TBR News July 7, 2016

Jul 06 2016

The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C. July 6, 2016: “We are out of the country on business and will return July 9.”

 The Müller Washington Journals   1948-1951

At the beginning of December, 1948, a German national arrived in Washington, D.C. to take up an important position with the newly-formed CIA. He was a specialist on almost every aspect of Soviet intelligence and had actively fought them, both in his native Bavaria where he was head of the political police in Munich and later in Berlin as head of Amt IV of the State Security Office, also known as the Gestapo.

His name was Heinrich Müller.

Even as a young man, Heini Müller had kept daily journals of his activities, journals that covered his military service as a pilot in the Imperial German air arm and an apprentice policeman in Munich. He continued these journals throughout the war and while employed by the top CIA leadership in Washington, continued his daily notations.

This work is a translation of his complete journals from December of 1948 through September of 1951.

When Heinrich Müller was hired by the CIA¹s station chief in Bern, Switzerland, James Kronthal in 1948, he had misgivings about working for his former enemies but pragmatism and the lure of large amounts of money won him over to what he considered to be merely an extension of his life-work against the agents of the Comintern. What he discovered after living and working in official Washington for four years was that the nation¹s capital was, in truth, what he once humorously claimed sounded like a cross between a zoo and a lunatic asylum. His journals, in addition to personal letters, various reports and other personal material, give a very clear, but not particularly flattering, view of the inmates of both the zoo and the asylum.

Müller moved, albeit very carefully, in the rarefied atmosphere of senior policy personnel, military leaders, heads of various intelligence agencies and the White House itself. He was a very observant, quick-witted person who took copious notes of what he saw. This was not a departure from his earlier habits because Heinrich Müller had always kept a journal, even when he was a lowly Bavarian police officer, and his comments about personalities and events in the Third Reich are just as pungent and entertaining as the ones he made while in America.

The reason for publishing this phase of his eventful life is that so many agencies in the United States and their supporters do not want to believe that a man of Müller¹s position could ever have been employed by their country in general or their agency in specific.

Friday, 25. May, 1951.

Much uproar in Germany these days. The Adenauer puppet government has been terribly insulted by (General Otto Ernst, ed. ) Remer, head of the SRP (Socialist Reichs Party, ed) who has been jailed for four months for calling Adenauer a tool of America. Of course the new government there is a backside-kissing mass of toadies and sycophants most of whom had been in concentration camps for defeatism or treason or God knows what kinds of law breaking (many § 175ers), (German laws against homosexuality, ed.) or other night monsters. Hitler was right when he had me shoot as many of these cretins as I could before the end. It didn’t prevent the survivors from crawling up to the Americans and licking their boots. Of course over there no one forgives Remer who stopped the putsch against Hitler and was directly responsible for shooting the sainted Stauffenberg.

Well, Remer shot him and I dumped him down the Klo (water closet, ed.) but the smell lingers on. No doubt they will be naming streets after the creep now that his pinheaded friends are in power. With the support of the Amis, note.

Thayer and two of his friends; one a geneticist from the Ukraine and another someone with an unpronounceable name from Hungary had a private meeting last week with several of us. Very interesting and sounded like the old days.

There is a plan being worked on by a sub-group, with Thayer involved, to do “active research” into breeding superior peoples! It sounds like the nonsense I used to encounter in the 30s and 40s. Thayer is having problems about his two mistresses that he brought back with him from Vienna. The wife has a father in high places and his domestic life is not pleasant.

Back to the Nordic breeding farms again. They managed to get their hands on the Mengele reports and are sending someone down to Paraguay to interview the good doctor about any suggestions he might have relative to such a program here. The plan is to set up a CIA-funded department of genetic research connected with Harvard and continue the M. experiments but without killing twins this time. The Gregor Mendel Society would have a grand time trying to improve all the mongrels that I have to work with on a daily basis!

Bunny is now very pregnant and very difficult to deal with. We have sudden hysterical outbursts, rampant self-pity with touches of paranoia and general manifestations of very bad humor. Physical relations are simply not possible during the pregnancy and I am sleeping in another room. She has these fits and then feels very badly and when she is apologizing, I am very supportive. It is hard to be supportive when she is shrieking that I am having an affair (which I am not…at least at the present time) and so on.

It is necessary for me to spend a good deal of time at home to allay her suspicions and I think she is beginning to come around.

It will be impossible for me to take her to Europe, that’s for certain. I bribed her doctor to tell her that she may not travel and she went for it so I will have more freedom when I go back. This is coming soon! This July and early August. I have a pile of brochures on various concerts, etc. but I keep them away from Bunny who wants to go to Europe but knows she cannot. The baby is due in early September and it would be cutting it a bit fine to take her and then have to have her give birth on the boat.

My affair with Libby H. has cooled off but is not entirely over. Her fat husband is still furious with Philby but is friendly enough with me these days. Libby hasn’t told him yet but what will she do when I dump her? She is getting to be a terrible bore what with her constant demands for very strenuous sex. She does talk a good bit and Bill tells her quite a lot that he shouldn’t. I have told her not to keep pushing him about P. but she claims she will never forgive him because of some dreadful caricature Burgess did of her.

Women are both insecure and vain and in this combination is contained a terrible amount of vindictive malice. They should be disposable so that when we have finished with them, we could do what I did to Stauffenberg and flush them down the drain!

Viktor wants to get together with me next week to discuss what he has found out about the disks. I want him to talk to Behn too so something can be arraigned. I will be going to New York so V. and I can go to Broad Street and meet with Behn at his office.

Some “astonishing” developments, Viktor says, but not on the telephone.

It is known that the CIA taps the phones of all their employees and I cannot control what they do in the telephone offices. In the house or on a nearby telephone pole of course but I am careful what I say.

 

Harvey’s animosity towards Philby eventually exposed him as a Soviet spy. The CIA worked very closely with British Intelligence and was well informed about affairs in London. A highly confidential report that has emerged from the files of a former CIA agent, went into some detail about the Burgess-MacLean defection and it now appears quite certain that they were tricked into fleeing by very high level British bureaucrats who were themselves either active homosexuals, Soviet sources or both. MacLean had suffered a serious mental breakdown after his period of service in Washington and Burgess was always a perpetual menace so the brace of them were told that their exposure was only a matter of days away and this resulted in the headlong flight to the safety of Moscow. Following this disaster, the British government went to great lengths to stonewall any American investigations, still fearful that many serving bureaucrats would be exposed for their various lapses into treason and buggery.

