"Fire-ravaged Notre Dame cathedral is being turned into a 'woke theme park' with renovators adding a 'discovery trail' and 'Christianity for dummies' exhibits, critics have claimed." Source: Daily Mail.
"Under new plans, confessional boxes, altars and classical sculptures will be scrapped for trendy art murals, with sound and lighting effects creating 'emotional spaces.'
"A 'discovery trail' will lead visitors through various chapels, with an emphasis on Africa and Asia, and scripture will be beamed onto the walls in various languages, including Mandarin. One of the sanctuaries will even be dedicated to the environment.
"Maurice Culot, an award-winning Paris-based architect, told The Telegraph: 'It's as if Disney were entering Notre-Dame.
"'What they are proposing to do to Notre-Dame would never be done to Westminster Abbey or Saint Peter's in Rome. It's a kind of theme park and very childish and trivial given the grandeur of the place.'"
Comment: As far as I can tell, these idiotic plans are just proposals being floated by woke morons like the ones who originally wanted to rebuild the cathedral with a glass roof, steel spire or Islamic minaret. According to the Daily Mail, "The majority of the members of the scientific committee overlooking the restoration are not keen on the plans, but General Jean-Louis Georgelin, who Macron has tasked with leading the restoration, and the Paris Archbishop want to press ahead." The decision will apparently be made next month, so let's hope that sanity prevails. If it doesn't -- if they actually go through with this atrocity -- then it would probably be better to just burn the cathedral to the ground.
Next video shows the state of the restoration as of July, 2021.
"A new study from The Australian National University (ANU) has revealed the death rate of babies in ancient societies is not a reflection of poor healthcare, disease and other factors, but instead is an indication of the number of babies born in that era." Source: Science Daily.
"The findings shed new light on the history of our ancestors and debunk old assumptions that infant mortality rates were consistently high in ancient populations."
Comment: If you ask me, the findings here don't shed new light on much of anything at all. This study was based on an analysis of modern statistics which were then used to make conclusions about life in the prehistoric world:
"The researchers examined United Nations (UN) data from the past decade for 97 countries that looked at infant mortality, fertility and the number of deaths that occurred during infancy. The analysis revealed that fertility had a much greater influence on the proportion of deceased infants than the infant mortality rate.
"Because there is very little known about early human societies, the UN data helped the researchers make interpretations about humans from the past 10,000 years."
"The recovery of new lumbar vertebrae from the lower back of a single individual of the human relative, Australopithecus sediba, and portions of other vertebrae of the same female from Malapa, South Africa, together with previously discovered vertebrae, form one of the most complete lower backs ever discovered in the early hominid record and give insight into how this ancient human relative walked and climbed."
Video from 2011.
Note: Despite the publicity given to these partial remains, it's possible that this particular species isn't a human relative at all:
"Australopithecus sediba is an extinct species of australopithecine recovered from Malapa Cave, Cradle of Humankind, South Africa. It is known from a partial juvenile skeleton, the holotype MH1, and a partial adult female skeleton, the paratype MH2. They date to about 1.98 million years ago in the Early Pleistocene, and coexisted with Paranthropus robustus and Homo ergaster/H. erectus ... A. sediba was initially described as being a potential human ancestor, and perhaps the progenitor of Homo, but this is contested and it could also represent a late-surviving population or sister species of A. africanus which had earlier inhabited the area." (Wikipedia)
"The Kingdom of Mapungubwe (or Maphungubgwe) (c. 1075–c. 1220) was a medieval state in South Africa located at the confluence of the Shashe and Limpopo rivers, south of Great Zimbabwe. The name is derived from either TjiKalanga and Tshivenda. The name might mean 'Hill of Jackals'. The kingdom was the first stage in a development that would culminate in the creation of the Kingdom of Zimbabwe in the 13th century, and with gold trading links to Rhapta and Kilwa Kisiwani on the African east coast. The Kingdom of Mapungubwe lasted about 80 years, and at its height the capital's population was about 5000 people." (Wikipedia) Note: I'm not sure which capital this refers to.
Mapungubwe hill. Around 24 human skeletons were discovered here and later reburied. Video from 2010.
The central area of Mapungubwe covered around 30,000 hectares (around 74,000 acres), according to the UNESCO World Heritage List. That's something like 109 square miles, I believe, and the kingdom had a much larger buffer zone, so its territory was fairly large for that period. Over the course of its history, Mapungubwe had three capitals -- "Schroda; Leopard’s Kopje; and the final one located around Mapungubwe hill - and their satellite settlements and lands around the confluence of the Limpopo and the Shashe rivers whose fertility supported a large population within the kingdom."
The kingdom's location allowed it grow rich from trade with the outside world:
"Mapungubwe's position at the crossing of the north/south and east/west routes in southern Africa also enabled it to control trade, through the East African ports to India and China, and throughout southern Africa. From its hinterland it harvested gold and ivory - commodities in scarce supply elsewhere – and this brought it great wealth as displayed through imports such as Chinese porcelain and Persian glass beads." (UNESCO)
Missouri has a deep history. According to Wikipedia, "Archaeological excavations along river valleys have shown continuous habitation since about 9000 BCE. Beginning before 1000 CE, the people of the Mississippian culture created regional political centers at present-day St. Louis and across the Mississippi River at Cahokia, near present-day Collinsville, Illinois [next video]. Their large cities included thousands of individual residences. Still, they are known for their surviving massive earthwork mounds, built for religious, political and social reasons, in platform, ridgetop and conical shapes. Cahokia was the center of a regional trading network that reached from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. The civilization declined by 1400 CE, and most descendants left the area long before the arrival of Europeans. St. Louis was at one time known as Mound City by the European Americans because of the numerous surviving prehistoric mounds since lost to urban development. The Mississippian culture left mounds throughout the middle Mississippi and Ohio river valleys, extending into the southeast and the upper river."
