In our article the polarity reversal... about a brief earth magnetic field polarity switch and in this line of articles we have mentioned "our cousins", the Neanderthals. They were not a different race of Homo sapiens but a DIFFERENT SPECIES of EVOLVED hominids. Becoming extinct by 40,000 years ago, these hominids and modern humans coming from Africa had a brief encounter over more than 5,000 years in Europe, even possibly a 10,000 years overlap, during which they "interbred" somewhat. More information about the influx of modern humans into Europe through more scientific research and genetic studies shed light on this strange relationship which produced offsprings with both genetic markers, leading the modern humans in Europe to still retain a small percentage of NEANDERTHAL genetic material. This is part of the evolution of our species that make us who we are... Eventually we will find out the trail of where the Neanderthals came from in Africa, when they diverged from the original ape common ancestor, and when they moved to the European continent. A new study brings more information:

The four-story labyrinth of galleries in Bulgaria's Bacho Kiro cave has long been a magnet for all sorts of humans. Neanderthals came first, more than 50,000 years ago, and left their characteristic Mousterian stone tools among the stalagmites. Next came modern humans in at least two waves; the first littered the cave floor with beads and stone blades stained with ochre, about 45,000 years ago. Another group settled in about 36,000 years ago with even more sophisticated artifacts.

Now, a new ancient DNA study shows the first group of modern humans at Bacho Kiro carried a recent legacy from Neanderthals: Those people's ancestors had interbred with our extinct cousins as recently as six generations, or 160 to 180 years, previously.

However, another study out this week, of what may be the oldest modern human in Europe, shows the first wave of moderns had diverse Neanderthal legacies. The genome of a dark-skinned, brown-haired, brown-eyed woman from Zlatý kůň cave in the Czech Republic included only 3% Neanderthal DNA, which likely came from a long-ago tryst in the Middle East, not from recent contact, the study suggests.

Taken together, these genomic snapshots offer a glimpse into the identities of the mysterious modern humans who first set foot in Europe and their relationship to Neanderthals, who vanished about 40,000 years ago. “You're talking about multiple waves of modern humans,” says paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London. “Some groups mixed with Neanderthals, and some didn't. Some are related to later humans and some are not.”

The new revelations fill out the story of these ancient encounters, says Mateja Hajdinjak, a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI) and an author of the Bacho Kiro study. “For the first time, we're getting ancient DNA from multiple early modern humans that tells us so much about their interactions with some of the very last Neanderthals in Europe,” she says.

After modern humans trekked out of Africa 60,000 to 80,000 years ago, they interbred at least once with Neanderthals, most likely in the Middle East about 50,000 years ago, previous ancient DNA research has shown. Those studies include analyses of two early modern humans from Eurasia: a 45,000-year-old thigh bone of a man from Ust'-Ishim in Siberia, and the jawbone of a young man from Petştera cu Oase cave in Romania, dated to between 37,000 and 42,000 years ago. The Oase man inherited as much as 6.4% of his DNA from a recent Neanderthal ancestor. But he lived at least 5000 years after modern humans had arrived in Europe. This week's studies offer a genetic glimpse of an earlier time, when modern humans first ventured into Neanderthal territory.

Hajdinjak and MPI paleogeneticist Svante Pääbo analyzed genomes from Bacho Kiro, where last year researchers used a new protein-based method to show that bone fragments in a middle layer of cave sediments came from modern humans (Science, 15 May 2020, p. 697). In the new study, the researchers sequenced genomes from a molar and bone fragments from that middle layer and directly dated them to 42,580 to 45,930 years ago. They also sequenced DNA from bone found in a younger layer and dated it to 35,000 years ago. Remains from both layers were modern humans, but from different populations, they report in Nature this week.

The genomes show the three oldest modern humans at Bacho Kiro were distantly related to a 40,000-year-old partial skeleton from Tianyuan in China, as well as to other ancient and living East Asians and Native Americans. That suggests they all descended from an early population that once spread across Eurasia, but whose descendants in Europe seem to have died out. The lineage survived in Asia, later giving rise to people who migrated to America.