It was Müller’s favorite observation, never repeated in the Anglophile confines of the CIA buildings, that the British were best defined as “polymorph and perverse” and in support of his thesis, he often regaled his close associates with terrible and cruel anecdotes that he gleaned from secret CIA and FBI reports he had copies of.

 https://www.amazon.com/DC-Diaries-Translated-Heinrich-Chronicals-ebook/dp/B00SQDU3GE?ie=UTF8&keywords=The%20DC%20Diaries&qid=1462467839&ref_=sr_1_1&s=books&sr=1-1

Belgian Neanderthals ‘were eating each other 40,000 years ago’

Members of human subspecies also appear to have fashioned tools out of bones of their own kind, researchers say

July 6, 2016

The Guardian

Belgian Neanderthals were eating each other 40,000 years ago, new research has shown.

The grisly discovery was made in a cave where scientists found bones bearing marks left by intentional butchering.

Not only were they cannibals, but the Neanderthals appear to have fashioned tools out of the bones of their own kind.

Neanderthals were a human subspecies that lived in Europe and western Asia for hundreds of thousands of years before becoming extinct between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago.

Their disappearance followed the arrival of Homo sapiens, ancestors of people living today, from Africa. Evidence shows that the two kinds of humans interbred, and up to 4% of the DNA of modern Europeans and Asians is believed to have been inherited from Neanderthals.

The bones uncovered from the Goyet caves near Namur in Belgium bore cut marks, pits and notches signifying butchery, said researchers writing in the journal Scientific Reports.

It appears to have been a thorough process. There is evidence of skinning, cutting up, and extraction of bone marrow. Lead scientist Prof Hervé Bocherens, from the University of Tübingen in Germany, said: “These indications allow us to assume that the Neanderthals practised cannibalism. The many remains of horses and reindeer found in Goyet were processed the same way.”

Other hints of Neanderthal cannibalism have emerged previously in Spain and France. Four bones from Goyet clearly suggest that Neanderthals also used the remains of their deceased as tools.

One thighbone and three shinbones were used to shape stone implements. In a similar way, animal bones were often used as knapping tools.

Neanderthals in Europe Died Out Thousands of Years Sooner Than Some Thought, Study Says

August 20, 2014

by Kennerh Chang

New York Times

Neanderthals, our heavy-browed relatives, spread out across Europe and Asia about 200,000 years ago. But when did they die out, giving way to modern humans?

A new analysis of Neanderthal sites from Spain to Russia provides the most definitive answer yet: about 40,000 years ago, at least in Europe.

That is thousands of years earlier than some scientists have suggested, and it narrows the period that Neanderthals and modern humans overlapped in Europe.

“After that, we don’t think there are any Neanderthals on the continent anymore,” said Thomas Higham, the deputy director of the radiocarbon accelerator unit at the University of Oxford in England.

On the other hand, the dating also argues against the view that modern humans overwhelmed the Neanderthals as soon they arrived in Europe. While modern humans and Neanderthals do not appear to have intermingled in the same locales, the findings suggest they co-existed in neighboring regions for up to several thousand years.

The findings, reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, run counter to claims that pockets of Neanderthals persisted in Portugal, Spain and Gibraltar until just 30,000 years ago, even as modern humans spread outward.

“This is a very strong compilation,” said Chris Stringer, who leads research on human origins at the Natural History Museum in London and who was not involved in the research. “I think it kind of replaces the picture we had before.”

In 1995, researchers including Jean-Jacques Hublin, now at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, announced fossil evidence of Neanderthals living 30,000 years ago in a cave near the southern Spanish city of Málaga.

Dr. Hublin said he had changed his mind as better radiocarbon dates became available. “To me, I’m ready to buy the new date,” he said.

Modern humans migrated out of Africa at least 60,000 years ago, and anthropologists have been trying to figure out what happened when the two groups encountered each other.

One of the reasons some researchers think Neanderthals survived longer on the Iberian Peninsula is that there are no signs of modern humans living there at that time.

A recent analysis of Neanderthal DNA shows that Neanderthals and modern humans not only crossed paths, but interbred. For non-African people living today, 1 to 4 percent of their genome has Neanderthal origins.

The genetics suggest that interbreeding occurred about 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, somewhere in western Asia.

“You’ve kind of got two parts of the story,” Dr. Stringer said. “There must have been a western Asia coexistence, which included interbreeding. Then there was a later coexistence in Europe, for which we have no evidence of interbreeding but possible evidence of some cultural contact between the groups.”

Dr. Higham, the lead author of the Nature paper, and his colleagues took advantage of advances in radiocarbon dating in testing samples of bone, charcoal and shell from 40 sites, mostly in Western Europe. The dating method takes advantage of unstable, radioactive carbon 14 atoms produced from the bombardment of the atmosphere by cosmic rays from outer space. The radioactive carbon combines with oxygen atoms to form carbon dioxide, and plants and animals take up some of it as long as they are alive.

But when they die, they absorb no additional radioactive carbon, and the carbon 14 disappears over time. The ratio of carbon 14 to carbon 12, which is stable, thus tells the age and can be used to date bones and artifacts up to about 50,000 years ago.

Contaminants containing younger organic molecules can distort the dating. Dr. Higham said just 1 percent of modern carbon infiltrating a 50,000-year-old fossil would make it look 7,000 to 8,000 years younger. The researchers prepared samples that would extract collagen in the bone and remove the contaminants.

“What we find is often the dates get older,” Dr. Higham said. “We’ve managed to chip away at these erroneous younger Neanderthal dates to come up with a more refined, and we think accurate, estimate for when Neanderthals disappeared.”

Dr. Higham said his team would like to expand the research to Neanderthal sites in Eastern Europe and across Russia to Siberia. It is possible that Neanderthals survived later in those areas.

Some of the conclusions are tentative because many of the sites do not have bones of the actual inhabitants, and paleontologists are still debating whether it was Neanderthals or modern humans who made the tools found at some sites.

“This gives us a framework, basically, which allows us to ask more interesting questions,” said William Davies of the University of Southampton in England, who wrote an accompanying commentary in Nature. “About what the tools might mean, how they were used, what they tell us about Neanderthal interactions.”

