Welcome to Sott.net
Tue, 21 Sep 2021
The World for People who Think

Secret History
Map

Blue Planet

Dragon Man: Large ancient skull from China could be new human species

Katie Pavid
National History Museum
Fri, 25 Jun 2021 12:00 UTC
Dragon Man china homo
A huge cranium found in the Songhua River in China represents a new sister lineage for Homo sapiens. It dates to at least 146,000 years old.

A team led by Prof Qiang Ji at the Hebei GEO University described the skull in a new paper published in the journal The Innovation.

The skull is almost complete and provides important evidence for understanding the evolution of humans and the origin of our species.

It is so distinctive in shape that some of the team have suggested declaring the skull as a new species of the genus Homo, and it has been dubbed Dragon Man, or Homo longi. The name is derived from the Long Jiang, or Dragon River, in the Heilongjiang province of China.

Chris Stringer, a human evolution expert at the Museum, studied the skull alongside Ji and their team.

Comment: This comes on the heels of a related discovery in Israel: Nesher Ramla Homo type - a prehistoric human previously unknown to science

See also: And check out SOTT radio's:

      Read More...
Video

Documents reveal CIA support for anti-Iranian propaganda film Argo, butchering of history

Tom Secker
Press TV
Tue, 22 Jun 2021 01:09 UTC
ARGO-CIA
© Press TV
The 2012 spy comedy-drama Argo was a massive critical and commercial success, and while the CIA's support for the film was an open secret, until now the details on how and why the Agency helped to make Argo were hard to come by. In response to a FOIA request made in 2012, the CIA recently released over 200 pages of documents about their role in the making of Argo, providing a glimpse behind the curtain of why the CIA is working with Hollywood.

Argo tells the story of six US State Department employees who fled the US embassy in Tehran during the 1979 revolution, and were hiding out in the city. The CIA's Tony Mendez came up with the idea of pretending they were a Hollywood film crew, so he could sneak them out of Iran. The CIA, with the help of assets in Tinseltown, set up a fake production company and bought the rights to a sci-fi script, titled Argo, before Mendez traveled to Tehran and exfiltrated the six government employees.
      Read More...
Info

Nesher Ramla Homo type - a prehistoric human previously unknown to science


Binghamton University,
Thu, 24 Jun 2021 18:49 UTC
Nesher Ramla human mandible
© Avi Levin and Ilan Theiler, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University
The Nesher Ramla human mandible (left) and parietal bone (right).
Analysis of recently discovered fossils found in Israel suggest that interactions between different human species were more complex than previously believed, according to a team of researchers including Binghamton University anthropology professor Rolf Quam.

The research team, led by Israel Hershkovitz from Tel Aviv University, published its findings in Science, describing recently discovered fossils from the site of Nesher Ramla in Israel. The Nesher Ramla site dates to about 120,000-140,000 years ago, toward the very end of the Middle Pleistocene period.

The human fossils were found by Yossi Zaidner of the Hebrew University during salvage excavations at the Nesher Ramla prehistoric site, near the city of Ramla. Digging down about 8 meters, the excavators found large quantities of animal bones, including from horses, fallow deer and aurochs, as well as stone tools and human bones. The human fossils consist of a partial cranial vault and a mandible. Researchers made virtual reconstructions of the fossils to analyze them using sophisticated computer software programs and to compare them with other fossils from Europe, Africa and Asia. The results suggest that the Nesher Ramla fossils represent late survivors of a population of humans who lived in the Middle East during the Middle Pleistocene period.

"The oldest fossils that show Neandertal features are found in Wesern Europe, so researchers generally believe the Neandertals originated there," said Quam. "However, migrations of different species from the Middle East into Europe may have provided genetic contributions to the Neandertal gene pool during the course of their evolution."
      Read More...
Comet 2

Comet strike 13,000-years-ago may have sparked civilisation shift


The University of Edinburgh
Thu, 24 Jun 2021 18:34 UTC
A cluster of comet fragments believed to have hit Earth nearly 13,000 years ago may have shaped the origins of human civilisation, research suggests.
Archaeological site in Arizona, US,
© Comet Research Group
Archaeological site in Arizona, US, with a distinctive black layer, indicating substantial environmental changes beginning about 10,800 BC, with impact debris at its base.
Possibly the most devastating cosmic impact since the extinction of the dinosaurs, it appears to coincide with major shifts in how human societies organised themselves, researchers say.