Those modern humans had also inherited 3% to 3.8% of their DNA from Neanderthal ancestors. The chunks of Neanderthal DNA were long, which suggested they arose from mixing only six generations earlier, because with each new generation, recombination breaks stretches of DNA in shorter fragments. That mating must have been different from the one that gave the younger Oase man his larger Neanderthal legacy. This “suggests that such mixing was common,” Hajdinjak says.

Genomic analysis of the female skull found in Zlatý kůň cave (which means golden horse in Czech), near Prague, tells a different story, according to a paper this week in Nature Ecology & Evolution by a team led by paleogeneticists Johannes Krause and Kay Prüfer of MPI. The woman's Neanderthal DNA likely came from the first known interbreeding, between Neanderthals and the ancestors of all living Eurasians, as modern humans expanded out of Africa and moved into Eurasia, Krause says.

Researchers hadn't been able to directly date the Czech skull, which was discovered in the 1950s, because bovine glue used to repair it contaminated the bones. So Krause and Prüfer turned to a clever dating method that uses the ancestral mating with Neanderthals as a time marker. The chunks of Neanderthal DNA in the genome from the Zlatý kůň skull suggest the woman was born 60 to 80 generations (roughly 2000 years) after her ancestors mated with Neanderthals, they conclude. The 45,000-year-old Siberian male inherited his shorter Neanderthal DNA chunks about 85 to 100 generations after that same encounter. That suggests the Czech female lived before the Siberian male and could be as old as 47,000 years—the oldest known modern in Europe, Krause says.

The authors make a “compelling” case that the woman lived at least 45,000 years ago, says population geneticist John Novembre of the University of Chicago.

Krause's team also found that unlike the Bacho Kiro individuals, the Zlatý kůň skull was no more closely related to ancient Asians than to Europeans. This suggests she came from an ancient population that had not yet differentiated genetically into Asians and Europeans, Krause says.

The differences in how often modern humans mated with Neanderthals could reflect the small population sizes of each group at the time, Novembre suggests. And Zlatý kůň is located in what was perhaps the northern edge of Neanderthal territory, whereas Bulgaria's Balkan Mountains were a known refuge for Neanderthals as modern humans pushed into Europe.

The new data show that all of the modern human lineages vanished by the advent of the last ice age, which reached its peak about 20,000 years ago. After the ice melted, other modern humans from Eurasia repopulated the continent. “Multiple groups headed out [to Eurasia], but it seems like only a fraction of these early modern humans left progeny,” Novembre says.

Read more:

Science 09 Apr 2021:
Vol. 372, Issue 6538, pp. 115-116

Free Julian Assange Now !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Archaeologists found the fossil remains of nine Neanderthal men in a cave near Rome, Italy's Culture Ministry said on Saturday.

Eight of them date to between 50,000 and 68,000 years ago, while the oldest could be 90,000 or 100,000 years old, the ministry said in a statement.

Archeologists made the major discovery in Grotta Guattari — prehistoric caves found more than 80 years ago — situated about 100 meters (328 feet) from the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea in San Felice Circeo in Italy's Lazio region.

"Together with two others found in the past on the site, they bring the total number of individuals present in the Guattari Cave to 11, confirming it as one of the most significant sites in the world for the history of Neanderthal man," the ministry said.

Culture Minister Dario Franceschini praised the find as "an extraordinary discovery which the whole world will be talking about."

Archaeologists began conducting new research into the Guattari Cave in October 2019. The cave was initially found by accident by a group of workers in 1939.

Paleontologist Albert Carlo Blanc discovered a well-preserved Neanderthal skull shortly afterward. The cave had been closed off by an ancient landslide.

Excavations also uncovered bones, craniums and other body parts at the site, as well animal remains such as the aurochs — an extinct bovine — and elephant, rhinoceros, giant deer, cave bears, wild horses and hyenas.

"Many of the bones found show clear signs of gnawing," the ministry statement said. 

