New Nation News - European Pre-History News

 


Seahenge, the remarkable ring of oak timbers

European Prehistory Search

 "For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again," bible
Kennewick Man Western Civilization news links March 6, 2013
(note: some older links may have expired - ed.)
 
European Pre-history News

  • [Updated link from reader for]: A cradle in the wrong place
    We have all been taught that the cradle of civilization was in the Middle East, but a prehistoric village in the south of France suggests that Europe has a rival claim
  • Lascaux Art Gallery "There is no medium quite like interior of Lascaux, with the original wick lamps, shadows, and three dimensional topography of the walls. The images are actually resonable copies, the originals are better, but the "gallery" is closed to the public, as well ultraviolet light from flashbulbs is harmful to any painting".
  • Facing North
    When engaged in sacred activities there was one direction that Heathens faced and that was North. They looked Northward when praying, and sacrificing. (278) Instead of taking this practice and converting it for their own use, like they did for so many other things, the Christians looked upon the North quarter as the 'unblessed quarter.' It was also unlucky to make a throw in the northern direction. (279) We know also that most Heathen graves were oriented in a northern direction and that Christian graves were oriented in an Eastern direction. At the abrenuntiatio, which many Heathens were forced to take in order to renounce their Heathen beliefs they were instructed to face west when renouncing the Heathen gods and goddesses and then to face east when accepting the one god and Christ. (280)
    - (from "Regintroth: A Book of the Northern Way")

  • Viking blood still flowing - Many Vikings settled in Britain 1,200 years ago
    Blood tests taken over the past year may help show part of Cumbria in northwest England was a Viking stronghold 1,200 years ago. Geneticists discovered the area around Penrith has clear evidence of Norwegian influence. However, the study also confirms that Vikings settled in large numbers in the Shetland and Orkneys and the far north of the Scottish mainland.
Thor's HammerThor's Hammer
Miniature Thor's hammers were widely used as religious amulets during the Viking era. These charms were normally between two and three centimeters in length, and typically made from silver. The following examples are typical of the approximately fifty such amulets that have been discovered.
THOR the Viking Thunder God
  • 5,000-year-old pub found on Orkney served real dung ale
    It tastes like what? Real ale fans in Orkney will take authenticity to its furthest extreme today by supping "stone-age" beer flavoured with dung. The neolithic ale has been scientifically recreated, complete with original farmyard flavours, after historians discovered what they claim is a 5000-year-old pub and brewery on the islands. Now hard-drinking Orcadians have been invited to put their brewing heritage to the test – in the full knowledge it has been manufactured in clay pots bearing the traces of baked animal droppings.
  • Alien seekers damage Stone Age mound
         Trespassing UFO hunters have climbed into Silbury Hill in Wiltshire, damaging the biggest man-made Neolithic mound in Europe. English Heritage closed the 4,000-year-old mound to the public after an 18th Century mining shaft opened up in the summit in May last year.
  • Evidence of Dark Age beach parties suggests Celts were connoisseurs of Byzantine wine The find helps to link a West Country Celtic kingdom called Dumnonia – associated with King Arthur – with the successor to the Roman imperial era, the Byzantine empire. The finds may also lead to the discovery of a Celtic palace near by.The evidence indicates that the hosts and guests sated themselves on beef, pork, mutton, venison, rabbit, duck and chicken – all washed down with generous quantities of Byzantine wine.
  • Ancient Ogham in Oklahoma? by Gary Vey for ViewZone
    The idea that he had discovered evidence of ancient Europeans and Asians in the panhandle of Oklahoma was not unusual to Bill McGlone. He spent the better part of his life examining and researching the petroglyphs that were etched into the cliffs, peaks and caves all around his home in La Junta, Colorado... (reader link)
    Ogam is the oldest form of writing in Ireland and Scotland. It can still be seen inscribed on hundreds of large and small stones, on the walls of some caves, but also on bone, ivory, bronze and silver objects. The Ogam noscript was especially well adapted for use on sticks. Sticks are part of the Basque word for "alphabet": agaka, agglutinated from aga-aka, aga (stick or pole) and akats (notch). The meaning of the word agaka therefore isn't so much "alphabet" as "writing", a stick with Ogam notches conveying a message. The name Ogam likely comes from oga-ama, ogasun (property, wealth) ama (Priestess, mother) property of the Priestess, which indicates that the noscript may originally have been designed for use by the clergy of the pre-Christian religion.

