"Proto-Elamite is the last undeciphered writing system from the Ancient Near East with a substantial number of sources (more than 1600 published texts). It was used for a relatively short period around 3000 BC across what is today Iran." Source: Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CLDI, 2013).
Note: Wikipedia describes the Proto-Elamite script as "largely" undeciphered, so there may have been some progress in translation recently.
Reflectance Transformation Imaging, the technology Oxford used to study their proto-Elamite tablets (see video above), "...is a computational photographic method that captures a subject’s surface shape and color and enables the interactive re-lighting of the subject from any direction," according to Cultural Heritage Imaging.
"For a majority of the tablets the only available images are hand copies, drawn 80-100 years ago, but for a growing number of texts kept in the Louvre Museum high quality images are available," according to the CDLI.
"They number in the hundreds, can be larger than an NFL football field and are found across Saudi Arabia, including on the slope of a volcano. Sprawling stone structures reported in 2017 now appear to be some of the oldest monuments in the world, dating back some 7,000 years, archaeologists now report." Source: Live Science.
"A new study of the mysterious stone structures — once called 'gates' but now referred to as 'mustatils,' the Arabic word for 'rectangle' —suggests they were used for rituals; and radiocarbon dating of charcoal found within one of the structures indicates people built it around 5000 B.C., a team of researchers report in an article recently published in the journal The Holocene."
The researchers believe that these were ritual sites of some kind:
According to the Archaeology News Network, "More than one hundred new mustatils have been identified around the southern margins of the Nefud Desert ... joining the hundreds previously identified from studies of Google Earth imagery, particularly in the Khaybar area. The team found that these structures typically consist of two large platforms, connected by parallel long walls, sometimes extending over 600 meters in length. The long walls are very low, had no obvious openings and are located in diverse landscape settings. It is also interesting that little in the way of other archaeology - such as stone tools - was found around the mustatils. Together these factors suggest that the structures were not simply utilitarian entities for something like water or animal storage."
Deserts of Saudi Arabia. Some of the strange stone structures are shown at 4:13.
Note: "Between 10 and six thousand years ago the Arabian Peninsula saw the most recent of the ‘Green Arabia’ periods, when increased rainfall transformed this generally arid region. The transition to the Neolithic in Arabia occurred during this period of climatic amelioration. Various forms of stone structures are abundant in northern Arabia, and it has been speculated that some of these dated to the Neolithic, but there has been little research on their character and chronology [until now]." Source: The Holocene.
Jesus Was Caesar by Francesco Carotta is an interesting book even if you don't buy its central premise that the story of Jesus is a retelling of the story of Divus Julius -- the deified Julius Caesar. I don't buy it myself and Carotta's theory has been completely ignored by serious scholars, probably for good reason, but the book's worth checking out if you're interested in alternate histories of the origin of Christianity.
"The thesis of Carotta's book Jesus was Caesar is based on a comparison of the gospels, especially the earliest Gospel of Mark, with the ancient sources about the last years in the life of Caesar and his immediate legacy," according to Wikipedia. "Within Carotta's theory the gospels are hypertexts after a diegetic transposition." This basically means that the story of Caesar's assassination and deification is the story hidden within the story of Jesus.
According to Carotta, the cult established by Augustus for the Divine Caesar evolved into the Jesus cult over the years:
"Julius Caesar, son of Venus and founder of the Roman Empire, was elevated to the status of Imperial God, Divus Julius, after his violent death. The cult that surrounded him dissolved as Christianity surfaced. A cult surrounding Jesus Christ, son of God and originator of Christianity, appeared during the second century. Early historians, however, never mentioned Jesus and even now there is no actual proof of his existence. On the one hand, an actual historical figure missing his cult, on the other, a cult missing its actual historical figure: intriguing mirror images." -- from the synopsis of Jesus Was Caesar.
On the face of it, I don't see any reason why one kind of cult couldn't have morphed into another like this, but Carotta's theory isn't very convincing, to say the least. He suffers from a bad case of parallelism, i.e., the tendency to find parallels everywhere, and some of his arguments are tenuous at best, even more shaky than many of the parallels Joseph Atwill claims to find between the gospels and The Jewish War by Josephus.
Carotta makes some strange claims, arguing, for instance, that Jesus may have already been dead when he was crucified, assuming he was crucified at all, and Jesus Was Caesar describes in incredible detail a bewildering maze of connections that aren't exactly overpowering in their persuasiveness, to put it mildly. One way or another, though, it's obvious that Carotta's done a huge amount of research on the history of early Christianity and the imperial cult of Caesar.
