Turbowolf Interview Graham Hancock: Episode 1, The Ancients
In the first of a series of four episodes, Turbowolf interview Graham Hancock at The Roman Baths in Bath.
Guatemalan Mayans to World: 2012 is Not the End, and We Should Know
President G. W. Bush at a demonstration of a Mayan ritual at Iximche, Guatemala in 2007.
This breezy seemingly fluffy travel article in the Guardian just days before NYE that somehow got overlooked as the apocalyptic hysteria surrounding the Mayan Long Count date of 21 December 2012 reached a pots-New Year crescendo (for now).
In it, author Kevin Rushby reminds us that unlike the Atlanteans, the ‘noble savage’ and other imaginary creatures Mayan culture still exists and continuous with its more grandiose past.
When Rushby asks a local Guatemalan shaman about the end-of-the-world prophecy, he says, “It is the end of a 5,126-year cycle, that’s true, but there is no mention of the end of the world. People seem to have got that from the Dresden Codex (a pre-Columbian volume of Mayan writings now in the State Library of Dresden). But in that record there is no mention of 2012.” According to Rushby, “Some millenarian-minded…
Graham Hancock On Ancient Mysteries
Graham Hancock discusses his views on the following topics:
1 – Precession of the equinoxes
2 – Bringers of wisdom from the Heavens
3 – Monuments aligning to 10,500BC
4 – What happened in 10,500BC?
5 – The Mystery of the Pyramids
6 – The Sarcophagus
7 – Dating Giza
8 – Hidden Halls of Records
9 – Structures on Mars
10 – Cataclysm of Mars
11 – A species with amnesia
12 – Where is the Lost Civilization?
Orgies for Jesus
[Site editor's note: The following is an excerpt from the new Disinformation title 50 Things You're Not Supposed To Know: Religion, authored by Daniele Bolelli.]
What if Christian theology dismissed the virgin birth and other miracles as fairy tales? What if your pastor/priest told you to flush the Ten Commandments down the toilet and instead live life to the fullest? What if Sunday service at your local church consisted in a juicy orgy? All of this could have happened had Carpocrates had his way.
Carpo … who? The lead character in our story was the leader of a second century Christian community based in the Greek islands. Back in those days, early Christians couldn’t agree on just about anything. Official Christian doctrine hadn’t been fully established yet, so an extremely wide range of opinions and teachings fell under the label of “Christianity.” The only thing they had in common was that they all thought…
Did Life On Earth Start With A Single Ocean-Sized Mega-Creature?
File this under we-are-all-connected: three billion years ago, life on Earth may have been a global mega-organism called LUCA, from which all living things today are descended. Can we get an artist’s rending of this colossal being? New Scientist writes:
ONCE upon a time, 3 billion years ago, there lived a single organism called LUCA. It was enormous: a mega-organism like none seen since, it filled the planet’s oceans before splitting into three and giving birth to the ancestors of all living things on Earth today.
This strange picture is emerging from efforts to pin down the last universal common ancestor – not the first life that emerged on Earth but the life form that gave rise to all others.
The latest results suggest LUCA was the result of early life’s fight to survive, attempts at which turned the ocean into a global genetic swap shop for hundreds of millions of years. Cells struggling…
Essenes May Have Authored Dead Sea Scrolls
Part of the mystery of the Dead Sea Scrolls is unraveling. Via the Daily Mail (yes, I know it’s a tabloid rag, but they have good photos…):
It has been debated for centuries, but scholars think they are one step closer to discovering who wrote The Dead Sea Scrolls.
The world’s oldest known biblical documents may have been penned by a sect called the Essenes, according to scholars who studied material discovered in caves at Qumran, in the West Bank.
Scholars previously believed the 2,000-year-old scrolls were written by a Jewish sect from Qumran in the Judean Desert and were hidden in the caves around 70AD, when the Romans destroyed the temple in Jerusalem.
But this new research says that all the textiles are made of linen, rather than wool, which was the preferred textile used in ancient Israel.
The Dead Sea Scrolls consist of nearly 900 texts, the first batch of which were discovered by…
Cave Art More Realist Than Abstract
Image of a horse from the Lascaux caves.
If you thought that those ancient cave paintings at Lascaux and elsewhere were pretty abstract, think again. AP via Fox News reports that DNA studies suggest the cave painters were actually painting what they saw:
Cave painters during the Ice Age were more like da Vinci than Dali, sketching realistic depictions of horses they saw rather than dreaming them up, a study of ancient DNA finds.
It’s not just a matter of aesthetics: Paintings based on real life can give first-hand glimpses into the environment of tens of thousands of years ago. But scientists have wondered how much imagination went into animal drawings etched in caves around Europe.
The latest analysis published online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences focused on horses since they appeared most frequently on rock walls. The famed Lascaux Cave in the Dordogne region of southwest France and the…
Did Prehistoric Giant Squids Make Art From Bones?
