Incoherent Catastrophism?

skepticink |  It happens now and then a perfectly good scientist takes hold of a crank idea and plunges headlong into pseudoscience. Olaus Rudbeck discovered the lymphatic system and wrote hefty tomes arguing that Plato’s Atlantis was located in Uppsala, Sweden. Velikovsky was an accredited psychiatrist. Several Young Earth Creationists have genuine scientific degrees from respected institutions. Anatoly Fomenko, creator of the lunatic New Chronology, is an eminent mathematician at Moscow University. Etc.

Martin Sweatman, a chemical engineer at Edinburgh University, is earning a place on that list with his “decoding” of ancient art as a form of astronomical notation. In a couple of peer-reviewed papers co-authored with Dimitrios Tsikritsis and Alistair Coombs, plus a number of blog posts and now a book, Sweatman claims statistical validation of his claims so powerful that no other interpretation has any chance of being correct. Any of us who quibble, according to him, simply don’t understand science.

Now, I have quibbled quite a bit already: an initial critique of his Gobekli Tepe paper, a response to his rebuttal, a parody paper applying his analytical method to a different database (Looney Tunes characters) with similarly dazzling success, and some lively discussion in the comments of both our blogs. At the risk of seeming obsessive, I’m taking up Sweatman’s challenge to critique his second paper, which extends his grand hypothesis forward to Catal Huyuk and backward to Paleolithic art, as far back as 40,000 years ago. As his second paper builds on the results from the first, however, it is necessary to cover some old ground.

Recap: Pillar 43 at Gobekli Tepe is the cornerstone of the analysis. Sweatman interprets some of its engravings as a constellation-map and some as solstice and equinox constellations, the two combining to form a “date-stamp” for 10,950 BC, the presumed date of the (highly controversial) Younger Dryas Impact. Applying a basic probability calculation, he concludes that his assumptions have been verified, and no other interpretation is possible.

What he actually demonstrates is how thoroughly a competent scientist can be seduced by wishful thinking. The paper is a dense pudding of circular reasoning, data taken out of context, and speculations that are subsequently treated as fact, all of which are clear markers of pseudoscience; errors and inconsistencies that Sweatman dismisses as irrelevant; and an overall amateurism with regard to the archaeology and iconography that is honestly beyond a joke. I’ve pointed some of these out in previous critiques, but there are points to add, and some that bear repeating.

Does the Symbolism at Gobekli Tepe Correlate with Asterisms?

phys.org |  A team of researchers with the University of Edinburgh has found what they describe as evidence of a comet striking the Earth at approximately the same time as the onset of the Younger Dryas in carvings on an ancient stone pillar in southern Turkey. The group has published their findings in the journal Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry. 

Prior evidence based on ice cores taken from Greenland has suggested that a strike by a comet may have led to the onset of the Younger Dryas—a period of Earth cooling that lasted for approximately 1000 years. Other evidence also suggests that the cooling period caused groups of people to band together to cultivate crops, leading to the development of agriculture, which in turn led to huge leaps in technological innovations and societal developments, i.e. Neolithic civilization. In this new effort, the researchers describe evidence they found on a stone pillar at Gobekli Tepe (the oldest known temple site) that aligns with the ice core findings—that a comet struck the Earth in approximately 10,950BC.

The pillar was created by the people of Gobekli Tepe and now appears to have served as a means of commemorating a devastating event—perhaps a comet breaking up and its remnants crashing into the Earth, causing an immediate environmental impact around the globe and possible loss of life (one of the characters on the pillar was of a headless human.) The team fed likenesses of the images carved onto the pillar (known as the vulture stone) into a computer to determine if they might be linked with constellations. Doing so revealed associations between characters on the pillar and astronomical symbols in the sky for the year 10,950 BC. The fact that the people took the time and considerable effort to create the characters on the pillar suggests something very important must have happened during the same time period that the Greenland ice core suggests a comet struck, approximately 10,890BC.

We have interpreted much of the symbolism of Göbekli Tepe in terms of astronomical events. By matching low-relief carvings on some of the pillars at Göbekli Tepe to star asterisms we find compelling evidence that the famous 'Vulture Stone' is a date stamp for 10950 BC ± 250 yrs, which corresponds closely to the proposed Younger Dryas event, estimated at 10890 BC. We also find evidence that a key function of Göbekli Tepe was to observe meteor showers and record cometary encounters. Indeed, the people of Göbekli Tepe appear to have had a special interest in the Taurid meteor stream, the same meteor stream that is proposed as responsible for the Younger-Dryas event. Is Göbekli Tepe the 'smoking gun' for the Younger-Dryas cometary encounter, and hence for coherent catastrophism? 

