Hancock is one of the foremost authorities on Ancient Mysteries, having written numerous bestselling non-fiction books on the subject such as Fingerprints Of The Gods, The Sign & The Seal, Heavens Mirror and Supernatural and, most recently, the fantasy adventure novel Entangled.

Turbowolf released their eponymous debut album in November 2011, a blend of dirty rock ‘n roll, punked-up riffs and psychedelic noise. The band are about to embark on a European tour starting February 23, 2012 in London. Their shared fascination with the esoteric and the mysterious led to this meeting of minds.

In this episode Graham & the band discuss his time in Ethiopia and the search for the Ark Of The Covenant, the evidence for a Lost Civilisation, Ancient Maps & an alternative chronology for many of the worlds Ancient Monuments.

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 person had put these two separate records together and made a doomsday scenario.”

Read more about contemporary Mayan culture over at the Guardian.

To the student of apocalypticism 2012 is a clear case of secularised but still linear Christian eschatology meets a previously colonised cyclical but urban shamanism. When this doesn’t happen:

… it will be fascinating to watch the cognitive dissonance in action, one way or another …

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?

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 Jesus was a cool guy. Other than that, everything else was up for debate since they couldn’t even agree on which books should become official scriptures. Some Christians believed their religion was to remain exclusively for Jewish people. Others wanted to open it to all ethnicities. Some believed Jesus and God were one. Others were far from sold about this. Some were strict ascetics. Others enjoyed a very sensual life. Some promoted women as leaders within their groups. Others felt women were good to cook dinner and make babies, but religious leaders? Ha!

In the midst of this very chaotic beginning, Carpocrates emerged as a particularly charismatic preacher, who soon attracted enough of a following as to give birth to his own branch of Christianity. His ideas were just a tad on the wild side. Jesus—Carpocrates argued—was as human as anyone else. He was a visionary whose brilliance and wisdom put him in touch with God, but was not God himself. This didn’t diminish Jesus’s status in Carpocrates’s eyes, since it set him up as a model of behavior that regular human beings could hope to emulate. The whole story of the virgin birth made Carpocrates laugh. In his view, good old Jesus was conceived in the old fashioned way: through sweaty sex. The depth of Jesus’s wisdom was enough for Carpocrates to admire and love him, so he felt no need for any supernatural special effects.

Since this beginning was apparently not controversial enough, Carpocrates promptly taught his followers to reject Mosaic Law as well as the prevailing morality of his times as mere human opinions, not divine commandments. A goodie-goodie morality was according to Carpocrates nothing but a cage built by those who were too scared by life’s intensity. The soul could only achieve freedom and fulfillment by experiencing all of life, without discriminating too much. Only in this way, it would free itself from the cycle of reincarnation …

Oh, yeah, did I forget to mention that? Carpocrates’s followers—like the members of many other early Christian sects—fully believed in reincarnation. And just like several tantric schools found in the history of both Hinduism and Buddhism, they also believed that human beings should explore every emotion without holding back. Sensual pleasure in their eyes was not any less sacred than the most spiritual practices, so good food, sex and every other earthly joy was embraced as a stepping stone toward liberation.

This determination to live life to the fullest went hand in hand with another radical notion. Carp considered differences in wealth and social class as unnatural perversions. Since everyone is born naked and equal in front of God, human attempts to gain status at the expense of others were misguided and ultimately against God’s plan. The cure for the very human tendency toward ego aggrandizing was to discourage the evil of private property. Instead, everything—from material possessions to sexual partners—was to be held in common. Coupled with Carp’s insistence on indulging in sensual pleasures, this idea led his followers to regularly stage sexual orgies as part of their spiritual practices … which makes you wonder: just how different would the world be had mainstream forms of Christianity decided to embrace Carpocrates rather than stern moralists like Saint Paul and Saint Augustine? I think it’s a safe bet that church attendance would be much higher.

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 to survive on their own exchanged useful parts with each other without competition – effectively creating a global mega-organism.

