Discovery of new human species?
In a handful of fossilized teeth and bones, scientists say they’ve found evidence of a previously unknown human species that lived in what is now the Philippines about 50,000 years ago. The discovery deepens the mystery of an era when the world was a melting pot of many different human kinds on the move.
Small-jawed with dainty teeth, able to walk upright but with feet still shaped to climb, these island creatures were a mix-and-match patchwork of primitive and advanced features in a unique variation of the human form, the scientists reported Wednesday in the journal Nature…
Using a technique called uranium-series testing, which measures the rate of radioactive decay in a sample, the scientists determined that the bones dated to a time between 50,000 and 67,000 years ago.
The creature’s teeth, toes and finger bones appear to mix aspects of the other human species in existence elsewhere at the time, including Homo sapiens, Denisovans, Neanderthals, Homo naledi and Homo floresiensis, nicknamed the hobbit species for its small stature and big feet.
So far, the scientists haven’t found evidence that these creatures used tools to hunt or to process their food, which might indicate how highly developed their brains might have been. The scientists also have been unable to isolate DNA from the bones and teeth that could be used to understand how closely they were related to other human species.
And this seems especially interesting:
The scientists also don’t know how these creatures reached the island, which was isolated from the mainland of Asia in that primordial era by deep ocean, just as today. Their more primitive ancestors may have been washed ashore on storm-driven debris or perhaps sailed on rafts, as much as 700,000 years ago, they said.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
– Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio
They probably tasted like chicken.
Everything tastes like chicken if you are a salt water crocodile.
Durned WSJ.
*M87star* is a tastier science cake today, as only on one day is the first photo of a black hole shown to mankind. And 6.4 billion solar masses at 55 million light years distant? Yeeps.
I read somewhere that all the fossils of early humans could fit on a large conference room table.
I have no doubts that “aging” these fossils can accomplished with a high degree of accuracy (+/- 10,000 yrs or so) , but the amount of fossils obtained from a given site is usually very small; say a pinky bone, a partial jaw, etc. (Olduvai Gorge , Tanzania is a notable exception – all sorts of early human/ape was found there; a real mother lode).
For the most part they only recover small bits of the entire human/ape/ape-human (e.g., Denisovan bones)
And I realize that DNA or other genetic material is oft times recovered/analyzed to help assign where the human/ape/ape-human may fit within the entire scheme of human evolution.
But the reality is they have not a clue if the bones they recover are predecessors of extinct apes, chimps , humans or a combination thereof.
After all, modern day humans and chimps share something like 95% of their DNA, yet these are two totally distinct species today; the DNA similarity only suggesting? affirming? a common ancestor a few million years ago.
And while the “collected” evidence shows that the earliest humans emerged from Africa, and all the evolutionary tree mappings exhibit this , imagine if a significant pre-human/human/pre-ape/pre-ape, human) far older than any other remains was found in ,say, Uzbekistan or India or in the Ural Mountains of Russia.
It literally would upset the ENTIRE edifice constructed based upon heretofore scant evidence. It would be the equivalent of Trump beating Hillary; an impossibility !!
Finding pre-human fossils is totally dumb luck; like winning the powerball lottery except finding pre-human fossils odds are far worse then winning the powerball.
And it’s human nature to attempt to fit evidence into a logical sequence of sorts, even if there is no logical sequence.
The paucity of evidence – at least so far- suggests that much of what we read about the human tree of evolution is merely conjecture. Just because scientists believe that “X” must fit next to and downstream of “Z” is only a guess.
Think of it this way; some fossils are found that share 95% of the human DNA. Is it a pre-human? an extinct ape? a pre-human/ape creature? What?
Oh, it’s a bunch of chimp bones that somehow, due to the vagaries of nature and geology, buried itself in soil deposits 750,000 years old .