Neanderthals are the closest known ancient relatives of humans.

In 2016, scientists found that Neanderthals from Siberia's Altai mountains may have shared 1-7% of their genetics with the ancestors of modern humans.

"Neanderthal man is a fundamental stage in human evolution, representing the apex of a species and the first human society we can talk about," said local director of anthropology Mario Rubini. 

Rubini said the discovery of the Neanderthal remains near Rome will shed an "important light on the history of the peopling of Italy."

Neanderthals died out around 40,000 years ago. Scientists have suggested that factors including increased competition from modern humans as well as climate change which killed them off.

Read more:

https://www.dw.com/en/archaeologists-discover-neanderthal-remains-in-caves-near-rome/a-57470987

Read from top 

See also: 

assange2

By Meagan Cantwell

May. 11, 2021 , 2:55 PM

More than 10 million years ago, the world was brimming with a wide variety of apes. Scientists studying the ones that are still alive today can learn a lot about human evolution—but they miss out on many clues that can only be found from the apes that went extinct. Watch to learn how fossil apes have strengthened ideas about how humans evolved, and what steps we can take to learn even more about our ancient ancestors.

See video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vytO_s_iKg

Read from top.

assange2

Middle Pleistocene Homo in the Levant

Our understanding of the origin, distribution, and evolution of early humans and their close relatives has been greatly refined by recent new information. Adding to this trend, Hershkovitz et al. have uncovered evidence of a previously unknown archaic Homo population, the “Nesher Ramla Homo” (see the Perspective by Mirazon Lahr). The authors present comprehensive qualitative and quantitative analyses of fossilized remains from a site in Israel dated to 140,000 to 120,000 years ago indicating the presence of a previously unrecognized group of hominins representing the last surviving populations of Middle Pleistocene Homo in Europe, southwest Asia, and Africa. In a companion paper, Zaidner et al. present the radiometric ages, stone tool assemblages, faunal assemblages, and other behavioral and environmental data associated with these fossils. This evidence shows that these hominins had fully mastered technology that until only recently was linked to either Homo sapiens or Neanderthals. Nesher Ramla Homo was an efficient hunter of large and small game, used wood for fuel, cooked or roasted meat, and maintained fires. These findings provide archaeological support for cultural interactions between different human lineages during the Middle Paleolithic, suggesting that admixture between Middle Pleistocene Homo and H. sapiens had already occurred by this time.

Science 25 Jun 2021:
Vol. 372, Issue 6549, pp. 1424-1428

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW ≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈„´‰®‰!!!!!

In “The Dawn of Everything,” the anthropologist David Graeber and the archaeologist David Wengrow aim to rewrite the story of our shared past — and future.

One August night in 2020, David Graeber — the anthropologist and anarchist activist who became famous as an early organizer of Occupy Wall Street — took to Twitter to make a modest announcement.

“My brain feels bruised with numb surprise,” he wrote, riffing on a Doors lyric. “It’s finished?”

He was referring to the book he’d been working on for nearly a decade with the archaeologist David Wengrow, which took as its immodest goal nothing less than upending everything we think we know about the origins and evolution of human societies.

Even before the Occupy movement made him famous, Graeber had been hailed as one of the most brilliant minds in his field. But his most ambitious book also turned out to be his last. A month after his Twitter announcement, Graeber, 59, died suddenly of necrotizing pancreatitis, prompting a shocked outpouring of tributes from scholars, activists and friends around the world.

“The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity,” out Nov. 9 from Farrar Straus and Giroux, may or may not dislodge the standard narrative popularized in mega-sellers like Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapiens” and Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel.” But it has already gathered a string of superlative-studded (if not entirely uncritical) reviews. Three weeks before publication, after it suddenly shot to #2 on Amazon, the publisher ordered another 75,000 copies on top of the 50,000 first printing.

In a video interview last month, Wengrow, a professor at University College London, slipped into a mock-grandiose tone to recite one of Graeber’s favorite catchphrases: “We are going to change the course of human history — starting with the past.”

