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31st-Jul-2011 10:21 pm - Celts and Stonehenge
Me
 
The celts built Stonehenge, and all the other megaliths.
     Of course, that depends on how you define "celt".   

For decades, the definition was based on an arbitrary (and false) idea of an aryan race who invaded and conquered/assimilated/engulfed any indigenous western europeans.   Later on that aryan label was re-named "proto-indo-european", for a few reasons.   That nonsense is still being taught in lower-tier universities.   You'll still find it in (very) outdated reading lists that reflect obsolete ideas.  Institutional inertia remains very powerful.    Change comes... but slowly.  

Good news is that the archaeologic and genetic evidence overwhemingly shows that definition to be false, and top-tier universities are openly researching and discussing this -- and the curriculum will eventually trickle down.   The same folks we know who later used the megaliths (the druids for example) were the direct descendants of the cultures and people that erected them.    an unbroken line.  

___

On June 9-10, 2011, the CRBC (Centre de Recherche Bretonne et Celtique) will organize at the University of Brest (Brittany, France) an international conference which will bring together several researchers (archaeologists, linguists, geneticists) who will compare their viewpoints on the connections between the populations living in Atlantic Europe and the languages spoken there from the late Paleolithic period… The conference is the introductory stage of an interdisciplinary collaboration between archaeologists, linguists, paleo-anthropologists, historians, geneticists on the same subject.
The received doctrine for the origin of the Celts in Western Europe was centered upon the idea of an Indo-European Invasion in the Copper Age (4th millennium B.C.), by horse-riding warrior pastoralists. The subsequent process of Celtic language evolution would therefore have taken place in the II and I millennium, that is in the Bronze and Iron Age. The evidence collected by archaeology in the last thirty years overwhelmingly prove the absence of any large scale invasion in Europe, and the uninterrupted continuity of most Copper and Bronze Age cultures of Europe from Neolithic, and of most Neolithic cultures from Mesolithic and final Paleolithic.
Some of the participants hold for the PCP (Paleolithic Continuity Paradigm), which considers that the recent prehistory of Western Europe – from the Megalithic culture through the Beaker Bell to the colonialistic La Tène – must have all been Celtic. Consequently, the duration of the colonial expansion of the Celts was much longer than thought, and its direction was from West to East and not vice versa. Other participants will expound different viewpoints.
13th-Jul-2010 11:46 am - london
Me
early reference to "london" as a place name.
20th-May-2010 08:54 am - scandinavians
Me

Stone Age Scandinavians unable to digest milk

The hunter-gatherers who inhabited the southern coast of Scandinavia 4,000 years ago were lactose intolerant. This has been shown by a new study carried out by researchers at Uppsala University and Stockholm University. The study, which has been published in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology, supports the researchers’ earlier conclusion that today’s Scandinavians are not descended from the Stone Age people in question but from a group that arrived later.
4th-Mar-2010 09:39 pm - The Ancients
Me

Seafaring intelligence, over 1 million years ago. Oops!


"Now a far more complex picture is emerging. Ancient apemen, who might have been thought to lack the nous for global conquest, appear to have done the trick almost a million years earlier.

One of the major tenets of human evolution, the story of our world conquest, is now urgently in need of revision."
25th-Feb-2010 06:48 am - Gobekli Temple
Me
The Gobekli Temple


" 'Gobekli Tepe changes everything,' says Ian Hodder, at Stanford University.

David Lewis-Williams, professor of archaeology at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, says: 'Gobekli Tepe is the most important archaeological site in the world.'

As Reading University professor Steve Mithen says: 'Gobekli Tepe is too extraordinary for my mind to understand.'

Carbon-dating shows that the complex is at least 12,000 years old, maybe even 13,000 years old.

That means it was built around 10,000BC. By comparison, Stonehenge was built in 3,000 BC and the pyramids of Giza in 2,500 BC.

