AMAZING RECONSTUCTION OF SHANIDAR NEADERTHAL WOMAN'S FACE

BBC NEWS : FACE OF 75,000 YEAR OLD NEANDERTHAL WOMAN 

The skull was smashed flat.  In this story of cutting edge Archaeology and Science, despite the many pieces being soft, the skull was reconstructed, the "fat" and "muscles" added in the right places, and the face came forth.

Excerpt:

The rebuilt skull was then surface-scanned and a 3D print given to Dutch artists Adrie and Alfons Kennis, who are renowned for their skill in creating anatomically faithful representations of ancient people from their bone and fossil remains.

WHAT DID THEY SNACK ON IN POMPAEII ? ARCHEOLOGY MAY INSPIRE YOUR NEW YEARS FEAST...

 that is if you like goat and snails.

This article explores what archeology is telling us.  The people who lived there before Vesuvius erupted did SNACK but they sure didn't have chips.

DAILY MAIL = 2000 YEARS AGO POMPEII SNACKED article by Ian Randall.  Great images of painted frescos.

A thermopolium was a snack bar.

"Painstaking excavations revealed a multi-sided serving counter with wide holes in its top surface that held deep vessels for hot foods much like might be seen in present day buffet and salad bars.

WHO REALLY DISCOVERED AMERICA : ANCESTRY WORSHIP GENEALOGY FILM REVIEW

WHO REALLY DISCOVERED AMERICA : ANCESTRY WORSHIP GENEALOGY FILM REVIEW

Christopher Columbus? His day has gone bust, in part because Native Americans rightly say they were on the American Continent (North and South) well before he arrived.  This film embraces the fact that there were possibly many excursions, by those sailing all sorts of ships from massive junks to simple canoes, that brought DNA into the America's which is the best evidence yet that people from Polynesia, China, Ireland, Norway, as well as, possibly, Hebrews, coming in to explore and some of them very likely had sex with individuals from previous populations.

As you probably know, the practice of genealogy relies on documents, but some people are having their DNA analyzed because of the matching services that usually come with having your hair, blood, bone marrow, or other body part analyzed.  Sometimes you can pick up the trail that you lost if you are matched with a "cousin" who knows more that you.  For many of us, the trail is lost after about three or four generations, but it is exciting to find out that in the deep past your people may have traveled the world, maybe by boat.

This film is exciting too because it brings the testimony of some experts who have made it their life's work to focus on micro-specialization, an assortment of archeologist, experts on how the ocean tides move ships, linguistics experts, people who can read ancient languages off rocks.

So here are some teasers!

Mysterious stones that are probably anchors from Chinese Junks have been found off the coast of Palos Verdes (Los Angeles) and in the 19th century the Chinese actually were fishing out there.  Maybe these are older from 1000 years ago?

It's believed the Welsh made it.  Could these be the blond haired "moon eyed" people who Cherokees interbred with the Mandan people.  President Thomas Jefferson heard there were Welsh speaking Indians.

Are carbon-dated Chicken Bones evidence that the Polynesians made it thousands of miles in 60 foot canoes about 1000 AD?

And the Chumash Natives (who lived from about where Santa Barbara is now and north) have fish hooks and boat building, and linguistic links to Polynesians as well!

The Vikings, The Irish (Saint Brendan the Navigator) and the Hebrews can all make claims, and evidence would include particular forms of building under the earth or with stone.

IT'S THE CHEROKEE, Chief Joe Sitting Owl, of the CENTRAL band, who got DNA testing.  Though only 1% of the Cherokee, Family Tree DNA did the work, and found no evidence of Hebrew or Jewish DNA.  Most Hebrew/Jewish DNA is in the G, J, T, or E haplogroups. but he says don't let this sway you away from the truth. 