The findings so far indicate that Neanderthals did not disappear all at once.

“I think we’ll see patchy disappearance prior to extinction,” Dr. Higham said.

New evidence suggests Stone Age hunters from Europe discovered America

February 28, 2012

by David Keys

The Independent

New archaeological evidence suggests that America was first discovered by Stone Age people from Europe – 10,000 years before the Siberian-originating ancestors of the American Indians set foot in the New World.

A remarkable series of several dozen European-style stone tools, dating back between 19,000 and 26,000 years, have been discovered at six locations along the US east coast. Three of the sites are on the Delmarva Peninsula in Maryland, discovered by archaeologist Dr Darrin Lowery of the University of Delaware. One is in Pennsylvania and another in Virginia. A sixth was discovered by scallop-dredging fishermen on the seabed 60 miles from the Virginian coast on what, in prehistoric times, would have been dry land.

The new discoveries are among the most important archaeological breakthroughs for several decades – and are set to add substantially to our understanding of humanity’s spread around the globe.

The similarity between other later east coast US and European Stone Age stone tool technologies has been noted before. But all the US European-style tools, unearthed before the discovery or dating of the recently found or dated US east coast sites, were from around 15,000 years ago – long after Stone Age Europeans (the Solutrean cultures of France and Iberia) had ceased making such artefacts. Most archaeologists had therefore rejected any possibility of a connection. But the newly-discovered and recently-dated early Maryland and other US east coast Stone Age tools are from between 26,000 and 19,000 years ago – and are therefore contemporary with the virtually identical western European material.

What’s more, chemical analysis carried out last year on a European-style stone knife found in Virginia back in 1971 revealed that it was made of French-originating flint.

Professor Dennis Stanford, of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, and Professor Bruce Bradley of the University of Exeter, the two leading archaeologists who have analyzed all the evidence, are proposing that Stone Age people from Western Europe migrated to North America at the height of the Ice Age by travelling (over the ice surface and/or by boat) along the edge of the frozen northern part of the Atlantic. They are presenting their detailed evidence in a new book – Across Atlantic Ice – published this month.

At the peak of the Ice Age, around three million square miles of the North Atlantic was covered in thick ice for all or part of the year.

However, the seasonally shifting zone where the ice ended and the open ocean began would have been extremely rich in food resources – migrating seals, sea birds, fish and the now-extinct northern hemisphere penguin-like species, the great auk.

Stanford and Bradley have long argued that Stone Age humans were quite capable of making the 1500 mile journey across the Atlantic ice – but till now there was comparatively little evidence to support their thinking.

But the new Maryland, Virginia and other US east coast material, and the chemical tests on the Virginian flint knife, have begun to transform the situation. Now archaeologists are starting to investigate half a dozen new sites in Tennessee, Maryland and even Texas – and these locations are expected to produce more evidence.

Another key argument for Stanford and Bradley’s proposal is the complete absence of any human activity in north-east Siberia and Alaska prior to around 15,500 years ago. If the Maryland and other east coast people of 26,000 to 19,000 years ago had come from Asia, not Europe, early material, dating from before 19,000 years ago, should have turned up in those two northern areas, but none have been found.

Although Solutrean Europeans may well have been the first Americans, they had a major disadvantage compared to the Asian-originating Indians who entered the New World via the Bering Straits or along the Aleutian Islands chain after 15,500 years ago.

Whereas the Solutreans had only had a 4500 year long ‘Ice Age’ window to carry out their migratory activity, the Asian-originating Indians had some 15,000 years to do it. What’s more, the latter two-thirds of that 15 millennia long period was climatologically much more favorable and substantially larger numbers of Asians were therefore able to migrate.

As a result of these factors the Solutrean (European originating) Native Americans were either partly absorbed by the newcomers or were substantially obliterated by them either physically or through competition for resources.

Some genetic markers for Stone Age western Europeans simply don’t exist in northeast Asia – but they do in tiny quantities among some North American Indian groups. Scientific tests on ancient DNA extracted from 8000 year old skeletons from Florida have revealed a high level of a key probable European-originating genetic marker. There are also a tiny number of isolated Native American groups whose languages appear not to be related in any way to Asian-originating American Indian peoples.

But the greatest amount of evidence is likely to come from under the ocean – for most of the areas where the Solutreans would have stepped off the Ice onto dry land are now up to 100 miles out to sea.

The one underwater site that has been identified – thanks to the scallop dredgers – is set to be examined in greater detail this summer – either by extreme-depth divers or by remotely operated mini submarines equipped with cameras and grab arms.

Sinkhole discovery suggests humans were in Florida 14,500 years ago

Knife, bone, and dung cast doubt on Bering Strait theory and indicate humans spread through Americas 1,500 years earlier than thought, researchers say

May 14, 2016

by Alan Yuhas and agencies

The Guardian

A stone knife, mastodon bones and fossilized dung found in an underwater sinkhole show that humans lived in north Florida about 14,500 years ago, according to new research that suggests the colonization of the Americas was far more complex than originally believed.

Archaeologists have known of the sinkhole in the Aucilla river, south of Tallahassee, for years. But they recently dived back into the hole to excavate what they call clear evidence that ancient mankind spread throughout the Americas about 1,500 years earlier than previously thought.

Almost 200ft wide and 35ft deep, the sinkhole was “as dark as the inside of a cow, literally no light at all”, according to Jessi Halligan, lead diving scientist and a professor at Florida State University at Tallahassee. Halligan dived into the hole 126 times over the course of her research, wearing a head lamp as well as diving gear.

In the hole, the divers found stone tools including an inch-wide, several inch-long stone knife and a “biface” – a stone flaked sharp on both sides. The artifacts were found near mastodon bones; re-examination of a tusk pulled from the hole confirmed that long grooves in the bone were made by people, probably when they removed it from the skull and pulled meat from its base.

“Each tusk this size would have had more than 15lbs of tender, nutritious tissue in its pulp cavity,” said Daniel Fisher, a paleontologist at the University of Michigan who was a member of a team that once removed a tusk from a mammoth preserved in Siberian permafrost.

Of the “biface” tool, Halligan told Smithsonian.com: “There is absolutely no way it is not made by people. There is no way that’s a natural artifact in any shape or form.”