Their analysis backs up claims that an impact occurred prior to start of the Neolithic period in the so-called Fertile Crescent of southwest Asia.

During that time, humans in the region - which spans parts of modern-day countries such as Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon - switched from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to ones centred on agriculture and the creation of permanent settlements.

Catastrophic event

It is thought that the comet strike - known as the Younger Dryas impact - also wiped out many large animal species and ushered in a mini ice age that lasted more than 1,000 years.

Since it was proposed in 2007, the theory about the catastrophic comet strike has been the subject of heated debate and much academic research.

Now, researchers from the University of Edinburgh have reviewed evidence assessing the likelihood that an impact took place, and how the event may have unfolded.
      Read More...
Colosseum

Being Anglo-Saxon was a matter of language and culture, not genetics

University of Sydney
Eureka Alert
Wed, 23 Jun 2021 19:14 UTC
Sutton Hoo
© Elissa Blake/University of Sydney
The famous Anglo-Saxon Sutton Hoo helmet from about 625 CE, part of the British Museum collection. Photo: Elissa Blake/University of Sydney view more
A new study from archaeologists at University of Sydney and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, has provided important new evidence to answer the question "Who exactly were the Anglo-Saxons?"

New findings based on studying skeletal remains clearly indicates the Anglo-Saxons were a melting pot of people from both migrant and local cultural groups and not one homogenous group from Western Europe.

Professor Keith Dobney at the University of Sydney said the team's results indicate that "the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of early Medieval Britain were strikingly similar to contemporary Britain - full of people of different ancestries sharing a common language and culture".

Comment: On the Anglo-Saxon issue, Laura Knight-Jadczyk in Meteorites, Asteroids, and Comets: Damages, Disasters, Injuries, Deaths, and Very Close Calls writes:
Until that point in time, the Britons had held control of post-Roman Britain, keeping the Anglo-Saxons isolated and suppressed. After the Romans were gone, the Britons maintained the status quo, living in towns, with elected officials, and carrying on trade with the empire. After AD 536, the year reported as the "death of Arthur", the Britons, the ancient Cymric empire that at one time had stretched from Cornwall in the south to Strathclyde in the north, all but disappeared, and were replaced by Anglo-Saxons. There is much debate among scholars as to whether the Anglo-Saxons killed all of the Britons, or assimilated them. Here we must consider that they were victims of possibly many overhead cometary explosions which wiped out most of the population of Europe, plunging it into the Dark Ages which were, apparently, really DARK, atmospherically speaking.
For further insight into the issue raised in the article, see: Time to axe the Anglo-Saxons? Rethinking the 'migration period'

See also: Also check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: Who was Jesus? Examining the evidence that Christ may in fact have been Caesar!

      Read More...
Briefcase

They've done this before: Five past cases of FBI incitement


Revolver
Mon, 21 Jun 2021 00:00 UTC
Wray
© revolvernews
FBI Director Christopher Wray
Last week, Revolver highlighted the disturbing number of key figures in the January 6 Capitol incident who have gone unnamed and unindicted even as the number of criminal cases federal officials have brought spirals into the hundreds. Read it here if you've been living under a rock.

By now, it is a distinct possibility that many participants in the January 6 "riot" were associated with the government in some manner, be it as informants or full-blown agents. America's regime media is deeply committed to the narrative of January 6 as a planned "insurrection," so they have flailed desperately to debunk reporting by Revolver as well as Fox's "Tucker Carlson Tonight." Twitter's "neutral" "aggregators" made a cringeworthy clarification that only further bolstered Revolver's claims.

Revolver will continue to report out the story of the Capitol incident and the federal government's potential role in instigating it. But there is another reason to suspect federal involvement in January 6: The federal government has a decades-long history of this exact behavior. Revolver has already reported extensively on the phony "plot" against Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, where five out of eighteen core plotters were actually connected to the federal government. But there are countless additional incidents, all over the country, stretching all the way back to the 1950s.

Now, for your edification, we would like to present five of the most egregious incidents of the federal government inciting the crimes it claims to be fighting:
      Read More...
Blue Planet

The lush reservoirs of the ancient Maya

Michael Miller, University of Cincinnati
Phys.org
Tue, 22 Jun 2021 12:00 UTC
Tikal
© UC
University of Cincinnati biology professor David Lentz stands in front of a pyramid at Tikal in Guatemala.
The ancient Maya city of Tikal was a bustling metropolis and home to tens of thousands of people.

