UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

Collectively, genetics studies have shown us that the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas are descended from a group that diverged from its Siberian ancestors beginning sometime around 23,000 years before present & remained isolated in Beringia (the region of land that once connected Siberia & North America) for an extended period of time. When the glaciers covering North America melted enough to make the Pacific coast navigable, southward travel became possible, & patterned genetic diversity across North & South America reflects these early movements.

Recent ancient DNA studies indicate that approximately 13,000 years ago, two clades (genetic groups) of peoples emerged; one exclusively consisting of northern Native Americans, & one consisting of peoples from North, Central, & South America, including the 12,800 year old Anzick child from a Clovis burial site in Montana. All genetics research to date has affirmed the shared ancestry of all ancient & contemporary indigenous peoples of the Americas, & refuted stories about the presence of “lost tribes”, ancient Europeans, & (I can’t believe that I actually have to say this) ancient aliens.

Events that occurred after people first entered the Americas – how they settled in different parts of the continents, adapted to local environments, interacted with each other, & were affected by European colonialism – have received somewhat less attention in the press, but as can be seen in the links above, there have been some very significant research papers published on these topics. One such paper that I’ve recently found very interesting (in fact, I wrote up a short article for Current Biology that discusses its significance), Genetic Discontinuity between the Maritime Archaic & Beothuk Populations in Newfoundland, Canada by Duggen et al. (2017), explores the genetic diversity within three different ancient groups who lived in Newfoundland & Labrador.

One reason this region is of particular interest is that it’s on the furthest northeastern margin of North America & so was one of the last areas in the Americas to be peopled. It appears to have been occupied successively by three culturally distinct groups beginning about 10,000 years before present (YBP) in Labrador & 6,000 YBP in Newfoundland: the Maritime Archaic, the Paleo-Inuit (also referred to as the Paleo-Eskimo), & the indigenous peoples that Europeans called the Beothuk. Today the region is home to several indigenous groups, including the Inuit, the Innu, the Mi’kmaq & the Southern Inuit of NunatuKavut.

The members of the Maritime Archaic tradition created the oldest known burial mounds in North America (dating to 7,714 YBP) & subsisted upon coastal marine resources. Approximately 3,400 YBP they seem to have abandoned Newfoundland, either in response to the appearance of Paleo-Inuit in the region or because of climate changes. The Paleo-Inuit’s presence on the island overlapped with the peoples referred to as the Beothuk beginning around 2000 YBP. The Beothuk encountered European settlers in 1500 AD, & in response to their presence gradually moved to the interior of the island, where their populations declined.

The last known Beothuk, Shanawdithit, died of tuberculosis in captivity in 1829. Although it remains possible that Beothuk traces of ancestry persist in contemporary residents of NL, including members of the Innu, Mi’kmaq, & European communities, it is generally accepted that the Beothuk became culturally extinct with the death of Shanawdithit.

By analyzing mitochondrial haplogroups (groups of closely related maternal lineages) present within individuals from all three populations, Dugan et al. addressed the question of whether they were genetically similar or whether all three groups were biologically as well as culturally distinct from each other. This happens to be one of the most fundamental questions that arises when studying the past: do cultural changes in the archaeological record of a region represent the arrival of new groups, or did one group of people living in the same region over time adopt new cultural practices & technologies from others?

In the case of Newfoundland, the three groups were genetically distinct; they do not share any maternal haplogroups except for haplogroup X2a, lineages of which were found in both the Maritime Archaic & Beothuk. (The presence of haplogroup X2a in North American populations has sometimes been cited as evidence for European ancestry in ancient Americans. If you’re interested in why I & most other geneticists specializing in Native American populations disagree with that, you can read about it here).