Evolution studies are indeed interesting, fascinating; but let’s face it , it’s mostly guess work based on tiny bits of information that dumb luck has made available.
it’s mostly guess work based on tiny bits of information
It’s the “consistent with” or correlation is causation of modern science. In one instance, they inferred a sea monster from a single tooth. They infer a universe from signals with presumed fidelity based on assumptions/assertions of the intermediate space and sources. And, yet, we cannot reach a consensus when a human life (“person”) begins her evolution. The conventional belief is that it is a product of spontaneous conception (“viability”)… or maybe that’s just what they tell themselves. In Stork They Trust. We have entered the Twilight Fringe.
Agree with Mr. Tyler. Tend to view these sorts of articles with a big hunk of rock salt.
n.n,
I’m guessing the pay is pretty good. Why should they care whether or not their conjectures are correct?
NEO,
FYI … the ability to edit posted comments appears to be missing.
Why can’t they find an ancient race of people wherein the women were even better looking, healthier, and sexier than today …? That’s what I want to know.
How come all these ancient races of people featured women that were short, ugly, and had giant prehensile feet? Geez, couldn’t evolution do any better? Are we going to dig up nothing from now til kingdom come but monkey faced dwarves, knock-kneed, skinny shank shufflers, with giant cheekbones and receding chins?
Two million years and no “girl next doors”? Why not?! Inquiring minds demand an answer!
And there is a mystery scientists should really be working on.
DNW: The Cro-Magnon men and women from 40,000-10,000 years ago were pretty good-looking — the first prominent chins! — and were taller, had strong musculature and bigger brains than the ordinary run of homo sapiens who followed.
Wherever the truth lands on this latest branch of the family, my bet is we’ve all been sailors for a very long time.
I once read a fascinating article on Polynesian seafaring. While those boys didn’t have the compass and sextant, but they still brought some serious tech to the table in terms of minute observations of winds, wave, weather, sea color and passed-down history.
I don’t believe humans ended up in the Philippines or Australia via “storm-driven debris.” If they did, they were already out at sea intentionally.
JohnTyler on April 10, 2019 at 6:46 pm at 6:46 pm said:
I read somewhere that all the fossils of early humans could fit on a large conference room table.
* * *
Interesting — the layperson reading these report headlines kind of assumes the scientists have a pretty much complete skeleton, but that never seems to be the case.
Even Sherlock Holmes doesn’t make the kind of far-flung assertions they do on so little evidence.
Well, this is nothing but conjecture without more data. Sort of like global whatever.
After all, modern day humans and chimps share something like 95% of their DNA, yet these are two totally distinct species today; the DNA similarity only suggesting?
They don’t share 95%. They share something like 68%. The media and popular science refused to tell you that they threw out the “junk DNA” that didn’t match, because they didn’t understand what that DNA did.
And what the media refuses to print as news for you to take, most people stay ignorant that way.
Recent tests redone on so called dinosaur bones shows living tissue within the bones. Absolutely impossible after millions of years. Also, they showed different carbon dating for different bones, as if they had pieced together these dino saur skeletons from disparate sources.
Incidentally, the first dinosaur theory pushers were these side show con artists.
Also incidentally, large bones were found ,but they generally tended to be humanoid giant bones near Illinois and clustered thereabouts. That was a problem the Smithsonian had to clean up, as it would directly contradict the theory of evolution, that humans started small and stupid and got bigger and smarter.
Aesop, of course they do not have complete skeletons. The only complete giant skeletons people have are of humanoids. Go look it up.
They make inferences and educated guesses. Little better than those found on internet comment sections.
Prehensile toes? Bah — who cares. Nothing new. That’s how Nancy Pelosi is able to sleep hanging from the ceiling.
Would Bigfoot have a complete skeleton if he had lived in Illinois? Do people who make stuff up in comments sections live in glass houses? Ask the Smithsonian.
“Clean up on isle three.”
Here’s a discovery quite a bit more recent but fascinating because of its local ramifications and its poignancy.
https://www.foxnews.com/science/cherokee-writing-alabama-cave-decoded
Prehensile toes? Bah — who cares. Nothing new. That’s how Nancy Pelosi is able to sleep hanging from the ceiling.