This is a massive book (358 pages with over a hundred pages of footnotes and a detailed bibliography) full of details about Roman and Jewish religion, paleography, ancient languages, geography, statuary, artwork, cultic practices, etc. At times Carotta reaches an almost Robert Burton level of scholastic obsessiveness, but it's fascinating stuff if you're into this kind of thing. Jesus Was Caesar is the kind of humongous tome you could easily spend months or years reading and studying. In fact, it would probably take a lifetime of research just to track down and verify all of Carotta's sources.
Jesus Was Caesar should be classified as "speculative nonfiction." It's one of those books that's worth reading for its details rather than its conclusion, though it's almost impossible to know if Carotta got the details right. Reading it would also make a good intellectual exercise in spotting leaps of logic and hidden assumptions, but I'm not sure it's worth the effort. I've got to admit that I couldn't make it through the whole thing. I gave it a shot, but I got bogged down pretty quickly.
I have to give Carotta credit for one thing, at least. His book is well-sourced with extensive footnotes. Maybe his argument is wrong -- I'm not saying it is or isn't -- but Jesus Was Caesar is definitely a scholarly work, which is more than can be said for a lot of the alternate histories of early Christianity that are floating around out there.
"Neanderthal extinction began around 40,000 years ago in Paleolithic Europe, after anatomically modern humans had reached the continent. This date, which is based on research published in Nature in 2014, is much earlier than previous estimates, and it was established through improved radio carbon dating methods analyzing 40 sites from Spain to Russia. The survey did not include sites in Asia, where Neanderthals may have survived longer. Evidence for continued Neanderthal presence in the Iberian Peninsula at 37,000 years ago was published in 2017." (Wikipedia)
The Neanderthals didn't drop dead overnight. It took thousands of years for them to disappear. That's a long time in historical terms, a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. Their extinction has been blamed on everything from parasites to climate change and interbreeding, but "it is unlikely that any one of these hypotheses is sufficient on its own; rather, multiple factors probably contributed to the demise of an already widely-dispersed population."
Nobody has the slightest idea what happened to the Neanderthals, but that doesn't stop the experts from coming up with theories. For example, some researchers recently suggested that the population of Neanderthals, already diminished by human encroachment, ran into some bad luck which wiped them out:
"Experts in the field had come to a broad consensus that our forebears played a key role in the extinction of Neanderthals by invading their territory and outnumbering or outsmarting them. But fresh research suggests that their small population of only around 10,000 left Neanderthals extremely vulnerable to extinction, and some natural fluctuations in birth rates could have done them in." Source: RT (2019).
I have no idea how these experts come up with their population estimates. If this list is up to date, only a few hundred Neanderthal sites have been discovered so far in Europe and Asia, but the researchers apparently made some assumptions based on the size of current indigenous populations (see below). The findings described in the RT story are the result of computer models:
"The research team used mathematical and computer models to represent Neanderthal populations. They then ran these populations through a range of scenarios, including inbreeding, difficulties in mate-finding and random fluctuations in mortality and reproduction."
Computer models, as demonstrated by their use by climate alarmists, are only as good as their data and basic assumptions. In the case of extinct Neanderthal populations, there isn't that much data to work on and most of the assumptions about how the Neanderthals migrated, bred and interacted with other species are just that -- assumptions. And when the experts announce the results of studies like this the media tends to pass on the news as if they aren't just reporting on the outcome of a mathematical simulation.
"Using data from extant hunter-gatherer populations as parameters, the authors developed population models for simulated Neanderthal populations of various initial sizes (50, 100, 500, 1,000, or 5,000 individuals). They then simulated for their model populations the effects of inbreeding, Allee effects (where reduced population size negatively impacts individuals' fitness), and annual random demographic fluctuations in births, deaths, and the sex ratio, to see if these factors could bring about an extinction event over a 10,000-year period."
The Allee effect is based on the idea that there is a correlation between population size and individual fitness. The smaller the population, the less fit the individual on average. I'm not sure why that would happen, but I'm assuming that the theory must have some connection to the real world at some point. Anyway, the basic idea here, as far as I can tell, is that the declining fitness of the Neanderthals as their population shrank made them more vulnerable to extinction.
That seems logical enough, but it's hardly an earth-shattering revelation. After all, if the population of a species drops below a certain critical threshold, almost anything that goes wrong could wipe it out completely. The same thing happens with languages; if there are only a few people left who speak a certain language, then it probably won't survive.
