Let’s start today by passing along a bit of news. America Unearthed host Scott Wolter visited Westford, Massachusetts with a crew from Committee Films to shoot a segment for the upcoming season of his television show. According to the Westford Eagle, which incorrectly identified his show (twice!) as airing on the Discovery Channel and the History Channel (it airs on H2), Wolter was in town last week to observe a newly discovered marking on the stone housing the Westford Knight.
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Several alert readers sent me links to a variety of news articles announcing the discovery of a 12,000 year old skeleton in the Yucatán Peninsula, which was reported yesterday in the online version of the journal Science in the article “Late Pleistocene Human Skeleton and mtDNA Link Paleoamericans and Modern Native Americans.” The bones, which were discovered underwater along with the remains of Ice Age fauna, are among the oldest ever found in the Americas. Tests of her mitochondrial DNA, however, are causing even more of a stir, helping to pinpoint the origin of the first Americans—and suggesting that some of the wilder claims about their origins are wrong.
Archaeologists made a fascinating discovery beneath the waters of Lake Huron. John O’Shea of the University of Michigan reported the discovery of large V-shaped stone walls that date back to a time before Lake Huron reached its modern levels—back during the last Ice Age. O’Shea believes that the structures were used as hunting blinds by the Paleoindians for hunting megafauna. O’Shea said that the stone walls are similar to hunting blinds found on Baffin Island but are much more complex and sophisticated. According to O’Shea, the structures were preserved only because they were underwater and they were likely commonly used across North America.
Sodom and Gomorrah have been much abused in fringe history, going back to the early suggestion dating back to the Soviet sources cited by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier that the biblical cities of sin were destroyed by a nuclear bomb, speculation repeated in Erich von Däniken and his successors, sometimes substituting an alien death ray for a nuclear bomb. The tale of cities felled from the sky is not just an ancient one, but one far more widespread than the Bible. The Arabs had a parallel myth of the destruction of Iram of the Pillars in a great explosion of sound from the sky (Qur’an 89:6-14 with Arabian Nights 276-279), and Vedic literature tells of the destruction of the triple city of Dwarka in a tremendous burst of energy from the sky (Mahabharata, Karna Parva 34).
So here we go again. The Universe: Ancient Mysteries Solved E02 “The Pyramids” intends to show us how the pyramids of Egypt connect to the stars. Obviously, this could go one of two ways. It could look at real archaeoastronomical investigation into what the Egyptians really believed, or it could descend into New Age theories about radical alignments to various constellations based on astrology. The fact that the first person to speak on the show is the Egyptologist Mark Lehner suggests early on that we will be sticking closer to facts rather than the most outlandish claims for stellar associations.
Let’s get this out of the way first: H2’s press release about The Universe: Ancient Mysteries Solved scouring the world for the “megalithic yard” wasn’t just deceptive—I’m happy to say it was completely wrong! Nary a word about the “megalithic yard” was uttered on The Universe, and perhaps the PR officer for the network has drunk the Ancient Aliens and America Unearthed Flavor Aid a bit too deeply and now sees even serious and sober science through the lens of the network’s lunatic fringe offerings. I do wonder, though, what happened. My on-screen cable guide also listed the megalithic yard (“just one unit of measurement”) as the subject for the show. Did someone realize after America Unearthed that the unit was a fiction and erase it from the more “serious” show, thus accounting for all the astronomical repetition? Why was all of PR information wrong?
With the massive snowstorm barreling down on the East Coast, I’m spending today shoveling, hunkering down, and trying to stay out of the snow. This morning I almost got t-boned by car sliding straight through an intersection, and conditions are only getting worse.
Today I have a grab bag of a few newsworthy items to share. I have three topics today. Two are short, and one is my review of The Curse of Oak Island.
First, if you subscribe to my email newsletter, you’ve already seen this link to an interview I did with Matt Staggs over at RandomHouse’s suvudu.com about Cthulhu in World Mythology. Be sure to check it out! After many, many delays, Atomic Overmind has scheduled the release of the eBook for the beginning of February and the print book at the end of February. I admit to being somewhat mystified by claims of a Smithsonian conspiracy to suppress the truth about American history. Why the Smithsonian? Why not the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Why not the British Museum, which, arguably, was more influential for most of its existence? It must be because the Smithsonian is a charitable trust administered by the United States government and therefore connected to the Lovecraftian evil that is the U.S. government.
Although I have not yet read Graham Robb’s new book The Discovery of Middle Earth: Mapping the Lost World of the Celts, which was published in the U.K. as The Ancient Paths, the book’s major claims straddle the border of alternative history and deserve a mention, even if it might take me a while before I get to reading the book. The information below comes from a number of reviews of the books published recently.
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AuthorI am an author and researcher focusing on pop culture, science, and history. Bylines: New Republic, Esquire, Slate, etc. There's more about me in the About Jason tab. Newsletters
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