When ancient people butchered or scavenged the mastodon, the sinkhole was a shallow pond: a watering hole for men, mastodons, bison, bears and apparently dogs. The researchers found bones that appear to be canine, suggesting dogs trailed the humans, either as companions or competitors for scraps.

The discovery makes the sinkhole the earliest documented site for humans in the south-eastern United States. The researchers published their findings in the journal Science Advances on Friday, writing that the artifacts show “far better” evidence of early humans than previous work at the site.

“The evidence from the Page-Ladson site is a major leap forward in shaping a new view of the peopling of the Americas at the end of the last Ice Age,” said Mike Waters, an archaeologist at Texas A&M University.

“In the archeological community, there’s still a terrific amount of resistance to the idea that people were here before Clovis,” he added, referring to the so-called “Clovis people”, a group long thought the first band of humans in the Americas.

Waters said that the watering hole would have made for “easy pickings” for humans looking to corner prey. Halligan suggested the ancient hunter gatherers may have been the first seasonal nomads of the east coast, traveling south in the winter.

“They were very smart about local plants and local animals and migration patterns,” she said. “This is a big deal. So how did they live? This has opened up a whole new line of inquiry for us as scientists as we try to understand the settlement of the Americas.”

Humans are thought to have crossed into the Americas during the Ice Age, when land linked Siberia to Alaska, but the timing of the crossing is a question of long dispute. In the 1930s, archaeologists found distinctive spearheads among mammoth bones near Clovis, New Mexico. For decades the Clovis people were considered the first to colonize the Americas, around 13,000 years ago. Thousands of Clovis spearheads have been found around North America and as far south as Venezuela.

But in the last two decades, archaeologists have found an 11,000-year-old skull in Brazil, human DNA by way of feces in a cave in Oregon, evidence of humans in coastal Chile as long as 14,800 years ago, and spearheads in Texas that could date human arrival in the Americas to 15,500 years ago. Most of the manmade artifacts found in these disparate sites lack the signatures of the Clovis people.

At the Florida site, the researchers analyzed twigs in fossilized mastodon dung to date the bones and artifacts, finding them to be about 14,550 years old. The timing casts the Bering Strait theory into doubt, Halligan said: the ice-free land bridge was only open for a few thousand years.

“So the ice-free corridor is not our answer for how the Americas were initially colonized,” she told the Smithsonian.

“The logical way people could have come to Florida by 14,600 years ago is if their ancestors entered the Americas by boat along the Pacific Coast,” Waters told Discovery News.

“They could have travelled by boat to central Mexico, crossed and come along the Gulf Coast. They could have entered the Americas via the Columbia river and then travelled inland to the Mississippi river and followed it down and entered the Gulf Coast, eventually making their way to Florida.”

Mastodon remains have been found as far north as Kentucky, she said. Fisher added that the discovery that “humans and megafauna coexisted for at least 2,000 years” casts doubt on another theory: that the Clovis hunters quickly made mammoths and mastodons extinct as they launched a “blitzkrieg” across the continent.

“That means that however humans and mastodons interacted, it took at least two millennia for the process of extinction to run to completion,” he said at a press conference. The main reason the giant mammals went extinct, he said, was probably the warming climate.

Several anthropologists not affiliated with the research said it added to the mounting evidence of a complex, many-staged migration into the Americas.

“I think this paper is a triumph for underwater archaeology and yet another nail in the coffin of the Clovis-first theory,” Jon Erlandson, an anthropologist at the University of Oregon in Eugene, told Nature magazine.

“I don’t know what else to tell you,” archaeologist Michael Faught, one of the reviewers of the research, told National Geographic. “It’s unassailable.”

Presenting: Cro-Magnon v. Neanderthal in the Battle of Extinction

Competition, not climate change, led to Neanderthal wipe-out

by Rachel Durfee

Popular Science

Back in pre-historic times, say, 130,000-30,000 years ago, Europe was dominated not by quaint cafes and dainty bakeries, but by a group of not-quite humans called Neanderthals. In the form of a common insult, their legacy lives on today, and perhaps more accurately than we think: new research suggests that the Neanderthal’s extinction was not due to climate change (as was previously argued) but rather to their inability to beat the competition, which came in the form of Cro-Magnon—the first anatomically modern human population.

According to research performed by Dr William E. Banks and a team from the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, l’Ecole Pratique d’Hautes Etudes, and the University of Kansas, and published in the journal PLoS ONE this month, an analysis of the distribution of archaeological sites shows modern humans moving in on Neanderthal territory and the consequent shrinking of Neanderthal-dominated zones across Europe around 40,000 years ago.

Scientists used a radiocarbon dating and modeling technique that allowed them to reconstruct areas inhabited by Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon populations. They also made high-resolution simulations of past climates from specific time periods in the same areas. Then they developed an algorithm that analyzed the relationship between location and climate, ran it hundreds of times over, and ended up with a fairly accurate prediction regarding which regions could have been occupied by which human cultures. That’s impressive enough, but even better, the same model also projects the ecological footprint of one culture onto the environmental conditions of a later climatic phase. Meaning that scientists could determine if a particular population left a more or less impactful ecological footprint.

The data reveals that Team Cro-Magnon began to take over during a not-so-severe climatic era called Greenland Interstadial 8—an abrupt cold reversal taking place around 40,000 years ago. Even though research shows the Neanderthals could have held on at this point, they started disappearing as the ecological niche occupied by Cro-Magnon groups started expanding. Cro-Magnon territory had previously laid claim as far south as northern Spain, but during the temperate GI8, they capitalized on less severe conditions and expanded all the way to the south, surely realizing the future land values of the Costa del Sol. The remaining Neanderthals down south survived the longest, avoiding direct competition with modern humans for more time than most. Although, it may not all have been life-or-death contact. Scientists also noted the distinct possibility of cross-population mingling, potentially leading to cultural and genetic exchanges, if you catch my drift.

The expansion of the first anatomically modern humans across Europe the Cro-Magnon there is obviously a clear winner here, and that’s us.