That’s how I pick my socks up off the floor. Doesn’t everyone?
Then there’s the case of Piltdown Man — a candidate for the missing link based on fragments of a human skull, an orangutan jaw and some chimpanzee teeth. The hoax stood for 45 years.
Mike Oldfield wrote a fun passage titled “Piltdown Man,” complete with caveman howling and growling in some proto-language, which appears on the second side of “Tubular Bells.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M70A9yTGZl8
sdferr,
While I was happy to see the blackhole “image” on the front page of the WSJ when I opened it and spread it out for my kids’ to, hopefully, read when they make it down to the kitchen table after my departure this morning, I wish reporters were more careful about using the word, “photograph.” That image was created from whole cloth based on interpretations of data. It’s almost definitely what that region would look like if it could be viewed by the human eye, or with a human eye or camera using an optical telescope. But it is not an optical image. It is computer generated.
And very, very cool!!
JohnTyler,
Very apt comment. My theory is we will get many nearly certain answers about human evolution and migration, as well as the evolution of all species in the near future; 10 – 20 years.
As DNA testing drops in cost and more and more living humans voluntarily opt in to DNA databases, coupled with the incredible processing power of modern computers, these answers will almost certainly be flushed out stastically. Computers will be able to “rewind” migratory patterns based on propensity of certain DNA patterns in certain regions as well as “devolving” evolution through statistical analysis of evolutionary mutation patterns.
Most of our best guesses based on physical evidence will likely be proved correct, but there will probably be some fun surprises. Maybe foxes evolved from ancient rodents, rather than felines or canines. Maybe dolphin evolved independently of blue whales from independent occurences of land dwelling animals evolving to return to the seas. Stuff like that.
Regarding humans, I also think DNA will make it obvious that our ancestors were almost universally very brutal and xenophobic. I won’t be surprised to find the statistics indicate most unique tribes abandoned or ostracised off-spring that didn’t meet locally desired traits. I’ll bet most all human groups “sped up” natural selection by artifically eliminating traits they did not like.
In other words, I’ll bet our noble savage ancestors were a lot more savage than noble regarding groups outside of their families and tribes.
Speaking of new forms of life, a report out yesterday told of a women who called the police, because she could hear someone in her bathroom making strange noises, so she locked the bathroom door, and called 911.
A SWAT team plus a K-9 unit was sent to her house, they burst into the house to discover that strange noises were, indeed, coming from her bathroom.
After calling several times for the intruder to come out and show himself, police cautiously opened the door, and discovered a trapped ROOMBA that was bumping into the walls and, no doubt, making some strange noises, as it attempted to escape the locked bathroom to continue on its cleaning route.
See https://www.facebook.com/WCSOOregon/photos/a.56915846935/10156668897616936/?type=3&theaterlocked room and finish its route.
Rufus T. Firefly:
Even without DNA analysis that’s where the data is going.
___________________________________________________
Several archaeologists and anthropologists now argue that violence was much more pervasive in hunter-gatherer society than in more recent eras. From the !Kung in the Kalahari to the Inuit in the Arctic and the aborigines in Australia, two-thirds of modern hunter-gatherers are in a state of almost constant tribal warfare, and nearly 90% go to war at least once a year. War is a big word for dawn raids, skirmishes and lots of posturing, but death rates are high—usually around 25-30% of adult males die from homicide. The warfare death rate of 0.5% of the population per year that Lawrence Keeley of the University of Illinois calculates as typical of hunter-gatherer societies would equate to 2 billion people dying during the 20th century.
At first, anthropologists were inclined to think this a modern pathology. But it is increasingly looking as if it is the natural state. Richard Wrangham of Harvard University says that chimpanzees and human beings are the only animals in which males engage in co-operative and systematic homicidal raids. The death rate is similar in the two species. Steven LeBlanc, also of Harvard, says Rousseauian wishful thinking has led academics to overlook evidence of constant violence.