Gobekli Tepe is MUCH Larger Than You Think It Is...,

dainst |  Since recently there has been renewed interest in the results of geophysical survey undertaken at Göbekli Tepe in the years 2003, 2006, 2007, and 2012 we put together this short overview on these works and their results – which helped to understand the extension of the Neolithic site and its monuments even in those parts of the tell not yet excavated.

Without a doubt, the most widely known features of the Göbekli Tepe archaeological site are the monumental buildings, which, due to their ‘outstanding universal value’, were recently inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Notably, since the very early years of excavations, one of the most pressing questions has been whether these structures, with their characteristic T-pillars, were restricted to certain parts of the mound (where revealed through excavation and suggesting a unique agglomeration of this particular building type) or whether they existed all over the tell.

Archaeological survey methods have changed significantly over the last years. One innovation which has dramatically changed the way field archaeologists work are ground-based physical sensing techniques (for a short introduction into this technology and its application see, e.g. here [external link]). This technology provides us with images of possible archaeological features beneath the surface without even taking a shovel to hand. In 2003, a geophysical survey was undertaken at Göbekli Tepe with the help of GGH – Solutions in Geoscience GmbH. In a first step, large parts of the tell were subjected to extensive magnetic prospection, and later selected areas were studied using georadar and geoelectric tomography.

As already noted by Klaus Schmidt in his 2003 field report which was published the same year (Schmidt 2003, 5), first results already provided a better understanding of the site and served to confirm earlier observations:

Juxtaposition and Superimposition Show What Became of the Original Americans...,

Not a repeat - it starts at a specific part of the video - so just click it.

nautil.us |  What’s more, a flickering flame in the cave may have conjured impressions of motion like a strobe light in a dark club. In low light, human vision degrades, and that can lead to the perception of movement even when all is still, says Susana Martinez-Conde, the director of the Laboratory of Visual Neuroscience at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Ariz. The trick may occur at two levels; one when the eye processes a dimly lit scene, and the second when the brain makes sense of that limited, flickering information. 

Physiologically, our eyes undergo a switch when we slip into darkness. In bright light, eyes primarily rely on the color-sensitive cells in our retinas called cones, but in low light the cones don’t have enough photons to work with and cells that sense black and white gradients, called rods, take over. That’s why in low light, colors fade, shadows become harder to distinguish from actual objects, and the soft boundaries between things disappear. Images straight ahead of us look out of focus, as if they were seen in our peripheral vision. The end result for early humans who viewed cave paintings by firelight might have been that a deer with multiple heads, for example, resembled a single, animated beast. A few rather sophisticated artistic techniques enhance that impression. One is found beyond the Hall of Bulls, where the cave narrows into a long passage called the Nave.

High on the Nave’s right wall, an early artist had used charcoal to draw a row of five deer heads. The images are almost identical, but each is positioned at a slightly different angle. Viewed one at a time with a small circle of light moving right to left, the images seem to illustrate a single deer raising and lowering its head as in a short flipbook animation. 

Marc Azéma, a Paleolithic researcher and filmmaker at the University of Toulouse in France, has studied dozens of examples of ancient images that were meant to imply motion and has found two primary techniques that Paleolithic artists used to do this. The first is juxtaposition of successive images—the technique used for the deer head—and the second is called superimposition. Rather than appearing in sequence, variations of an image pile on top of one another in superimposition to lend a sense of motion. Superimposition can be seen in caves across France and Spain, but some of the oldest examples come from Chauvet cave in France’s Ardèche region. Burned wood and charcoal streaks along Chauvet’s walls indicate that campfires and pine torches lit the cave.

What Does Cave Art Have to do with Animation?

awn |  The first thing that strikes me when looking at the many reproductions (I have yet to see an original) is that there are no stories, at least so far as I understand a graphic story to be. Instead what appears are images of local fauna in full view, mid-view, and close-up.

Even though these paintings were created more than 10,000 years ago, the drawing style is highly accomplished. There's a strong sense of 3D form translated onto a 2D surface, the coloration is finely tuned, and the animals breathe life. So these artists could have told a story if they had chosen to.

But nothing is chronicled in the way that we structure narrative, with a beginning, middle, and end. Instead the artists have chosen to present these huge images (the bulls at Lascaux are 20 feet wide) singly or sequentially, on the rock wall deep inside these safe chambers well below the earth's surface.

Sequentially? What are sequential images doing on a cave wall painted tens of thousands of years ago? As an animator I recognize them immediately to be like the key frames of an animation.

It's one thing to enter a cave and be confronted with a huge still image, but how much more dramatic would be an image that reads as an animal in motion.

What finer way than this to present shock and awe from a safe vantage point. Perhaps the artists were seeking to recreate and thereby control these near overwhelming sensations, feelings certainly experienced above ground and probably often in dangerous if not deadly circumstances.

Did these artists want to recreate them in a controlled way so that while the audience's experience was akin to the real thing, the real dangers remained above ground and well outside the cave?

