The HENGES of North America (was something about X mt DNA)

[Tiompan]

Now that you have finally learnt to use the something like the correct terminology , where is the data that shows that the allele for above average height is expressed in the Adena or for X mt DNA in general ?

Btw It's X2a .

[E.P. Grondine]

Jim Egan, who runs a small museum across the street from the Newport Tower, delivered a talk,which I missed, entitled "Newport Tower Through the Ages: New Light on an Old Tower". As you may be aware, Egan favors an Elizabethan, 16th century, origin for the tower. He believes John Dee designed the tower. I'm really not enough up to speed on his research at all. Been too many years since I examined his writings and thoughts. I know Jim, have known him for years. Great guy and great speaker, but I missed his talk altogether. He also opened his museum on the Sunday of the meeting, when field trips around the state take place.

And here I was hoping that Gunnar Thompson's speculations on Newport might have some basis in fact.
http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/gunna ... port-tower
or even better:
http://andywoodruff.com/blog/norumbega- ... d-vikings/



wherein the Norse settled right at Harvard.

For a good analysis, see:
http://www.davistownmuseum.org/PDFs/TDMnativeAm.pdf
in which there is no lack of interesting sites.
Once again, Morrehead is at the center of the early work in the area.

[E.P. Grondine]

Now that you have finally learnt to use the something like the correct terminology , where is the data that shows that the allele for above average height is expressed in the Adena or for X mt DNA in general ?

Btw It's X2a .

That data is alll over the place, but especially in the standard academic texts on the Adena,
the 'fringe' publications "Mounds for the Dead" by Dragoo and Neuman,
and Webb and Snow's "The Adena".

But much of the material was gathered together here:



The same place you can find the excavation reports for stone cairns along the Ohio River, which cairns are another marker of Adena culture.

[Tiompan]

Can you quote anything from a reputable academic text that "shows that the allele for above average height is expressed in the Adena or for X mt DNA in general ?"

[E.P. Grondine]

Can you quote anything from a reputable academic text that "shows that the allele for above average height is expressed in the Adena or for X mt DNA in general ?"

Read either Dragoo or Snow and get back to me.
Real archaeologists, real excavations, real academic positions.
You have to remember that both men wrote in the days before modern genetics.
Dragoo's "Big Man" theory was entertained for years, but we now know better.

[Tiompan]

Why do have such a problem answering simple questions ?

Here is the question again . "Can you quote anything from a reputable academic text that "shows that the allele for above average height is expressed in the Adena or for X mt DNA in general ?"

The answer should either be no ,the most likely , or Yes , in which case you provide the quote .

[E.P. Grondine]

Why do have such a problem answering simple questions ?

Here is the question again . "Can you quote anything from a reputable academic text that "shows that the allele for above average height is expressed in the Adena or for X mt DNA in general ?"

The answer should either be no ,the most likely , or Yes , in which case you provide the quote .

For allele work, you might want to write to Dr. Becker at U. Penn
All I can do is note the extra-ordinarily tight co variance of X and height.
What are you planing on doing, cloning a basketball team?

[Tiompan]

As expected the answer is no .

You just wasted another load of key strokes .

[shawomet]

Which pics are you looking for? Maybe I can help. :

http://www.preservation.ri.gov/pdfs_zip ... s-fort.pdf

Thanks .
Two things that come to mind that could be helpful are tightening up of the dates for the build and a palynological study to see what the tree cover was like during the approximate/more accurate period of construction .
It doesn't look too old and surely can't be much older than the massacre .

I was interested to see what the two points , the putative backsight and foresight looked like and whether there was anything to suggest that
they should be considered as being part of an alignment .

Why would the locals build an alignment to the solstice into what appears to be a defensive structure ?
If there was tree cover a visual alignment would not make any sense .
Stonewall John is possibly not getting the credit he deserves .[/quote]


