Illusions of the Past Come up Again – Ancient Canals that Aren’t

For the second time this week, I ran across an image on Google Images that was connected with ME, specifically.  You all won’t believe what a double take that does to you!  The first time was actually a photo of me, while I was looking up neolithic spirals in Acambaro, Mexico.  Then tonight I was looking up something called the Las Lunas stone, out in Arizona or someplace.  And there was this image:

Following the link took me to this:

Annunaki Hieroglyphics – New Jersey Coast”

Mayans in Georgia? Or Maybe Someone Else from Mexico?

Around the beginning f the year, there was an article in The Examiner which I took note of – Ruins in Georgia Mountains Show Evidence of Mayan Connection.  It creat4ed quite a stir with establishment arkies mentioned in the article screaming bloody murder that they might be connected with something not 2,000% conservative like most of archeology.

What it did for me was bring to mind something in Ed Grondine’s “Man and Impacts in the Americas“.  His Appendix B, The Ancient Word of the Natchez, is an account of the Natchez’s history including their mass emigration from what is certainly the mountainous Huastecan area of northern Vera Cruz state in Mexico, where they had been long fighting off the aggressive Teotihuacans of the Valley of Mexico. This migration would have been some time between 200 AD and 1200 AD. The Natchez fought them off successfully, which not few could claim – but eventually got really tired of having to do so – so they left. Once up and around the Gulf coast, they settled originally on the west bank of the lower Mississippi.  Here is the part of the Appendix that tells about the extent of their settled area:

IS HUMAN EVOLUTIONARY EXCEPTIONALISM TRUE?

For years and years, I’ve wondered at the gall of anthropologists and arkies who claimed that Homo became h.sapiens sapiens a mere 40,000 years ago.

Evolution for all the other animals took many hundreds of thousands of years, even millions of years, and they would tell us that with a straight face.  Even within the mechanics of evolution itself, animals are basically retarded, while wonderful humans got on the fast track, because – well, because we are US.  Do we need another reason?

Then they would also tell us that only 35,000 years ago the Neandertals faded, stomped into the ground by the flat-foreheaded Cro-Mags.  And instantly we were no long even Cro-magnons, but fully developed modern man.  Oh, excuse me, I forgot to capitalize that: Modern Man. In spite of our having left the Man-in-the-image-of-God crap behind when the Royal Society gave the Church the final finger (or at least when Lyell and Darwin did), science still thought of us humans as that miracle birth, right out of the virginal womb of the Patriarchal God.  Still does, it seems.

Even the 200,000 years ago Mother of us all, “African Eve”, was told to us with a straight face.

(There is clear clear evidence that Ötzi, the Alpine ‘Ice Man,’ had a mitochondrial DNA type that is no longer with us.  Now, what is the bigger picture that this tells us?  That genetic types go extinct, get cut off, get lost, and are never seen again.  But what is the next thing that this tells us?  That if one type went extinct only 5,000 years ago, others also are likely to have gone extinct, and at varying times in the past.  And then what is the next next thing that this suggests?  That at the 200,000 year point when African Eve “birthed us all,” that is only one take on it.

It was ALSO very possibly a bottleneck, a time when other genetic types died out and only one survived.  It may have all been a long process or a short one; we cannot know yet.

African Eve may merely be the end of a long bottleneck, a woman who had enough fecund children to begin the proliferation of humans. It, in fact, might have been a case similar to the biblical Noah and his story (one which is repeated in scores of ancient accounts).  Noah’s wife – or her equivalent in Babylonian or New World accounts/histories/tales – would then be an Eve.  But the scientists don’t dare refer to African Eve as Noah’s wife Set.  That is WAY too close to religion and – heaven forbid – The Flood of Noah.  I am not saying she specifically was or wasn’t.  After all, the story of Noah doesn’t enter the Biblical account until after the Jewish people were held in captivity in Babylon, whose tale of The Flood preceded the tale of Noah.  So it is very possible that Noah’s tale was a retelling of the Babylonian tale.  This thinking is nothing new, but it is well to mention it.

Could this have happened 200,000 years ago, instead of 4,000 years ago?  At least some evidence is moving in that direction, so, yes, maybe it does, though to make an assertion to that effect would be un-scientific – as in not conservative enough for peer-review.

All these changes, in the blink of a geological eye or even an evolutionary eye.

Poppycock!