It sounds completly crazy. But it’s what a group of paleontologists are claiming — the first sentient beings on Earth to create art may not have been humans, but monstrously large, tentacled sea creatures called “kraken” who lived 200 million years ago and possibly arranged bones in geometric, decorative patterns. io9 explains further:
For decades, paleontologists have puzzled over a fossil collection of nine Triassic icthyosaurs (Shonisaurus popularis) discovered in Nevada’s Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park. Researchers initially thought that this strange grouping of 45-foot-long marine reptiles had either died en masse from a poisonous plankton bloom or had become stranded in shallow water.
But recent geological analysis of the fossil site indicates that the park was deep underwater when these shonisaurs swam the prehistoric seas. So why were their bones laid in such a bizarre pattern? A new theory suggests that a 100-foot-long cephalopod arranged these bones as a self-portrait after drowning the reptiles.…
Ancient Greeks Help Explain The Rioting Of Modern Britons
Dr. Mark A. Wolfgram writes a fascinating letter to the Financial Times:
Sir, The August 17 commentaries by Richard Florida (“The inchoate rage beneath our global cities”) and John Kay (“Why the rioters should be reading Rousseau”), as well as the excellent Financial Times series on “The Squeezed Middle”, are all making important observations about a similar social, economic and political factor — inequality. Inequality is a fact of human societies built on hierarchies. We come to accommodate ourselves to different levels of inequality, as long as we feel that our society, overall, is at some level just.
In a recent academic work, “A Cultural Theory of International Relations”, Richard Ned Lebow goes back to ancient Greek thought on human motivations and argues that we need to reintegrate their notion of spirit into our understanding of human behaviour. The Greeks argued that humans are motivated by both appetite (the pursuit of material…
LDS Church Builds Replica Of Jerusalem In Utah Desert
The biblical-era city of Jerusalem has been rebuilt in the middle Utah, courtesy of the Mormon Church. “Jerusalem West” (as I call it) will be used for movies, educational tours and pilgrimages, and, presumably, as a crash pad when Jesus eventually returns to Earth. The Salt Lake Tribune writes:
He’ll turn water into wine. He’ll heal a lame man at the pool of Bethesda. And he — the actor slated to play Jesus Christ — will do it all in rural Utah.
A thick, gnarled fake olive tree, for Jesus to pray beside, sits at the end of a pathway in the replicated Garden of Gethsemane. Large, faux stone walls line a maze of city streets, crafted to look rough and weather-beaten. A dozen heavy steps lead up to Solomon’s Porch outside the Temple complex, which will be filled with 30-foot-high columns mimicking the actual 100-foot ones that stood in the ancient city.
After…
NASA: Building Blocks Of DNA Come From Space
Will Mormonism’s creation theory of the seed of humanity arriving on Earth from a distant planet turn out to be proved totally true? Geekosystem writes:
NASA researchers studying meteorites have found that they contain several of the components needed to make DNA on Earth. The discovery provides support for the idea that the building blocks for DNA were likely created in space, and carried to Earth on objects, like meteorites, that crashed into the planet’s surface. According to the theory, the ready-made DNA parts could have then assembled under Earth’s early conditions to create the first DNA.
The researchers, from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, found adenine and guanine — two of the nucleobases needed to make DNA (the other two are thymine and cytosine, which were not found) — on meteorite samples. Additionally, the samples showed the presence of three molecules that are similar to nucleobases, but do not have a biological role…
Joe Rogan & Jan Irvin Discuss ‘The Mushroom and The Cross’
“His conclusion is that, all of Christianity is a gigantic misunderstanding, what it is really about is the fertility cults and the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms.” –Joe Rogan
Here’s a fun podcast with Joe Rogan and Jan Irvin, contributor to the recent book The Holy Mushroom: Evidence of Mushrooms in Judeo-Christianity.
Early Humans Likely Practiced Ritualistic Cannibalism
To be fair, 30,000 years ago, there were few other recreational activities to occupy one’s spare time. The Archaeology News Network writes:
Archaeologists have found 32,000-year-old human remains in southeastern Europe, which suggest that the earliest humans practiced “mortuary” or “ritual” cannibalism.
The excavated human remains, the oldest known in Europe, were found at a shelter-cave site called Buran-Kaya III in Ukraine and exhibit post-mortem cut marks, the MSNBC reports. “Our observations show a post-mortem treatment of human corpses including the selection of the skull,” said the paleozoologist and archaeologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, Stephane Pean.
However, Pean said that the treatment of the human bodies, which came with ornaments, did not follow nutritional purposes, rejecting the possibility of dietary cannibalism.
“Observed treatment of the human body, together with the presence of body ornaments, indicates rather a mortuary ritual: either a ritual cannibalism or a specific mortuary practice for secondary…
How the Ancient Romans Made MSG
Some researchers contend this food habit helped influence the decline the Roman Empire. Here’s a balanced look at MSG from Esther Inglis-Arkell on io9.com:
Monosodium glutamate is a food additive that enhances flavor. Although it’s frowned upon today, the ancient Romans loved it and ate it with almost every meal.