--------------------

Actually, on a visit to Queen's Fort with a previous RI State Archaeologist, he was of the opinion that it was not at all certain that it was built as a defensive structure. Approaching from the east and south would have been difficult, not so difficult from the west or north. And I do not know if there was tree cover, whenever it was built. (I think, just as an aside, that the notion all was an old growth forest wilderness prior to colonization might be a misconception. In 1524, for instance, when Verrazano visited Narragansett Bay, a party of his men explored westward from the West Passage of Narragansett Bay nearly as far as the present day Connecticut border, and reported the land was clear everywhere, due, perhaps to the practice of slash and burn agriculture by the local natives). But, certainly, if the Solstice marker was intentional, it would have been easy peasy to clear the top of tree cover. It's really a very small surface area that we are talking about, the top of the glacial boulder dump itself, and the portion contained within the walls. And there is no genuine evidence whatsoever that Stonewall John built the feature. The first time the place is even mentioned in any documents was in a history of the South County area published in 1835. Its existance was never noted before or during King Philip's War. Stonewall John was a real person, but I don't think there is any feature that can be attributed to him with certainty. Not Fort Ninigret, which also displays bastions and was a wampum factory to some extent, and which may have been built by the Dutch sometime prior to the colonization of Rhode Island. The Narragansett were known to be skilled masons, but I honestly don't know why Stonewall John stands out in that regard. His is a name known to the United Colonies, but we just don't have any real evidence to tie him to Queen's Fort.

On the other hand, the present day Narragansett do associate the site as important to their history, but I do not know if they themselves associate it with King Philip's War. The skirmish described as taking place between a group of soldiers associated with the army stationed at Wickford before the assault on the native Fort in the Great Swamp, and Narragansett associated with the squaw sachem Quaipen, took place west of Wickford, but it seems to be only an assumption that Quaipen and her forces were held up in Queen's Fort at the time. Their principal village was nearby.

Interestingly, back in the 70's, if I stood upon the largest boulder, within the walls of the fort, in the winter, I could actually see the waters of Wickford Harbour, several miles east of the location. (Tree growth in the woods east of the fort make that no longer possible). But at that time I always fancied the natives could therefore have noted the arrival of the colonial army to Wickford. I always assumed it had been a native fort associated with the war. Now, I'm not sure, area historians are not sure, Doug Harris of the Narragansett certainly saw it as "ceremonial" when I visited the site with him( he believed it marked the Winter solstice), and the state archaeologist at the time of that visit agreed there was no certainty it was a defensive position. Where the truth lies, I do not know, and I acknowledge I have no real way to know at this point. The site has long been special to me simply as a surviving stone built site associated with the Narragansett. It will always be very special to me for that reason. Just because it has survived. Be it circa 340 years old, or much older. It has survived.

When judging age("it doesn't look too old"), don't judge by the SW bastion, as that has clearly been rebuilt. If you were to see some of the features located near the NE bastion, I'm not sure your observation of "not too old" would be so obvious.

https://books.google.com/books?id=arfWR ... rt&f=false

http://www.providencejournal.com/news/c ... aciers.ece


E.P., my apologies, as this particular topic is so far off topic re your thread.....

[E.P. Grondine]

E.P., my apologies, as this particular topic is so far off topic re your thread.....

no problem. Tiompan was just demonstrating his stupidity by trying to game me.

[Tiompan]

The stupidity was clearly all yours EP .
You failed , yet again , to provide any supporting evidence to back up one of your claims .

[Tiompan]

Even if the the site was older and built by the Narragansett , there are still the problems of why would they have a solstice alignment ,
why should the putative backsight and foresight should be considered as such ,where are the precedents ,and the more personal , what do they look like ?

[shawomet]

Even if the the site was older and built by the Narragansett , there are still the problems of why would they have a solstice alignment ,
why should the putative backsight and foresight should be considered as such ,where are the precedents ,and the more personal , what do they look like ?

Sorry, I can't answer your questions. Most relevant to my deficit of knowledge, I can't speak for the Narragansett. Mavor and Dix are both dead as well. I know the Narragansett are aware of many sites in this region that are important to them, for reasons only they know, and they don't share that with just anyone. Certainly not me.

And archaeoastronomy or whatever the discipline is called these days, is not my forte in the least, so for that reason alone, I can't address your questions. Mavor and Dix accepted the SW bastion as a spiral design to be a given. I told them they should not. But I think they got caught up in "oh look, it's in the shape of a spiral" because it somehow enhanced their interpretation of the site's purpose. And I can't address their conclusion that the site included a solstice alignment. I'd love to know more about Narragansett tradition for the site, but I would never be in a position to really be granted access to that.

[Tiompan]

Ahhh the old "oh look " problem .Same as the "gawp 'n guess " one for rock "interpretation" .
It's no doubt an interesting site but bedevilled by over eggers who want to turn it into something to suit their fancies .
The archaeoacoustic properties of the site will no doubt be next on the list to show that "entrainment" was part of it's purpose ,or an echo was similar to the sound of some totemic species .