Think of experiencing a huge thunderstorm from the safety of a cozy cottage, or watching a horror film from the security of a movie theater. There's something deeply satisfying about being awed or terrified while knowing one is safe.

Were these paleolithic men and women our film artist ancestors?

Here Go Your Ancient Aliens Original Global UR Civilization...,

ancientnews |  Gobekli Tepe offers compelling evidence for an advanced civilisation that fell foul to a forgotten catastrophic event. They also see obvious links between the dating of Göbekli Tepe and the Younger Dryas climate events. Briefly, the Younger Dryas period is marked by sudden intense cooling 12,800 years ago followed by equally sudden and intense warming 11,500 years ago. Archaeological evidence suggests that at both ends of the Younger Dryas global cataclysms occurred that led to mass extinctions.

Certainly, the megalithic builders responsible for Göbekli Tepe lived through the collapse of their civilisation and decided to bury their work. It is evident their culture went into rapid retreat, and today it only remains in the region of origination – Australasia.      The stones of Göbekli Tepe speak, but only if one knows their language. These mighty megaliths bear the signature of the Australian Aboriginal traditions from which they emerged. The fingerprints of this culture remain across much of northern Australia, but lest anyone raise the accusation of regional cherry-picking, the focus here will be almost entirely in one area, Arnhem Land.

Arnhem land is no arbitrary selection for investigation. Situated on the closest point to the Indonesian islands, Arnhem Land was once part of lands that extended much further out into the Timor Sea and the Arafura Sea. Migrants moving towards Southeast Asia would have passed through what is now Arnhem Land.

It is not only at Göbekli Tepe that we find this Aboriginal Australian symbolism. Contained in the greater body of research work is a far broader picture. After the cataclysms, new sprouts of civilisation emerged from cultural seeds planted by a lost Aboriginal Australian global culture. Aboriginal Australasians have carried the hidden history of this first culture through comet impacts, solar storms and deliberate genocide. Today we owe them an enormous debt. The sacred art of Aboriginal Australians provides a final few cultural connections between the builders of Göbekli Tepe and Aboriginal Australia. In these photographs, we see an exact match between a symbol on an Aboriginal elder’s chest and one on a pillar at Göbekli Tepe (see page 65). The meaning of this is often suggested to be of two people sitting to share knowledge.  On a central pillar in enclosure D, we find a set of symbols normally reserved for the most sacred artefacts of the Australian Aboriginals, churinga stones. A modern example of a churinga stone is shown on page 65. The only difference from the symbol on the pillar is that the two lines do not merge with the central circle. Churinga stones are regarded as receptacles for spiritual energy associated with creator beings, sky heroes that came down to Earth. Incredibly, the full pillar on which this churinga symbol appears is itself described as a stylised representation of a humanoid deity. We see the mysterious being’s arms folded just above the belt (see image on page 65).¹⁰

How Old is Original Human Civilization?

holdmyark |  Located in south-western Arnhem land Australia is a stone monument that was created by the aboriginal Australians 50,000 years ago. A part of Jawoyn country, Nawarla Gabarnmung is an incredible example of engineering a rock shelter not seen elsewhere at this period of time in ancient history. Meaning, “hole in the rock”, “passageway”, or “valley open from the centre” by the Jawoyn people, Nawarla Gabarnmung is a sacred and protected site. Jawoyn Elder, Margaret Katherine, has the responsibility of safe guarding this very special place today. The Jawoyn people have only allowed ‘Gabarnmung’ to be studied in recent years. Margaret explains how sharing knowledge with blackfullas, and whitefullas is important.

The work completed at Gabarnmung by these ancient engineers may not have required the precise mathematics to build a great pyramid, but still valued math and the intelligent knowledge of working with stone for a great length of time. The shelter was constructed by tunneling into a naturally eroded cliff face. The roof is 1.75m to 2.45m above floor level, supported by 50 pillars created by the natural erosion of fissure lines in the bedrock. 36 pillars were painted. Some pre-existing pillars were removed, some were reshaped and some moved to new positions. In some areas ceiling slabs were removed and repainted by the ancient Jawoyn people who used the shelter.