There’s been some debate over what exactly monosodium glutamate does to people. Some people say it gives them severe headaches, numbness, weakness, and even heart palpitations. Scientists could confirm that it does give some people short-lived reactions, but no tests showed that it had long-term health effects. Some say that it’s an addictive substance which causes people to crave it repeatedly if they try it too often. Others say it’s just a flavor enhancer, and people crave it because it makes things taste better.
The chemical is listed as ’safe’ by the FDA, although they do require it to be clearly listed as…
Was ‘God’s Wife’ Edited Out Of The Bible?
TIME ponders the suppression of an omnipotent female counterpart to the male God solo-featured in Judeo-Christianity. Was this where the great Middle Eastern religions went wrong?
Some scholars say early versions of the Bible featured Asherah, a powerful fertility goddess who may have been God’s wife.
Research by Francesca Stavrakopoulou, a senior lecturer in the department of Theology and Religion at the University of Exeter, unearthed clues to her identity, but good luck finding mention of her in the Bible. If Stavrakopoulou is right, heavy-handed male editors of the text all but removed her from the sacred book.
What remains of God’s purported other half are clues in ancient texts, amulets and figurines unearthed primarily in an ancient Canaanite coastal city, now in modern-day Syria. Inscriptions on pottery found in the Sinai desert also show Yahweh and Asherah were worshipped as a pair, and a passage in the Book of Kings mentions the goddess…
Celebrating Valentine’s Day With Animal Sacrifice And Whipping Women
St. Valentine by Bassano.
Yes, you read the headline right: Valentine’s Day was celebrated by the Ancient Romans in a variety of more or less (un)appealing ways, depending on your tastes (and gender, one suspects). Arnie Seipel reports for NPR:
Valentine’s Day is a time to celebrate romance and love and kissy-face fealty. But the origins of this festival of candy and cupids are actually dark, bloody — and a bit muddled.
Though no one has pinpointed the exact origin of the holiday, one good place to start is ancient Rome, where men hit on women by, well, hitting them.
From Feb. 13 to 15, the Romans celebrated the feast of Lupercalia. The men sacrificed a goat and a dog, then whipped women with the hides of the animals they had just slain.
The Roman romantics “were drunk. They were naked,” says Noel Lenski, a historian at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Young women…
Giant Rodents Lead Scientists To Discover Ancient Face Carvings In East Timor
Face carving found in Lene Hara Cave. Photo: John Brush
CSIRO News reports:
Ancient stone faces carved into the walls of a well-known limestone cave in East Timor have been discovered by a team searching for fossils of extinct giant rats.
The team of archaeologists and palaeontologists were working in Lene Hara Cave on the northeast tip of East Timor.
“Looking up from the cave floor at a colleague sitting on a ledge, my head torch shone on what seemed to be a weathered carving,” CSIRO’s Dr Ken Aplin said.
“I shone the torch around and saw a whole panel of engraved prehistoric human faces on the wall of the cave.
“The local landowners with whom we were working were stunned by the findings. They said the faces had chosen that day to reveal themselves because they were pleased by the field work we were doing.”
The Lene Hara carvings, or petroglyphs, are frontal, stylised faces each…
New Zealand’s Lost ‘Eighth Wonder Of The World’ Found Deep Underwater
Kiwi scientists have discovered portions of the Pink and White Terraces, a natural wonder which was ravaged by a 19th century volcanic blast. Sadly, the remnants are buried at the bottom of a lake, meaning they will remain hidden away from the eyes of humans. Science Daily reveals:
They were called the Eighth Wonder of the World. Until the late 19th century, New Zealand’s Pink and White Terraces along Lake Rotomahana on the North Island, attracted tourists from around the world, interested in seeing the beautiful natural formations created by a large geothermal system. But the eruption of Mt. Tarawera on June 10, 1886, buried the terraces in sediment and caused the lake basin to enlarge, engulfing the land where the terraces stood. For more than a century, people have speculated whether any part of the Pink and White Terraces survived the eruption.
This week, scientists from New Zealand’s GNS Science, in collaboration…
Japanese Scientists Plan to Resurrect Mammoth Within Five Years
_-_Mauricio_Ant%C3%B3n.jpg "Woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) - Mauricio Antón")
Woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) – Mauricio Antón/PLoS (CC)
Are we one step closer to Jurassic Park? Perhaps wishful thinking on my part, but we’re making progress, as reported by the Daily Mail:
It died out around 8,000 years ago…but in just five years the woolly mammoth could soon be walking the Earth again.
Japanese scientists are behind an ambitious project to bring the long-extinct mammal back from the dead.
The revival requires a sample of intact DNA for cloning purposes and an elephant to act as surrogate mother, donating an egg and her womb.
Taking into account the 600 or so days needed for the pregnancy, the first baby mammoths of the modern age could be born in four to five years.
In recent years, scientists have used samples of hair frozen in the Siberian ice for thousands of years to piece together the mammoth’s genetic code. And DNA preserved in bone has been used to…