It was around 2.9 billion years ago that LUCA split into the three domains of life: the single-celled bacteria and archaea, and the more complex eukaryotes that gave rise to animals and plants (see timeline). It’s hard to know what happened before the split. Hardly any fossil evidence remains from this time, and any genes that date that far back are likely to have mutated beyond recognition.

That isn’t an insuperable obstacle to painting LUCA’s portrait, says Gustavo Caetano-Anollés of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. While the sequence of genes changes quickly, the three-dimensional structure of the proteins they code for is more resistant to the test of time. So if all organisms today make a protein with the same overall structure, he says, it’s a good bet that the structure was present in LUCA.

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 a Bedouin shepherd in 1947. They date from before A.D. 70, and some may go back to as early as the third century B.C.

Orit Shamir, curator of organic materials at the Israel Antiquities Authority, and Naama Sukenik, a graduate student at Bar-Ilan University, published their research comparing materials in journal Dead Sea Discoveries.

The pair compared the white-linen textiles found in the caves to other found elsewhere in ancient Israel, and they discovered some parts are being bleached white, even though fabrics from the period often have vivid colours, Live Science reports.

But not everyone agrees with their diagnosis…

[continues in the Daily Mail]

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 Chauvet Cave in southeast France feature numerous scenes of brown and black horses. Other caves like the Pech Merle in southern France are adorned with paintings of white horses with black spots.

Past studies of ancient DNA have only turned up evidence of brown and black horses during that time. That led scientists to question whether the spotted horses were real or fantasy.

To get at the genetics of equine coat color, an international team led by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Germany analyzed DNA from fossilized bones and teeth from 31 prehistoric horses. The samples were recovered from more than a dozen archaeological sites in Siberia, Eastern Europe, Western Europe and the Iberian peninsula.

It turned out six of the horses had a genetic mutation that gives rise to a spotted coat, suggesting that ancient artists were drawing what they were seeing. Brown was the most common coat color, found in 18 horses…

[continues at AP via Fox News]

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. And no, we’re not talking about Cthulhu.

After considering the more brutal aspects of modern octopus predation, paleontologist Mark McMenamin of Mount Holyoke College came to the conclusion that the shonisaur remains had been deposited in a “kraken” lair by its massive, tentacled squatter:

We hypothesize that the shonisaurs were killed and carried to the site by an enormous Triassic cephalopod, a “kraken,” with estimated length of approximately 30 m, twice that of the modern Colossal Squid Mesonychoteuthis. In this scenario, shonisaurs were ambushed by a Triassic kraken, drowned, and dumped on a midden like that of a modern octopus. Where vertebrae in the assemblage are disarticulated, disks are arranged in curious linear patterns with almost geometric regularity.

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 goods), as well as spirit (self-esteem, respect). A shortcoming of our current analysis of the riots in Britain and many other social phenomena is that western thought since the Enlightenment has dismissed spirit and focused solely on appetite as the central human motivation.

The rioters were only partly, and perhaps only marginally, motivated by material gain. How does setting a building on fire or burning a car make one wealthier? Why engage the police in pitched battles? However, if we recognise that the rioters were also pursuing spirit or seeking recognition from their peers, we gain more insight into what is happening. The stolen television or the confrontation with the police is a sign of honour that feeds the spirit and sense of self-esteem.

The ancient Greeks recognised that unconstrained pursuit of appetite or spirit in any society would lead to disaster. Therefore, they argued that reason must govern the pursuit of both appetite and spirit. When we fail to use our reason to moderate our drives, we risk falling into a world governed by fear, a world of riots…

[continues in the Financial Times (free registration required)]

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 months of construction, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will begin filming 55 educational vignettes about Jesus’ life next week on a new movie set modeled mainly after biblical Jerusalem. The set — roughly a football-field-by-a-football-field in size near Goshen, south of Utah Lake — has been painstakingly erected by hundreds of workers in hope of bringing the holy city to life.

Producers expect the set to last for decades and be used for future church projects as well. To achieve a lasting realism, creators consulted experts at Brigham Young University.