Apart from that single exception, the Maritime Archaic, Paleo-Inuit, & Beothuk are clearly genetically distinctive from one another. However, it’s important to note that this study was done on mitochondrial DNA, which is exclusively matrilineally inherited, & so we can only say that the three groups were not maternally related. While they indicate that the groups are genetically different from each other, does that mean that there was no shared ancestry between them at all? It’s unclear without looking at the rest of the genome whether, for example, there might have been any paternal lineages shared between the populations. I hope that the authors of this study will follow up with analyses of complete genomes from these ancient individuals, as there is a great deal more to be learned by looking more deeply at their ancestry.

As this study shows, we can learn a lot about the past by characterizing the genomes of ancient & contemporary peoples. This paper by Duggen et al. adds to decades of study of the genomes from ancient & contemporary peoples of the Americas, which reveals a nuanced picture of their complex & remarkable history of evolution, interaction, & resilience in the face of unbelievable oppression.

But it’s also important to understand what genetics can’t tell us. While writing up this article, I was appalled (although not surprised) that there is at least one personal ancestry testing company that has made the claim that they can help you determine whether or not you are Beothuk based on your DNA.

Let’s be clear: all claims that a person’s tribe or indigenous nationality can be determined from their genomes are scientifically inaccurate. First, this is because there simply are no currently known genetic markers that allow us to identify individual tribes or nations; although we see geographically patterned genetic variation throughout the Americas in ancient & contemporary populations which allows us to differentiate them (as done in this study), genetic lineages are not tribal or nation-specific.

More importantly, who is or is not a member of a particular community is determined by indigenous groups’ own standards of belonging, which are often just as much about relations & community ties as they are about biological descent. Geneticists can’t determine who is or is not authentically Beothuk, Cherokee, or anything else based on the percentage of “Native American DNA” they might have.

One of the worst threats to hang over the head of humankind in recent times is that of the grim specter of nuclear war, the effects of which we got a brief and tragic taste of back in World War II with the bombs dropped to horrific effect on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The thought that the whole world could be reduced to such devastation is a fear that constantly looms over us in this day and age, with good reason, but this must surely be a modern fear, right? After all, nuclear weapons are devices of sadistic human ingenuity that has only come about within the last century with the development of our macabre technology, are they not? However, according to ancient texts and some anomalous evidence, it has been alleged by certain conspiracy theorists that nuclear strikes were possibly carried out thousands of years ago, far back in the mists of time.

One of the main historical oddities that has been used to illustrate the possibility of an ancient nuclear war is supposedly contained within the 8th century Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata, which chronicles the Kurukshetra War and battle between Rama and the demon Ravana. Within these pages are claimed to be references to some catastrophic event that in many ways sounds exactly like what one would expect a nuclear strike to look like, such as an annihilating explosion described as being “brighter than a thousand suns,” which caused all trees to instantly ignite into flame, and reduced everything in its path to ashes. Indian historian, Kisari Mohan Ganguli, has said of such weapons of mass destruction in old texts:

Indian sacred writings are full of such descriptions, which sound like an atomic blast as experienced in Hiroshima and Nagasaki… The passage tells of combat where explosions of final weapons decimate entire armies, causing crowds of warriors with steeds and elephants and weapons to be carried away as if they were dry leaves of trees.

Interestingly, the texts also mention that survivors of the catastrophe later fell down ill and lost their hair, which undeniably sounds very much like radiation sickness, thousands of years before they should have known what that was. According to one purported rough translation, one section reads:

A single projectile charged with all the power in the Universe…An incandescent column of smoke and flame as bright as 10,000 suns, rose in all its splendor…it was an unknown weapon, an iron thunderbolt, a gigantic messenger of death which reduced to ashes an entire race. The corpses were so burned as to be unrecognizable. Their hair and nails fell out, pottery broke without any apparent cause, and the birds turned white. After a few hours, all foodstuffs were infected. To escape from this fire, the soldiers threw themselves into the river.

Besides this text, there are various archeological sites throughout the region and indeed the world that supposedly hold evidence of such nuclear destruction in an era long before World War II. One is the site of the mysterious ancient city of Jodhpur, which lies along the edge of the great Thar desert in India, and is said to have long been plagued by unusually high levels of radiation since ancient times. Inhabitants here have long been said to have much higher incidences of cancer, birth defects, and other related complications than other areas, and radiation readings here have quite often gone off the charts. Why should that be?