The key question when it comes to the Neanderthals is why their population declined to the point where they were so vulnerable to extinction. So far, nobody knows and we'll probably never know until someone invents a time machine so we can go back and watch it happen for ourselves. It's quite possible, however, that the carrying capacity of the Neanderthal's environment dropped dramatically when they found themselves in competition with modern humans.
"Millions of modern humans ask themselves the same question every morning while looking in the mirror: Why am I so hairy? As a society, we spend millions of dollars per year on lip waxing, eyebrow threading, laser hair removal, and face and leg shaving, not to mention the cash we hand over to Supercuts or the neighborhood salon. But it turns out we are asking the wrong question—at least according to scientists who study human genetics and evolution. For them, the big mystery is why we are so hairless." Source: Smithsonian Magazine.
Nobody has the slightest idea why humans lost their fur. Of course this question is only a mystery if you assume that humans were actually covered with fur in the first place. Nevertheless, if we did evolve (like the modern apes) from some "fruit-eating, slow-climbing primate that resembled a baby gibbon," then presumably at one time Homo Sapiens was just as furry as the gibbons of today.
I don't buy any of the explanations given in the top video. According to the new research described in the Smithsonian article, we may have lost our fur because of a genetic mutation which could also be responsible for baldness:
"A researcher studying the plantar region of rabbits noticed that an inhibitor protein, called Dickkopf 2 or Dkk2, was not present in high levels, giving the team the fist clue that Dkk2 may be fundamental to hair growth. When the team looked at the hairless plantar region of mice, they found that there were high levels of Dkk2, suggesting the protein might keep bits of skin hairless by blocking a signaling pathway called WNT, which is known to control hair growth."
According to this still speculative theory, something happened early in human evolution which led to an increase in Dkk2, which in turn inhibited the growth of hair. It's still unclear, at least to me, why a genetic mutation like this could effect an entire species, but these things can apparently spread very quickly.
"The remains of 'monumental temples' dating to the Iron Age and medieval buildings may be hidden underground at Navan Fort, an archaeological site in Northern Ireland, a new study finds." Source: Live Science.
"Exactly what's left of these ruins, however, remains to be seen. Archaeologists discovered the buried structures by using remote-sensing techniques that allowed them to map the hidden landscape and detect anomalies, such as architectural features made by humans."
"These Iron Age and medieval buildings suggest that Navan Fort was 'an incredibly important religious center and a place of paramount sacral and cultural authority in later prehistory,' study co-researcher Patrick Gleeson, a senior lecturer of archaeology at Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland, told Live Science."
Oronteus Finaeus (1494 - 1555) was an French mathematician and cartographer. I guess it would accurate to call him a popular-science writer of the Renaissance period. According to Wikipedia, he was "one of the most prolific authors of mathematical books of his age" and published several popular astronomy books, including 'De mundi sphaera (On the Heavenly Spheres), a popular astronomy textbook whose woodcut illustrations were much appreciated.'"
Over the years the Oronteus Finaeus map and other old maps have been used to support the existence of various lost civilizations.
Video from 2019.
These maps have also been used to support the idea that ancient mariners may have explored the coasts of Antarctica. For instance, in a 1984 NY Times story about the subject, a geophysicist named Dr. John W. Weihaupt suggested that it was possible that "Bronze Age seafarers from the Mediterranean, trading along the east and west coasts of Africa, might have ventured farther south than previously believed" and discovered a relatively ice-free Antarctica.
The idea that that ancient sailors might have discovered Antarctica isn't all that far-fetched. There's no evidence to support it, as far as I know, but it could have happened. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like the Oronteus Finaeus map can be used to support the theory that Antarctica was recently free of ice or that the continent was discovered before the first confirmed sighting in 1820. Finaeus mixed legend with reality when he created the map and the landmass taken for Antarctica is probably Tierra del Fuego:
"Finé attempted to reconcile discoveries in the New World with old medieval legends and information (derived from Ptolemy) regarding the Orient. Thus, on one of his two world maps, Nova Universi Orbis Descriptio (1531), the legend marked Asia covers both North America and Asia, which were represented as one landmass. He used the toponym 'America' for South America, and thus Marco Polo's Mangi, Tangut and Catay appear on the shores of the present-day Gulf of Mexico. On the same map, Finé drew Terra Australis to the south, including the legend 'recently discovered but not yet completely explored', by which he meant the discovery of Tierra del Fuego by Ferdinand Magellan." (Wikipedia)
Early maps showed an extreme southern continent because the ancients believed that the land in the northern hemisphere had to be balanced by an equal amount of land in the southern hemisphere:
"The history of Antarctica emerges from early Western theories of a vast continent, known as Terra Australis, believed to exist in the far south of the globe. The term Antarctic, referring to the opposite of the Arctic Circle, was coined by Marinus of Tyre in the 2nd century AD." (Wikipedia)
Antarctica, the last region on Earth to be discovered, was a true lost world until the mid-20th century when the first serious research efforts began.
