UPDATE December 07 2019 - Helen and I have only just discovered that our Web Editor, John, has been ill for several weeks. Firstly with Noro Vius that lasted 3 weeks, then shortly afterwards with a serious bout of flu over the past 3 weeks. As we work in Frankfurt, and John was not responding to emails or phone calls Helen flew over to see what was up, and rang a doctor immediately as he was having great trouble breathing properly.
John is now being treated but will not return to Web Editor duties. The rest of us have decided, with John's agreement, that next year the news pages will no longer be updated. We will focus on finding somewhere new to live for John after what he thought of as an old friend deliberate;ly sabotaged his efforts to move back to South Wales in late September. The motive? Jealousy at John amazing achievement in running The Morien Institute website over the past 23 years.
John will instead focus on writing books and making documentaries about his lifelong research into ancient people's fascination and concern with events visible in the ancient skies on every continent around the world as evidenced by the astronomilcally-aligned remains they left behind. Helen and I will help him in this as will Picti in Orkey and Pierot in Carnac, Brittany. We five constitute The Morien Institute 'working group'.
"Japan team finds 143 stunning new images in Nazca Lines of Peru" The Asahi Shimbun (Japan)
"Japanese researchers discovered 143 stunning geoglyphs of humans, birds, camels and other animals etched into the desert in southern Peru around the mysterious Nazca Lines.
One image was found using AI technology, which was backed up by an on-site investigation.
Yamagata University studied the area between 2016 and 2018, and announced its findings on Nov. 15.
A research team headed by Masato Sakai, a professor specializing in anthropology, said the geoglyphs are concentrated on the west side of the plateau, stretching about 10 kilometers north to south.
In its entirety, the Nazca plateau stretches 20 kilometers east to west and 15 km north to south."
[What an amazing new discovery in Peru by the Japanese archaeologists! The more people look at this area from the air the more geoglyps there seems to be. Well done Asahi Shimbun for bringing this find to the wider global audience.
It's well worth vsiting the site to read the full story and see the image of a new geoglyph - Ed.]
The pioneers travelled south of mile-high ice sheets covering Canada and found vast lands, abounding with mammoth, giant sloth and other now-extinct megafauna.
This much has been known for decades.
But when it comes to the details, debates have raged over precisely when and how humans populated the New World.
Today, the story is beginning to take shape, thanks to well-dated archaeological sites, DNA analysis and geological work to understand when ice and sea levels permitted entry to the Americas.
It's clear that people occupied the continents by about 15,000 years ago, probably taking a route along the Pacific coast.
And one site, perhaps more than any other, helped scholars reach this conclusion: Chile's Monte Verde."
[Another excellent story from Discover Magazine! That ancient peoples were in South America this long ago suggests some mainstream archaeologists will have to rewrite their timelines - again.
It's well worth vsiting the site to read the full story and see the images - Ed.]
In the space of just a couple of years, average temperatures abruptly dropped, resulting in temperatures as much as 14 degrees Fahrenheit cooler in some regions of the Northern Hemisphere.
Layers of ice in Greenland show that this cool period in the Northern Hemisphere lasted about 1,400 years.
This climate event, called the Younger Dryas by scientists, marked the beginning of a decline in ice-age megafauna, such as mammoth and mastodon, eventually leading to extinction of more than 35 genera of animals across North America.
Although disputed, some research suggests that Younger Dryas environmental changes led to a population decline among the Native Americans known for their distinctive Clovis spear points.
Some geologists, however, subscribe to what is called the impact hypothesis: the idea that a fragmented comet or asteroid collided with the Earth 12,800 years ago and caused this abrupt climate event.
Along with disrupting the glacial ice-sheet and shutting down ocean currents, this hypothesis holds that the extraterrestrial impact also triggered an 'impact winter' by setting off massive wildfires that blocked sunlight with their smoke.
The evidence is mounting that the cause of the Younger Dryas' cooling climate came from outer space."
[We would not normally re-publish this amount of material from any source. But the importance of this excellent study, which has confirmed the work of many other scientists who also came to the same conclusions about the Younger Dryas event 12,800 years ago, needed a longer introduction in order to encourage readers to visit the Astronomy Magazine website to read the full article.
The many links to previous studies that arrived at the same conclusion that the Younger Dryas event was caused by an extraterrestrial impact of cometary debris, or asteroid impact, are really well worth following.
That way you will get as full a bigger picture as the author of this study has reviewed in conjunction with his own study of the White Pond lake sediments found in southern Kershaw County, South Carolina, USA.
We cannot recommend highly enough a thorough reading of the full story - Ed.]
Calling it a 'cosmopolitan and planned city', the authority said the early Bronze Age settlement covered 160 acres and was home to about 6,000 people.
'We have here an immense urban construction, planned with streets that separate neighbourhoods and public spaces', Yitzhak Paz, a director of excavation, said.
The discovery cast doubts on the colonial Aryan Migration Theory (AMT), popularly called AIT (Aryan Invasion Theory).
'In this city, we have a planned settlement with a whole net of streets and alleys and squares, drainage installations and a storage installation.'
The Antiquities Authority said that during the dig, archaeologists also found evidence of an earlier settlement dating back 7,000 years underneath the city's houses."
[What an amazing discovery in this area of the middle east! Though not surprising given the general area was settled many thousands of years before this date, an urban construction complete with drainage is nevertheless very rare.
The images on the ABC News site are well worth a visit to see while reading the full story - Ed.]
"The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project" Cardiff/Athens Universites (Cymru/Greece)
[In October 1900, Captain Dimitrious Kondos was leading a team of sponge divers near the the island of Antikythera off the coast of Greece. They noticed a shipwreck about 180 feet below the surface and began to investigate. Amongst the artifacts that they brought up was a coral-encrusted piece of metal that later archaeologists found was some sort of gear wheel.
The rest of the artifacts, along with the shape of the boat, suggested a date around 2000 years ago, which made the find one of the most anomalous that had ever been recovered from the Greek seas. It became known as The Antikythera Mechanism.
In 2006 the journal "Nature" published a letter, and another paper about the mechanism was published in 2008, detailing the findings of Prof. Mike G. Edmunds of Cardiff University. Using high-resolution X-ray tomography to study the fragments of the anomalous Antikythera Mechanism, they found that it was in fact a bronze mechanical analog computer that could be used to calculate the astronomical positions and various cycles of the Moon - as seen from the Earth: - Ed]
"Researchers have many questions regarding both the Great Flood and Atlantis: Which areas were flooded? Where did the flood waters come from? What caused the flooding? How was Atlantis destroyed? Where was Atlantis located?
The short answers: Noah's Flood was caused by tsunami waves that covered all the costal areas around the Atlantic Ocean.
They also flooded the Mediterranean Basin temporarily raising sea level above 600 feet.
The tsunamis were created by comet fragments that landed in the ocean and within the Americas.
Some estimations claim that over 500,000 comet fragments hit the Americas. The craters are called Carolina Bays.
These craters are concentrated along the Atlantic seaboard within the coastal states of Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Florida, and as far away as Nebraska.
Atlantis was part of Plato's boundless continent, North America. Plato: '. . .and the surrounding land may be most truly called a boundless continent."