My opinion: Maybe the Latter Day Saints can provide the funds for more Native American DNA testing, since their religious beliefs are that a Lost Tribe of Israel did make it to American.  Paleo Hebrew inscriptions in stones may appear in New Mexico, but perhaps most convincing is that a carbon dated rock with Hebrew inscriptions has been found in a Cherokee burial ground.

THE PERFECT CORPSE : BOG MEN FORENSICS and THE LATEST IN RECREATION OF A FACE!

THE PERFECT CORPSE : BOG MEN FORENSICS 

I just LOVE when scientists and artists use skeletal remains and an understanding of musculature or the latest computer technology to actually sculpt or virtually sculpt a face of a person who was in a bog for thousands of years!

If you've heard of bog men before you know that some DNA analysis is being done and that there are living people today who are related to bog men...  But well, this film is more about trying to figure out why, culturally, certain people are in the bog.  Some of them appear to have been murdered on purpose, even the victims of over-kill, having been killed three different ways.  Will we ever know how it is they were chosen?  Were they abducted and protesting or doped up and willing?

Why the violence?  Were they human sacrifices by Druids?  Can we assume that these horrific deaths are part of Celtic culture just because they are found in bogs around Ireland?

Today the scientists and artists can tell us that a certain victim was young, rich - because he used imported hair pomade to put his hair on end to possibly compensate for being short - and healthy because of the diet remains in his stomach. 

 

HERE'S THE LINK TO THE COMPANION WEB SITE TO THE FILM :

 PBS THE PERFECT CORPSE

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BLACK DEATH !

ABC/ AP story SKELETONS REVEAL BLACK DEATH SECRETS

EXCERPT: This week, Don Walker, an osteologist with the Museum of London, outlined the biography of one man whose ancient bones were found by construction workers under London's Charterhouse Square: He was breast-fed as a baby, moved to London from another part of England, had bad tooth decay in childhood, grew up to work as a laborer, and died in early adulthood from the bubonic plague that ravaged Europe in the 14th century.

The poor man's life was nasty, brutish and short, but his afterlife is long and illuminating.

 

***

 

THE BLACK DEATH is interesting to me because if you're European, there's a good chance you're a descendent of a survivor of the Black Death.

 

***

 

EXCERPT: To test their theory, scientists took one tooth from each of 12 skeletons, then extracted DNA from the teeth. They announced Sunday that tests had found the presence of the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, in several of the teeth, meaning the individuals had been exposed to — and likely died from — the Black Death.

WHAT DOES ARCHEOLOGY and SCIENCE (DNA) HAVE TO DO WITH FAMILY HISTORY RESEARCH AND WRITING?

If you haven't guessed by some of my postings on this GENEALOGY and FAMILY HISTORY WRITING SITE, I have an intense interest in DNA, DNA Science and Genealogy, Human History, archeology, anthropology, cultural studies, and spirituality - reincarnation; the WHO WHAT WHERE WHY AND WHEN of writing about human beings.

Genealogy research can take us only so far because it relies on records - usually written records and truly, many people are only able to go back three to five generations without loosing the trail.  Once in a while I meet someone who, because they are related to royalty or aristocracy (or maybe a Jewish rabbi who was famous) has found more convincing evidence of connections further back. Once in a while I meet someone who came to understand themselves through hypnotic regression be because they found themselves in a past life.)

DNA can help us understand more about how the people who passed on their genetics to us traveled the world and settled, and of course DNA tests are allowing us to learn more about our ethnicity as well.  Our notions of who we are have a lot to do with ethnicity.

DNA tests can help us connect with other people who may be related to us. (Everyone on earth is related in some way, but that's a very big concept to understand.)