–Hunter-gatherers: Noble or savage?
https://www.economist.com/node/10278703
Hmm. The link above only provides a few teaser paragraphs. Try the print version to read the whole thing:
https://www.economist.com/node/10278703/print
The article goes on to say:
____________________________________________________
Constant warfare was necessary to keep population density down to one person per square mile. Farmers can live at 100 times that density. Hunter-gatherers may have been so lithe and healthy because the weak were dead. The invention of agriculture and the advent of settled society merely swapped high mortality for high morbidity, allowing people some relief from chronic warfare so they could at least grind out an existence, rather than being ground out of existence altogether.
____________________________________________________
Which is probably why Cro-Magnons were a better-looking crew than the proto-European farmers who followed.
It’s a pity they didn’t get DNA on the new finds.
______
The image of the black hole at the center of galaxy M87 is really cool. It doesn’t seem that long to me since we were questioning the existence of real black holes, to discovering that all galaxies have black holes at their center, to having an image of one along with it’s “shadow.”
The best article on it that I’ve found is this one at physicsworld.
The image looks quite blurry because of the limited resolution of the “Event Horizon Telescope” in spite of it having the highest resolution ever. A nice visual interpretation of what you are seeing is given by the trio of photos 2/3’s of the way into the physicsworld article. The 1st is the EHT telescope image, the 2nd is a computer model of what they think they are looking at, the 3rd is the computer model blurred by the limiting resolution of the telescope. Images 1 and 3 are not exactly the same, but close.
As Rufus T. F. says, the image is not a photograph as these are radio telescopes operating at 1.3mm, i.e. short microwaves. I wouldn’t call the image just a collection of data however. These radio telescopes located around the world each have their own atomic clocks and are phase synchronized to very high accuracy. Virtually all high res. telescopes these days, optical or otherwise, use multiple mirrors or reflectors, where the signals are phase synchronize and re-combined. Here is a Wikipedia graphic summarizing what the big optical telescope mirrors look like.
The “shadow” of the black hole is interesting. As matter is pulled into the black hole, the tremendous acceleration and velocity causes it to radiate a lot of radiation before it hits the event horizon where no light can escape. Also, the center of a galaxy is a bright place with lots of stars around.
One expects that the center of a black hole looks black, but when we image that dark region it’s apparently about 3 times larger than the physical event horizon, because the “light” we see has been bent by the intense gravitational field of the hole.
Wikipedia has a nifty computer simulation, here, of what a completely black (no accretion disk) black hole would look like if it passed in front of a spiral galaxy, like our own Milky Way. I think you can see how the black region gets much bigger in the middle of the animation.
These little critters (and others like them) were almost certainly wiped off the map by the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia 70,000-odd years ago. It spewed out 700 cubic miles of magma and the resulting ash cloud lowered average temperatures (already in the depth of the last glacial advance / ice age) by as much as 20 degrees. The only hominids left standing (not counting Neanderthals) were huddled in central Africa. A fluke of history that changed everything . . .
“As Rufus T. F. says, the image is not a photograph as these are radio telescopes operating at 1.3mm, i.e. short microwaves.”
Actually it is a photograph as long as you define a “photograph” as an image built from a collection of photons. In this case the photons are in the radio region rather than in the visible region. They increased the resolution by using Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) which allowed them to basically combine signals from multiple telescopes to create an effective radio telescope the diameter of the earth. As the resolution of an optical device is proportional to its optical diameter they were able to achieve the resolution needed to view the BH.
huxley on April 11, 2019 at 3:00 pm at 3:00 pm said:
Hmm. The link above only provides a few teaser paragraphs. Try the print version to read the whole thing:
https://www.economist.com/node/10278703/print
* * *
Gotta love the pro-forma call-out in the final paragraph, from back in 2007.