This [hole in the wall] ‘monument’ contains a historical gallery of rock art and some of the oldest full paintings in the world. Also a historical recording of human history like many other sites in the Arnhem Land area of Australia. The Artwork at Gabarnmung rivals the paintings found in France and Spain. Noting that most dates for Rock Art are questionable, so are those greater dates now suggested for France and Spain[65,000 years]

The significance of the Gabarnmung rock art is in the amazing detail. These mystifying and intriguing images demonstrate the experience of the Jawoyn Artists. The people and culture still being here today to help tell the story is what makes the works of art much more alive. The many examples found in rock painting across Australia over the past 200 years explains how the Original people have been painting since the earliest times in human History. A few years ago Smithsonian wrote an article making these comparisons of Gabarnmung:

If science can offer something to the Jawoyn, the Jawoyn have something to offer science. “We don’t have anyone to explain Chauvet Cave to us. In France, these are sites with no memory, no life. With Gabarnmung, we are lucky. There is the living culture, the memories. The Jawoyn can help us build a new knowledge.” Jean-Michel Geneste

“ Like the Sistine Chapel, the ceiling of the expansive rock shelter was a mural of breathtakingly vivid and bold works of art – hundreds of them. And the paintings extended up and down 36 remarkable sandstone columns that, like the pillars of a temple, appeared to support the cave”

YT Tickle Me "Discovering" Isht....,

bbc |  Scientists are beginning to tap into a wellspring of knowledge buried in the ancient stories of Australia's Aboriginal peoples. But the loss of indigenous languages could mean it is too late to learn from them. 

The Luritja people, native to the remote deserts of central Australia, once told stories about a fire devil coming down from the Sun, crashing into Earth and killing everything in the vicinity. 

The local people feared if they strayed too close to this land they might reignite some otherworldly creature.

The legend describes the landing of a meteor in Australia's Central Desert about 4,700 years ago, says University of New South Wales (UNSW) astrophysicist Duane Hamacher. 

It would have been a dramatic and fiery event, with the meteor blazing across the sky. As it broke apart, large fragments of metal-rich rock would have crashed to Earth with explosive force, creating a dozen giant craters. 

The Northern Territory site, which was discovered in the 1930s by white prospectors with the help of Luritja guides, is today known as the Henbury Meteorites Conservation Reserve. 

Mr Hamacher, who runs an Indigenous astronomy program at UNSW, says evidence is mounting that Aboriginal stories hold clues about events from Australia's ancient past. 

Last year, he travelled to Victoria with tsunami expert James Goff, also from UNSW, to visit members of the Gunditjmara people

"They describe this gigantic wave coming very far inland and killing everybody except those who were up on the mountaintops, and they actually name all the different locations where people survived," says Mr Hamacher. 

He and Mr Goff took core samples from locations between 500m and 1km (0.6 miles) inland, and at each spot, they found a layer of ocean sediment, about 2m down, indicating that a tsunami likely washed over the area hundreds, or possibly thousands, of years ago. 

The samples need further analysis but Mr Hamacher says it is a "very exciting" result that suggests the legend could be true. 

Earlier this year, another team of researchers presented a paper arguing that stories from Australia's coastal Aboriginal communities might "represent genuine and unique observations" of sea level rises that occurred between 7,000 and 11,000 years ago.

Nishada Kingdom

wikipedia |  Besides the Papuans, Australian Aboriginals, Melanesians, and Negritos, the "Australoid" category is often taken to include various tribes of India. The inclusion of Indian tribes in the group is not well-defined, and is closely related to the question of the original peopling of India, and the possible shared ancestry between Indian and Australian populations of the Upper Paleolithic. The American Journal of Physical Anthropology (1996, p. 382) by American Association of Physical Anthropologists. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi and Alberto Piazza in their text, The History and Geography of Human Genes (1994, P. 241) all use the term.^{[clarification needed]}

 

Tee suggested Australoid ancestry of the original South Asian populations has long remained an open question. It was embraced by Indian anthropologists as emphasizing the deep antiquity of Indian prehistory. Australoid hunter-gatherer and fisherman tribes of the interior of India were identified with the Nishada Kingdom described in the Mahabharata. Panchanan Mitra (1923) following Vincenzo Giuffrida-Ruggeri (1913) recognizes a Pre-Dravidian Australo-Veddaic stratum in India.^[19] Alternatively, the Dravidians themselves have been claimed as originally of Australoid stock,^[20] a view held by Biraja Sankar Guha among others.^[21]

 

South Indian tribes specifically described as having Australoid affinities include the Oraon, Munda, Santal, Bhil, Gondi, the Kadars of Kerala, the Kurumba and Irula of the Nilgiris, the Paniyans of Malabar, the Uralis, Kannikars, Mithuvan and Chenchus.^[22] but other Indian anthropologists of the post-colonial period, such as S. P. Sharma (1971) and D. N. Majumdar (1946, 1965), have gone as far as claiming Australoid ancestry, to a greater or lesser extent, for almost all the castes and tribes of India.^[23] Newer Indian anthropology studies about cranial morphology do not support an Australoid ancestry in South Asian populations.^[5]

 