GAVIN MENZIES : WHO DISCOVERED AMERICA? ANCESTRY WORSHIP BOOK REVIEW: DNA EVIDENCE OF NATIVE AMERICAN ASIAN ANCESTRY

GAVIN MENZIES - OFFICIAL SITE WITH LINKS TO ALL HIS WORKS

Gavin Menzies has written previous books, including the bestselling "1421  - How the Chinese discovered America."  He's considered controversial because of his theories - which he has enhanced with world travel and meeting with experts in many fields - importantly finding pre 1492 maps.  He currently bucks against academia and established theories of science.  For instance he is opposed to the Bering Straight - land bridge theory of how Native American people crossed into the Americas and is in favor of sea travel.  (Sea travel by the way figures in many tribal stories of how they got here.  I recall in one of my anthropology classes the Native American students got angry with the professor and marched out!)

Reading his "Who Discovered America" closely, there are a few assertions that I disagree with, but since DNA science is an essential part of proofing his theories that people were either shipwrecked or traveled the natural currents of the oceans to travel around the continents, I'm intrigued and open minded.

Page 245 ..."The currents in the North Pacific flow in a great lip, carrying boats north from China, past Japan, then swinging east past the Aleutian and Kuril Islands to Alaska, then south along the American coast to Central America.  So sea travelers from Asia to North and Central America have a free ride and food along the way and can sail so they are only out of sight of land for three days. This great clockwise, nearly rectangular, flow of water takes place all year round... It appears certain that man reached the Americas by sea at least forty thousand years ago..."

Does being controversial mean he's all wrong?

No, it doesn't. 

Over many works, he does have his fans.  For instance the New York Times magazine called his ideas revolutionary.  The New York Daily News called him a historical detective.  Like Jared Diamond, who is a professor in another field but writes his theories about man's evolution of culture and society such as "Guns, Germs, and Steel,"  or Elizabeth Caldwell Hirschman, another professor in a field outside genealogy, but who is combining genealogy and DNA studies of the  Melungeons, which suggests that they were Sephardic Jews, there is room for alternative theories.  There is room for those who are writing outside their specialty fields or who are simply smart and not educated formally.  At one time the World was thought to be flat and anyone who thought otherwise was considered a heretic. (And I suspect that some day science will catch up with reincarnation theories too.)

JARED DIAMOND OFFICIAL SITE

Pages 185-186 - Overview: Gavin Menzies and Ian Hudson in a chapter on North Carolina and the Virginias, is about some of the same territory that Elizabeth Caldwell Hirschman's researching.  He writes about a researcher named Jerry Warsing who is following a disease called Machado-Joseph as evidence of Chinese mariners in North America decades before Christopher Columbus.  The Melungoens of West Virginia have a high incidence of this disease which is prevalent in Yunnan Province, China as well as in the Aborigines of Australia and in Yemen.  The theory has been that the Portuguese spread this disease but Waring now believes it was the same huge Chinese fleets that Menzies wrote about in previous books who took the disease around the world.

He focused on the Native American tribe called the Mingo whose DNA has a high admixture of East Asian genes. The Mingos themselves said they were not Indian people but descendants of shipwrecked sailors.

Page 186  - Excerpt:

..."Further investigations led Warsing to the eventual conclusion that a fleet of some two hundred ships under the command of Zheng He had been wrecked in about 1432 on the coast between modern Southport, North Carolina, and the Norfolk, Virgina.  Confronted with the marshy inhospitable coast, they marched inland up the Cape Fear and Roanoke rivers and settled in the western foothills of the Appalachian Mountains between Salem and Asheville, North Carolina.  Some of them also settled in route in West Virginia, where they left a proliferation of stone buildings -  Warhing believed that they also left a selection of Chinese plants, pallowwaddy and rice, along the way.  He believes their survivors are among the tribes of the Ming Ho (Mingo), Wyo Ming,  Lyco Ming, Shawnee (name corrupted from Oceanye Ho), and Melungeons."

WHO DISCOVERED AMERICA
The Untold History of the Peopling of the Americas
by Gavin Menzies and Ian Hudson
is published by William Morrow - An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

C 2011-2025 Ancestry Worship Genealogy BlogSpot

All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights

 

GOLD BEDECKED SKELETON AN ANCIENT BEAKER PEOPLE QUEEN ?

