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…
Graham Hancock Sees The Future In The Past
The good folks at Bear and Company recently mailed us a new release that’s been keeping us up nights.
Lost Knowledge of the Ancients: A Graham Hancock Reader
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…
Earth’s Precession Changes Zodiac Signs: Are You Now An Ophiuchus?
The interwebs have been going crazy with a supposed change to the zodiac that has added a new sign called Ophiuchus and changed all the other signs’ dates.
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…
Teeth From Homo Sapiens Older Than Accepted History Of Homo Sapiens
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…
New Species Of Human Discovered
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…
Climate Change and the 4000 BCE Origins of Child Abuse, Sex-Repression, Warfare and Social Violence
Matriarchy.info reviews Dr. James DeMeo’s book SAHARASIA: The 4000 BCE Origins of Child Abuse, Sex-Repression, Warfare and Social Violence, In the Deserts of the Old World:
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…
Happy Saturnalia To All!
A celebration dear to the hearts of the Disinformation team at this time of year is Saturnalia, one of the most popular Roman festivals. It was marked by tomfoolery and reversal of social roles, in which slaves and masters ostensibly switched places, with expectantly humorous results. Saturnalia was introduced around 217 BC to raise citizen morale after a crushing military defeat. Originally celebrated for a day, on December 17th, its popularity saw it grow until it became a week-long extravaganza, ending on the 23rd.
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:
The Secret History of Rock ‘n’ Roll: Building a Mystery
Site editor’s note: The following is 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.
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…
Descendants Of ‘Lost Legion’ Of Roman Soldiers Found In China
Green- and blue-eyed villagers in a remote part of China may be the descendants of a fairy-tale-ish “lost legion” of ancient Roman soldiers, writes the Telegraph:
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…
Rubber People Invade Los Angeles
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…
Robots Explore Tunnels of Teotihuacan
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…
Evidence of Ancient Civilization Found in the Amazon
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…
Graham Hancock Presents: Elves, Aliens, Angels & Ayahuasca (Video)
Graham Hancock’s first stop on his 2010 North American book tour (for his novel Entangled) was Dragon*Con in Atlanta, Georgia. On opening night he presented his lecture “Elves, Aliens, Angels and Ayahuasca” at Eyedrum. The Disinformation Company videotaped the lecture and is pleased to present it in full for those of Graham’s readers not close to tour stops or who were otherwise unable to attend. Make no mistake, the live lectures with Question and Answer sessions are the real deal, but we hope you’ll enjoy this video nonetheless (please excuse the low lighting). For more information about his ideas and the book visit Entangledthebook.com.
Christian Creationism, Krishna Creationism, and the Origin of the Human Species
[The following is an excerpt from The Forbidden Archeologist: The Atlantic Rising Columns of Michael A. Cremo, reprinted with kind permission of the publisher, Torchlight Publishing.]
For a long time, Darwinists assumed that anyone who argued seriously against their theory of human evolution must be a Christian creationist. Perhaps that’s why my book Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race came as such a surprise.
In a review of Forbidden Archaeology published in Geoarchaeology (1994, 9:337-340), Kenneth Feder wrote: “The book … represents something perhaps not seen before; we can fairly call it ‘Krishna creationism’ with no disrespect intended. The basic premises of the authors are breathtaking…: The prevailing paradigm of human evolution … is wholly untenable. There is what amounts to a passive conspiracy (the authors call it a “knowledge filter”) to suppress a huge body of data that contradicts our prevailing paradigm … this purported evidence indicates that “beings quite…
Dead Sea Scrolls Go Digital
Want your very own copy of the Dead Sea Scrolls? You’ll soon be able to access the ancient writings in their – sort of – original form thanks to this interesting new project brought to you by the Israel Antiquities Authority and Google.
Joel Greenberg of The Washington Post explains:
The joint project is the latest stage of gradually widening access to the 2,000-year-old documents, once available to only a restricted group of scholars but made more accessible in recent decades through facsimile editions and published studies. Organizers say the first images will be online in a few months.
The project marries “one of the most important finds of the previous century with the most advanced technology of the next century,” said Pnina Shor, the director of the project at the Antiquities Authority. “We are putting together the past with the future in order to share it.”
The scrolls were discovered in the late 1940s…