According to a large craniometric study (Raghavan and Bulbeck et al. 2013) the native populations of South Asia have distinct craniometric and anthropologic ancestry. Both southern and northern groups are most similar to each other and have generally closer affinities to various "Caucasoid" groups. The study further showed that the native South Asians (including the Vedda) form a distinct group and are not aligned to the "Australoid" group. However, Raghavan and Bulbeck et al., while noting the differences of South Asian from Andamanese and Australoid crania, also explain that this is not in conflict with genetic evidence (found by Reich et al. in 2009) showing a common ancestry and genetic affinity between South Asians and the native Andamanese (a group sometimes considered to be related to Australoids), stating: "The distinctiveness of Andamanese and southern Indian crania need not challenge the finding by Reich et al. for an “Ancestral South Indian” ancestry shared by southern Indians and Andamanese" [the latter being a Southern Eurasian population possibly related to Australoid peoples] and that "some populations are craniometrically specialised while others are not...What the present analysis adds is that southern Indians also have specialised craniometrics. Andamanese on the other hand have unspecialised craniometrics...Therefore, southern Indians' craniometric distinctiveness from Andamanese should be interpreted as a result of their craniometric specialisation rather than as evidence against a shared, ancient ancestry with Andamanese.^[24]

"Discovered" in 1963 - But Not a Single History Book Rewritten?

xinhua |  Sanliurfa Provincial Culture and Tourism Director Aydin Aslan said to the Anadolu Agency that Gobeklitepe was a huge excavation site that changed the world's archaeology history to a great extent, adding that excavations were continuing non-stop in the region.

The city is home to the world's oldest temple, which is believed to be twice as old as the Stonehenge and the Pyramids.

Ancient stone carvings and a tablet analyzed at this mysterious site could eventually confirm, even there are some critics to this new theory, that a comet struck earth around 11,000 BC. Experts at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, analyzed mysterious symbols carved onto stone pillars at Gobeklitepe to find out that they could be linked to constellations.

The markings, according a research published in Mediterranean Archaeology and Archeometry, suggest that a swarm of comet fragments hit earth at the time that a mini ice age struck, changing the course of human civilization.

Researchers believe the images on the pillars were intended as a record of cataclysmic event, and a further carving showing a headless man could possibly indicate human disaster and massive loss of life.

This site is contemporary with the Greenland ice core samples, which are dated to around 10,900 BC of the sites may features, none are more famous than the many standing pillars that dot the excavated grounds.

This is because of the extensive programs and animal reliefs that decorate these pillars, which include various representations of mammal and avian species. One of the pillars, known as the "vulture stone," was of particular interests to archaeologists, as it is suspected that its representation which is associated with death could have been intended to commemorate a devastating event, like a cataclysm.

The Turkish official Aslan said the roof works are expected to be finished on July 15. "As of July 15, the roof project will be finished and the area will be open to visitors. The priority of works is the protection of Gobeklitepe. The cost of this work is nearly 600,000 euros, provided by the Turkish state and the European Union," he added.

The head of the Gobeklitepe excavations team, Celal Uludag, said for his part that the excavations will be delayed because of the roof project in the field.

He said the protection of the field of historical artifacts is as important as the protection of the artifacts, and that new findings can also be unearthed during upcoming excavations. He said they have been planning to start excavations in the region for long years.

"We will start excavations after the roof project. We believe that we can continue excavation works in the settlement for long years. So far, seven temples have been unearthed in the region and many of them are waiting to be discovered. It is important to protect and display the findings. Now we give priority to the protection of the current findings," he added.

Gobeklitepe was discovered in 1963 as a Neolithic settlement, during the surface surveys realized as a part of a Joint Project named "Prehistoric Research in Southeastern Anatolia" by Istanbul University in cooperation with Chicago University.

5% Excavated, No Idea Who Built It, No Idea Why, No Effect on the Mainstream Narrative...,

smithsonian |  Six miles from Urfa, an ancient city in southeastern Turkey, Klaus Schmidt has made one of the most startling archaeological discoveries of our time: massive carved stones about 11,000 years old, crafted and arranged by prehistoric people who had not yet developed metal tools or even pottery. The megaliths predate Stonehenge by some 6,000 years. The place is called Gobekli Tepe, and Schmidt, a German archaeologist who has been working here more than a decade, is convinced it's the site of the world's oldest temple.

"Guten Morgen," he says at 5:20 a.m. when his van picks me up at my hotel in Urfa. Thirty minutes later, the van reaches the foot of a grassy hill and parks next to strands of barbed wire. We follow a knot of workmen up the hill to rectangular pits shaded by a corrugated steel roof—the main excavation site. In the pits, standing stones, or pillars, are arranged in circles. Beyond, on the hillside, are four other rings of partially excavated pillars. Each ring has a roughly similar layout: in the center are two large stone T-shaped pillars encircled by slightly smaller stones facing inward. The tallest pillars tower 16 feet and, Schmidt says, weigh between seven and ten tons. As we walk among them, I see that some are blank, while others are elaborately carved: foxes, lions, scorpions and vultures abound, twisting and crawling on the pillars' broad sides.

 

Schmidt points to the great stone rings, one of them 65 feet across. "This is the first human-built holy place," he says.