"Phorusrhacids, colloquially known as terror birds, are an extinct clade of large carnivorousflightless birds that were the largest species of apex predators in South America during the Cenozoic era; their conventionally accepted temporal range covers from 62 to 1.8 million years ago." Source: Wikipedia.
Terror birds spread into North America around 2.7 million years ago after the formation of the Isthmus of Panama connected the two continents, leading to a cross-migration of flora and fauna known as the Great American Interchange.
It's possible that early humans coexisted with descendants of these monsters in South America. According to Wikipedia, "...reports from Uruguay of new findings of relatively small forms [of terror birds] dating to 18,000 and 96,000 years ago would imply that phorusrhacids survived there until very recently (i.e., until the late Pleistocene); the initial report of such a recent date has been questioned."
"Referred to as 'China's Venice of the Stone Age', the Liangzhu excavation site in eastern China is considered one of the most significant testimonies of early Chinese advanced civilization. More than 5000 years ago, the city already had an elaborate water management system. Until now, it has been controversial what led to the sudden collapse. Massive flooding triggered by anomalously intense monsoon rains [next video] caused the collapse, as geologists and climate researchers have now shown." Source: Science Daily.
Note: This discovery was made by analyzing cavern dripstones (stalactites, etc) that preserve a record of climate conditions in the past. According to the researchers, it looks like Liangzhu's water-management system was simply overwhelmed by heavy rainfall:
"The massive monsoon rains probably led to such severe flooding of the Yangtze [river] and its branches that even the sophisticated dams and canals could no longer withstand these masses of water, destroying Liangzhu City and forcing people to flee."
Salt flats and brine water, Yucatan. Video from 2011.
"Maya archaeologists have excavated salt kitchens where brine was boiled in clay pots over fires in pole and thatch buildings preserved in oxygen-free sediment below the sea floor in Belize. But where these salt workers lived has been elusive, leaving possible interpretations of daily or seasonal workers from the coast or even inland." Source: Science Daily.
Note: "The sources of salt are mainly along the coast, including salt flats on the Yucatan coast and brine-boiling along the coast of Belize, where it rains a lot." These workers apparently were part of an (seasonal?) industry which distributed salt to communities along the coast and perhaps into the interior, but archaeologists are still working to discover more about how the network operated.
I'm not sure how salt is harvested from a salt flat, but I suppose it's just a matter of separating the salt from all the other sediments. The next video shows how to make salt by boiling brine water using primitive tools.
During the years 250-900 AD, a chaotic period that saw the decline and fall of the western Roman Empire and the beginning of the Dark Ages in Europe, an advanced civilization completely unknown to the Romans entered its golden age in the rain forests of MesoAmerica on the other side of the world, only to collapse mysteriously by the end of the millennium.
This was the classical civilization of the Maya. Their secrets would remain hidden in the jungles until Spanish conquistadors subjugated the Yucatan Peninsula in the 16th Century. Since then, the Mayan ruins have been explored and their hieroglyphs translated, revealing an enigmatic, bloody and sophisticated culture that may have been the most technologically advanced society on the planet at the time.
"More than 1,000 years before Europeans landed on the shores of the Americas, the Maya developed a science-based civilization in the almost total isolation of the tropical lands of the Yucatan Peninsula," according to James A. O'Kon, author of The Lost Secrets Of Maya Technology (New Page Books, 2012). "The mystery of the Maya and the origins of their advanced science and technology have always intrigued me and initiated my quest for answers to their riddles."
O'Kon is an interesting character, a professional engineer who "synergistically applied field exploration, research, forensic engineering and 3D virtual reconstruction of Maya projects to discover lost Maya technological achievements." He argues persuasively that the engineering and scientific feats of the Maya rivaled any of the accomplishments of the more well-known civilizations in the Mediterranean world.
The Maya developed a written language, mathematics (including the number zero), an elaborate astronomical system, huge cities that included some of the highest buildings ever constructed at the time, the blast furnace, water systems, underground reservoirs and an extensive network of paved roads, among other things, all without the benefit of metal tools.
This lack of metal tools means that the Maya are generally considered to be a Neolithic culture, but O'Kon disputes the current "three-age system" (Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age) popular with mainstream archaeology, precisely because the Maya clearly meet all of the criteria for an advanced civilization. He suggests calling them "technolithic," meaning "a technologically advanced culture that did not have metal tools," (p. 88) presenting evidence that the Maya compensated for their lack of metals by designing tools made of jadeite and obsidian.
The Lost Secrets of Maya Technology discusses subjects like the rise and fall of the classical Mayan civilization and their mathematics and astronomy, but its main focus is on their technology. O'Kon goes into considerable detail about the techniques they used in the manufacture of cement, multistory buildings, arches, vaults, water collection and storage systems, water filtration, roads, long-span bridges and things like Maya boat construction and the "man-powered tumpline," a "load-carrying mechanism that powered the Maya economy." (p. 274)
O'Kon sees the collapse of the Classical Period as a result of the breakdown of Maya technology in the face of radical environmental changes. He surveys the evidence that climatic conditions, especially prolonged drought and the effects of tropical volcanic eruptions, led to the abandonment of Maya cities which could no longer support their populations.
This is a fascinating and unique book, well-written and accessible to the general reader. I'd recommend it highly for anyone interested in one of the most exotic and spectacular civilizations in the ancient world.