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 on Earth: Purine, 2.6-diaminopurine, and 6.8-diaminopurine. Hypoxanthine and xanthine, compounds used in biological processes, but not DNA, were also found. What is particularly significant about the new research is that the scientists were able to confirm that the biological parts were created in space and carried to Earth.

Read the rest at Geekosystem

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.

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 disposal,” he described.

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 an additive in any food product that uses it. It’s most often found in canned soups and vegetables. Modern MSG is manufactured using genetically engineered bacteria. They take in nutrients and excrete glutamic acid. The acid is concentrated, and sodium is added to make the final product.

Read More on io9.com

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 as being housed in the temple of Yahweh.

St. Valentine by Bassano.

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 would actually line up for the men to hit them, Lenski says. They believed this would make them fertile.

The brutal fete included a matchmaking lottery, in which young men drew the names of women from a jar. The couple would then be, um, coupled up for the duration of the festival – or longer, if the match was right.

The ancient Romans may also be responsible for the name of our modern day of love. Emperor Claudius II executed two men — both named Valentine — on Feb. 14 of different years in the 3rd century A.D. Their martyrdom was honored by the Catholic Church with the celebration of St. Valentine’s Day…

[continues at NPR] ]]> http://www.disinfo.com/2011/02/celebrating-valentines-day-with-animal-sacrifice-and-whipping-women/feed/ 4 http://www.disinfo.com/2011/02/giant-rodents-lead-scientists-to-discover-ancient-face-carvings-in-east-timor/ http://www.disinfo.com/2011/02/giant-rodents-lead-scientists-to-discover-ancient-face-carvings-in-east-timor/#comments Fri, 11 Feb 2011 20:36:56 +0000 Pelliciari http://www.disinfo.com/?p=46235

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…

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 with eyes, a nose and a mouth. One has a circular headdress with rays that frame the face.

[Continues at CSIRO News]

]]>

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 with engineers and scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and colleagues from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University and NOAA-PMEL, located portions of the long-lost Pink Terraces.

The research team, using autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to map the bottom of Lake Rotomahana, are certain they have found the lower portions of the Pink Terraces on the lake floor.

After detecting areas of interest with the AUV’s sonar systems, the team used the underwater camera system, developed with funds from the U.S. National Science Foundation, to capture images of the lake floor where they were able to photograph some of the stepped terrace edges.

Dr. de Ronde said the rest of the Pink Terraces were either destroyed during the eruption, or are still concealed under thick sediment not able to be penetrated by high-frequency AUV sonars.

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 recreate the prehistoric giant’s blood.

But the latest project is far more ambitious.

The Kyoto University researchers are planning an expedition to the Siberian permafrost this summer in search of a flash-frozen specimen still rich in DNA…

[continues in the Daily Mail)]

Lost Knowledge of the Ancients: A Graham Hancock Reader is a collection of essays curated by Graham Hancock at his website. This volume gathers these contributions together in print for the first time and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

A book of essays by various authors certainly encourages grazing more than cover-to-cover reading, but no matter where one begins or ends this exploration of possible histories, one finds unexpected connections.

Lost includes essays by Robert Bauval, Mark Booth, Richard Hoagland, Robert Schoch, John Anthony West and Hancock himself. While the book is wide-ranging, covering topics from pole shifts to quantum philosophy to antediluvian history, its real strength lies in the themes that run throughout the book:

* The human race is much older than we think.

* There was a highly advanced human civilization that pre-dated ancient Egypt.

* Until we understand this ancient history, we will never understand who we really are.

Read more at JoeNolan.com.

It’s world-changing (well if you believe in this sort of thing : ) If you’d like to read what’s really going on here behind the hubbub and learn a bit about astronomy not astrology, Charlie Jane Anders over at io9.com has an excellent post:

What on Earth is going on? And why does everybody suddenly have to work with a new version of the completely meaningless zodiac?