From this perch 1,000 feet above the valley, we can see to the horizon in nearly every direction. Schmidt, 53, asks me to imagine what the landscape would have looked like 11,000 years ago, before centuries of intensive farming and settlement turned it into the nearly featureless brown expanse it is today.

Prehistoric people would have gazed upon herds of gazelle and other wild animals; gently flowing rivers, which attracted migrating geese and ducks; fruit and nut trees; and rippling fields of wild barley and wild wheat varieties such as emmer and einkorn. "This area was like a paradise," says Schmidt, a member of the German Archaeological Institute. Indeed, Gobekli Tepe sits at the northern edge of the Fertile Crescent—an arc of mild climate and arable land from the Persian Gulf to present-day Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and Egypt—and would have attracted hunter-gatherers from Africa and the Levant. And partly because Schmidt has found no evidence that people permanently resided on the summit of Gobekli Tepe itself, he believes this was a place of worship on an unprecedented scale—humanity's first "cathedral on a hill."

Did You Notice This Morning?

The First Americans: What Do You Do When You Realize EVERYTHING You've Been Taught Is a Lie?

bbc |  The programme, Ancient Voices, shows that the dimensions of prehistoric skulls found in Brazil match those of the aboriginal peoples of Australia and Melanesia. Other evidence suggests that these first Americans were later massacred by invaders from Asia.

Until now, native Americans were believed to have descended from Asian ancestors who arrived over a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska and then migrated across the whole of north and south America. The land bridge was formed 11,000 years ago during the ice age, when sea level dropped.

However, the new evidence shows that these people did not arrive in an empty wilderness. Stone tools and charcoal from the site in Brazil show evidence of human habitation as long ago as 50,000 years.

The site is at Serra Da Capivara in remote northeast Brazil. This area is now inhabited by the descendants of European settlers and African slaves who arrived just 500 years ago.

But cave paintings found here provided the first clue to the existence of a much older people.

Images of giant armadillos, which died out before the last ice age, show the artists who drew them lived before even the natives who greeted the Europeans.

These Asian people have facial features described as mongoloid. However, skulls dug from a depth equivalent to 9,000 to 12,000 years ago are very different.

Walter Neves, an archaeologist from the University of Sao Paolo, has taken extensive skull measurements from dozens of skulls, including the oldest, a young woman who has been named Lucia.

"The measurements show that Lucia was anything but mongoloid," he says.

The skull dimensions and facial features match most closely the native people of Australia and Melanesia. These people date back to about 60,000 years, and were themselves descended from the first humans, who left Africa about 100,000 years ago. 

But how could the early Australians have travelled more than 13,500 kilometres (8,450 miles) at that time? The answer comes from more cave paintings, this time from the Kimberley, a region at the northern tip of Western Australia. 

Here, Grahame Walsh, an expert on Australian rock art, found the oldest painting of a boat anywhere in the world. The style of the art means it is at least 17,000 years old, but it could be up to 50,000 years old. 

And the crucial detail is the high prow of the boat. This would have been unnecessary for boats used in calm, inland waters. The design suggests it was used on the open ocean.

That Which Wiped Out the Megafauna, Wiped Out the Clovis...,

nature |  The Younger Dryas (YD) impact hypothesis posits that fragments of a large, disintegrating asteroid/comet struck North America, South America, Europe, and western Asia ~12,800 years ago. Multiple airbursts/impacts produced the YD boundary layer (YDB), depositing peak concentrations of platinum, high-temperature spherules, meltglass, and nanodiamonds, forming an isochronous datum at >50 sites across ~50 million km² of Earth’s surface. This proposed event triggered extensive biomass burning, brief impact winter, YD climate change, and contributed to extinctions of late Pleistocene megafauna. In the most extensive investigation south of the equator, we report on a ~12,800-year-old sequence at Pilauco, Chile (~40°S), that exhibits peak YD boundary concentrations of platinum, gold, high-temperature iron- and chromium-rich spherules, and native iron particles rarely found in nature. A major peak in charcoal abundance marks an intense biomass-burning episode, synchronous with dramatic changes in vegetation, including a high-disturbance regime, seasonality in precipitation, and warmer conditions. This is anti-phased with northern-hemispheric cooling at the YD onset, whose rapidity suggests atmospheric linkage. The sudden disappearance of megafaunal remains and dung fungi in the YDB layer at Pilauco correlates with megafaunal extinctions across the Americas. The Pilauco record appears consistent with YDB impact evidence found at sites on four continents.

I Done Already Told You Cats What Time It Is...,

craigmurray |  Just as we are not conditioned to recognise the violence of the state as violence, we do not always recognise resistance to the state as violence. If you bodily blockade a road, a tube station or a building with the intention to prevent somebody else from physically passing through that space, that is an act of physical force, of violence. It may be a low level of violence, but violence it is. Extinction Rebellion represents a challenge to the state’s claim to monopolise violence, which is why the Metropolitan Police – a major instrument of state domestic violence – were so anxious to declare the activity illegal on a wide scale.