When H.P. Lovecraft wrote his classic novella The Mountains of Madness in 1931, Antarctica was still terra incognita in many ways so it wasn't beyond the realm of possibility that the remains of an unknown ancient civilization could exist deep in the interior of the continent. A lot of people still think this could be true.
Chartres Cathedral is a spectacular example of the way Christianity usurped the old pagan religions and literally built its churches over the sacred sites of the pagan world in an attempt to erase them from history.
According to Chartres Cathedral.net, " the town of Chartres has been of religious importance since ancient times. It was the site of Druid ceremonies, which were held around a well that was later discovered under the cathedral crypt.
"Sometime later, a Gallo-Roman temple stood on the same spot. The early Christians erected a basilica there during the 4th century, and St. Bernard preached the Second Crusade there in 1146. Later in history, Chartres was the coronation site of Henry IV in 1594."
Chartres is surrounded by legends, many of which can be traced back to pagan beliefs. According to Ancient Origins, "[the legendary roots of the site] come from the time when Druids, the Celtic priests of Britain and Gaul, held sacred rites there." A Druidic statue of the mother goddess of infants found at the site may have inspired the Christian legend that the pagans "had foretold the story of a virgin who would give birth to a child for the good of the world." This is speculative, but it makes sense considering the way the Christians hijacked pagan beliefs to support their new religion.
"During the Gallo-Roman times, the underground waters of the site were believed to have been revered by the Druids. Legend also says that Roman soldiers attacked Christians while they were celebrating their faith at the virgin shrine. It seems that Christians identified the mother goddess of the Druids with the virgin Mary." (Ibid)
The cathedral has been associated with the Knights Templar, the famous Catholic military order founded in 1199 to protect pilgrims traveling to the Kingdom of Jerusalem after its liberation by the First Crusade. Originally consisting of only nine men who could do little more than provide an armed escort for pilgrims to the Holy Land, the order grew into one of the richest and most powerful organizations of its day until it was violently suppressed and virtually exterminated in 1307.
Surrounded by conspiracy theories then as now, "[t]he Knights Templar have become associated with legends concerning secrets and mysteries handed down to the select from ancient times," (Wikipedia). According to Ancient Origins, the Chartres cathedral's association with the Templars comes from the two black madonnas which can be seen there:
"According to legend, the Black Madonna was a lady of the Templars. The statue of the Black Madonna with a child was commissioned in 1508. It is perhaps a black wooden copy of the silver Madonna that was located on the main altar before. The statue sits on the top of the pillar and is often called the ''Lady of the Pillar''. Before the French Revolution, the Chartres Cathedral had a second Black Madonna in the crypt. Unfortunately, it was probably burned during the revolution, although some resources are convinced that the church didn't suffer in this period. Today, tourists and pilgrims can see a copy in the church that was made in 1857. "
These black madonnas are apparently found in churches all over France and other countries in Europe.
"Throughout Europe, especially in France, about 500 Black Madonnas, painted or carved in wood or stone, stand in Catholic churches, with a few in museums. Most date from the 11th to the 15th centuries. These medieval images of the Virgin holding the Christ Child gaze benignly on their devotees, who come as pilgrims and associate them with miracles and healing." Source: Europe Up Close.
I'm not sure what to think about the Templar connection with these images, but they seem to have a pre-Christian origin. According to Europe Up Close, "many scholars say that the Black Madonna is a link to religions that existed long before Christianity. Her shrines are often in locations that were once pagan shrines to Diana, Artemis of Ephesus, Cybele and other goddesses. Some Black Madonna figures look just like the Egyptian goddess Isis with her infant son Horus, showing the influence of old ways on changing faiths. Even further back than that, she may represent the archetypal Earth Mother, the ancient, eternal power of the feminine force."
The great Oswald Spengler saw the Gothic cathedrals as prime symbols of the Faustian spirit of Western civilization, but even though Spengler believed that the Classical and Western worlds were fundamentally separate the pre-Christian influences on Christianity, especially on Catholicism, can be seen both in its teachings and its architecture. These fantastic cathedrals contain all sorts of mysteries that can be traced back to very ancient times. As for the Chartres cathedral, it was being restored back in 2015 (I'm not sure if the work has been completed yet). The renovation apparently created a lot of controversy.
Video from 2017. Note the mention of artwork discovered on the formations.