Anthropology

by Russell Howard Tuttle

Encyclopædia  Britannica

Neanderthal, also spelled Neandertal ,the most recent archaic humans, who emerged between 300,000 and 100,000 years ago and were replaced by early modern humans between 35,000 and perhaps 24,000 years ago. Neanderthals inhabited Eurasia from the Atlantic regions of Europe eastward to Central Asia and from as far north as present-day Belgium southward to the Mediterranean and southwest Asia. Similar populations lived at the same time in eastern Asia and Africa. Because Neanderthals lived in a land of abundant limestone caves, which preserve bones well, and where there has been a long history of prehistoric research, they are better known than any other archaic human group. Consequently, they have become the archetypal “cavemen.” The name Neanderthal (or Neandertal) derives from the Neander Valley near Düsseldorf, Germany, where quarrymen unearthed portions of a human skeleton from a cave in 1856.

The Neanderthal originated in Africa between 300,000 and 100,000 years ago and were replaced by early modern humans between 35,000 and perhaps 24,000 years ago. Neanderthals inhabited Eurasia from the Atlantic regions of Europe eastward to Central Asia and from as far north as present-day Belgium southward to the Mediterranean and southwest Asia. Similar human populations lived at the same time in eastern Asia and Africa. Because Neanderthals lived in a land of abundant limestone caves, which preserve bones well, and where there has been a long history of prehistoric research, they are better known than any other archaic human group. Consequently, they have become the archetypal “cavemen.” The name Neanderthal (or Neandertal) derives from the Neander Valley near Düsseldorf, Germany, where quarrymen unearthed portions of a human skeleton from a cave in 1856.

The remains from the Neander Valley consist of 16 pieces, which were scientifically described shortly after their discovery. Immediately there was disagreement as to whether the bones represented an archaic and extinct human form or an abnormal modern human. The former view was shown to be correct in 1886, when two Neanderthal skeletons associated with Middle Paleolithic stone tools and bones of extinct animals were discovered in a cave at Spy, Belgium.

From shortly after the Spy discovery to about 1910, a series of Neanderthal skeletons were discovered in western and central Europe. Using those skeletons as a basis, scholars reconstructed the Neanderthals as semi-human, lacking a full upright posture and being somewhat less intelligent than modern humans. According to that view, the Neanderthals were intermediate between modern humans and the apes, as no older human forms were then generally recognized. They were also considered to be too different from modern humans to be their ancestors.

Neanderthal skeletons have been found in caves and shelters across Europe, in Southwest Asia, and eastward to Uzbekistan in Central Asia, providing abundant skeletal remains and associated archaeological material for understanding these prehistoric humans. The Neanderthals are now known from several hundred individuals, represented by remains varying from isolated teeth to virtually complete skeletons.

The Neanderthalfirst evolved in sub-Saharan Africa sometime before 100,000 years ago. Subsequently they spread northward sometime before 55,000 years ago, displacing or absorbing local archaic human populations.

In 2009 a group of European researchers reported that they had assembled six complete mtDNA genomes from the Neanderthal specimens taken from El Sidrón (Spain), Feldhofer (Germany), Vindija (Croatia), and Mezmaiskaya Cave (Russia). Although the specimens spanned roughly 30,000 years and 4,200 km (2,600 miles), the mtDNA diversity in the overall sample was about one-third that of modern H. sapiens. The research supported earlier conclusions that the mtDNAs of Neanderthals and modern humans were derived from separate lineages.

Creators of the lost ark: replica of Noah’s vessel unveiled in Kentucky

The Ark Encounter, based on proportions laid out in the Bible, is 510ft long, seven stories tall, and features model animals – including dinosaurs

July 6, 2016

Adam Gabbatt in Williamstown, Kentucky

The Guardian

God curbed his dramatic tendencies on Tuesday, neglecting to initiate a global flood during the figurative launching of a full-size Noah’s ark replica in Kentucky.

The Ark Encounter, based in the north of the Bluegrass state, is sculpted to proportions specified in the book of Genesis. It is 510ft long, seven storeys tall and, given its base is made of concrete, almost certain not to survive another of God’s watery caprices. (The vessel would displace – while sinking like a stone – 15,000 to 20,000 tons of water).

Answers in Genesis, a creationist religious organisation that believes God created the Earth in six days and that the world is 6,000 years old, is behind the modern-day ark, which will open to the public on 7 July. The group estimates that 1.4m people will visit the vessel in the first year and that the ark will bring $4bn to the Commonwealth of Kentucky. The ark is a non-floating exhibition offering both a glimpse into Noah’s life at sea and an opportunity to learn about Answers in Genesis’s theories on how our planet came to exist.

For those making the journey to Williamstown, 50 miles north of Lexington, a genuinely impressive structure awaits. In fact the ark’s scale is such that even Charles, the taxi driver who dropped me off there on Tuesday morning and had never heard of the Ark Encounter, despite living only twenty miles away, was impressed.

“Wow,” he said as we pulled up at the ark’s port side. “That’s neat as hell.”

Neat is quite a good adjective for the ark’s exterior. It looks brand new and pristine. The pale yellow wood on its long hull – Radiata pine imported from New Zealand – brings to mind Ikea’s ubiquitous birch veneer furniture collection. In fact, the whole ship looks like something one might find at Ikea: smooth lines, minimal design and a baffling assembly method.

Answers in Genesis got the details for the build from measurements written in Genesis 6, in which God tells Noah the ark should be “300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits high”. A cubit is roughly the distance from your fingers to your elbow – you can buy a “Noah’s cubit” in the gift shop.

Noah’s ark, according to Answers in Genesis, took between 55 to 75 years to build. Once it was constructed, Noah herded the world’s animals, two by two, into the bowels of his vessel, where he tended to them until the flood receded.

The Ark Encounter comfortably beat Noah’s construction time, having been assembled in less than two years. It holds no livestock, but has models of various creatures stored in wooden cages.

Creationists believe that rather than taking one of every modern species onboard the ark, Noah took ancestors of the animals we know today. According to this belief, the original ark would have held two early forms of canine, whose offspring developed into wolves, foxes, domestic dogs and other animals upon leaving the ark. As such, the model animals held on the Ark Encounter are approximations of what dogs’, cats’ and rhinos’ ancestors would have looked like.

There’s a cat-type mammal that has a head like a lion but is about the size of a big house cat. There’s something that looks like a rhino but without the horn.