This program claims the Viking were too stupid to live in climate of Greenland. Hello, They had been living in it for five hundred years!!! They also try say, the church caused them to dry out. BUT THESE ARE ALL LIES!!! So, what killed the Viking colony in Greenland?? RACE WAR!! This trash Web site speaks of "Inuit (Eskemos) neighbors". When Eric the Red, came to Greenland no one lived on the Island. When the Inuit(Eskemos) came the Grenlanders tried fight them off, but when they killed off one lot, more would come. The Inuits tell their kids stories about how they killed all the Europeans!! I saw one program years ago, in which an Inuit Artist was painting pictures of Inuits killing Greenlander Women and Children, and burning down thier homes!!! BUT THIS PROGAM TELLS US NOTHING ABOUT THIS!!! One day the Inuits come and kill all of the people in the last Greenlander village. A ship land shotly afterwards and everyone gone and everything smashed and broken! This progam asked "Why didn't they learn from...Inuit..." what trash, the Inuit were stone age savages, the Viking did need anything from them! There is NO mystery about what happened to the Viking colony in Greenland they were killed in a GENOCIDAL RACE WAR!!"

  • UK: Iron age discovery at road scheme Relics dating back 3,000 years have been unearthed during work on a new motorway near Birmingham. The discoveries were made by archaeologists working alongside the construction teams on the Birmingham Northern Relief Road (BNRR). Their finds have included Bronze Age charcoal mounds, an Iron Age settlement and a Roman farmstead. The Iron Age discovery, near Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham, is the first of its kind in the area.
  • Richest Prehistoric Cave Art Discovery Owned By British Couple
  • Experts Rave Over French Prehistoric Cave Art Find
    PARIS (Reuters) - Stunning prehistoric engravings uncovered in a cave in western France could be just a foretaste of the treasures held in the dank interior, but the public will probably never get a glimpse, an archaeologist said on Thursday.
    Art experts have hailed the find at Cussac in the Dordogne valley as a major discovery, with the grotto chamber covered in spectacular drawings of wild animals, hybrid beasts, birds and women and erotic imagery.

  • 'Edda': Presenting an Epic as Vikings Might Have Heard It (Upstream list)(NYT free reg) Because Iceland, which was populated by Norse tribes beginning about A.D. 700, is geographically isolated, it remained culturally homogeneous. So the Icelandic version of the Edda tales, uninfluenced by other cultures or the influx of Christianity into Northern Europe, affords a rare glimpse of an atavistic North European tribal culture.
Cussac Cave art may be oldest found in France. Engravings could predate Lascaux paintings Bisons and a horse are seen in the Cussac cave in France's Dordogne region
PERIGUEUX, France (AP) -- Vivid prehistoric engravings that could date back as far as 28,000 B.C. have been found in a cave in western France, regional officials said July 4th, 2001. An archaeologist characterized the engravings as a major discovery. They are believed to predate the world's oldest cave paintings -- the 18,000-year-old paintings in the famed Lascaux caves, also in western France.
  • Newly discovered cave drawings may be oldest
    PERIGUEUX, France - Vivid prehistoric engravings that may be the world's oldest - possibly dating as far back as 28,000 B.C. - have been found in a cave in western France.

    An archaeologist characterized the engravings as a major discovery. They are believed to predate the world's oldest cave paintings - the 18,000-year-old paintings in the famed Lascaux caves, also in western France. "It is as important for engraving as Lascaux is for painting," Dany Baraud, chief archaeologist at the Regional Direction of Cultural Affairs of Aquitaine, said of the cave discovered in the hamlet of Cussac.

    Officials said hundreds of yards of detailed engravings in the Cussac cave depict animals - including bison, horses and rhinoceroses - and human figures.

The site was discovered by an amateur cave explorer in September but not announced by experts until Wednesday. France's Culture Ministry has classified the site as a historic monument, but has not yet confirmed the estimated date of the engravings.