It seems to have started with this article in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune last weekend, in which one astronomer made some statements about the zodiac. Parke Kunkle is on the board of directors of the Minnesota Planetarium Society and teaches astronomy at Minneapolis Community and Technical College. Kunkle told the Star-Tribune the Earth’s relation to the sun had changed since the Babylonians first created the zodiac.

We got in touch with Kunkle and asked him what he actually told the Star-Tribune. He said he was asked by the Star-Tribune to give them a few bits of information about astronomy, not realizing the article would become a huge discussion of astrology and the relationship between astronomy and astrology. And the main stuff he talked to the Star-Tribune about has to do with the phenomenon of “precession.”

Read More from Charlie Jane Anders over at io9.com

Qesem Cave, Israel. Source: Institute of Archaeology, Tel Aviv University

In keeping with Disinfo’s tradition of challenging accepted boundaries in all things, as well as in the spirit of the disinformation book Underground!, here’s a little jewel of a discovery written by Daniel Estrin for AP via Yahoo News. Homo Sapiens teeth … potentially 400,000 years old. So much for the old timeline of human history!

Israeli archaeologists said Monday they may have found the earliest evidence yet for the existence of modern man, and if so, it could upset theories of the origin of humans.

A Tel Aviv University team excavating a cave in central Israel said teeth found in the cave are about 400,000 years old and resemble those of other remains of modern man, known scientifically as Homo sapiens, found in Israel. The earliest Homo sapiens remains found until now are half as old.

“It’s very exciting to come to this conclusion,” said archaeologist Avi Gopher, whose team examined the teeth with X-rays and CT scans and dated them according to the layers of earth where they were found.

He stressed that further research is needed to solidify the claim. If it does, he says, “this changes the whole picture of evolution.”

The accepted scientific theory is that Homo sapiens originated in Africa and migrated out of the continent. Gopher said if the remains are definitively linked to modern human’s ancestors, it could mean that modern man in fact originated in what is now Israel.

Sir Paul Mellars, a prehistory expert at Cambridge University, said the study is reputable, and the find is “important” because remains from that critical time period are scarce, but it is premature to say the remains are human…

[continues at AP via Yahoo News]

Denisovan tooth. Photo: David Reich, et al./Nature

Unraveling ancient human DNA must be like crack for anthropologists — they just can’t stop! Joe Palca reports for NPR:

DNA taken from a pinkie bone at least 30,000 years old is hinting at the existence of a previously unknown population of ancient humans. It’s just the latest example of how modern genetic techniques are transforming the world of anthropology.

The pinkie bone in question was unearthed in 2008 from what’s called the Denisova Cave.

“The Denisova Cave is in southern Siberia in the Altai Mountains in central Asia,” says David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston. “This bone is the bone of a 6- to 7-year-old girl.”

Reich and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig were able to extract DNA from the pinkie bone and sequence all 3 billion letters of DNA that made up this girl’s genome. This is the second ancient genome this team has unraveled. The first was the Neanderthal genome announced earlier this year.

Closer To Neanderthals

Reich says there were several remarkable things about the group of people this girl is from, a group he and his colleagues call Denisovans.

“On the one hand it’s a sister group to Neanderthals, which means that it’s more closely related to Neanderthals on average than it is to modern humans,” he says.

As he reports in the journal Nature, the other remarkable finding was that Denisovans’ genome was more closely related to humans currently living in New Guinea than it was to genomes of people in Europe or Asia…

[continues at NPR]

A new geographical study on the ancient historical origins of human violence and warfare, drawing upon global archaeological and anthropological evidence, has just been published presenting substantial proof that our ancient ancestors were non-violent, and far more social and loving than are most humans today – moreover, the study points to a dramatic climate change in the Old World, the drying up of the vast Sahara and Asian Deserts, with attending famine, starvation and forced migrations which pushed the earliest humans into violent social patterns, a trauma from which we have not yet recovered in over 6000 years.

