry S. Truman's decision to use atomic bombs, has opted to remain silent on the issue. This is unfortunate. A national reckoning is overdue.

Most Americans have been taught that using atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 was justified because the bombings ended the war in the Pacific, thereby averting a costly U.S. invasion of Japan. This erroneous contention finds its way into high school history texts still today. More dangerously, it shapes the thinking of government officials and military planners working in a world that still contains more than 15,000 nuclear weapons.

Comment: Hiroshima and Nagasaki - 70 years ago the US 'elite' murdered 500,000 Japanese civilians to 'send a warning' to Russia

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Info

Lost tomb of Aristotle found in Greece

Erik Shilling
Atlas Obscura
Thu, 26 May 2016 18:07 UTC
Aristotle
© Wikimedia CommonsBust of Aristotle. Marble, Roman copy after a Greek bronze original by Lysippos from 330 BC; the alabaster mantle is a modern addition.
A group of archaeologists in Greece say they have found the lost tomb of Aristotle, the Greek philosopher and likely world's first true scientist.

The Greek newspaper Ekathimerini reported Thursday that the finding will be announced at a press conference, as a capstone to a Aristotle-themed conference in Thessaloniki.

The archaeologists had been digging for 20 years at a site in the ancient northern Greece city of Stageira, where Aristotle was born in 384 B.C. Aristotle died 62 years later in Chalcis, about 50 miles north of Athens.

Ahead of the official announcement, the Greek Reporter has some more details on the tomb, saying that "literary sources" say that Aristotle's ashes were transferred there after his death. It is located near the ancient city's agora, apparently intended to be viewed by the public.

From the Greek Reporter:
The top of the dome is at 10 meters and there is a square floor surrounding a Byzantine tower. A semi-circle wall stands at two-meters in height. A pathway leads to the tomb's entrance for those that wished to pay their respects. Other findings included ceramics from the royal pottery workshops and fifty coins dated to the time of Alexander the Great.
Not much is known about Aristotle's life, aside from what he left in his own writings. It took over 2,300 years, but at least we're starting to learn more about his death.
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2 + 2 = 4

Exposing U.S. hypocrisy on South China Sea: Washington has done worse for centuries

Wayne Madsen
Strategic Culture Foundation
Sun, 22 May 2016 17:49 UTC
island workers
While the Pentagon and US State Department continue to issue forth missives and warnings to China about its activities in staking territorial claims to disputed islands in the South China Sea, Washington has its own sordid history of retaining control of islands claimed by other nations.

Navassa Island is a small 5.2 square kilometer outcropping in the Caribbean Sea between Haiti and Cuba. In 1857, US President James Buchanan unilaterally annexed the island to the United States. Before the American Civil War, the island had previously been the virtual private domain of the Navassa Phosphate Company of Baltimore, which sent African-American contract workers (the American Union's quaint term for slaves) to Navassa where they worked to mine phosphate-rich guano. In 1889, the workers rebelled against their horrible working conditions and killed five of their white bosses.

The US Navy quelled the rebellion and returned eighteen of the workers to stand trial for murder. In 1890, the US Supreme Court ruled the Guano Islands Act of 1856, which provided the legal framework for the annexation of Navassa by the United States, constitutional. The high court also upheld death sentences for three of the eighteen arrested black miners from Navassa. The United States also ignored nearby Haiti, which had laid claim to Navassa before the American unilateral annexation.
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Sherlock

Centuries-old artifacts discovered beneath Malcolm X's childhood home

Megan Gannon
Live Science
Tue, 24 May 2016 16:02 UTC
hole dug house
© City of Boston Archaeology Program
In May 2016, ahead of planned restoration work at the Malcolm X House in Boston, excavators conducted an archaeological investigation.
The boyhood home of influential black activist Malcolm X has turned out to be a fascinating archaeological site.

An excavation at the house in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood ended last week. In trenches around the home's foundations, archaeologists unearthed thousands of artifacts, including a vinyl record of American folk songs from the 1950s, as well as toys and housewares from Malcolm's lifetime. They also discovered the remains of a previously unknown 18th-century home.

The house, located at 72 Dale Street, was built in 1874 and has been owned by Malcolm's family since the 1940s. Malcolm lived there with his older half sister Ella Little-Collins after his father died and his mother was institutionalized. Rodnell Collins — Ella's son, who owns the house today — plans to restore the home, possibly to turn it into apartments for graduate students studying civil rights, social justice or African-American history, according to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. But before work could begin on the foundation, archaeologists had to conduct an investigation because of the home's landmark status.

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Info

DNA from ancient Phoenician shows European ancestry

Rossella Lorenzi
Discovery News
Wed, 25 May 2016 18:08 UTC
Ancient Phoenician
© M.Rais/Creative CommonsThis reconstruction shows what Ariche might have looked like.
Researchers have sequenced the complete mitochondrial genome of a 2,500-year-old Phoenician, showing the ancient man had European ancestry.

This is the first ancient DNA to be obtained from Phoenician remains.

Known as "Ariche," the young man came from Byrsa, a walled citadel above the harbor of ancient Carthage. Byrsa was attacked by the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus "Africanus" in the Third Punic War. It was destroyed by Rome in 146 B.C.

Ariche's remains were discovered in 1994 on the southern flank of Bursa hill when a man planting trees fell into the ancient grave.