Another is skeletons supposedly unearthed at the ancient ruins of the city of Mohenjo-Daro, Pakistan, in 1927, which are infused with high radiation levels and appear to have been people who dropped spontaneously where they stood to lie there in the streets, as if from some great weapon of mass destruction that struck them down instantly. Many of these skeletons, which are strangely devoid of the decay one would expect, were purportedly found lying face down right in the streets, in some cases still holding hands as if they had been anticipating the doom that was coming for them, and some of the rocks of these ruins seem to have been partially crystallized as if by some incredibly intense flash of heat. Indeed, British Indian researcher David Davenport claimed to have found rocks with evidence that they had been mysteriously fused and blasted into glass with heat as high as 1500°C. Something very unusual happened here in around 2,500 BCE, but what it was remains unclear.

Mohenjo-Daro

Speaking of anomalous fused glass, there are other sites around the world that exhibit the same phenomenon. In December of 1932, a surveyor from the Egyptian Geological Survey by the name of Patrick Clayton found a mysterious sheet of glass buried in the sands of the Great Sand Sea, near the Saad Plateau in Egypt. Such mysterious glass chunks have been found in such disparate places as the deserts of Libya, the Sahara, Mojave, and others. Experts who have looked at such unusual glass formations have often likened them to the sort of glass left behind by nuclear tests at places like the White Sands missile range, in southern New Mexico. Engineer Albion W. Hart famously once likened the glass left behind at the missile range to similar deposits he had personally witnessed in the deserts of Africa, but speculated that the ones he had seen would have had to have come from a blast roughly 10,000 times more powerful than the detonations at White Sands.

Some scientists have tried to explain these vast glass deposits as the result of some meteorite impact, but the lack of any crater makes such speculation problematic. There is also the high purity and transparency exhibited by much of this glass, which is not consistent with a meteorite strike. So what caused these weird glass deposits? No one really has a clue. Evidence such as this and the other accounts we have looked at have caused some theorists to proclaim that it all points to some sort of event or events involving nuclear weapons far in the past, although how this could have occurred is left to speculation, such as that it was due to time travelers, aliens, or both.

Whatever the cause may be, it on the surface seems when looking at these cases that at least the evidence for some sort of ancient nuclear apocalypse is rather solid and undeniable, but did any of this actually really happen? Unfortunately, there are many problems with this idea, not the least of which is that no official historical or archeological account gives any mention of such a cataclysm, and there has been much doubt cast upon the veracity of the claims of ancient texts describing such doomsday events. There has also been much criticism aimed at the methodologies used and the way the findings made at places like Mohenjo-Daro were analyzed and interpreted, with later studies showing that the bodies were not merely lying in the streets, but had actually merely been displaced from their original graves. Their bodies were also explained as being so well preserved due to the dry and hot climate of the region.

Other findings such as the fused glass and radiation have also been looked at with a skeptical eye, likely caused by rational reasons, and since the buildings themselves are mostly intact it seems odd to presume a nuclear blast should have swept through this site. The ancient texts describing some doomsday scenario have also been called into question, with Brian Dunning from the site Skeptoid perusing the translated version of the Mahabharata for any references to a nuclear war and finding none, leaving him forced to maintain that such tales are fabricated at best. You can read Dunning’s rather thorough deconstruction of the ancient nuclear war theory here.

Despite all of this debunking, the matter is not really settled for some, and many mysteries remain. There are certainly many conspiracy theorists who stand by the notion that such an ancient nuclear war really did happen, that the evidence proves it, and it seems that the debate will keep going on for some time. It is curious to wonder about how, if such an event ever really took place, did this all come to pass? Why would such sophisticated agents of destruction be available so many thousands of years ago and who would have been behind deploying them and for what reasons? We will never know either way, but we can hope that it never happens again.