Gobekli is thus the oldest such site in the world, by a mind-numbing margin. It is so old that it predates settled human life. It is pre-pottery, pre-writing, pre-everything. Gobekli hails from a part of human history that is unimaginably distant, right back in our hunter-gatherer past. "


_______

Everything works right until that last bit of foamy-mouthed nonsense.   The author is trying to fit the facts (the site's age) with his lie: that timeline we're told just must be true -- civilization followed agriculture.   Fact is, that site also includes tons of pottery -- so why did he say "pre-pottery"?   Its far more likely that a civilization created this site, and that the modern timeline simply needs to be revised. 
18th-Feb-2010 12:20 pm - ancients
Me
We know that through the interglacials, advanced civilizations have existed before... how many times?   That our ancient ancestors were sharp, intelligent, not bumbling cavemen.  That we are not the height of all human history -- we are merely a stream amongst many.    But then, this is the pagan view.   

Many scholars are coming around, though: 

"While some scholars like [Jean Clottes] Clottes had recorded the presence of cave signs at individual sites, Genevieve von Petzinger, then a student at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, was surprised to find that no one had brought all these records together to compare signs from different caves. And so, under the supervision of April Nowell, also at the University of Victoria, she devised an ambitious masters project. She compiled a comprehensive database of all recorded cave signs from 146 sites in France, covering 25,000 years of prehistory from 35,000 to 10,000 years ago.

What emerged was startling: 26 signs, all drawn in the same style, appeared again and again at numerous sites (see illustration) . Admittedly, some of the symbols are pretty basic, like straight lines, circles and triangles, but the fact that many of the more complex designs also appeared in several places hinted to von Petzinger and Nowell that they were meaningful - perhaps even the seeds of written communication. "

Full article here


1st-Jan-2010 05:15 pm - Formorians
Me
 What happened to the hominids that were smarter than us? 

Ancient memories in the myths...


"...As if the Boskop story were not already strange enough, the accumulation of additional remains revealed another bizarre feature: These people had small, childlike faces. ... Boskop has a face that takes up only about one-fifth of his cranium size, closer to the proportions of a child. Examination of individual bones confirmed that the nose, cheeks, and jaw were all childlike.

The combination of a large cranium and immature face would look decidedly unusual to modern eyes, but not entirely unfamiliar. Such faces peer out from the covers of countless science fiction books and are often attached to “alien abductors” in movies. The naturalist Loren Eiseley made exactly this point in a lyrical and chilling passage from his popular book, The Immense Journey, describing a Boskop fossil:

“There’s just one thing we haven’t quite dared to mention. It’s this, and you won’t believe it. It’s all happened already. Back there in the past, ten thousand years ago. The man of the future, with the big brain, the small teeth. He lived in Africa. His brain was bigger than your brain. His face was straight and small, almost a child’s face.”

...
"We’re drawn to the idea that we are the end point, the pinnacle not only of the hominids but of all animal life.

Boskops argue otherwise. They say that humans with big brains, and perhaps great intelligence, occupied a substantial piece of southern Africa in the not very distant past, and that they eventually gave way to smaller-brained, possibly less advanced Homo sapiens—that is, ourselves."
...
"At his new dig site, FitzSimons came across a remarkable piece of construction. The site had been at one time a communal living center, perhaps tens of thousands of years ago. There were many collected rocks, leftover bones, and some casually interred skeletons of normal-looking humans. But to one side of the site, in a clearing, was a single, carefully constructed tomb, built for a single occupant—perhaps the tomb of a leader or of a revered wise man. His remains had been positioned to face the rising sun. In repose, he appeared unremarkable in every regard...except for a giant skull.

 

31st-Jul-2009 12:31 pm - underground towns
Me
Underground towns with hydraulic engineering.

There are few alive on earth capable of pulling this off today.  

29th-Jul-2009 08:13 pm - headless
Me
off with their heads.

51 Headless Vikings Found in English Execution Pit?

Naked, beheaded, and tangled, the bodies of 51 young men—their heads stacked neatly to the side—have been found in a thousand-year-old pit in southern England, according to carbon-dating results released earlier this month.


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