  • Roots — Deep Ones - The perils of looking into American prehistory.
    - by John J. Miller     (reader link)
    One of the secrets of archaeology is that many truly great finds aren't made by archaeologists. It was a farmer, Harold Conover, who stumbled on a clue in the late 1980s that led to a magnificent site in Virginia called Cactus Hill. Conover and his wife were walking on logging roads near their home when he spotted a few Indian artifacts mixed in the sand. He soon traced the sand back to a quarry about ten miles away. Thanks to this detective work, a group of archaeologists led by Joseph McAvoy started digging near that quarry in the early 1990s. They unearthed signs of human habitation stretching back about 18,000 years — making Cactus Hill one of the two or three oldest sites in North America. They also found evidence to support one of the most provocative developments of our time: the growing suspicion among physical anthropologists, archaeologists, and even geneticists that some of the first people who settled in the New World were Europeans.
  • Archaeologist Edward Wright Dies
     LONDON (AP) - Amateur archaeologist Edward Wright, who discovered Europe's oldest cargo boats in the shore of an English river, has died at age 83. It was the third boat, found by Wright and his young grandson in 1963, that finally was confirmed as dating from about 2000 to 1900 B.C. The boat was 50 feet long and made of thick oak planks sewn together with twisted yew branches. It was capable of carrying heavy cargo with space for 18 paddlers and possibly a mast.
  • Editor Note: as this page has gotten too big, I am splitting off the original page as Ref: Page 1
  • Aryan Invasion: Indian males caste in European mould? By Chidanand Rajghatta
    WASHINGTON: The upper caste Indian male population is genetically closer to Europeans than the lower castes, which are more "Asian," according to a potentially controversial new study being published in the forthcoming issue of the journal Human Genome. The authors of the study say their findings support historical data indicating that West Eurasians migrating into India during the last 10,000 years were mostly male.
  • THE CURSE OF THE RED-HEADED MUMMY
         How could an ancient mummy found in remote China have red hair and caucasian features? The answer has sparked a battle over smuggled DNA, Western imperialism, and history as we know it. - by Heather Pringle (reader link)
  • Euro-prehistory links from Reader
  • The Cherchen Mummies: "Mair found himself in front of an elegantly dressed family with clear Caucasian, or European, features. Their narrow faces, long noses, fair hair and skin, round eyes — probably blue — and imposing height had nothing in common with the Mongoloid features of the East."
  • Mystery of the mummies:
    Four thousand years ago, a community lived in the Tarim Basin in the heart of Asia. The Tarim Basin people thrived there for at least 1,500 years. There are indications that they survived as a culture even into the second century. Then they disappeared. Now their remains are being reclaimed from the sands, and the people of that extinct nation are challenging scientists and scholars to fathom who they may have been, and -- if an answer can be found -- where, in prehistory, they came from. According to sweeping physical evidence, they were not Chinese. They were not even Asian. They were Caucasian.
  • The Takla Makan Mummies
         In the late 1980's, perfectly preserved 3000-year-old mummies began appearing in a remote Chinese desert. They had long reddish-blond hair, European features and didn't appear to be the ancestors of modern-day Chinese people. Archaeologists now think they may have been the citizens of an ancient civilization that existed at the crossroads between China and Europe. ...Her tall stature, high nose, and red hair indicate that she was of European descent.
  • Stone Age find will not halt dam Portugal's prime minister yesterday vowed to continue building Europe's largest reservoir despite the discovery of Stone Age engravings up to 20,000 years old in a river valley due to be flooded. Manuel Calado, Professor of Archeology at the University of Lisbon, confirmed their importance. "It is the first time carvings like this have been found in southern Portugal'', he said. The carvings, which show turtles, lizards, goats and unidentifiable four-legged animals, are visible to the untrained eye.
Helge's saga
There was a man named Helge, son of Olav, who was a great adventurer. Helge journeyed to Vinland to study the Skraelings and to follow in the footsteps of the old warriors. He took as his wife a woman named Anne. Together they made many discoveries and told many stories that brought great honour to his people. In time Helge became a great man and died at a very old age. (more...
  • [Reader recommends] Smithsonian "Vikings" site
    "It has the tour dates and locations. It's in Denver now. Feel free to advertise it, maybe the popularity will be so great everywhere that those bastards will make it permanent! There are some great prints depicting Viking family life. I took my family and they were very moved by it. My kids are very much into their Nordic and other European ancestry now. This exhibit
    helped get them interested. We need more of the kids being interested in that."