[circumspice]

As you have never read my book you have no idea of the sources nor method I used for it.
Your knowledge of impact scientists is similar: nil.
I am pretty certain you never read my reporting either.

Other people have though:

Hancock: I’m working now on a big book on ancient America. Two main reasons for that; firstly, a lot of new science on the peopling of the Americas has taken a long time . It’s taken about 25 years to break the old paradigm. But the old understanding of the peopling of the Americas, which used to say there were no humans in the Americas before about 13,000 years ago, has now been completely overturned by new discoveries. Initially, those discoveries were resisted by the establishment very strongly, and many archeological careers were ruined – those archaeologists who were willing to acknowledge and older human presence. But lo and behold, they were right.

The information has now reached such a level that it has overwhelmed the old paradigm; the old paradigm cannot stand in the face of new evidence of humans in America 25,000 years ago, 50,000 years ago, and most recently, a big paper published in Nature in April 2017: Human Presence in the Americas 130,000 Year Ago. That’s 10 times as old as human beings were supposed to have been, in the Americas! That’s in a site near San Diego in California. So, not only that, but DNA work is also giving us a new story about the peopling of the Americas. We’re now beginning to understand how complicated it is. There are certain fragments of DNA that are associated with a group of humans; not anatomically modern humans, but humans that have been a bit like the Neanderthals. They have bred with modern humans and left their traces in the human DNA, just like the Neanderthals did. That DNA is present very strongly amongst Australian Aboriginal Indians and amongst certain tribes in South America.

It hardly appears at all in North America. So the notion that the whole Americas were peopled across the Bering land bridge once the sea level was lower, now the Bering Strait, and that the migration came all the way through to South America, is just wrecked by that finding. It means that people, human beings, had to have got to South America by sea directly, not coming through North America at all, and that raises huge issues about ancient navigation and ancient skills and ancient abilities.

The second reason I’m very interested in focusing in on the Americas is that they have not played a big part in my work until now, and I’m just intrigued and excited by what’s happening. I got activated on this subject when I participated at Standing Rock in 2016 and got to know the Lakota, did some interviews there, and really for the first time I think, I understood the terrible genocide that was inflicted upon the Native American peoples and how their culture, their history, their true past was deliberately obliterated by the invaders, and how so many lies were told about them. I’d like it if my new book can help correct those lies.

As a colleague put it to me, "Hancock is going to eat your lunch".

Graham Hancock Endorses Book about Lost "Megalithic" Culture of North America

12/13/2017

It’s been a big week for Graham Hancock. A South African professor endorsed his lost civilization, and a luxury magazine conducted a fawning interview. Now, Bear & Company is getting ready to publish Spirits in Stone: The Secrets of Megalithic America: Decoding the Ancient Cultural Stone Landscapes of the Northeast by Glenn Kreisberg, and Hancock has his name on the cover as the author of the book’s credulous forward. Of the book itself there is little to say. It is more than 400 pages long and seeks to explore alleged stellar alignments among various rocks and earthworks in the northeastern United States to conclude that an advanced super-civilization once occupied the future United States. Weirder, it is partly the work of Kresiberg and partly an anthology of partially related essays by other writers. It is an odd book.
​Kreisberg developed his ideas while living near Woodstock, New York, which he identified as a center of megalithic star culture. He has been promoting version of the idea since at least 2011, including on Graham Hancock’s own website. I remember reading the linked article last year and finding it so unimpressive that I didn’t think to say anything about it. Kreisberg is also the editor of Mysteries of the Ancient Past: A Graham Hancock Reader, so you can see where from where he takes his inspiration.

I feel like I should be reviewing Spirits in Stone, but I must confess that the thought of giving more than a cursory reading to 400 pages of minute arguments about stellar alignments makes my eyes glaze over. The problem is reducible to a simple point: Even if we accept that such stones and earthworks were indeed purposefully aligned to stars and constellations (and that they are all artificial constructions and not, as is the case with some, natural), it implies nothing about the existence of an “advanced” Atlantis-like civilization, for observation of the stars and the ability to point rocks at them is, in the final analysis, not an inherent development of state-level societies. Anyone with sufficient motivation and a rudimentary ability to carve records of stellar positions could do it.

