In his book on the seal people, Gaelic historian John MacAulay puts forward an interesting theory, that the Selkie stories are actually a very old form of oral history. He suggests that for thousands of years, Eskimo type kayakers in sealskin canoes have been travelling down to Scotland from remote Arctic Norway. The Sea Sami, now extinct, were a nomadic tribe of hunter-gatherers that used Eskimo kayaks and technology to hunt and fish.
http://www.elisabethgifford.com/blog/2014/5/3/the-secret-history-hidden-in-the-selkie-story
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Ancient denizens of what is now Ireland and Scotland buried stashes of so-called “bog butter” in peat bogs, presumably to stave off spoilage. Thanks to the unique chemistry of those bogs, the stashes have survived for thousands of years. Now, scientists at University College Dublin have conducted chemical analysis and radiocarbon dating of several bog butters recovered from archaeological sites in Ireland. They found that the practice was a remarkably long-lived tradition, spanning at least 3,500 years, according to their new paper in Nature: Scientific Reports.
The researchers also uncovered the first conclusive evidence that Irish bog butters are derived from dairy fat as opposed to being meat-based. According to bioarchaeologist Kristina Killgrove, writing in Forbes, “Previous attempts at analyzing bog butter have come up short, because even though the butter is known to have an animal origin, techniques were unable to distinguish between adipose tissue where lipids or fats are stored and milk fats from ruminants like cows and sheep, particularly on an archaeological time-depth.”
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Alexander Belov, whose book on the wreck, Ship 17: a Baris from Thonis-Heracleion, is published this month, suggests that the wreck’s nautical architecture is so close to Herodotus’s description, it could have been made in the very shipyard that he visited. Word-by-word analysis of his text demonstrates that almost every detail corresponds “exactly to the evidence”.
Ship 17 is the 17th of more than 70 vessels dating from the 8th to the 2nd century BC, discovered by Franck Goddio and a team – including Belov – from the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology during excavations in Aboukir bay, with which the Oxford Centre is involved.
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The problem with evaluating your life based on “joy-sparking” is it’s not a fair judgement, it is only taking into account one thing – happiness. It doesn’t ask if it is the right thing to do, or the necessary thing to do. If I used this method I would never do laundry again! When people forgo parenthood because they don’t think having children would “spark joy,” they are using happiness as the judge, and who made “happiness” the best judge of life? “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace” Ecclesiastes 3:1-3. Life must be seen for all its complexity and should not be reduced to happy or unhappy.
Happiness is Not the Standard
Underneath our judgments of life is an underlying belief that life is “supposed to be happy”. A school of philosophers called Existentialists reject this view of the world. Instead they remind us of the intrinsic difficulty of life. Jordan Peterson is an existentialist – like Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky before him. Growing up in the military, I traveled the world and saw that poverty and hardship were commonplace. Life seemed so arbitrary and unfair. When I was a teenager I read The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky portrays suffering as intrinsic to the story of human experience. However, he shows that as we accept the fragility of life we can live life more fully.
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Narrative really is that powerful. You see it in the behavior of social media users, you see it in the behavior of governments, you see it in religions, and you see it in abusive relationships which continue because of the narrative “He’s a good guy underneath it all and he really loves me” even though the facts say “He beats you and cheats on you all the time.” If you can control the stories that people tell themselves about a given situation, then you control those people on all matters pertaining to that situation. Regardless of facts.
Which is why the plutocratic class funnels so much money into buying up media influence, funding think tanks, and other means of narrative control: if you can control the narrative, no amount of facts will deter the mainstream public from going along with your agendas. This is why the behaviors of governments so consistently move in alignment with the interests of this same media-buying, think tank-funding, politician-owning plutocratic class. Whoever controls the narrative controls the world.
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In addition to the long-term stability of the major component of the Anatolian ancestry, the researchers also found a pattern of interactions with their neighbors. By the time that farming had taken hold in Anatolia between 8,300-7,800 BCE, the researchers found that the local population had about a 10 percent genetic contribution from populations related to those living in what is today Iran and the neighboring Caucasus, with almost the entire remaining 90 percent coming from Anatolian hunter-gatherers. By about 7000-6000 BCE, however, the Anatolian farmers derived about 20 percent of their ancestry from populations related to those living in the Levant region.