“There is a modern moral in this story. We have been creating ecological crises for ourselves and our habitats for tens of thousands of years. We have been solving them, too. Pessimists will point out that each solution only brings us face to face with the next crisis, optimists that no crisis has proved insoluble yet. Just as we rebounded from the extinction of the megafauna and became even more numerous by eating first rabbits then grass seeds, so in the early 20th century we faced starvation for lack of fertiliser when the population was a billion people, but can now look forward with confidence to feeding 10 billion on less land using synthetic nitrogen, genetically high-yield crops and tractors. When we eventually reverse the build-up in carbon dioxide, there will be another issue waiting for us.”
The new issue will be addressing starvation, because IF we even can reverse the “build-up” in CO2, being humans, we will overdue it and create a deficit that will be much more dangerous than the alleged “global warming” problem.
Sad news: Israeli spacecraft Beresheet had an early main engine cutout and therefore smash landed on the lunar surface this afternoon. Good effort falls short yet there seem to be vows to try again.
I’ve written here before about an intro undergrad Physical Anthropology course I took several decades ago, and how the TA who taught our section firmly believed that “man is not a killer,” and manipulated the evidence to conform to his belief.
Thus, in his view, primitive men were not hunters and killers, but rather scavengers i.e. that our ancestors didn’t kill big game, but that it was larger predators which killed big game and ate their fill and then, human scavengers—waiting in the shadows—crept in and ate whatever remained.
A lot of these lessons revolved around famous discoveries printed up in offprints of seminal articles, and one that he was teaching from involved a famous find of the skeleton of a Mammoth with a Clovis spearpoint embedded in its rib cage.
Well, our little TA twisted everything around to fit his beliefs, he ignored what was written in the offprints we were given and, instead, as he taught it, this find was not at all evidence that it was human hunters who killed this Mammoth.
Instead, according to him, this spearpoint was located on a hill overlooking the site where this Mammoth just laid down and died and, just by happenstance, a flood came along, washed the Clovis point down the hill, where it just happened to lodge in the Mammoth’s rib cage.
Apparently this TA had never heard of Occam’s Razor.
I wonder just how many classes these days are also taught crap like this, so as to conform to some academic’s belief in Global Warming, or some other Lefty theory like it.
Cont’d–Rousseau’s concept of the “noble savage” has a lot to answer for.
In the Southwest you always see pictures of Canyon de Chelly, hear about Chaco Canyon, and the ”peaceful” “Old Ones,” the “Anasazi,” (the word “Anasazi” a Navajo word meaning “ancient enemy”) the Pueblo farming people who were the ancestors of modern day Hopis, Zunis, and other Pueblo peoples.
But it turns out that there is accumulating evidence that they weren’t so “peaceful.”
Thus, I am sure that it was with horror that establishment anthropologists greeted the material collected by University of Arizona Physical Anthropologist Christy Turner, three decades ago, in which he marshaled physical evidence from thirty eight sites that he said showed evidence that cannibalism had occurred at them, a theory that is still being fought against today.
The standard received anthropological wisdom was and still, apparently, mostly still is, to deny the there is any solid evidence of cannibalism among these supposedly “peaceful” native Americans.
So that, for instance, any cut marks or other marks on bones have been explained away as somehow occurring due to some other natural cause, rather than being evidence of systematic cannibalism.
But, unfortunately, more recently, along came other anthropologists, who found ancient human feces—paleofeces—in the campfire at sites in conjunction with physical evidence of such cannibalism, and, upon testing, these paleofeces were demonstrated to contain Human DNA i.e. whoever “deposited” them had eaten human flesh.