The study and book, titled SAHARASIA: The 4000 BCE Origins of Child Abuse, Sex-Repression, Warfare and Social Violence, In the Deserts of the Old World, by retired professor James DeMeo, Ph.D., is the culmination of years of library and field research on the subject. Professor DeMeo undertook the original research as a 7-year dissertation project at the University of Kansas, which was concluded in 1986. He has since put an additional decade of research into the subject. His study is unusual in that it presents the first world maps of human behavior, as developed from large anthropological, historical and archaeological data bases. DeMeo’s findings were also recently presented at a regional meeting of the AAAS, in Grand Junction, Colorado.

“There is no clear or unambiguous evidence for warfare or social violence anywhere on planet Earth prior to around 4,000 BC and the earliest evidence appears in specific locations, from which it firstly arose, and diffused outward over time to infect nearly every corner of the globe.” says DeMeo, who today directs his own private institute in rural Oregon. “A massive climate change shook the ancient world, when approximately 6000 years ago vast areas of lush grassland and forest in the Old World began to quickly dry out and convert into harsh desert. The vast Sahara Desert, Arabian Desert, and the giant deserts of the Middle East and Central Asia simply did not exist prior to c.4000 BC” DeMeo asserts, pointing to numerous studies in paleoclimatology – the study of ancient climates. “Something happened around 4000 BC which forced the drying-out of this vast desert region, which I call Saharasia, and the drier conditions created social and emotional havoc among developing human agricultural societies in these same regions.”

DeMeo’s maps show spreading centers for the origins of patriarchal authoritarian cultures within this same Saharasian global region – male-dominated, child-abusive, sex-repressive cultures with a great emphasis upon war-making and empire-building. DeMeo points to the work of the controversial natural scientist Wilhelm Reich to explain the patterns.

The Trauma of starvation

“Famine and starvation is a severe trauma from which survivors rarely escape unscathed. A lot of people die, families are split apart, and babies and children are often abandoned, and suffer enormously. Starvation affects surviving children in an emotionally severe manner. They shrink from the exhausting heat and thirst, emotionally withdraw from the painful world, and simultaneously suffer a severe stunting of the entire brain and nervous system due to protein-calorie malnutrition. Even if such starved children later get all the food and water they want, they are deeply scarred in an emotional-neurological manner which forever changes their behavior – specifically, there is an implanted inhibition of any impulse of a pleasure-seeking, outward-reaching nature, and a discomfort with deeper forms of body-pleasure, in both maternal-infant or male-female expressions. Additionally, the child’s view of the mother, who could not protect or feed the child during the famine period, is thereafter colored with suspicion and anger. These attitudes and behaviors are deeply protoplasmic in nature, and are passed on to ensuing generations no matter what the climate, by social institutions which reflect the character structure of the average individual at any given period of time.”

As part of his project, DeMeo undertook a cross-cultural evaluation of Wilhelm Reich’s original ideas on human behavior. “Reich claimed humans became violent from two major causes: firstly from abusive and neglectful treatment of infants and children, and secondly from the repression of adolescent heterosexual feelings.” This latter consideration, DeMeo asserts, has gotten nearly no attention from specialists on child-abuse, given that our society still considers adolescent romance and pre-marital sex to be a bad thing. “Pre-marital, adolescent sexual romance is normal among the most peaceful cultures, but is always repressed in violent warlike cultures. It is an even more precise predictor of social and individual violence than is child-abuse.” Ideas such as these got Reich into hot water in the 1950s, DeMeo says, and his own work has similarly stirred up controversy.

Read more here.

See also:

• Did Societies Evolve To Be Corrupt?
• Pathocracy: Is Civilization the Creation of Psychopaths?
• Is Civilization Psychologically Damaging, or Just American Culture?

Our favorite exposition of Saturnalia has long been the Electric Sheep comic strip, no longer easily available on the web, but we dug in the crates and are pleased to bring it to you. We did find it here and in a video created from the original website posted to Funny or Die:

Site editor’s note: The following is excerpted from

I like to think of the history of rock & roll like the origin of Greek drama. That started out on the threshing floors during the crucial seasons, and was originally a band of acolytes dancing and singing. Then, one day, a possessed person jumped out of the crowd and started imitating a god.