Analysis of the skeleton revealed the man died between the age of 19 and 24, had a rather robust physique and was 1.7 meters (5'6″) tall. He may have belonged to the Carthaginian elite, as he was buried with gems, scarabs, amulets and other artifacts.

Now genetic research carried out by a team co-led by Lisa Matisoo-Smith at New Zealand's University of Otago has shown the man belonged to a rare European haplogroup — known as U5b2cl — that likely links his maternal ancestry to the North Mediterranean coast, probably on the Iberian Peninsula.

Published in the journal PLOS ONE, the findings provide the earliest evidence of the European mitochondrial haplogroup U5b2cl in North Africa, dating its arrival to at least the late sixth century BC.
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Info

Neanderthals built mystery cave rings 175,000 years ago researchers say

Bruce Bower
Science News
Wed, 25 May 2016 13:42 UTC
Circles in French Cave
© Etienne Fabre/SSACANCIENT RING A new study finds that Neandertals built structures out of stalagmites. Here, a researcher takes measurements of a circular arrangement of stalagmites created in a French cave around 176,500 years ago.
In at least one part of Stone Age Europe, Neandertals were lords of the rings. Humankind's close evolutionary cousins built large, circular structures out of stalagmites in a French cave around 176,500 years ago, researchers say.

Neandertal groups explored the cave's dark recesses, where they assembled stalagmite pieces into complex configurations, archaeologist Jacques Jaubert of the University of Bordeaux in France and colleagues report online May 25 in Nature. Two ring-shaped formations and four smaller stalagmite arrangements, situated 336 meters inside France's Bruniquel Cave, all display traces of ancient fires on stalagmite chunks.

These ancient constructions were discovered in the early 1990s, but limited access to Bruniquel Cave delayed dating of the finds until 2013. Jaubert's team calculated the age of these creations based on the decay of uranium variants in seven stalagmites from the two circular structures. Neandertals inhabited Europe and Asia from around 400,000 to 40,000 years ago. Homo sapiens did not leave Africa until about 60,000 years ago. That leaves Neandertals as the only candidates for builders of the stalagmite circles.
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Syringe

State-sanctioned LSD experiments in Cold War Bulgaria

Jordan Todorov
Atlas Obscura
Wed, 25 May 2016 16:04 UTC
Prof. Marina Boyadjieva
© Jordan TodorovProf. Marina Boyadjieva (first row, second right) with colleagues from the Multiprofile Hospital for Active Treatment in Neurology and Psychiatry St. Naum in Sofia, Bulgaria.
LSD is usually associated with the hippie counterculture of the late 1960s. What has not been known until recently is that dozens of experiments involving the psychedelic drug were carried out in Communist Bulgaria, from 1962 to 1968, by the Bulgarian psychiatrist Marina Boyadjieva. Among the human guinea pigs were doctors, artists, miners, truck drivers, and even prisoners and mentally ill patients. These research subjects were involved in some 140 trials.

Years before Timothy Leary's famous 1966 exhortation to "Turn on, tune in, drop out" and the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," LSD experiments were taking place in Bulgaria in the early years of the Cold War, where recreational drugs were completely unknown. Mind you, this was all happening legally and with the state's blessing.

Comment: Further reading:

MI6 payouts over secret LSD tests

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Beaker

5,000-year-old Chinese beer recipe had secret ingredient

Tom Metcalfe
Live Science
Mon, 23 May 2016 16:48 UTC
ancient pot fragment
© Fulai Xing
A stove fragment from the Mijiaya site that was probably used to heat the fermenting grain mash during the beer-brewing process.
Barley might have been the "secret ingredient" in a 5,000-year-old beer recipe that has been reconstructed from residues on prehistoric pots from China, according to new archaeological research.

Scientists conducted tests on ancient pottery jars and funnels found at the Mijiaya archaeological site in China's Shaanxi province. The analyses revealed traces of oxalate — a beer-making byproduct that forms a scale called "beerstone" in brewing equipment — as well as residues from a variety of ancient grains and plants. These grains included broomcorn millets, an Asian wild grain known as "Job's tears," tubers from plant roots, and barley.

Barley is used to make beer because it has high levels of amylase enzymes that promote the conversion of starches into sugars during the fermenting process. It was first cultivated in western Asia and might have been used to make beer in ancient Sumer and Babylonia more than 8,000 years ago, according to historians.

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Light Sabers

Mysterious mass graves hold prisoners of bloody 17th-century battle

Lindsay Dodgson
Live Science
Fri, 20 May 2016 15:49 UTC
exumed skeleton
© North News
Two mass graves holding an estimated 1,700 skeletons were found underground at the southern tip of Durham University's Palace Green Library.
Three years ago, archaeologists at Durham University began excavating a site on campus for a proposed addition to the school's library, but work was unexpectedly halted when the researchers uncovered remnants of two mass graves. The discovery ignited a centuries-old mystery, but now, scientists say clues point back to one of the shortest but bloodiest battles of the English Civil Wars.

The estimated 1,700 skeletons, found underground at the southern tip of Durham University's Palace Green Library, were likely Scottish soldiers who had been taken prisoner after the Battle of Dunbar in 1650, the archaeologists said.

The prisoners were captured by Oliver Cromwell, the controversial English leader who waged a successful military campaign against the Royalists in a 17th-century civil war, toppling the monarchy and culminating in the execution of King Charles I in 1649.

The two mass graves beneath Durham University had been hidden for nearly four centuries.

Comment: Related articles:

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