See https://www.nature.com/articles/35024064 https://www.nature.com/articles/35024064
See also https://www.deseretnews.com/article/781308/Tests-show-cannibalism-in-Anasazi.html
See also https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-dec-20-me-55814-story.html
See also http://www.trussel.com/prehist/news128.htm
See also https://www.amazon.com/Man-Corn-Cannibalism-Prehistoric-Southwest/dp/0874809681
And, finally, see also this little tidbit at https://redditblog.com/2016/01/20/dining-with-cannibals-why-eating-human-brains-can-kill-you/?ref_source=upvoted&ref_campaign=issue40_20160124&ref=tier5_explainlikeimfive&ref_type=copy1
Napoleon Chagnon used to catch leftists’ holy hell for his reports on Amazonians’ violence as I recollect. Don’t think the lefties called what they were doing political science though.
Barry Meislin on April 11, 2019 at 12:12 pm at 12:12 pm said:
Here’s a discovery quite a bit more recent but fascinating because of its local ramifications and its poignancy.
https://www.foxnews.com/science/cherokee-writing-alabama-cave-decoded
* * *
Very interesting, especially the backward writing for the spirits in the rock to read.
A good friend of mine wrote a ficiton book for Junior readers about the development of the Cherokee writing system.
Making the Leaves Talk, Elaine Marie Alphin, 2007.
FWIW, my Grandad always said his mom was one-quarter Cherokee, but she could not get the documentation to prove it. According to the linked article, a lot of people on the Trail of Tears did escape, but then they would necessarily not be enrolled in the tribe when it was censused later.
Sadly, my DNA test doesn’t even allow me the 1/1024 percent that would get me into Harvard.
Yes, I was amazed to discover that spirits actually knew HOW to read. (I had always thought they preferred more efficient methods of communication such as, say, telepathy.)
Most interesting, for me at least, was the stickball-baseball continuum and how this might change the whole history of “America’s pastime”. (Kind of like how the Iroquoian “Great Law of Peace” was the inspiration behind the of Declaration of Independence”, etc. etc.) Now I don’t know if Abner Doubleday will be having nightmares about this (telepathically, of course) or whether the Hall of Fame will be moving from Cooperstown down to Florida or Alabama (or wherever) any time soon, but it is kind of interesting.
(I also wondered why Elizabeth Warren wasn’t cited by the article, or at least asked for a comment—she’s always good for a comment on practically anything…. And since very few people pay any attention to her, it’s all fairly harmless.)
Most interesting discussion. Thanks to all! A lot of reading of the links lies ahead of me.
. . .
One correction: “HER” is NOT a possessive (nor an indirect-object) pronoun of unspecified gender. That pronoun is “his” or “him.” The other pronoun “he” and its various forms, that refer specifically to a male person (or other critter), is completely different in meaning. Which is meant is almost always easily understood from the context.
Similarly, “man” may mean a male human, or it may mean “a member of mankind: i.e., of humankind.”
PC has no place in determining rules of grammar — in any language.
Rufus is correct about the distinction, as NASA has managed to cleverly mislead people into thinking their space art are actual photos. Scientific orthodoxy tends to take shortcuts that lead into corruption once there is enough money involved and somebody else does it too. Case in point, see Climate Change data manipulation.
Every scientist doing an experiment has bias, but when Climate Change gives them government bucks to falsify data, that’s an entirely different issue.
The reason for the space art aka photography, is that classical physics has need of these public reaction gigs to help distract people from the fundamental problems of the theory of gravity.
Newton failed to solve the Three Body Problem of gravity, and it still remains unresolved today, even as NASA uses Newtonian equations and physics to risk life, limb, man, and machine in space. Shouldn’t that be a concern of theirs? Nope, sit back down peon on Earth where you belong.
Dark Matter and energy is this unobservable phenomenon, invisible, that patches up the holes in Einstein’s Relativity math. So of course they have to massage the data they obtain and say “see, black holes” to distract from how a black hole isn’t what people think it is given the flaws in the fundamental physics work.
Astrophysics or cosmology, has a margin of error 120 zeroes long. Yes, you read that right. 120 zeroes. 10 to the power 120. If they don’t manage to show the masses and public some cool looking “photos” of “black holes”, their funding may get cut.
https://youtu.be/xciCJfbTvE4?t=2073
These colored, high def (back then), video of the Apollo missions provide interesting data on what actually happened with the photos of Earth from space.