GLOBAL WARMING IS NOT THE ONLY ‘CONSENSUS’ THAT HAS HELD BACK SCIENCE

H/T Lloyd Pye

First a brief overview:

From the discovery in 1929 of a special style of stone spear point outside Clovis, NM until 1997. The consensus among archeologists and anthropologists was that no humans came to the Americas before the ‘Clovis Man’ about 13,000 years ago. Ignoring evidence of earlier Americans and sweeping it under the carpet was the rule. The ‘Brahmins’ of Clovis controlled who got funding, who got taught, who was hired, pretty much everything regarding the late Pleistocene influx of humans into America. Many of you probably know something about it, how at about 13,000 years ago an ‘ice-free corridor opened up from Alaska down between two ice sheets that were covering most of Canada, allowing Asians to walk across Beringia, because the ice sheets lowered the sea levels enough that the Bering Strait was dry land. According to the consensus, no other time, ever, could humans have gotten to the Americas, because they had no boats and the land route was blocked every other possible time. Well, in 1997 a site in Chile, Monte Verde, was proven and fully vetted as being a human settlement about 1,000 years before the ice-free corridor was open. The ‘Clovis First’ dogma had – after almost 7 decades – been toppled. Since then much progress has been made, and the previously anathema progress continues. It has turned out that genetics has played a large part in it, showing that FIVE incursions of humans came, from at least four areas – one of them Europe, and one of them Polynesian. And yes, boats were used. (End of overview)

So, on with the show!

I think anyone here can read the following and substitute ‘global warming’ in place of ‘Clovis First’ and ‘the Hockey Team’ for ‘Paleo experts’. . .

What inspired this theoretical hardness that permitted nothing outside the boatless Isolationist box? Was there a mass conspiracy to defraud the public by a cabal from the original skull and bones society? Are the secrets buried next to The Ark in some Pentagon-subsidized Smithsonian warehouse and kept out of public hands because we cannot handle the truth?

Dream on. It was the Paleo experts themselves who could not handle the truth. Clovis First/Isolationism was guided by a consensus mentality, a groupthink that reason could not penetrate. What’s the use of wasting time and money trying to prove yourself wrong when you know you are right? In the end it was nothing but wishful thinking, an obsession that stunted the development and maturation of First American research.

– Christopher Hardaker – 2007 ‘The First American: The Suppressed Story of the People Who Discovered the New World’ (p. 246) Kindle Edition

Prior to 15 years ago, Clovis First was THE consensus among academics, so much so that Hardaker could and did write,

The idea of water travel in any Pleistocene migration theory was strictly taboo, except for Australia. In the Americas, it was land or nothing. Now everyone is a diffusionist by definition. That means Pandora’s box has opened for good, and Isolationism is clearly dead. Now we must reconsider more recent immigrants, such as [George] Carter’s chickens, Japanese sailors, and Chinese Olmecs. No! No! Clovis just got lucky, that’s all. Nice try. The Pleistocene coastal approach to the New World had been discussed decades earlier by the enlightened Canadians. The gringos, however, claimed that the northwest Pacific coastline was blocked by glaciers, and that immigrants could not walk around them, so they didn’t. Silly? You bet. [Ibid, page 244 Kindle edition]

and

In my first upper division archaeology class at San Diego State in 1973, my professor warned us all not to visit Carter’s Texas Street site. Carter had apparently returned to do some more excavations at his infamous site, and my professor must have feared we might be “infected” with his madness if we got too close. The professor made a point of not telling us where the site was. His final words: If you visit the Texas Street site, you will be kicked out of the department. This was essentially a death sentence for any aspiring California archaeologist … if you got caught. It meant your curiosity would never be tamed, disciplined, nor aligned with the scientifically credible. It meant you had a yen for the incredulous. Such interests would only tarnish the good name of archaeology in the future. [Ibid, pg 146, Kindle edition]

From: Dan Josselyn Alabama Archaeological Society University of Alabama

To: Dr. Cynthia lrwin-Williams Eastern New Mexico University Portales, New Mexico…

…I’m accused of “theories”, which I detest. My only point is that we have overlooked an amazing and abundant lithic technology – let’s see what it means!  I wish all archaeologists could see the ton of “crude stuff” spread all over my tables, floors, spare beds. Wormington, Krieger, Desmond Clark, Dragoo, Vertes, Bordes, Leakey, Muller-Beck, Stirling, etc., agree with me that we must investigate this matter thoroughly.’ (Emphasis in original.)

In Josselyn’s last paragraph we find that just asking questions about early assemblages brought a lot of heat, regardless of the luminaries who felt the same way. This heat came from the dogmatic Clovis First folks. By merely acting on his interest and curiosity, Josselyn was accused of “theories.” “Theories,” specified in this way, resemble the modem accusation of conspiracy theories.

In the “you’re with us or against us” world of Clovis-Isolationism, every question, no matter how innocent, was regarded as an allegation against the Brahmin, who would then turn around and let you have it. When they accused Josselyn of “theories,” it was his thinking abilities that were being attacked. It carries the notion that you suffer from a gullibility toward the fantastic, that you cannot discern science from fantasy. The fact that he lists so many others sharing the same curiosity strengthens Josselyn’s position. His frustration was evident, but he was not alone. In the end, it did not matter one bit. Clovis First was just too entrenched to let facts get in the way. [all emphases in the originals] [Ibid, p. 141. Kindle Edition.]

Does this kind of idiocy and stone walls sound familiar?

Though shalt not put facts before the altar of our consensus.

But archeology and anthropology are now out of the control of a consensus and back in the hands of open inquirers who will follow the evidence wherever it leads – at least until the next consensus gets in the way.

