For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact, Unaware of WWII. Siberian summers do not last long. The snows linger into May, and the cold weather returns again during September, freezing the taiga into a still life awesome in its desolation: endless miles of straggly pine and birch forests scattered with sleeping bears and hungry wolves; steep-sided mountains; white-water rivers that pour in torrents through the valleys; a hundred thousand icy bogs. This forest is the last and greatest of Earth’s wildernesses. It stretches from the furthest tip of Russia’s arctic regions as far south as Mongolia, and east from the Urals to the Pacific: five million square miles of nothingness, with a population, outside a handful of towns, that amounts to only a few thousand people.
When the warm days do arrive, though, the taiga blooms, and for a few short months it can seem almost welcoming. Thus it was in the remote south of the forest in the summer of 1978. It was an astounding discovery. Beside a stream there was a dwelling. Proved irresistible for them…. Further evidence that Asians colonized the Americas long before Europeans did. Contrary to the claims of a recent study, the multiregional model, which states that modern humans evolved from several different groups of hominids (including Neanderthals) that interbred at some point to produce modern humans, fails to explain the genetics seen in modern humans, Neanderthals, and early modern humans.
The biblical model (stating that humans arose from one lineage from a single geographic location) still fits all the data better than the multiregional model. Previous anatomical studies have cast doubt on the likelihood of Neanderthals being the ancestors of modern humans. These studies showed differences in Neanderthal's hands, the brain case, and numerous other features of the Neanderthal skull.
Recent genetic studies comparing the hypervariable (subject to a higher than average mutation rate than usual) region of mtDNA of Neanderthals to that of modern humans, suggest that they were probably a separate species from modern humans. ...Rich Deem. Graphing the history of philosophy « Drunks&Lampposts. A close up of ancient and medieval philosophy ending at Descartes and Leibniz If you are interested in this data set you might like my latest post where I use it to make book recommendations.
This one came about because I was searching for a data set on horror films (don’t ask) and ended up with one describing the links between philosophers. To cut a long story very short I’ve extracted the information in the influenced by section for every philosopher on Wikipedia and used it to construct a network which I’ve then visualised using gephi It’s an easy process to repeat. It could be done for any area within Wikipedia where the information forms a network. I chose philosophy because firstly the influences section is very well maintained and secondly I know a little bit about it.
First I’ll show why I think it’s worked as a visualisation. Each philosopher is a node in the network and the lines between them (or edges in the terminology of graph theory) represents lines of influence. Simon. 10 Fun Ways to Euthanize Yourself. When does a minute last 61 seconds? Uncovering America's Pyramid Builders | Archaeology. When U.S. 40 reaches Collinsville, Illinois, the land is flat and open. Seedy storefronts line the highway: a pawnshop, a discount carpet warehouse, a taco joint, a bar. Only the Indian Mound Motel gives any hint that the road bisects something more than underdeveloped farmland.
This is the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, a United Nations World Heritage Site on a par with the Great Wall of China, the Egyptian pyramids, and the Taj Mahal. The 4,000-acre complex preserves the remnants of the largest prehistoric settlement north of Mexico, a walled city that flourished on the floodplain of the Mississippi River 10 centuries ago. Covering an area more than five miles square, Cahokia dwarfs the ancient pueblos of New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon and every other ruin left by the storied Anasazi of the American Southwest. Yet despite its size and importance, archaeologists still don’t understand how this vast, lost culture began, how it ended, and what went on in between. Why did it take so long to invent the wheel? Franklin Delano Roosevelt probably didn't have polio after all. 10 Bizarre Death Rituals from Around the World.
I'm surprised that the historic funerary rites of the Iroquoian peoples aren't on here. The Wendat (also known as Hurons) would bury their dead twice. The first time was when the person died. They would then be buried again during a ritual known as The Feast of the Dead. Every 10 to 25 years, the Wendat would move their village to a new location (the soils in Wendake are rather are sandy and rather poor, so the Wendat engaged in slash and burn agriculture, and would move when yields went down) but before the move they would hold a Feast of the Dead. Removed, and wrapped in beaver furs before being re-interned along with grave goods in a mass grave pit known as an ossuary.
In 1636, Jesuit Missionary Jean de Brébeuf, was invited to a large Feast of the Dead outside the village of Ossossané, near what is now Elmvale, Ontario. Then in 1947 and 1948 the Ossuary at Ossossane was excavated by archeologists from the Royal Ontario Museum. Why Some Civil War Soldiers Glowed in the Dark. By the spring of 1862, a year into the American Civil War, Major General Ulysses S. Grant had pushed deep into Confederate territory along the Tennessee River. In early April, he was camped at Pittsburg Landing, near Shiloh, Tennessee, waiting for Maj.