And, given Answers in Genesis believes that dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time as man, there are also dinosaurs. Lots of them. There’s one which is akin to a brachiosaurus, with a long neck and tail. There’s one that looks like a stegosaurus, with spines on its back. There’s some sort of dwarf-T Rex, and a depressed-looking leathery-thing that might be related to a pterodactyl.

The animals are stored across three levels inside the ark. Huge wooden columns – tree trunks harvested in Washington and Montana – support each floor. The stern of the ship is free of animal storage, allowing visitors to see the curvature of the craft’s hull, with huge beams holding pine planks in place.

It succeeds in giving a sense of what it might have been like on the ark. Or on an old wooden ship.

That impression is slightly spoiled by the presence of two Pepsi-branded refrigerators stocking a range of soft beverages, but – just as in Noah’s day – people do get thirsty.

The ark, which cost around $100m to build, has been the subject of some controversy. Answers in Genesis was awarded a tax break, reportedly worth $18m, by the state of Kentucky, allowing it to recoup taxes on money made from visitors. The break was rescinded after it emerged Answers in Genesis would only hire Christian staff members, but the organisation sued and won.

This June it also emerged that those wanting to work at the ark have to sign an agreement disavowing same-sex marriage and pre-marital sex. Staff and volunteers at the ark confirmed to the Guardian they had committed to the pledge.

Ken Ham, president and co-founder of Answers in Genesis, defended the Christian-only policy at Tuesday’s media preview.

“If you’re a religious organisation, you can have a religious preference in hiring. It makes sense. I can’t think of Planned Parenthood employing someone like me,” Ham said.

“Besides which,” he said, “this is going to create jobs outside of the ark.”

Answers in Genesis executives conducted interviews with the media on the third level of the ark, which, according to some accounts, is where the unclean animals were stored on the original. Thankfully, the top level of the Ark Encounter is instead home to a re-creation of the Noah family living quarters.

In this modern-day interpretation, Noah and his sons live in surprising luxury. The imagined seafarers’ accommodations look like something Roger Moore’s James Bond might blunder into on a jaunt to Morocco, complete with wooden latticing, red curtains and soft lighting.

To the rear of this soothing scene, Andrew Snelling, the organisation’s research geologist, sat down to chat. Snelling disputed the science that suggested the Earth is 4.5bn years old, citing testing Answers in Genesis had conducted.

“I know I’m rowing against the tide,” he acknowledged. “And I’m regarded as not a real scientist because I believe in creation, I believe in the flood.”

In this area of Kentucky, there is a particularly large number of fossils, Snelling said.

“We’ve got limestone layers underneath the ark here and they’re full of marine fossils, clams, corals, those sort of shallow water marine invertebrates,” he said, which suggested that at some point there had been a global flood.

“So if you think about it, today we’re a thousand feet above sea level and we’re 500 miles from the ocean.

“Why aren’t the marine creatures buried in the oceans? That’s where they lived. But they’re actually buried up on the continents.”

Noah’s Ark Found in Turkey?

The expedition team is “99.9 percent” sure. Others, well, aren’t.

April 30, 2010

by Ker Than

National Geographic News

A team of evangelical Christian explorers claim they’ve found the remains of Noah’s ark beneath snow and volcanic debris on Turkey’s Mount Ararat

But some archaeologists and historians are taking the latest claim that Noah’s ark has been found about as seriously as they have past ones—which is to say not very.

“I don’t know of any expedition that ever went looking for the ark and didn’t find it,” said Paul Zimansky, an archaeologist specializing in the Middle East at Stony Brook University in New York State.

Turkish and Chinese explorers from a group called Noah’s Ark Ministries International made the latest discovery claim Monday in Hong Kong, where the group is based.

“It’s not 100 percent that it is Noah’s ark, but we think it is 99.9 percent that this is it,” Yeung Wing-cheung, a filmmaker accompanying the explorers, told The Daily Mail.

Noah’s Ark Location in Turkey a Secret

The team claims to have found in 2007 and 2008 seven large wooden compartments buried at 13,000 feet (4,000 meters) above sea level, near the peak of Mount Ararat. They returned to the site with a film crew in October 2009.

Many Christians believe the mountain in Turkey is the final resting place of Noah’s ark, which the Bible says protected Noah, his family, and pairs of every animal species on Earth during a divine deluge that wiped out most of humanity.

“The structure is partitioned into different spaces,” said Noah’s Ark Ministries International team member Man-fai Yuen in a statement. “We believe that the wooden structure we entered is the same structure recorded in historical accounts. … ”

The team says radiocarbon-dated wood taken from the discovery site—whose location they’re keeping secret for now—shows the purported ark is about 4,800 years old, which coincides roughly with the time of Noah’s flood implied by the Bible.

“Noah’s Ark” Wood “Way, Way, Way Too Young”

Skepticism of the new Noah’s ark claim extends to at least one scholar who interprets the Bible literally.

Biologist Todd Wood is director of the Center for Origins Research at Bryan College in Tennessee, which pursues biology in a creationist framework.

As a creationist, Wood believes God created Earth and its various life-forms out of nothing roughly 6,000 years ago.

“If you accept a young chronology for the Earth … then radiocarbon dating has to be reinterpreted,” because the method often yields dates much older than 6,000 years, Wood said.

Radiocarbon dating estimates the ages of organic objects by measuring the radioisotope carbon 14, which is known to decay at a set rate over time. The method is generally thought to reach its limit with objects about 60,000 years old. Earth is generally thought to be about four and a half billion years old.

Across the board, radiocarbon dates need to be recalibrated, Wood believes, to reflect shorter time frames.

Given this perceived overestimation in radiocarbon dating, the wood the Noah’s Ark Ministries International team found should have a “traditional” radiocarbon date of several tens of thousands of years if the wood is truly 4,800 years old, Wood said.

“I’m really, really skeptical that this could possibly be Noah’s Ark,” he added. The wood date is “way, way, way too young.”

Wood thinks Noah’s ark will never be found, because “it would have been prime timber after the flood,” he said.

“If you just got off the ark, and there’s no trees, what are you going to build your house out of? You’ve got a huge boat made of wood, so let’s use that,” he said. “So I think it got torn apart and scavenged for building material basically.”

“Noah’s Ark” Found in Right Country, on Wrong Mountain?

Another reason scholars are skeptical of the latest Noah’s ark discovery claim is that Genesis—the first book of the Bible—never specifies which peak the vessel supposedly landed on in Turkey.

“The whole notion is odd, because the Bible tells you the ark landed somewhere in Urartu,”—an ancient kingdom in eastern Turkey—”but it’s only later that people identified Mount Ararat with Urartu,” said Jack Sasson, a professor of Jewish and biblical studies at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.

Stony Brook’s Zimansky agreed. “Nobody associated that mountain with the ark” until the tenth century B.C., he said, adding that there’s no geologic evidence for a mass flood in Turkey around 4,000 years ago. (See “‘Noah’s Flood’ Not Rooted in Reality, After All?”)

The Noah’s Ark Ministries International explorers are “playing in a very different ballpark than the rest of us,” Zimansky said. “They’re playing without any concern for” the archaeological, historical, and geological records.

Better Explanations for “Noah’s Ark” Structure?

Even if the Noah’s Ark Ministries International team did find a wooden structure or even a boat on Mount Ararat, there are other explanations for what the structure might be.

For example, it could be a shrine constructed by early Christians to commemorate the site where they believed Noah’s Ark should be, Zimansky said.

Even in that speculative case, it wouldn’t be 4,000 years old. “The Bible hadn’t even been written yet,” he said.

Bible scholar Sasson said he thinks biblical writers intended the story of Noah’s ark to be allegorical, not a true recounting of historical events. By presenting a scenario in which humanity is punished for its wickedness, “they were trying to draw us to the notion of a God who asks us to be acceptable,” Sasson said.

UN to Consider “Noah’s Ark”?

On its Web site, Noah’s Ark Ministries International says the Turkish government plans to apply to the United Nations to put the Noah’s ark discovery site on the UNESCO World Heritage list, a designation given to places of special cultural or physical significance.

But the agency hasn’t received any official requests from Turkey for “the inscription of ‘Noah’s ark'” into the list, UNESCO spokesperson Roni Amelan said in an email.

Such a move would take time, Amelan added. “This cannot be done overnight.”

Words of Mass Destruction That Continue to Deceive

July 5, 2016

by Patrick Cockburn

UNZ Review

By an accident of history, the Chilcot inquiry on the Iraq War is appearing at a critical moment in British history. The war was the first great test this century of the ability of the British powers-that-be to govern intelligently and successfully and one which they demonstrably failed. The crisis provoked by the vote to leave the European Union is the next crisis of similar gravity faced by these same powers and, once again, they appear unable to cope.

Britain’s politicians and senior officials have traditionally had the reputation of making fewer mistakes than their rivals, but their inability to grapple with these crises is a sign that this period may be drawing to an end. The Chilcot report will presumably provide evidence about why Britain made so many mistakes before and during the Iraq war, but is unlikely to explain why it went on making them in Libya and Syria.

Britain’s rulers periodically admit that they got many things wrong in Iraq, but they tend to be unspecific about what these were or what practical lessons can be learned from British military involvement there between 2003 and 2009. This ignorance is wilful, stemming from a conscious or unconscious sense that, if Britain admits to real weaknesses and failures, it will be seen as a less valuable ally by the US and others whom Britain is trying to convince of its continuing political and military strength.

One way of looking at the Iraq conflict is to see it as a disastrous attempt by Britain to make war on the cheap in conditions which were far more risky than those launching it imagined. To prevent fragile support for the war eroding further, bad news was concealed or glossed over to the point that propaganda took over from reality

It was comical but chilling in the early years of the war to see Tony Blair and other British ministers, sometimes protected by helmets and body armour, travelling by helicopter from Baghdad International Airport to the Green Zone because it was too dangerous for them to drive along the short stretch of road between the two. Despite the necessity for these security measures in the heart of the Iraqi capital, they would then blithely state that the insurgents were on the run and a majority of Iraqi provinces at peace, a claim they wisely made no attempt to validate by a personal visit and in the knowledge that journalists could not disprove without grave risk of being murdered.

Within a year of the invasion, the US and Britain controlled only beleaguered islands of territory which were under constant attack. The British Army, its forces far too small for the task they had been given, failed to control Basra in southern Iraq and by the end was humiliatingly confined to a camp on its outskirts. Many of the British soldiers there were transferred to an equally messy, unwinnable and ill-understood conflict in Helmand province in Afghanistan in 2006 with predictably grim and bloody consequences.

These failures should have given pause to anybody in authority in Britain plunging into foreign ventures which destabilised established states with no idea of what would replace them. Nevertheless, in 2011 David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy did not hesitate to lead the charge in overthrowing Muammar Gaddafi in a war which turned Libya into a battleground for rival warlords and opened the door for a flood of desperate migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean from Libya to Italy.

In Syria, British policy was for long predicated on the expectation that Bashar al-Assad was about to fall, though it should have been self-evident that this was not going to happen since he held most of the populated areas of the country and was backed by Russia and Iran. In 2012, just as Isis was establishing Al Nusra as its Syrian branch, senior British diplomats were saying in private that they believed that fears of the Syrian conflict spreading were much exaggerated.

The following year David Cameron favoured Britain undertaking airstrikes against Syrian government forces, though this would have either been ineffective or, if President Bashar al-Assad had fallen, would have led to him being replaced by extreme Islamists since they dominated the armed opposition.

The change in policy was fortunately turned down by the House of Commons which had taken on board the dangers involved in such ventures. But the government still seemed to be plugged into a fantasy picture of the Syrian war when last December it began airstrikes against the Islamic State in Syria, though once again the forces involved were so limited as to make it little more than a symbolic gesture. In order to avoid having to choose between Assad and IS, Mr Cameron claimed that we are acting in support of 70,000 moderate Syrian fighters prepared to take on both Syrian government forces and Islamic fundamentalists, but whose location cannot be disclosed and whose very existence is in doubt.

The Iraq war was militarily small compared to others fought by Britain over the last century. British forces lost just 179 dead in action in Iraq between 2003 and 2009 compared to 455 fatalities in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2015, both figures being entirely dwarfed by the horrendous figure of 40,000 dead for British and Indian soldiers killed fighting in what later became Iraq between 1914 and 1918.

But the political impact of the Iraq war in Britain and the US was serious, long-lasting and far outweighed its significance as an armed conflict. It permanently blasted the reputation of Tony Blair, though he won one more general election in 2006, and Barack Obama’s vote in the Senate against the war was a decisive advantage for him in competing with Hillary Clinton in the race to be Democratic presidential candidate in 2008.

In all wars propagandists get free range, but a distinctive feature of the Iraq war saw the blatancy and mendacity of official attempts to manipulate American and British public opinion which were probably worse than anything seen in either country since the First World War.

The US and Britain justified going to war in Iraq in 2003 by claiming that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the world because he possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD). It swiftly emerged that this was untrue and evidence for the charge had been fabricated or taken at face value when all the indications were that it was false. A further justification for the war was regime change on the grounds that Saddam was an evil dictator and mass murderer and his overthrow could only benefit of the Iraqi people.

Bad Saddam certainly was and it is impossible to know the course of events if there had been no invasion, but his fall was followed by 13 years of horrific war in which hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed and millions more permanently expelled from their homes. Early last Sunday morning a vehicle packed with explosives blew up in the Karada district of Baghdad, killing 165 people, many of them of them children, as they walked in the street at the end of the day’s Ramadan fast. The atrocity was claimed by Islamic State, whose murderous targeting of civilians is comparable with the Nazis in the Second World War, and whose rise owes everything to the sectarian civil war in Iraq which followed the invasion and occupation.

Chilcot may not produce explosive revelations about how the war was conceived or the degree of culpability of Tony Blair and those around him. Most of what happened is fairly clear or could be guessed at the time. Those who doubt this should read Robin Cook’s resignation speech in the House of Commons in March 2003 explaining his opposition to the war which was about to begin, in which he says that “Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term – namely credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target.”

He points out the contradiction between an invasion strategy that was based on the assumption that Saddam was militarily weak and incapable of putting up much resistance, but at the same time a government policy justifying its pre-emptive action against Iraq by claiming that it was potent threat to the world.

In the aftermath of the invasion there have been many conspiracy theories about how and why it began, but the main contours of what happened have been long established and are damning enoughin themselves. The most interesting part of the Chilcot report will not be to discover how the British and American governments deceived others, but how and why they deceived themselves and with such disastrous consequences.

UK property funds rush to suspend trading

In quick succession, three funds have called a halt to an outpour of capital, joining three others. The UK’s long-booming real estate market has become a leading source of worry for its financial system post-Brexit.

June 6, 2016

DW

Investors have scrambled to pull their money out of UK property funds as commercial property prices are expected to take a hit in the uncertain aftermath of the country’s vote to leave the European Union.

Citing “exceptional liquidity pressures,” Henderson Global Investors announced Wednesday it was going to suspend trading in its 5 billion euro ($5.5 billion) UK property fund. Columbia Threadneedle and Canada Life then followed suit less than a couple hours afterwards.

In so doing, they join three competing funds – M&G, Standard Life Investments and Aviva – that suspended their trading earlier in the week.

Commercial real estate is emerging as a dangerous weak spot for the British economy as the consequences of the Brexit vote become clear almost two weeks after the result was announced.

The announcement led many investors to complain to Britain’s Financial Ombudsman Service, which expected such suspensions but finds the extent of developments “quite troubling.”

Fueled largely by demand in London, Britain’s commercial real estate market enjoyed years of strong business before before being blindsided by Brexit. On Monday, the Bank of England pointed to the market, “overstretched” by large amounts of overseas capital, as a risk to the country’s financial stability.

Pound plummets as gold shines amid Brexit woes

The British pound has tumbled to a new 31-year low as risk-averse investors flee financial market uncertainty sparked by the Brexit vote. They have turned to the Japanese yen and gold as safe-haven assets

July 6, 2016

DW

Amid mounting Brexit woes, global investors have shunned Britain’s currency, driving the pound in European trading on Wednesday briefly below $1.28 (1,15 euros) – a new 31-year low – before the currency slightly recovered.

In Asian trading earlier in the day, the pound even fell as low as 1.2798 against the US dollar – its lowest level since June 1985 – and cutting about 13 percent off the value of the currency since Britons voted to leave the EU in a referendum on June 23.

Concern has grown in the past two days about financial stress in global markets as a result of weakening growth in the wake of the referendum. Adding to the woes was a move by the Bank of England on Tuesday to lower banks’ capital requirements in support of post-Brexit lending, which analysts view as a prelude to further monetary easing, likely to drive the pound even lower.

In a further sign of market uncertainty, three of Britain’s biggest property funds suspended trading earlier this week, following increasing redemptions by investors, who expect falling UK real estate prices.

“Just when you thought it was ‘safe to go back in the water,’ the pound got pounded as speculation around Brexit forms into something more concrete,” said Stephen Innes, senior trader at OANDA Asia Pacific.

Some analysts, including those at Moneycorp in London, believe the worst may not be over for the British currency. “Even though investors should by now have priced into sterling slower growth, lower rates, renewed quantitative easing and prolonged political discord, that does not mean they cannot mark it down further,” Moneycorp said in a note.

Flight to safe havens

By contrast, the Japanese yen, like the Swiss franc, attracted a fresh bout of flight-to-safety buying, causing the dollar to fall towards 100 yen, striking 100.40. And the yield on Japanese 20-year government bonds dipped below zero for the first time, while other maturities also fell to new lows.

The drop underscored that investors are willing to sacrifice earnings and even accept small losses to keep their money in rock-solid government debt. In Europe, the yield on 10-year German government bonds pushed below minus 0.20 percent to strike a record low of minus 0.205 percent.

Unsurprising for a time of heightened uncertainty, the price of gold on Wednesday reached peaks last seen more than two years ago. Gold rose to $1,375.45 per ounce in mid-session trading, its highest level since March 17, 2014.

“Gold is once again to the fore,” said David Govett, Head of Precious Metals at Marex Spectron. “As our glorious leaders (in the UK) continue to muck around and bicker with each other, sterling is sliding ever lower. This is impacting on the euro and various other markets and generally contributing to an atmosphere of worry and uncertainty,” he told the news agency AFP.

A breach of the key $1,400 price level for gold would become a distinct possibility, Govett added, if the UK “continues to talk itself down and drags others into the quagmire.”

Fresh money flowing into the gold market came mostly from equity markets, which were falling again Wednesday, but also from bond markets. Silver too boasted a two-year high, reaching $21.14 per ounce, a level last seen on July 18, 2014.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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