—Jim Morrison

Most historians believe that the Mysteries began at the end of the Neolithic Age (also known as the New Stone Age, roughly 9000 to 4500 BCE), making them one of the earliest cultural developments known to humanity. Coinciding with the development of agriculture, the rituals were designed to appeal to the grain gods of the Underworld by acting out their myths, which celebrated the cycles of planting, growth and harvesting. The earliest distinct Mysteries were practiced in Egypt, which depended on the yearly flooding of the Nile to fertilize its soil. This process was at the center of all the various (and often contradictory) regional cults that made up what we now generically refer to as “Egyptian religion.” From Egypt, the Mysteries migrated into western Asia and the Mediterranean basin, and eventually to the farthest frontiers of the known world.

The Mysteries were known by many names in Greece, including mysteria, teletai, bakchoi, and orgia (where the modern word orgy comes from). Adjectives like “unspeakable” or “forbidden” were often added, intensifying their mystique. Mysteries are generally distinguished from other cults by a number of features. The initiates worshipped “suffering gods,” and experienced their various deaths and dramas through ritual theater and music. Myths were retold and often acted out on those agricultural themes. These cults practiced secret initiations which were not to be shared with outsiders, sometimes on pain of death or more often, imprisonment.

The Mysteries were usually centered on a single god, but they were not technically monotheistic. Instead they were henotheistic, meaning they recognized the existence of other gods but focused their energy on one. Most importantly, the Mystery religions weren’t about dogma—they were about experience. Music and dance were essential to the rituals themselves, which usually took place at night. And most importantly, sexual symbols—or practices—were a crucial part of the process.

The gods of the Mysteries were usually believed to have come from faraway lands. Foreign gods have always had an exotic appeal, a kind of cosmic variant on the “grass is always greener” adage. This was especially true in the days before the rise of mass communications, but the same process repeated itself in the Victorian era and the Sixties. At its core, religion has always been about escape.

Most of the Mystery religions were decidely countercultural, offering a direct, personal relationship to a god, without a priest as middleman. Their voluntary nature was radical for its time, reflecting an overall trend toward individualism in Classical Greece. But even with their wild rituals, the Mysteries required a high degree of discipline and loyalty. These weren’t hippie stoners as we would understand them—as with the Central American shamans, the actual Mystery ritual would be the climax of a long period of study, sacrifice, and self-purification.

Less is known about the actual rituals themselves.  But songs and dances were performed, usually fast and wild, with crashing drums and screaming flutes—rock ’n’ roll, in other words. Simple pyrotechnics were often used (torches, sometimes treated with chemicals for different effects) and spontaneous rutting often broke out among the wilder cults such as the Roman Bacchanalia. As the eminent German historian Walter Burkert wrote, Mystery festivals were designed to be “unforgettable events casting their shadows over the whole of one’s future life, creating experiences that transform existence” (which brings us back to that one concert that changed your life). The initiates fully expected to meet their gods in the flesh, and by all accounts, they usually weren’t disappointed. The Greek philosopher Proclus wrote that the gods didn’t always take human shape, but would “manifest themselves in many forms, assuming a great variety of guises; sometimes they appear in a formless light, again in quite different form.”

Like Christianity sometime later, Mystery religions were based around concepts of death and resurrection. The Mysteries prepared believers for their death and descent to the Underworld, where one’s favorite god would be present to lend a hand. That was part of the pitch; an inscription at the Mystery temple Eleusis declared, “Beautiful indeed is the mystery given to us by the blessed Gods: Death is for mortals no longer an evil, but a blessing.”

Aside from the usual nocturnal gatherings, Mystery cults also ran more conventional temples for the uninitiated, which were remarkably similar—if not nearly identical—to liturgical Christianity, offering communion and holy water (imported from the Nile), and preaching doctrines such as salvation, resurrection, and judgment of the dead.