Anyway, Kreisberg invited Hancock to tour some of what he views as megalithic sites in the northeastern United States, and Hancock came away convinced that Native Americans once had a scientifically advanced civilization that expressed sophisticated mathematical truths through the medium of stones aligned to stars. However, Hancock feels that Euro-Americans have destroyed these stony wonders:

"What my rambles with Glenn have shown me, however, and what this book will reveal to you, are that those fragments are indeed present, even in the intensively settled, heavily farmed, and economically developed Northeast where the barbaric forces of “modernization” have been at work the longest, erasing and confusing the record of stone."

​Here Hancock presents an infuriating mixture of fact and fantasy that marries a correct criticism—that agricultural and industrial development has disturbed or destroyed archaeological sites—to a romantic fantasy that the destroyed parts of the archaeological record would reveal a “Hermetic” civilization of staggering wisdom and complexity, one possessed of “energizing, healing, and soul-enriching effects.”

Hancock is at a loss, though, to explain why North America, if part of the same global system of megalithic construction inherited from Atlantis, lacks the kinds of massive stone sites that the Old World has in spades. With the haughty condescension of a wealthy, liberal European, he attributes the missing stone structures to deliberate destruction by us heathen colonials who lack a certain European refinement and British comfort with deep history.

"What is different in America is only the scale of destruction of this ancient worldwide system, deliberate destruction, pursued for short-term economic gains, by rude and barbarous incomers whose cultures had been cut off from the wellsprings of planetary wisdom for so long that they were literally unable to see the pearls of great price that they so carelessly and callously swept away.'

​He doesn’t quite identify who these incomers are, but when he said that “we” are their “descendants,” he makes plain that he is speaking, somewhat imprecisely, of European colonists. Perhaps stung by the repeated criticism that his hypothesis about a lost white race civilizing the brown peoples of the world is racist, or at least racist-adjacent, Hancock has here and in his newer work from the past twelve months or so overcorrected and all but falls into the trap of demonizing Europeans while fetishizing Native Americans as possessors of a purer and more harmonious ancient earth wisdom that makes them all but avatars of occult earth magic.

Regarding the Bering Straight overland route vs. arrival by sea. There was not a lot of fanfare, but the so-called "Pacific Coast kelp highway route" has absolutely supplanted the overland route from Beringia into the Americas. So arrival by boat is now accepted by nearly all archaeologists working on the larger issue of the peopling of the Americas. This may be a revelation to Hancock, but it's almost old news by now....

Regarding the Cerutti Mastodon Site, dated at 130,000 years, I had the opportunity to meet the lead author of the Narure letter, as well as his wife, one of the co-authors, and these were my impressions. From the Fall meeting of the New England Antiquties Research Association(Neara), which was held in Rhode Island:

Dr. Kathleen Holen's talk was entitled "Evidence for human activity at large animal death sites". She and her husband have been involved in over 50 excavations of mammoth and mastodon remains, in the Great Plains and elsewhere. Of course, not all those have involved evidence of human activity, but some have, and have returned dates far older then Clovis. Her emphasis in her talk was on what fresh bone looks like when it is humans doing the work of breaking those bones open. Including experimentation using heavy hammerstones with fresh elephant bones in Africa. I cannot recapitulate her knowledge, and won't attempt it, but will say she convinced me that there are reliable clues that can be demonstrated when fresh bone has been fractured by hominids wielding large hammerstones for percussion operations.

Dr. Stephen Holen's talk was entitled "The Cerutti Mastadon Site in San Diego: 130,000 B. P."

Well, it was superb. I shook his hand afterward and told him I could not speak for Neara, but that I considered it an honor that he came to speak to us about what is grounbreaking(to say the very least!) research, to be able to hear the frontier research by the lead author of the Cerutti study. He replied that he felt honored to have been invited, and that it was wonderful to speak to an audience that was actually receptive to their study.

Indeed! The blowback against them has been nothing short of relentless and fierce. They told us of one grad student, who had no experience excavating a mastodon site at all, publishing a reply stating that heavy equipment driving above the Cerutti bones while they were still buried, was responsible for the fracturing seen. Both Holen and his wife were incredulous at this suggestion, having, as stated, not only so much more experience studying megafauna sites, but being able to easily demonstrate the difference between bones broken by percussion while fresh, and bones broken when dessicated(which the Cerutti bones would have to have been if broken by heavy vehicles driving over their burial sites. Even at 130,000 +/-9000 years old, the Cerutti bones are dessicated, not fossilized. In other words, they are still bones).