“There are some large gaps, both in time and geography, in the genomes we currently have available for study,” explains Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, senior author on the study. “This makes it difficult to say how these more subtle genetic interactions took place—whether it was through short-term large movements of people, or more frequent but low-level interactions.” The researchers hope that further research in this and neighboring regions could help to answer these questions.
https://phys.org/news/2019-03-anatolian-farmers-local-hunter-gatherers-agriculture.html#jCp
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Another account of telepathy and Dogmen was given to the site Week in Weird by a witness calling himself “Zay,” who claimed that he was in regular telepathic contact with Dogmen in the forests of rural Pennsylvania, in the United States. Similarly to the previous report, Zay has said that these creatures are not violent or malevolent in any way, and that although they are frustrated and displeased with humankind, they hold no ill-will or hatred for us. Zay explained of these beings:
https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2018/04/bizarre-encounters-with-telepathic-dogmen/
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Genesis – Chaos and Order
https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/podcast/episode-19/
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The iconic cover illustration of The New Yorker’s March 29, 1976, issue depicted a “view of the world from 9th Avenue,” starring a massive Manhattan that dwarfed not only other U.S. cities but entire countries, reducing the Pacific Ocean to a band of water not much wider across than the Hudson River.
But New Yorkers aren’t the only ones with a skewed perception of scale or an idiosyncratic sense of geography and place. Humans and other animals behave in ways that suggest they’re mapping out their “view of the world” by emphasizing the information they find valuable.
Two studies appearing in Science today show how deep that bias runs. Both research teams observed how the neurons that compile mental maps of physical space reprogram themselves to better reflect our experiences, activities and priorities. The findings also offer evidence for a link that other scientists have started to uncover: The brain’s way of encoding positional information may extend to the way it organizes volumes of other information to be navigated, including varieties of sounds and abstract concepts like social hierarchies.
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For some clues, we should turn to an Old Germanic language called Old Saxon. Its speakers were, quite obviously, related to the people who invaded Britain in the fifth century (compare the term “Anglo-Saxon England”), but the texts from the Saxons who remained on the continent go back to the second half of the ninth century. The main of them, a poem modern scholars call Heliand “The Savior,” is a magnificent retelling of the Gospels. In that poem, the word drōm appears multiple times and has three senses.
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From the standpoint of fossils, the hypothesis of our species’ African origin has rested mainly on the discovery there of the oldest remains attributable to Homo sapiens. These include the Herto and Omo skulls from Ethiopia, which are between 160,000 and 180,000 years old. The Qafzeh and Skhul sites in the Near East have provided an important collection of fossils also attributed to our species, which are between 90,000 and 120,000 years old. And yet, the “Out of Africa” hypothesis holds that our species was not able to enter Europe and Asia until some 50,000 years ago, so the presence of Homo sapiens in Israel was not considered dispersion or “exodus” as such.
Over the last decade, however, a significant number of fossils brings the 50,000-year date into question. These include the teeth and jaw found in Daoxian (Fuyan Cave) and Zhirendong, in South China, and the finger bone discovered in Al-Wusta (Saudi Arabia), which place our species outside Africa at least 80,000 years ago, although their presence may even be earlier than 100,000 years ago. With the discovery at a dig in Misliya (Israel) of a human jawbone dating from around 190,000 years ago—this is as old as the oldest African fossils attributable to Homo sapiens—it is becoming increasingly clear that our species was able to adapt to other territories earlier than we thought, although the debate is still open. Arguably, genetic evidence continues to suggest that modern humanity comes mainly from a process of dispersion that took place around 50,000 years ago. That does not, however, rule out earlier forays that may not have left any mark on modern humans—or perhaps we have simply not detected them yet. When we limit ourselves to maps with arrows representing the spread of humans, we may easily forget that hominins do not migrate in linear, directional ways, as if they were on an excursion or march with a predetermined destination or purpose. Like any other animal’s, human migration should be understood as the expansion or broadening of an area of occupation by a group when a lack of barriers (ecological or climactic, for example) and the presence of favorable demographic conditions allow them to increase their territory. The “Out of Africa” migration was probably not a single event or voyage, but rather a more or less continuous flow of variable volume. There may have been various “Out of Africa” movements, and also several “Into Africa,” reentries that are not technically returns, because hominins do not “go home.” Instead, they expanded the diameter of their territory whenever nothing kept them from doing so.
https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/articles/anthropology-what-we-have-learned-over-the-last-decade/
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They move like ghosts along the shorelines of Canada’s Vancouver Island, so elusive that people rarely see them lurking in the mossy forests.
British filmmaker Bertie Gregory was one of the lucky ones: He saw coastal wolves—also known as sea wolves—in 2011.
“There is something about being in the presence of a coastal wolf—they just have this magic and aura around them,” he says.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/08/sea-oceans-wolves-animals-science/?utm_source=reddit.com
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I have been rather ill for sometime. Spectre of Eternity surrounds me. Maybe my health is picking up, maybe not, I don’t want to tempt Fate.
For those who are curious to see, here is a long long thesis that I have enjoyed, upon the topic of Lake Ladies. It holds many secrets within mysteries and mysteries within secrets. Numerous levels or layers of meaning unfolding simultaneously.
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