I found the book to be a terrific read on how entrenched ideas stifle researchers, even when no one is directly leaning on them.  The story is mostly about a Mexican site near Puebla was the equivalent of Dr Louis Leakeys’ Olduvai Gorge in Africa, but since the science didn’t fit with the archeologists’ expectations, some nasty things were done.  I won’t give away the story, but it had some shockers in it, and is one of the best science stories I’ve come across.

Steve Garcia

THE TRUE MEANING OF ADAM SMITH’S ‘INVISIBLE HAND’

When I still had my company, I thought about that a lot about what would it take to get the economy back to what it was 40 years ago.  One must remember first that it took 170 years to get it to its full flower, and once it got disemboweled it can’t be re-built in any short time at all.

My best guess is that it will need small USA companies need to deal with other small USA companies as much as possible and keep doing it.  The big boys are all about $0.12/hr Chinese labor vs $18.00/hr US labor.  And trust me, the biggest expense for any company BY FAR is labor costs.

Even just with the small companies in the U.S. they constitute a very large market – still one of the largest economies in the world.

There have to be two economies – one for the big corporations and one for the small businesses.  Like their own Chamber of Commerce the small manufacturers need to pull together and help each other, and become – like Adam Smith called it – ‘the domestic society.’

The Republicans like to drag out Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand,” as the guiding principle behind their greed.  Here it is, the part they quote extensively:

…he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.

In other words, by trying to make himself as profitable as possible, the supposedly selfish and greedy person is actually doing his society a great favor – even though the society isn’t part of his thinking. 

A CHANGE OF PACE – TRIPLETS IN THE FAMILY

And now for something completely different. . .

On Valentine’s Day of all days, my daughter and her husband added a set of three girls to the 7 billion folks inhabiting this Big blue round activity place.

I had pleaded with her to please wait until Leap Year Day, but she – carrying in then end over 12 pounds of little buggers told me, of all people, to bugger off and stick my idea where our neighborhood star doesn’t shine.  I mean, what’s 15 days between father and daughter, anyway? [Pics below the fold…]

SEMI-RANTING ABOUT THE SOLUTREAN AND Y-D PAPERS

[At Europeans in America 20,000 years ago? Susan Belding posted about the Delmarva discoveries about the ‘radical’ theory of Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley.  The news had broken back on the 6th or so, and somehow it had not yet made it onto our American Waterways message board.  This is my reply to Susan… (cross-posted there)]

Susan –

Is this the first mention of this in this group? Good get! “Ancient
waterways” has to include the Atlantic, too, doesn’t it? If an ocean
isn’t a waterway, what is?

Standford and Bradley have been pushing this pretty much ever since
Clovis First was shot down in 1997. The DNA evidence gives them a
boost, too. But as is normal, arkies can only go one step into the
abyss, and even then their ideas are labeled “radical” for half a
century. (Standford and Bradley are at about 15 years and counting…)
It is pathetic when radical means not quite as conservative as an Oxford
Don.

A LITTA BITTA POLITICA

Some political rants… Don’t follow the link to “the rest of the story” unless you don’t mind possibly being insulted….

WHAT ARE WE TO THINK OF THE ENGINEERING OF THE LONG, LONG PAST?

EVERY society has to have engineer types, by whatever name.

Just as every tribe had a medicine woman and/or a shaman – both of whom were mainly healers, every tribe had to have someone who carried more technical knowledge than most.  Medicine women and shamans had to know the plants for healing, and which mushrooms were edible.  It wasn’t all about visions and mumbo jumbo, though arkies would have us all think that.

Engineer types are the ones who know how to build wigwams or build houses on stilts over Swiss lakes.

But those actually are later developments.

The cave art in Spain and France – on rivers that lead down to the Atlantic – shows the high level of art that someone either learned in the caves (so doubtful as to be retarded for anyone to think it could be true) or they came to the caves already with those talents.

The original Lascaux Grottoes, with the walkway built in the 1940s.
(Original source: unknown)

The latter idea has never even been considered, though it is the most likely.  After all, one gains painting skill by painting, and if one has nothing to paint on but cave walls, where is the evidence on those walls and celings of the rudimentary skill being practiced and improved?  Where are the 3rd-grade-level pictures?  If those are not on the cave walls, then we can be assured that the 3D quality of the cave paintings did not develop there.  Here, just by amazing coincidence is a bit of 3rd grade cave art – done by modern 3rd grader:

Modern 3rd grade "cave art" on brown paper

Post-Roman European art took till the 1300s or 1400s to wake up to 3D painting; till then it was all flat 2D representations.  Yet there, 30,000 years ago, cave artists drew in such a manner.

“HOW IS IT POSSIBLE THAT CLIMATE COULD BE FORECAST YEARS AHEAD?”

@Bruce Stewart  at WUWT asks: “How is it conceivable that climate could be forecast years ahead?”

Oh, I am certain that it will be. Look at so much that we have done with computers in each of the last 5-year periods since 1977. Not once in any of those would we have known what was coming in the next 5-year period. Certainly not in the 2nd one ahead.

How to do climate ahead?