Regarding what I felt was one key observation I took away. European colleagues working on sites far older then sites in the Americas, as well as African colleagues working at the famous Olduvai Gorge Early Man sites, are near universal in being of the opinion that the Cerutti Mastodon Site is an archaeological site. Everyone, both old world and new world archaeologists, are of the opinion that the dates for the site are valid. 130,000 +/-9000 years old. The old world archaeologists and paleontologist recognize the fracturing as clearly originating in percussion blows by humans. American archaeologists, in sharp contrast, have been near universal in rejecting the findings. American archaeologists are of the opinion that the Cerutti site is not an archaeological site at all. But I felt the Holen's have effectively overcome these opinions. And that is why I thanked them for the honor of hearing from the lead authors regarding what I believe will lead to a major breakthrough in understanding the peopling of the Americas.

BTW, already two additional sites have been located in California, which may show evidence of hominin activity, and both have returned dates of 80,000-100,000 years old. They told us of occasions where other sites have been destroyed because archaeologists had simply assumed a priori that the sites were simply "too old" and therefore simply not worth saving.

In short, the Holen's won me over. I wish a tape of their talks were available, and that I could offer here more then my impressions based on memory.

Regarding whether there are sites in the Northeast where Native Americans built in stone, well, archaeologist Dr. Curtiss Hoffman of the Massachusetts Archaeological Society favors an interpretation that does assign much of the stonework to prehistoric native peoples.. and has completed an inventory of such sites for the east coast of the United States. On the opposite side of the debate, archaeologists such as Rhode Island State Archaeologist Timothy Ives favors an interpretation that sees the numerous stone cairn sites that are common in New England backcountry hillsides as the product of field clearing by sheep farmers. In Vol. 43, 2015 edition of "Archaeology of Eastern North America", he outlined that viewpoint in an article entitled "Cairnfields in New England's Forgotten Pastures". Interestingly, Narragansett Doug Harris, of the Narragansett Historic Preservation Office, whom I also discussed offshore underwater sites with at the Neara meeting(the Narragansett have oral traditions locating village sites in Block Island and Rhode Island Sounds when those areas were above water), as well as many other New England tribal members do identify many of these stone structure sites in the Northeast with their ancestors, and not colonial and Post colonial sheep farmers.

Recently, the town of Hopkington, RI, together with the Narragansett Nation, preserved and dedicated an interesting site contained some 1000+ cairns, as a Narragansett Sacred Landscape Site. At the least interesting, that in the absence of firm archaeological data one way or another, that such sites are being preserved. It's sort of a "better safe then sorry" approach.
Here is that newly dedicated RI site, the Manitou Hassannash Preserve:

http://www.neara.org/images/pdf/Hopkint ... rogram.pdf

Preserving such sites has been ongoing for quite a few years now. Prior to the preservation of the Hopkington, RI, site, the most successful effort was getting the Turner Falls(Ma.) Sacred Hill Ceremonial Site protected and added to the National Register of Historic Places:

http://nolumbekaproject.blogspot.com/p/ ... ed-by.html

I know nothing about Glenn Kreisberg and his book about "megaliths" in the Northeast, nor what Hancock has planned. I hope it is not just a rehash of the older view that there was a connection between megalithic cultures on opposite sides of the Atlantic....

@shawomet: I have often wondered why the experts are so adamant that the New World wasn't colonized by man until after the last glacial maximum. Human ancestors left Africa by about 2 million years ago, give or take a couple hundred thousand years.

Why would the New World be out of bounds for those early exploratory wanderings? I mean there were periods of time long before the last ice age when the New World was accessible to people traveling by land or by sea. Ice ages pulsed in & out of existance for millions of years, possibly erasing or submerging any evidence that may have existed of such explorations. I feel certain that some of them, at some point in time, had to have made it to the Americas. That doesn't necessarily mean it was a colonizing event. To colonize successfully there is a minimum number of individuals required to sustain a healthy population. However, there could have been early incursions that didn't result in a lingering presence. The problem is to locate places where such evidence may have survived to the present time. If any such place is ever located, the archaeological work done there must be above reproach in order to overcome the prevailing prejudicial attitudes. I sure as hell wouldn't want to be in their shoes. I continue to keep an open mind about the colonizing of the New World. I'd be thrilled to learn that our part of the world has roots that run as deep as any in the Old World.