Greek shipWhite Archaeology: The search for a missing submarine turns up a second-century B.C. shipwreck at nearly 10,000 feet. The discovery of a 2,300-year-old shipwreck between the classical trading centers of Rhodes and Alexandria adds to the corpus of evidence that is challenging the long-held assumption that ancient sailors lacked the navigational skills to sail large distances across open water, and were instead restricted to following the coastline during their voyages. [Reader comments:] "Here's evidence that early sailors were capable of sailing
across a large expanse of water, rather than merely following coastlines."

Texas A&M Field School Discoveries May Rewrite History Of Early North American Man New discoveries in a valley on the eastern edge of the Texas Hill Country will prompt rewriting the history of early North American man, predict Texas A&M University archaeologists who are co-directing excavations at the artifact-rich site.
(reader-link)

petroglyphsAboriginal carvings not sacred, curator says
Ontario Parks bans photos of historic petroglyphs
The Diffusionists have Landed!
The Case of Barry Fell
Whose Race is it Anyway? (reader links)

Swiss archaeologists figure moss finding is 5,000-year-old insole ZUG, Switzerland - A piece of flattened moss found under a main road on the shores of a Swiss lake had archaeologists puzzled - until they saw it contained the imprint of a foot.

New SeahengeNew 'Seahenge' - Archaeologists are examining a mysterious circle of wood
which has emerged from under the shifting sands on the coast of Norfolk in the UK.
The structure was discovered just 100 metres from the site where the famous Bronze Age monument known as Seahenge was uncovered more than two years ago.
The new circle is slightly bigger than Seahenge.
'Seahenge' will be reburied under the Norfolk sands
Sea HengeThe Bronze Age timber circle known as "Seahenge" will be reburied under the Norfolk beach from which it was excavated for scientific research more than a year ago.
Druids and modern-day pagans had organised sit-ins against English Heritage's decision to remove and preserve the wood.

The Neolithic Palisaded Enclosure at Hindwell, Powys, Wales (reader-link)
Dig uncovers "Boudicca's brutal streak" In the history books, she is a flame-haired paragon of wronged womanhood, a first-century feminist leading a horde of righteous Britons against their nasty Mediterranean overlords. A dig in Colchester has revealed that, when Boudicca's troops seized the city in the first year of their two-year revolt that began in AD60, they went to enormous lengths to destroy anything touched by the Romans... Estimates of the number of Romans and 'collaborators' killed by Boudicca and her followers vary, although Roman historians claimed that up to 70,000 people died... For 150 years the woman who led the Iceni tribe from its base in Norfolk against the Roman invaders has been viewed as an icon of national resistance.
Boudicca led her revolt after her husband, the king of the Iceni, died, allowing the invaders to annex his lands and plunder the chief tribes men. After being flogged and seeing her two young daughters raped, she launched the most serious uprising faced by the Romans during their occupation of Britain.
Rare Skeleton Has Scientists Nervous* Rare Genetic Link to Europe
Skeleton's DNA Could Shed Light on American Migrations
Ohio, Nov. 27 - The discovery of prehistoric tools from an Ohio cave is one of several finds that has scientists questioning the identity of settlers thought to have moved in 11,000 years ago. "Disagreement swirls around the timing of their arrival, the nature of their migration, how fast they moved across the landscape and their relationship to contemporary Native Americans," he said.
Some scientists think that the earliest colonizers could have started out somewhere in Europe, not in Asia as previously thought. That idea is rooted in a rare genetic link called haplogroup X - DNA passed down through women that dates back more than 30,000 years. Recent genetic samples from remains in Illinois show that the rare European DNA was around centuries before European exploration. Today, haplogroup X is found in about 20,000 American Indians.
To some researchers, its presence suggests the Mongolian ancestors of most American Indians were latecomers. Genetic tests show the DNA is completely absent from East Asian and Siberian populations. (more... (reader-link)