This uncomfortable similarity is the reason early Christian fathers went on the warpath against the Mysteries in their writings, calling their gods demons and their goddesses the whores of Hell. (See Revelation 17:5: “Mystery, Babylon the Great.”) But even when the Church became the official cult of state and began literally wiping out the competition, it took a very long time to stamp out the Mysteries. In fact, the Church opted instead to simply absorb many of their rituals, beliefs and practices.

Ancient historians have cited books and scriptures used in the Mysteries, yet very few of them seem to have survived, other than as fragments. But there’s an extensive record of secondary material detailing the Mysteries’ beliefs, practices and influence, which gives a clear picture of the history and power of this remarkable movement.

Excerpted from The Secret History of Rock ’N’ Roll: The Mysterious Roots of Modern Music by Christopher Knowles (Viva Editions, October 2010). Used with permission.

A local man, Cai Junnian, is nicknamed by his friends and relatives Cai Luoma, or Cai the Roman, and is one of many villagers convinced that he is descended from the lost legion.

Archeologists plan to conduct digs in the region, along the ancient Silk Route, to search for remains of forts or other structures built by the fabled army.

“We hope to prove the legend by digging and discovering more evidence of China’s early contacts with the Roman Empire,” Yuan Honggeng, the head of a newly-established Italian Studies Centre at Lanzhou University in Gansu province, told the China Daily newspaper.

The genetic tests have leant weight to the theory that Roman legionaries settled in the area in the first century BC after fleeing a disastrous battle.

The clash took place in 53BC between an army led by Marcus Crassus, a Roman general, and a larger force of Parthians, from what is now Iran, bringing to an abrupt halt the Roman Empire’s eastwards expansion.

Thousands of Romans were slaughtered and Crassus himself was beheaded, but some legionaries were said to have escaped the fighting and marched east to elude the enemy.

They supposedly fought as mercenaries in a war between the Huns and the Chinese in 36BC – Chinese chroniclers refer to the capture of a “fish-scale formation” of troops, a possible reference to the “tortoise” phalanx formation perfected by legionnaries. The wandering Roman soldiers are thought to have been released and to have settled on the steppes of western China.

The theory was first put forward in the 1950s by Homer Dubs, a professor of Chinese history at Oxford University.

The Roman Empire reached its greatest territorial extent under the Emperor Trajan in the 2nd century AD, just as the Han empire was beginning to decline.

Most historians believe that the two empires had only indirect contact, as silk and spices were traded along the Silk Road through merchants in exchange for Roman goods such as glassware.

But some experts believe they could instead be descended from the armies of Huns that marauded through central Asia, which included soldiers of Caucasian origin.

Maurizio Bettini, a classicist and anthropologist from Siena University, dismissed the theory as “a fairy tale”.

“For it to be indisputable, one would need to find items such as Roman money or weapons that were typical of Roman legionaries,” he told La Repubblica. “Without proof of this kind, the story of the lost legions is just a legend.”

Olmec Head at La Venta Park, Villahermosa. This colossal head is 2.4 m high (9 ft) and is officially known as Monument 1. Photo: Hajor (CC)

David Littlejohn reports on a new exhibition about the Olmecs, or “Rubber People,” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, for the Wall Street Journal:

The name “Olmec” (or “rubber people”) was given to the oldest-known culture in the Americas almost 2,000 years after that culture had disappeared, and was accepted by scholars only in 1932. We have no idea what these people of what is now eastern Mexico, just inland from the Gulf at its southernmost point, called themselves. In fact, we know almost nothing about them, except that they seem to have endured from about 2,000 to 400 B.C.

What we do know, or think we know, comes almost entirely from the carved stone monuments and other artifacts that outlived them underground, because stone does not rot. The first—one of those colossal heads for which the Olmec are famous—was found by a Mexican farmer in 1850 and made known to the world in 1869. Not until 1942 was it publicly asserted that the Olmec was the “mother culture” of Mesoamerica (i.e., Mexico plus Central America).