"The Yonaguni-jima Kaitei Chikei, literally translated as 'Yonaguni Island Submarine Topography,' is an underwater mystery off the coast of the Ryukyu Islands, Japan. The massive underwater rock formation is speculated to have existed for more than 10,000 years, but whether the formation is completely man-made, entirely natural, or has been altered by human hands is still up for debate." Source: Atlas Obscura.
Many sources matter-of-factly describe the formations of the Yonaguni Monument as the ruins of an advanced prehistoric city which sank beneath the waves thousands of years ago. For instance, see the book Underworld by Graham Hancock, author of the classic work of alternate history "Fingerprints Of The Gods." This theory was first put forward by the Japanese professor and marine geologist Masaaki Kimura who began studying the monument in 1992 (the formation was first discovered by local divers in the 1980s).
Video from 2015.
After exploring the monument for around twenty years, Kimura "remains convinced that the site was carved thousands of years ago, when the land mass was above water. According to Kimura the Yonaguni’s numerous right angles, strategically placed holes and aesthetic triangles are signs of human alteration. He also claims that carvings exist on the monuments, resembling Kaida script. He believes that a pyramid, castles, roads, monuments and a stadium can be identified within the structure – which for him is evidence that the monument is what remains of the Lost Continent of Mu, the Japanese equivalent to Atlantis." (Atlas Obscura)
Note: Mu was also the home of the dreaded Ghatanothoa, an elder god so hideous that anyone who saw him (or an image of him, no matter how small) was instantly petrified, their skin turned to leather and bone while their brains remained alive and conscious forever. For more information on Ghatanothoa, see Out of the Aeons by H.P. Lovecraft.
The Yonaguni Monument could be part of a prehistoric city, I guess. It doesn't look natural to me -- there are two many straight lines and right angles and structures that definitely resemble loose blocks, stairs and what could be terraces or plazas -- but Kimura loses me when he claims that the monument originally stood on the Lost Continent of Mu. I'd like to believe in Mu and I suppose it's possible that lost continents once existed, but it would be nice to have some evidence other than ambiguous formations on the bottom of the sea.
Even if the monument is artificial, there are no signs (as far as I know) that it was ever inhabited. The top video mentions that artwork was discovered in the submerged "ruins," and Kimura claims in the next video that "tools and engraved stones" were discovered there, but I haven't been able to verify that these tools and engravings actually exist. The engravings may just be scratches in the rocks. To the best of my knowledge, no artifacts of any kind have ever been discovered in the Yonaguni Monument. In contrast, divers exploring the very real sunken town of Baiae off the coast of Italy have found all sorts of Roman statuary, mosaics, etc., lying around on the bottom of the Gulf of Naples. There doesn't seem to be anything like that in this enigmatic site off the coast of Japan.
Mainstream archaeologists and other experts call Kimura's "sunken city" pseudoarchaeology, and they're probably right. If you believe the geologists, anyway, this bizarre formation may not be all that bizarre after all:
"Some of those who have studied the formation, such as geologist Robert Schoch of Boston University, state that it is most likely natural. Schoch observed the sandstones that make up the Yonaguni formation to 'contain numerous well-defined, parallel bedding planes along which the layers easily separate. The rocks of this group are also criss-crossed by numerous sets of parallel, vertically oriented joints in the rock. These joints are natural, parallel fractures by which the rectangular formations seen in the area likely formed. Yonaguni lies in an earthquake-prone region; such earthquakes tend to fracture the rocks in a regular manner.' He also observes that there are similar formations on the northeast coast of Yonaguni. John Anthony West also reaches the same conclusion. Schoch also believes that the 'drawings' identified by Kimura are natural scratches on the rocks, and suggests that the 'walls' are simply natural horizontal platforms which fell into a vertical position when rock below them eroded, and the alleged roads are simply channels in the rock." (Wikipedia)
"Australia has a deep human history stretching back 65,000 years, but many of its oldest archaeological sites are now underwater. In an encouraging sign that Aboriginal artifacts and landscapes may actually be preserved offshore, archaeologists have discovered a 7,000-year-old site submerged along Australia's continental shelf, the first of its kind. Their discovery is outlined today in the journal PLoS One." Source: Smithsonian Magazine.
Note: "At the end of the Ice Age, sea level was much lower than today, and the Australian coastline was 160 kilometers farther offshore. When the ice receded and sea level rose to its current level, approximately two million square kilometers of Australian land became submerged where Aboriginal peoples had previously lived. Thus, it is likely that many ancient Aboriginal sites are currently underwater." (Science Daily)