Mysterious 4700 Year Old Temple Site Found In Wales
Archaeologists have discovered a mysterious 4,700-year-old temple that is the largest Stone Age structure ever found in Western Europe. More than a half a mile across and covering 85 acres, the site in mid-Wales is 30 times the size of Stonehenge.
A six-year research programme has revealed that the vast, egg-shaped religious complex consisted of 1,400 obelisks, each towering up to 23ft into the air. Made of oak, they were arranged as an oval with a perimeter of one-and-a-half miles. At its western end, archaeologists have discovered the site of the temple's main entrance - flanked by 6ft diameter timbers that may have stood 30ft tall.
However, when the Roman invaders arrived, its very sanctity seems to have made it a target. For, in common with many other native British sacred sites - including Stonehenge - the place appears to have been deliberately violated. The Romans seem to have chosen to insult local sensibilities by building first a marching camp on one part of the site and then a permanent fort on another. (more...
Scholars push idea of early European settlement of America (reader) (extract)
The steps and the cistern and the altar are the remains of a sweat lodge, asserts Friedman. This is where the ancient Europeans took steam baths in North America. In the woods near Woodstock, Friedman conjures history not found in textbooks. He tells of Druids and Celtic sun worshippers who came to this continent, specifically to what is now the northeastern United States, a long time before Christopher Columbus. "Everything that you have been told about history," he says, "is wrong."
Such arguments percolated for decades before getting a boost in the 1970s from an apparently unlikely source - a Harvard marine biologist named Barry Fell. The late scholar had a passion for interpreting ancient noscripts and claimed to have deciphered ancient Celtic writings on stone structures around New England. Fell maintained that innoscriptions written in various ancient European languages could be found throughout the New World.
Scattered throughout New York state and New England are dozens of semi-sunken stone rooms covered by giant slab roofs. Fell believed these were ancient structures dedicated to a sun god named Bel.

Pre-Cabot European Community Challenges Conventional Canadian History
by Joëlle Lauriol (reader-link)

Scientist: Europeans explored Ontario in 800 BC (reader-link)
Renowned professor believes Scandinavians carved petroglyphs.
Scandinavians may have crossed the Atlantic three millennia ago and made it as far as Peterborough, Ont. A Calgary archeologist says rock carvings at Petroglyph Provincial Park that are regarded as the work of aboriginal shamans were probably carved by Europeans about 800 BC.
David Kelley said the petroglyphs 40 kilometres northeast of Peterborough include a depiction of a Viking-like ship almost identical to prehistoric ships carved in a rock near Boslund, Sweden, as well as abstract symbols used as a form of writing by northern Europeans.

The rock drawings nobody wants to talk about
Peterborough PetroglyphsThe 900-odd "Peterborough Petroglyphs,'' etched on a marble slab near Stony Lake about 80 kilometres north of Peterborough, have caused a quarter-century of controversy. In the 1960s, Joan and Romas Vastokas of Trent University mapped glyphs, dating them to about 1300 and attributing them to native Algonkians. However, the Vastokases noted that some of the "spirit canoes,'' depicted with masts and side rudders, were very similar to Bronze Age ship glyphs in Sweden....

In reality, Canada has a rich pre-Cabot European history. Bronze Age Scandinavians
penetrated inland as far as Peterborough about 1000 BC, probably to acquire copper.

There was a European community around Lake Memphremagog before Cabot -- only a community needs a dam for a mill and has leisure to carve "gargoyles'' -- and there is reason to suspect it was a community of religious heretics.

There is evidence this community was massacred about 1500-1550. But who knows how many other Europeans "discovered'' and even settled in Canada?
Mowat's The Farfarers argues that there were European settlements in the Gulf of St. Lawrence from 600-1300 AD. (reader link)


Ragnarok, in Norse mythology, the battle at the end of the world

"GOT MILK?" Fiction by H. Millard (c) 2000 (has references to Norse Mythology)

DNA evidence traces Europeans to common ancestor (reader)
About 80 percent of Europeans arose from primitive hunters who arrived about 40,000 years ago, endured the long ice age and then expanded rapidly to dominate the continent, a new study shows.
Researchers analyzing the Y chromosome taken from 1,007 men from 25 different locations in Europe found a pattern that suggests four out of five of the men shared a common male ancestor about 40,000 years ago.
About 24,000 years ago, the last ice age began, with mountain-sized glaciers moving across most of Europe. Underhill said the Paleolithic Europeans retreated before the ice, finding refuge for hundreds of generations in three areas: what is now Spain, the Balkans and the Ukraine.
He said the research shows a pattern that developed in Spain is now most common in northwest Europe, while the Ukraine pattern is mostly in Eastern Europe and the Balkan pattern is most common in Central Europe.
About 8,000 years ago, said Underhill, a more advanced people, the Neolithic, migrated to Europe from the Middle East, bringing with them a new Y chromosome pattern and a new way of life: agriculture. About 20 percent of Europeans now have the Y chromosome pattern from this migration, he said.


 

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