The city comprised roads, paved plazas, towering pyramids, temples and palaces and thousands of homes for its residents, all supported by agriculture.

Now researchers at the University of Cincinnati say Tikal's reservoirs — critical sources of city drinking water — were lined with trees and wild vegetation that would have provided scenic natural beauty in the heart of the busy city.

Comment: Despite clearly being aware of the value of clean water, with the Maya having invented a purification system that is known as one of the oldest and most effective in the Western hemisphere, eventually the reservoirs became so polluted with toxins that the water would have been undrinkable.

See also:

      Read More...
Better Earth

On Nasser's fight for Arab independence and a free Palestine

Cynthia Chung
Strategic Culture Foundation
Tue, 15 Jun 2021 00:00 UTC
Nasser's fight
In the 1950s the so-called enemy of the West was not only Moscow but the Third World's emerging nationalists, from Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt to Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran. The United States and Britain staged a coup d'état against Mossadegh, and used the Muslim Brotherhood, a terrorist movement and the grandfather organization of the militant Islamic right, in an attempt to remove Nasser, the leader of the Arab nationalists.

In the 1960s, left wing nationalism and Arab socialism spread from Egypt to Algeria to Syria, Iraq and Palestine. This emergence presented a threat to the old imperialist game of Great Britain, to which the United States was a recent recruit of, and thus they decided to forge a working alliance with Saudi Arabia intent on using Wahhabi fundamentalism as their foreign policy arm in the Middle East, along with the Muslim Brotherhood.

This paper will go through the carving up of the Middle East under Sykes-Picot, the British creation of Saudi Arabia and Israel and the British occupation of Palestine, the origin of the Muslim Brotherhood and Nasser's fight for Arab independence. In a follow-up paper, I will discuss the role of the City of London in facilitating the bankroll of the first Islamic fundamentalist state Saudi Arabia, along with the Muslim Brotherhood and its terrorist apparatus.
      Read More...
Dig

Mystery of dark-age grave exhumations probed by archeologists


Sputnik
Mon, 21 Jun 2021 21:58 UTC
sword
© Ca' Foscari University of Venice/Andrea Avezzù
The practice of re-opening graves to remove symbolic items, including swords from men's burials and broaches from women's, spread widely across Europe in the sixth century but died out in the eighth. The motives for the practice remain unknown.

Archaeologists are trying to solve the riddle of why people of the Dark Ages, from Romania to Anglo-Saxon England, commonly reopened the graves of their own dead to remove specific items.
"The practice of reopening and manipulating graves soon after burial, traditionally described — and dismissed — as 'robbing,' is documented at cemeteries from Transylvania to southern England," said a team of Swedish, Austrian, Dutch and German scholars, writing in a paper published in the journal Antiquity on Friday.

Comment: This appears to coincide with another early burial practice that archeologists concluded revealed just how interconnected the peoples of Europe were:
"[...] a key change in Western European burial practices spread across the continent faster than previously believed — between the 6th — 8th centuries AD, burying people with regionally specific grave goods was largely abandoned in favor of a more standardized, unfurnished burial.

"Almost everyone from the eighth century onwards is buried very simply in a plain grave, with no accompanying objects, and this is a change that has been observed right across western Europe,"
One wonders just what could have caused such a shift in the beliefs and practices of people across much of Europe?

See also:

      Read More...
Blue Planet

35,000 year old cave paintings may depict ice age sign language

Nala Rogers
Inside Science
Fri, 18 Jun 2021 20:48 UTC
hand stencils
© Sarah2 via Shutterstock
A modern artist's recreation of prehistoric hand stencils found in caves.
Tens of thousands of years ago in what is now Europe, people held their hands against cave walls and blew a spray of paint, leaving bare rock where their hands had rested. Many of these stencils show all five fingers, but in some, fingers appear to be shortened or missing.

Researchers have proposed grisly explanations for these absent digits: Perhaps the artists lost fingers to frostbite or disease, or perhaps they endured amputations for ritual purposes or punishment. But other experts have long argued that it's more likely they weren't missing any fingers at all. Instead, the stone age artists may have been folding their fingers down to make hand signs -- possibly humanity's earliest venture into writing on the wall.

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

      Read More...
Amazon Smile
Revolt! T-shirts