Ultimately civil resistance represents a denial of the state’s right to enforce its monopoly of violence. The Hong Kong protests represent a striking demonstration of the fact that rejecting the state’s monopoly of violence can entail marching without permission, occupying a space, blockading and ultimately replying to bullets with firebombs, and that these actions are a continuum. It is the initial rejection of the state’s power over your body which is the decision point.

Just as I used the example of tax evasion and healthcare to demonstrate that the state’s use of violence is not always bad, I use the example of Extinction Rebellion to demonstrate that the assertion of physical force, against the state’s claim to monopoly of it, is not always bad either.

We are moving into an era of politics where the foundations of consent which underpin western states are becoming less stable. The massive growth in wealth inequality has led to an alienation of large sections of the population from the political system. The political economy works within a framework which is entirely an artificial construct of states, and ultimately is imposed by the states’ monopoly of force. For the last four decades, that framework has been deliberately fine-tuned to enable the massive accumulation of wealth by a very small minority and to reduce the access to share of economic resource by the broad mass of the people. 

The inevitable consequence is widespread economic discontent and a resultant loss of respect for the political class. The political class are tasked with the management of the state apparatus, and popular discontent is easily personalised – it concentrates on the visible people rather than the institutions. But if the extraordinary wealth imbalance of society continues to worsen, it is only a matter of time before that discontent undermines respect for political institutions.

Who Decides U.S. Foreign Policy?

thenation |  President Trump campaigned and was elected on an anti-neocon platform: he promised to reduce direct US involvement in areas where, he believed, America had no vital strategic interest, including in Ukraine. He also promised a new détente (“cooperation”) with Moscow.

And yet, as we have learned from their recent congressional testimony, key members of his own National Security Council did not share his views and indeed were opposed to them. Certainly, this was true of Fiona Hill and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman. Both of them seemed prepared for a highly risky confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, though whether retroactively because of Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea or for more general reasons was not entirely clear. 

Similarly, Trump was slow in withdrawing Marie Yovanovitch, a career foreign service officer appointed by President Obama as ambassador to Kiev, who had made clear, despite her official position in Kiev, that she did not share the new American president’s thinking about Ukraine or Russia. In short, the president was surrounded in his own administration, even in the White House, by opponents of his foreign policy and presumably not only in regard to Ukraine.

Rabbi Says "Assimilated Yidden" Have Forgotten Their Place...,

occidentaldissent |  Rick Wiles and Doc Burkhart are doing the Lord’s work:

The Forward:

“Jewish Twitter is erupting in anger over the latest incendiary video from an anti-Semitic website, this one asserting that the impeachment inquiry into President Trump was a “Jew coup.”

TruNews, the creator of the video, said YouTube had “banned us again” because of the “Godcast,” published on Friday. In it, the site’s founder, a non-denominational pastor named Rick Wiles, and Doc Burkhart, the site’s general manager, highlight Jewish Democrats connected to impeachment.

Outraged Jewish leaders and others called on Twitter, Apple and other platforms to ban TruNews as well, the latest flare in the ongoing wars over the boundary between free speech and hate crimes. …”

Times of Israel:

“An American pastor and radio host warned of a “Jew coup” to impeach U.S. President Donald Trump on Christian site TruNews.

“This impeach Trump movement is a Jewish coup. And the American people better wake up to it really fast,” said Rick Wiles, a non-denominational pastor at Flowing Streams Church in Florida and founder of TruNews, in a video posted Monday. …”

Look who is outraged at TruNews for doing nothing but reading headlines from a bunch of different Jewish media sources about Trump’s impeachment:

This (((Coup))) Is NOT FOR YOU!!!

Thanks to Pamela Karlan for so aptly capturing Democratic elites' delusional, Reaganite, jingoistic Cold Warrior mindset in your claim that we need to arm Ukraine "so they fight the Russians there and we don't have to fight them here" & we remain "that shining city on the hill." pic.twitter.com/C78aNThnUk

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) December 4, 2019

blackagendareport |  Self-styled liberals believe they are a better class of people than Trump, but are bigger supporters of unjust wars than the so-called “deplorables.”

“Liberals eagerly wait for a war they can believe in.”

The trauma of Donald Trump’s presidency has created continued insanity for American liberals. They were never very trustworthy, due to their abiding belief in United States exceptionalism and an imagined right for it to intervene in the rest of the world as it pleased. Liberals could be counted on to protest wars which killed Americans in Vietnam or in Iraq. But by and large they trust in imperialist dictates if someone they like is in charge and who doesn’t allow too many of their countrymen to get hurt.