Gen. Don Carlos Buell’s army to meet up with him. On the morning of April 6, Confederate troops based out of nearby Corinth, Mississippi, launched a surprise offensive against Grant’s troops, hoping to defeat them before the second army arrived. Grant’s men, augmented by the first arrivals from the Ohio, managed to hold some ground, though, and establish a battle line anchored with artillery.
Fighting continued until after dark, and by the next morning, the full force of the Ohio had arrived and the Union outnumbered the Confederates by more than 10,000. The Union troops began forcing the Confederates back, and while a counterattack stopped their advance it did not break their line. A Bright Spot And that’s just what Bill did. A Good Light. 10 Science Experiments That Looked Like the End of the World.
British have invaded nine out of ten countries - so look out Luxembourg. The analysis is contained in a new book, All the Countries We've Ever Invaded: And the Few We Never Got Round To. Stuart Laycock, the author, has worked his way around the globe, through each country alphabetically, researching its history to establish whether, at any point, they have experienced an incursion by Britain. Only a comparatively small proportion of the total in Mr Laycock's list of invaded states actually formed an official part of the empire. The remainder have been included because the British were found to have achieved some sort of military presence in the territory – however transitory – either through force, the threat of force, negotiation or payment.
Incursions by British pirates, privateers or armed explorers have also been included, provided they were operating with the approval of their government. Among some of the perhaps surprising entries on the list are: * Cuba, where in 1741, a force under Admiral Edward Vernon stormed ashore at Guantánamo Bay. Andorra Belarus. Cold War tests in St. Louis raise concerns - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq.
By Jim Salter - The Associated Press Posted : Wednesday Oct 3, 2012 18:52:04 EDT ST. LOUIS — Doris Spates was a baby when her father died inexplicably in 1955. She has watched four siblings die of cancer, and she survived cervical cancer. After learning that the Army conducted secret chemical testing in her impoverished St. In the mid-1950s, and again a decade later, the Army used motorized blowers atop a low-income housing high-rise, at schools and from the backs of station wagons to send a potentially dangerous compound into the already-hazy air in predominantly black areas of St.
Local officials were told at the time that the government was testing a smoke screen that could shield St. But in 1994, the government said the tests were part of a biological weapons program and St. Now, new research is raising greater concern about the implications of those tests. Aides to Sens. McCaskill agreed. A People's History of the United States. The Note: This great book should really be read by everyone. It is difficult to describe why it so great because it both teaches and inspires.
You really just have to read it. We think it is so good that it demands to be as accessible as possible. Once you've finished it, we're sure you'll agree. The disclaimer: This version is made from OCR. The crayola-fication of the world: How we gave colors names, and it messed with our brains (part I) | Empirical Zeal.
“Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity.” —Herman Melville, Billy Budd Spectral Rhythm. Screen Print by Scott Campbell. In Japan, people often refer to traffic lights as being blue in color. Blue and green are similar in hue. One of the first fences in this color continuum came from an unlikely place – crayons. Reconstructing the rainbow. In modern Japanese, midori is the word for green, as distinct from blue. And it’s not just Japanese. (Update: Some clarifications here. I find this fascinating, because it highlights a powerful idea about how we might see the world. Imagine that you had a rainbow-colored piece of paper that smoothly blends from one color to the other. A map of color for an English speaker. But if you think about it, there’s a real puzzle here. And here’s what they found.
12 Deadly Inventions That Killed Their Creators. The Deadliest Poisons in History (And Why People Stopped Using Them) How a Simple Glass Case Terraformed the Entire World. Released documents show U.S. helped hush Soviet massacre of thousands. Was King Richard III's long lost body just discovered beneath a U.K. parking lot? The world's first looping roller coasters were basically torture devices. The hoaxes that made fake people famous.
Chimps don't care if someone else gets robbed. Archaeological dig at Concentration Camp reveals what the Nazis tried to hide. Germany Maintained Contacts with Palestinians after Munich Massacre. In the busy streets of Beirut, the Lebanese capital, hardly anyone noticed the three Buick sedans that came to a stop just before the corner of Rue Verdun. Several couples got out of the cars. They were dressed casually and looked like tourists. Some of the people were in fact wearing blonde wigs and women's clothing, which wasn't recognizable from a distance. In fact, the couples were all men, members of an Israeli special forces unit operating in enemy territory. At about 1:30 a.m., they entered an apartment building. They rushed up the stairs to the upper floors, pulled Uzi submachine guns and explosives out from under their baggy clothing and received a radio message from their commander ordering them to blow open the doors to several apartments.