“NASA”.
As fairly usual for laypersons, most commenters there are skeptical how so far-reaching claims were made on so little evidence. At best they accept the conclusions as mere “educated guesses”. Actually, there is much more to this than that. This is called paleontological method, and it has a whole century behind it to develop and refine. It is based on comparative morphology developed by Cuvier and later evolving into evolutionary morphology. I could have given a whole lecture about these disciplines, but even basic concepts of them are too involved for non-biologists to learn them without investing into it a whole semester of university-level study. Just imagine that a trained specialist can infer a rather full description of the animal, its place on the tree of biological systematics, its ecological niche and way of life from a single digit of a toe and several tooth specimen.
Actually, there is much more to this than that. This is called paleontological method,
Your interlocutors are skeptical of the Wikiality of narrow professional subcultures. As they should be.
This narrow professional subculture is called a science, and skepticism of amateurs toward any science looks very funny to scientists.
TommyJay on April 11, 2019 at 3:02 pm at 3:02 pm said:
It’s a pity they didn’t get DNA on the new finds.
* * *
Maybe not on those, but this israeli cool.
https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(17)30276-8
“The Canaanites inhabited the Levant region during the Bronze Age and established a culture that became influential in the Near East and beyond. However, the Canaanites, unlike most other ancient Near Easterners of this period, left few surviving textual records and thus their origin and relationship to ancient and present-day populations remain unclear. In this study, we sequenced five whole genomes from ?3,700-year-old individuals from the city of Sidon, a major Canaanite city-state on the Eastern Mediterranean coast. We also sequenced the genomes of 99 individuals from present-day Lebanon to catalog modern Levantine genetic diversity. We find that a Bronze Age Canaanite-related ancestry was widespread in the region, shared among urban populations inhabiting the coast (Sidon) and inland populations (Jordan) who likely lived in farming societies or were pastoral nomads. This Canaanite-related ancestry derived from mixture between local Neolithic populations and eastern migrants genetically related to Chalcolithic Iranians. We estimate, using linkage-disequilibrium decay patterns, that admixture occurred 6,600–3,550 years ago, coinciding with recorded massive population movements in Mesopotamia during the mid-Holocene. We show that present-day Lebanese derive most of their ancestry from a Canaanite-related population, which therefore implies substantial genetic continuity in the Levant since at least the Bronze Age. In addition, we find Eurasian ancestry in the Lebanese not present in Bronze Age or earlier Levantines. We estimate that this Eurasian ancestry arrived in the Levant around 3,750–2,170 years ago during a period of successive conquests by distant populations.”
It is predictable that the Japanese/internationals would crash their attempted landing. As the telemetry is controlled from NASA and they launched from a NASA, station. Although it wouldn’t matter if they copied NASA and launched from the RUssian stations.
The Japanese or Israeli private corporation might actually have been legit. The Deep State doesn’t allow legit companies to access certain realms.
Sit back down on Earth and pay your taxes, human livestock. Don’t talk back to the Deep State if you know what is good for you.
Rather than the idea of the “peaceful” “noble savage” whose Eden-like existence was destroyed by us horrible, vicious, and warlike European invaders—while tribes and cultures differed— the actual situation among primitive peoples here in North and Central America seems to generally have been one of almost constant raids, warfare, slave-taking, torture, and sometimes cannibalism.
But, anthropologists are in love with their subjects of study, and have resisted a much more realistic, full, and balanced picture of life among the Indians in North America—which include tribes like the Comanche and the Iroquois—prior to European contact.*
Then, of course, there are the cultures of Mesoamerica i.e. Mexico and Central America—the Olmecs, the Maya, Incas, Aztecs, Toltecs, etc.
It seems to me that here again, the less savory aspects of these apparently especially violent and blood-thirsty cultures—the Aztecs in particular—are downplayed or ignored.