Seventeen huge heads (c. 1400-1000 B.C.) have been discovered so far, in four sites within a 90-mile range, measuring from just under five feet to just over 11 feet tall and weighing (it is estimated) as much as 50 tons. One archaeologist has figured that it took 1,500 people three or four months to move an apppropriate boulder from its source in the mountains to its designated location. With presumably less effort, two of the smaller heads were hauled up from their homeland to Los Angeles, where they are the stars of the first major museum exhibition outside of Mexico devoted to the “people of Olman” and their art.

The two great heads are set up at the front and the back of the light-filled central space of the new Resnick Pavilion at LACMA, atop brown cubistic concrete platforms designed by Michael Heizer—who knows something about colossal sculpture. Although the curators claim to discern individual features in each of the heads, suggesting that each represents a different ruler, I see an obsessive urge in the Olmec sculptors to make each one alike—a bullet-shaped mound, topped by a tight cap, beneath which flaring brows; huge popping, lidded eyes; a squashed nose; and fat, down-drooping lips convey an image at once all-powerful and either snarling or sad. All sorts of things (including jaguars and African origins) have been read into these features. But they may represent nothing more than a simple way to create a human face by grinding stone against stone, creating features related to those of Mexican Indians today…

[continues in the Wall Street Journal]

View of the Avenue of the Dead and the Pyramid of the Sun.

Teotihuacan, Mexico, “birthplace of the gods,” is famous for its massive pyramids and the Avenue of the Dead. Now its underground tunnels are revealing more of its secrets, thanks to robot explorers, as reported by AP:

The first robotic exploration of a pre-Hispanic ruin in Mexico has revealed that a 2,000-year-old tunnel under a temple at the famed Teotihuacan ruins has a perfectly carved arch roof and appears stable enough to enter, archaeologists announced Wednesday.

Archaeologists lowered the remote-controlled, camera-equipped vehicle into the 12-foot-wide (4-meter) corridor and sent wheeling through it to see if it was safe for researchers to enter. The one-foot (30-cm) wide robot was called “Tlaloque 1″ after the Aztec rain god.

The grainy footage shot by the robot was presented Wednesday by Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History. It shows a narrow, open space left after the tunnel was intentionally closed off between A.D. 200 and 250 and filled with debris nearly to the roof.

Archaeologist Sergio Gomez says the footage showed the arched-roof tunnel was an example of sophisticated work by the ancient inhabitants of Teotihuacan, which is located just north of modern Mexico City.

“All of the passage, more than 100 meters (yards) long was excavated in the rock perfectly, and in some places you can even see the marks of the tools the people of Teotihuacan used to make it,” said Gomez.

Well-worked blocks and a smoothly-arched ceiling showed the tunnel was not natural, but rather a man-made structure that researchers believe lead to possible burial chambers…

[continues at AP]

Amazon River drainage basin with the Rio Negro highlighted. Source: Kmusser (CC)

Tom Phillips reports that a drought in Brazil has provided evidence of an ancient civilisation in the form of engravings up to 7,000 years old, in the Guardian:

A series of ancient underwater etchings has been uncovered near the jungle city of Manaus, following a drought in the Brazilian Amazon.

The previously submerged images – engraved on rocks and possibly up to 7,000 years old – were reportedly discovered by a fisherman after the Rio Negro, a tributary of the Amazon river, fell to its lowest level in more than 100 years last month.

Tens of thousands of forest dwellers were left stranded after rivers in the region faded into desert-like sandbanks.

Though water levels are now rising again, partly covering the apparently stone age etchings, local researchers photographed them before they began to disappear under the river’s dark waters.

Archaeologists who have studied the photographs believe the art – which features images of faces and snakes – is another indication that thousands of years ago the Amazon was already home to large civilisations.

Eduardo Neves, president of the Brazilian Society of Archaeology and a leading Amazon scholar, said the etchings appeared to have been made between 3,000 and 7,000 years ago when water levels in the region were lower. The etchings were “further, undeniable evidence” that the region had been occupied by a significant number of ancient settlements and people.

“There has always been this idea that the Amazon was empty. The truth is that this hypothesis is not correct. In many parts of the Amazon we now have proof of settlements,” he said, adding that the discovery was of great scientific importance…

[continues in the Guardian]