They immediately opened fire, shooting and killing Abu Youssef, Kamal Nasser and Kamal Adwan, three senior officials with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). 'New Basis of Trust' The motives were plain. Spirit of Appeasement. This skull pushes back human occupation of Southeast Asia and Australia by 20,000 years. Feces Fossil, Stone Tools Found In Oregon Caves Dispel Theory About First Americans. GRANTS PASS, Ore. -- Stone tools and human DNA from ancient caves in Oregon offer new evidence of how some of the first Americans spread through the continent: Quite apart from the better-known Clovis culture, a separate group occupied the West.
Archaeologists said Thursday that using multiple techniques, they have dated broken obsidian spear points from Paisley Caves to about 13,200 years ago, as old as much different stone tools from the Clovis culture found in the southeast and interior United States. Radio-carbon dating of human DNA from coprolites – ancient desiccated human feces – shows people lived in the caves as early as 14,300 years ago. The dates indicate that the Clovis style of chipping stone was not the mother of Stone Age technology, as others have theorized, and that the two styles were developed independently by different groups, said Dennis Jenkins, an archaeologist with the University of Oregon's Museum of Natural and Cultural History who led the excavations.
Oh, (No) Canada! Borderlines explores the global map, one line at a time. July 22, 1948 is a red-letter day in alternate history. On that date, a new nation could have been born in the North America. A referendum on the constitutional future of the Dominion of Newfoundland — until then a separate entity within the British Commonwealth, with the same level of independence as Australia or New Zealand [1] — produced a slight majority for confederation with Canada, by 78,323 votes to 71,334. A swing of just 3,500 votes would have created a new state in the extreme northeast of the North American continent. Now nearing the 64th anniversary of its Independence Day, that Republic of Newfoundland — blessed with a small population [2] and ample natural resources [3] — might have become a beacon of state-sponsored prosperity à la Scandinavia. That didn’t happen, of course, but it’s not idle speculation, either.
So on midnight of March 31, 1949, Newfoundland became Canada’s 10th (and last) province [6]. Did the Romans drive a birth-control plant to extinction? 5 Petty Feuds That Shaped the Modern World. Everyone's been caught in the midst of a petty feud, where two people with trivial differences screw things up for everyone around them. These mostly occur in middle school and really shitty divorces, but some petty feuds have shaped the modern world.
Just because they're titans of business and leaders of nations, that doesn't mean grown men are above letting some name-calling influence their decisions. For instance ... #5. A Misheard Sentence Shapes the Shoe Market Getty Adolf and Rudolf Dassler were German brothers who shared a passion for shoemaking, and eventually they shared ownership of the Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory. Also unlike Hitler, the brothers' shoe-selling prowess survived World War II, and today they sell more athletic shoes and apparel than anyone other than Nike and Reebok. Via Stuartslondon.comAdolf, creator of Adidas. One night during an Allied bombing raid, Rudolf was sitting in his bomb shelter with his family when Adolf and his wife joined them. .
#4. . #3. 10 Movements to Secede from the United States. Japanese Tomb Found To House Rare Artifacts From Roman Empire. The 25 Biggest Mysteries of History - List25 - StumbleUpon. FUSAG: The Ghost Army of World War II. In the final years of World War II, both the Allied and Axis Powers knew that there was no chance of defeating Hitler without cracking his grasp on Western Europe, and both sides knew that Northern France was the obvious target for an amphibious assault.
The German high command assumed the Allies would cross from England to France at the narrowest part of the channel and land at Pas-de-Calais. The Allies instead set their sights some 200 miles to the west. The beaches of Normandy could be taken as they were, but if the Germans added to their defense by moving their reserve infantry and panzers to Normandy from their garrison in the Pas-de-Calais region, the invasion would be a disaster. (Edit 4/16: A reader pointed out that the original post was incorrect about the Germans' assumptions about the invasion site. This paragraph has been changed to correct that information. -Matt) George and His Imaginary Friends When intelligence officers learned that the First U.S. General George S. Constructing Stonehenge was the project that unified Britain.
The Legend of Mike 'The Durable' Malloy, History's Most Stubborn Murder Victim. Six Strange Cases of Science Fiction Trademarks. Remembering Alan Turing. The statues of Easter Island could have "walked" into place. Researchers uncover 8,000 years of human history hidden in the Middle East. The Great Wall of China is a lot Greater than we thought. Our ancestors may have originated in Asia, not Africa. The Family that turned the Roman Colosseum into a Fort. Rediscovering Central Asia by S. Frederick Starr.