Lots of pictures and discussions about their architecture, pyramids and extensive cities, their language and hieroglyphs, colorful costumes, road and counting systems, systems of agriculture, calendrical and astronomical knowledge, etc. but far less about their warfare, slavery, and human sacrifice on a grand scale—blood sacrifice, and bloody rituals including the flaying and tearing out the hearts of what where apparently cumulatively hundreds of thousands of individuals, and things like the several story high racks of skulls (Tzompantli) that scared the hell out of the first Spanish conquistadors, as they caught sight of and passed by them in the Aztec’s capitol city of Tenochtitlan, now buried underneath part of what his now Mexico city, and these Tzompantli were apparently also a feature of other cities as well. **
* See https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/north-american-indigenous-warfare-and-ritual-violence
** See https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4658112/Tower-human-skulls-Mexico.html
Cannibalism among the Anasazi–Cont’d–
Physical Anthropologist Christy Turner’s theory about cannibalism among the Anasazi is, that the Anasazi may have been a relatively peaceful farming people, but that they were moved in on by what we might think of as an extremely violent, “psychotic outlaw biker gang” ** which migrated northward from Mesoamerica—a group of thugs who practiced cannibalism—and which used cannibalism as a tool to terrorize, conquer, and to enslave the Anasazi.
Killing, butchering, and then eating members of the Anasazi, and then—carrying things even further, by defiling their presumably “sacred” home fires by defecating in them—was this gang’s ultimate terror technique, and their ultimate insult.
In reaction, theorized Turner, the Anasazi built and retreated into hard to find/reach and conquer walled settlements like those in Chaco Canyon.
** Moreover, the fact that a wide array of hallucinogenic drugs were commonly in use in Ancient Mesoamerica would likely have contributed to/intensified the violent and “psychotic” character of such a theorized gang. See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2173580814001527
Should be Canyon de Chelly, not Chaco Canyon.
P.S.—I’d imagine that it’s turning into a really great time to be an archeologist who focuses on ancient Mesoamerica.
New laser-based LIDAR technology has now given archeologists the ability to survey areas from the air, and to generate maps of the underlying terrain and the man-made structures that are today—in places like Guatemala—covered by hundreds of square miles of solid and impenetrable jungle, and invisible.
A 2018 National Geographic special on the impact of this new technology on the archeology of Mesoamerica showed how, using this technology, archeologists have newly discovered that the settlements/cities of the Maya that they had previously thought were few and isolated—one from the other—were actually both many times larger—in one instance an estimated 40 times lager—and many more in number than they had thought.
Moreover, that they were actually connected by a very sophisticated system of elevated roads, and that the jungle concealed a very extensive and sophisticated system of dikes, canals, reservoirs, other settlements, palaces, pyramids, defensive walls, ramparts, terraces, and fortresses—60,000 new buildings have been discovered so far—and that from just a partial survey of 800 square miles, 1/10th of the total proposed area to be surveyed.
This survey has also revealed that the jungle land long thought unsuitable for settlement and agriculture was, in fact, heavily populated, and had to have been intensively farmed to support the huge Mayan population of that time.
Another implication of these findings is that the ubiquity, number, and extent of these defensive walls, ramparts, and fortifications argues that warfare in Mayan civilization was far more general, extensive, and frequent, and involved a lot more manpower, than previous estimates had indicated.
In addition, given the number and widespread nature of these newly uncovered settlements, roads, irrigation systems, farmlands, and buildings, archeologist’s estimates of the population of the 15th century Mayan empire—the highest estimates formerly topping out at around five million people—have now jumped to ten to fifteen million or more, in an area just twice the size of Medieval England, but far more densely populated.
These new discoveries are now prompting some of these archeologists to say that Mayan culture—once thought to consist of just a few scattered and sparsely populated city states—was in actuality perhaps more comparable in sophistication to the cultures of Ancient Greece or China.
See https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/02/maya-laser-lidar-guatemala-pacunam/