YAHOO : GOLD BEDECKED SKELETON MAY BE ANCIENT QUEEN  link here (includes a picture of a reconstruction of what she may have looked like at the burial.)  The woman was found in England between Windsor Castle and another town.

EXCERPT:

"The woman's bones have been degraded by acid in the soil, making radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis impossible. Nonetheless, excavators believe she was at least 35 years old when she died sometime between 2500 B.C. and 2200 B.C., around the era Stonehenge was constructed.


The woman was adorned with a necklace that had tube-shaped beads fashioned out of sheet gold and black disks of lignite, a dark, coal-like material similar to jet. Though her clothing long ago disintegrated, amber buttons and fasteners were scattered across the woman's body in a row, hinting at how she may have been dressed..."

INBREEDING OF EARLY HUMANS : FOSSIL SKULL EVIDENCE

LIVESCIENCE : Tanya Lewis article : Inbreeding Common in Early Humans, Deformed Skull Suggests  link here!

EXCERPT: "The evidence comes from fragments of an approximately 100,000-year-old human skull unearthed at a site called Xujiayao, located in the Nihewan Basin of northern China. The skull's owner appears to have had a now-rare congenital deformity that probably arose through inbreeding, researchers report today (March 18) in the journal PLOS ONE..."

ISLAND OF THE BLUE DOLPHIN : CAVE OF NATIVE AMERICAN WOMAN WHO LIVED ALONE FOR 18 YEARS ON SAN NICHOLAS ISLAND

LA TIMES - ARTICLE BY STEVE CHAWKINS "CAVE OF POPULAR HEROINE FOUND AT LAST?

"By 1835, the few Nicoleños left were struggling. Whether motivated by compassion or a need to increase the ranks of mission laborers, Franciscan fathers from the mainland sent a ship for them. All but one made the trip to the mainland aboard the Peor es Nada, loosely translated as "Better than nothing."

The holdout came to be known as the Lone Woman. According to legend, she jumped overboard and swam for shore when she frantically realized that her baby had been left behind. Less romanticized theories hold that she told the captain she'd show up with her child but a sudden storm forced him to shove off without her.

What's known is that a solitary woman lived in the sand and fog of San Nicolas for the next 18 years. On the mainland, her legend grew. A time or two, fishermen reported seeing a fleeting figure on the deserted island. In 1850, a padre at the Santa Barbara Mission commissioned a sea captain to find her."

I read the book as an adult and found it to be a fascinating read.  The story of a woman alone for 18 years on an island who was rescued and died 7 weeks later has captured my imagination.

C 2012

THE FATE OF THE NEANDERTHALS : A and E FILM : WE HAVE A LITTLE OF THEM IN US?

Just noshing the other night watching this film, which came out in 2006, and is probably still available for rental or at your public library. A and E's THE FATE OF THE NEANDERTHALS, narrated by Leonard Nimoy of Star Trek fame, is the kind of educational film I enjoy. Several important professors of anthropology and archeology speak, and here is the consensus:

Neanderthals had very difficult lives. They usually lived to about 40, but this was enough time for some of them to have grandchildren. The men were buried with grave goods like weapons and flowers, the women were never buried with anything. This reflects a lack of status, possibly even a belief that women did not have an afterlife and suggests women were not respected in life. It is also possible that women and children lived separate of men for long periods of time. There is evidence that Neanderthals lived in small groups, and there were probably never more than 100,000 living at any one time. Their range based on burials and other evidence includes Israel and Iran, the British isles, and sweep of Mediterranean Europe. Since they treated each other differently than they treated most animals, they probably had a sense of themselves as special and different, and they may have had a concept of religiousness or worshipped a deity.

They were alive when Homo Sapiens emerged and the two groups probably encountered each other and recognized each other as both different and as people. Physically they were very robust, men with the strength of about 3 times that of modern man.