More seriously, Wengrow said, “The Dawn of Everything” — which weighs in at a whopping 704 pages, including a 63-page bibliography — aims to synthesize new archaeological discoveries of recent decades that haven’t made it out of specialist journals and into public consciousness.

“There’s a whole new picture of the human past and human possibility that seems to be coming into view,” he said. “And it really doesn’t resemble in the slightest these very entrenched stories going around and around.”

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/31/arts/dawn-of-everything-graeber-wengrow.html

We haven't hesitated to say on this site that humans only survived by deceit, because nature gave a raw unfinished status to homo sapiens. "We" had to steal pelt from other animals, steal their caves for shelter and steal from one another. We had to tell ourselves some idiotic stories to believe in our worth being together in a small scale community, against other communities... Not much has changed... We still live in the "Age of Deceit"... We have invented new ways to deal with this, from sophisticated lies to diplomatic bullshit (in which our ScoMo excels)... And this is why Julian Assange is in prison... He had the temerity of exposing the truth, the cad...

Read from top. 

BY Edward Curtin

They didn’t act like people and they didn’t act like actors.  It’s hard to explain.”
JD Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, 1951

There’s a reason that Catcher in the Rye, published 70 years ago, has become such an iconic book, praised and condemned in equal measure. It is because it is about lying, phoniness, acting, Hollywood, theater, plagiarism, and at its core, a society of liars. Actors in a masquerade willing to don masks and face other faces with the veiled glances of the defeated.

It is about the massive social confusion that entered American life in an intense way following World War II, a world of propaganda and performance. 

Although the book seems to be directed at adolescents, it is for adults, and while annoying many of them with its adolescent lingo, it cuts to the heart of our current life-the-movie society.  Adults have become kids, and Holden Caulfield knew that they would.  Or were.  Maybe he wanted it.  We now live in a society of costumed children, asking to be tricked.

“If you want to know the truth,” Holden keeps repeating, knowing that most people don’t, since they prefer the Show.

It is also a fall book with echoes of falling leaves in a dying land.

Football and war, Halloween and all souls drifting down in the crepuscular light of late October and the coming November remembrance of Veteran’s Day, once called Armistice Day, when the mad slow action film of WW I, the war to end all wars with millions dead in rat-infested trenches, is commemorated, as if anything has changed and such memories are not secret celebrations of the heroic sacrifices the gullible make for their masters.  War is a racket; the ultimate racket.

Liam Clancy reminds us of this truth regarding the “Great” War and all the others that have followed. Millions of deaths brought on by lying government bastards.  Actors in the mass masquerade.

But it goes deeper than lying leaders. For lying is the leading cause of living death in the USA, and the pharmaceutical companies have no prescription for it.  If they did, and if they cared, which they don’t, they would have manufactured such a drug long ago. It would have killed them of course, but since their business is profits not suicide, they don their masks of solicitude and bank the spoils, while producing poison to shoot people with.

The great English writer, DH Lawrence, warned us long ago to not let the living-dead eat us up. Yet we are still being devoured by a refusal that knows no name since it is not just them but us – victims and executioners, both in a mutual deadly game.

Death is a big hit, as everyone knows. It fascinates far more than does life. One glance at the mass media will confirm that. Fear, death, and disaster are the daily menu, interspersed with kitsch uplift. Propaganda feeds on it. Up down all around spin that wheel and rattle your brains.

But the ghosts of fall remind us to beware of this necrophilia.  The dead return and wander among us, masked children wandering through the streets looking for handouts. Adults laughing those tight grim laughs. How cute!

Nietzsche said that “all things are entangled, ensnared, and enamored.”  I find this especially true during the autumnal season, especially the Halloween weekend of ghosts, death, and masks.  

It is enchanting and disturbing if you give it thought.  Its symbolism explains the Covid propaganda and panic more than a thousand factual articles. It explains the warfare state and adults’ refusal to defiantly oppose it.  It explains the nihilistic underpinning of society and children’s fears and wishes to use a magic wand to change the world to one that celebrates life not death. 