Hence their dilemma with Donald Trump. Trump is their anti-Christ, a bad mannered, proudly stupid, racist who expresses the id of the great unwashed deplorable white masses. There are many reasons to oppose him but liberals generally attack from the right. The same people who remember that the surveillance state lied about the WMD threat from Iraq now parrot every word from the same people if they are anti-Trump. Their earlier opposition to war propaganda was more a result of their anti-Bush, anti-Republican stance than anything else. They didn’t really oppose U.S. interventions or stand up for peace. Instead they eagerly wait for a war they can believe in if the rationale is to their liking. 

“Liberals trust in imperialist dictates.”

Regime Change in Mexico - Conspicuously Obvious to the Casual Observer...,

thegrayzone |  AMLO’s left-wing policies have caused shockwaves in Washington, which has long relied on neoliberal Mexican leaders ensuring a steady cheap exploitable labor base and maintaining a reliable market for US goods and open borders for US capital and corporations.

On November 27 — a day after declaring Nicaragua a “national security threat” — Trump announced that the US government will be designating Mexican drug cartels as “terrorist organizations.”

Such a designation could pave the way for direct US military intervention in Mexico.

The designation was particularly ironic considering some top drug cartel leaders in Mexico have long-standing ties to the US government. The leaders of the notoriously brutal cartel the Zetas, for instance, were originally trained in counter-insurgency tactics by the US military.

Throughout the Cold War, the US government armed, trained, and funded right-wing death squads throughout Latin America, many of which were involved in drug trafficking. The CIA also used drug money to fund far-right counter-insurgency paramilitary groups in Central America.

These tactics were also employed in the Middle East and South Asia. The United States armed, trained, and funded far-right Islamist extremists in Afghanistan in the 1980s in order to fight the Soviet Union. These same US-backed Salafi-jihadists then founded al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

This strategy was later repeated in the US wars on Libya and Syria. ISIS commander Omar al-Shishani, to take one example, had been trained by the US military and enjoyed direct support from Washington when he was fighting against Russia.

The Barack Obama administration also oversaw a campaign called Project Gunrunner and Operation Fast and Furious, in which the US government helped send thousands of guns to cartels in Mexico.

Mexican journalist Alina Duarte explained that, with the Trump administration’s designation of cartels as terrorists, “They are creating the idea that Mexico represents a threat to their national security.”

“Should we start talking about the possibility of a coup against Lopez Obrador in Mexico?” Duarte asked.

The Poliitics of Destabilizing Lopez Obrador

Jacobin |  At four o’clock in the afternoon on October 17, 2019, the Mexican city of Culiacán, capital of the northeastern state of Sinaloa, erupted in gunfire. Minutes before, in the exclusive Tres Ríos district, members of the army and National Guard had arrested Ovidio Guzmán López, son of the jailed former head of the Sinaloa Cartel, Joaquín Guzmán (“El Chapo”), and one of the organization’s new generation of leaders.

The response was immediate: taking to the streets, cartel members fired rounds of automatic weapons from trucks and blocked intersections with burning vehicles, all in a bid to sow chaos. Surrounding the armed forces involved in the raid, they cut off access on the three bridges leading out of the area.

Over the radio frequencies used by the police and the army, the cartel proceeded to announce that, if Guzmán was not freed, it would take revenge against both the family members of those participating and the general public. Following hasty deliberations, the federal security cabinet decided to go ahead and release Guzmán, a decision approved by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO).

The response from the Mexican right was equally apoplectic and hypocritical. With no apparent irony, Marko Cortés, leader of the National Action Party (PAN), came to the remarkable conclusion that Mexico is a “failed state” that is “experiencing one of its worst episodes in the combat against delinquency.” While stating his party’s intention to sue AMLO for freeing Guzmán, Cortés stated that “the Mexican State was subdued, brought to its knees, humiliated by organized crime.”

Not to be outdone, elements of the military also got in on the game: in a case of rank insubordination, General Carlos Demetrio Gaytán Ochoa declared: “We feel insulted as Mexicans and offended as soldiers.” Going on to question the “strategic decisions” of the president, Gaytán Ochoa stated: “We are currently living in a politically polarized society because the dominant ideology . . . is based on currents from the so-called left, which accumulated a large amount of resentment over the years.”

Conveniently omitted from such vociferations were several key points. First, that President Felipe Calderón was the one who launched his homicidal, so-called war on drugs in the first place, which saw over 121,000 killed in his administration alone. Second, that Calderón himself oversaw the freeing of Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes (“El Mencho”), leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, under similar siege circumstances in 2012. And third, according to investigative journalist Anabel Hernández, Calderón’s government was in fact an active supporter of the Sinaloa Cartel by means of his all-powerful federal police force.

But history hardly matters when the goal is to make AMLO look weak in the fight against organized crime, the captain of a nation that is slipping out of his control.