That is the true treat that their unconscious playacting requests.  But the candy the adults give them conceals the poison the adults can’t face. The poison that they have ingested.

I think of how all persons are, by definition, masked, the word person being derived from the Latin, persona, meaning mask.  Another Latin word, larva, occurs to me, it too meaning mask, ghost, or evil spirit. The living masks light up for me as I think of ghosts, the dead, all the souls and spirits circulating through our days, swirling like dead leaves in the wind.

While etymology might seem arcane, I think it offers us a portal into our lives, not just personally, but politically and culturally as well. Word usage is at the heart of linguistic mind control, and we are in a world where the minders of the public’s mind have become adept at fashioning language to their devious ends.  

Orwell predicted this in Nineteen Eighty-Four with his explanation of Newsspeak:

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.  It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought – that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc – should be literally unthinkable, at least as far as thought is dependent on words.

A quick check of the latest dictionary updates will corroborate Orwell’s point about the future dictionary when Newspeak has been fully established, the meaning of words will be so changed that anything can mean anything, even its opposite.

Shakespeare, the ultimate wordsmith, was right, of course, to tell us that “all the world’s a stage,” though I would disagree with the bard that we are “merely” players.  It does often seem that way, but seeming is the essence of the actor’s show and tell.  

But who are we behind the masks?  Who is it uttering those words coming through the masks’ mouth holes (the per-sona: Latin, to sound through)?

Halloween. The children play at scaring and being scared. Death walks among them and they scream with glee. The play is on. The grim reaper walks up and down the street. Treats greet them. The costumes are ingenious; the masks, wild.  It’s all great fun, the candy sweet.  So what’s the trick?  When does the performance end?

As Halloween ends, the saints come marching in followed by all the souls. The Days of the Dead. Spirits. Ghosts walk the streets. Dead leaves fall. The dead are everywhere, swirling through the air, drifting. We are surrounded by them. We are them. Until.

Until when?  Perhaps not until we dead awaken and see through the charade of social life and realize the masked performers are not just the deadly politicians and celebrities, not only the professional actors and the corporate media performers, but us.

And while these days of the dead and children’s games can bring us to wonder whether we act like people or actors – “even if it’s hard to explain” – whether behind the double masks we realize we can be genuine actors if we go deep enough, the celebration of Veterans/Armistice/Remembrance Day a few days later should emphatically remind us of the Masters of War and the need to see through their masks, as Bob Dylan tells us.  The evil performers who “play with my world like it’s your little toy” with their endless lies.

Norman O. Brown so well describes our stage set:

Ancestral voices prophesying war; ancestral spirits in the danse macabre or war dance; Valhalla, ghostly warriors who kill each other and are reborn to fight again.  All warfare is ghostly, every army an exercitus feralis (army of ghosts), every soldier a living corpse.

It seems to me that Albert Camus was right, and that we should aspire to be neither victims nor executioners.  To do so will take a serious reevaluation of the roles we play in the ongoing national tragedy of lie piled upon lie in aggressive wars around the world and in election farces that perpetuate them.

The leading actors we elect are our responsibility.  We produce and maintain them.  They are our mirror images; we are theirs.  It is the danse macabre, a last tango in the land of bad actors, our two-faced show.  

This masquerade ball that passes for political reality is infiltrated by the ghosts of all those victims we have murdered around the wide world.  We may choose not to see them, but they are lurking in the shadowy corners.  And they will haunt us until we make amends.

“Do you not know there comes a midnight hour when everyone has to throw off his mask?” warned Kierkegaard.  “Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked?  Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this?  Or are you not terrified by it?”

“Whenever I take up a newspaper,” Ibsen added, “I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sands of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.”

Yet the children and the eloquent voices of the genuine actors I have so liberally quoted here remind us of what is possible if we chase the light and stop the masquerade.

That would be cause for a real holiday celebration.

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2021/10/31/the-masquerade/

Gus: Not much can change here. Deceit reigns supreme. Read from top. The ghosts of the past have always lied to us and many of us still believe them... 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW...