On May 4th 2021, the Ugandan Parliament passed the The Prevention and Prohibition of Human Sacrifice Bill - a piece of legislation aimed at stamping out the pervasive problem of child sacrifice in the country.

A quick thread on how it's been going in Uganda since then: 'Hunting dogs lead police to den of human sacrifices'

The data is difficult to gather but maybe two children a week are abducted and ritually murdered in the country.

The story of the Arctic Dorset people, Palaeo-Eskimos who lived in Canada between ~ 700 BC to ~ 1200 AD, is quite well known now. They disappeared in the face of the advancing Thule Inuit. But - what if some of them survived in some isolated form until recent times? Dorset culture technology was more limited compared to the Thule. They didn't hunt whales, use dogs or use bows-and-arrows. Instead they were masters of hunting seals. The broader diet of the Inuit certainly helped them move into and conquer a climatically unstable Arctic.

The power of Orkney during the late Neolithic period is best seen through the movement of grooved ware pottery and the associated ritual package. This map shows the locations of grooved ware pottery finds, expanding outwards from Orkney down the coast and over to Ireland...

https://twitter.com/Paracelsus1092/status/1823767870045585704

One part of the ritual package may have been the spread of timber and stone circles, and henges.

*The Tasmanian Fish Question*

The enduring story of Tasmanian aboriginal cultural decline includes the fact that they stopped eating fish around 2000 BC, or worse - that they lost or forgot the skills to do so.

Let's examine this claim 🧵 The origin of the claim is two-fold, firstly ethnographic evidence from Europeans on Tasmania, who observed that the inhabitants ate no fish, and secondly an absence of fish in the archaeological record starting around 1,800 BC.

Thread of some unusual mixed peoples from around the world

🧵 Hakka or Chinese-Jamaicans are the descendants of Chinese workers brought to Jamaica in the 1850s. Genetically there are more paternal Chinese markers in the population than maternal.

In 2008 a team of geneticists met with leaders of the Uros people, in a hotel lobby in Puno, Peru.

They had travelled from their artificial floating island homes on Lake Titicaca.

They had come to find out if science backed them up - were they the oldest people in the Andes? The modern Uros people are a tiny remnant of a large group which lived along the waterways in the Andes. After persecution from the Aymara and then the Inca, the Uros retreated to the interior of the lake - using reeds to build islands, houses and boats.

The skeletal remains of two newborn babies have been uncovered from underneath an Armenian 'dragon stone' monument, dating to around 1600 BC.

Let's take a look at this extraordinary Bronze Age burial. Dragon stones basalt stelae found in Armenia, south Georgia and eastern Turkey. They are so called for the folk tales of divine beings living around them in the mountains, some are shaped like fish, others like a bull-skin has been draped over them.

In 1990 a tiny tribe of Native Americans donated some blood samples to researchers at Arizona State University, to try and understand their soaring rates of diabetes.

The controversy that followed went on to shape Native American DNA research and modern bioethics. In 2003 one of the tribe, the Havasupai, attended a doctoral presentation, and discovered that their previously donated blood had been used for purposes other than diabetes research.

The Cochno Stone is one of Britain's most elaborate pieces of stone artwork, consisting of carved Neolithic/Bronze Age patterns.

But are they supposed to look this white and fresh, and why is the Cochno Stone called the most vandalised prehistoric monument in Europe? The stone was first documented by one Rev James Harvey, as he was walking at the foot of the Kilpatrick Hills on the edge of Glasgow in 1895. He sketched some of the carvings he saw in an exposed rock slab, digging in the turf to reveal more.

The last person tried under a British Witchcraft Act was in 1944, but not for the reasons you might expect Helen Duncan, a Scottish medium, spent much of her time doing battle with scientists and sceptics over her supposed abilities to vomit up 'ectoplasm' during seances, as well as her photography showing 'spirits' over her shoulder as she communed with the dead

The United Nations is again calling for international interventions to help prevent Haiti falling into total anarchy, but for many Haitians the UN is the devil in disguise, and don't want to invite him back in Following the 2004 coup against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the United Nations dispatched a stabilisation force to keep the country together. Made up of over 4000 police and soldiers, mostly from Latin America, it was named MINUSTAH.

Afrocentrism is probably unique amongst ethnocentric ideologies for its claims that basically every nation and people everywhere on earth were originally black. A thread: At this point most people are familiar with this line - that the first Europeans were black.

Before there was a Small Boats Crisis in the English Channel there was a Small Boats Crisis in Australia, and before that crisis started there was the Tampa Affair - that time when a Norwegian freight ship carrying Hazara Afghan migrants was boarded by Australian special forces.. On August 24th 2001 the rickety fishing boat, the Palapa, was disintegrating somewhere around 150km north of Christmas Island. Over 400 souls were aboard, mostly Hazara Afghans, with some women and children. They had been battered by storms and now faced sinking into the sea.

Skin whitening cosmetics are an $8 billion a year industry, and going up. Bought predominantly by women, as many as 75% of respondents to surveys admitted to trying to whiten their skin using commercial or DIY products. Most major companies sell some version of these lotions and creams around the world, with huge customer bases in southeast Asia, Africa, India, and Latin America. Terms like 'glowing', 'brightness' and 'natural fairness' are used along with 'whitening' to market the products.

Some extracts from Edgerton's book Sick Societies concerning the status of women in certain forager and pastoralist cultures. Edgerton's main point in this book is to question the idea that all traditions and customs are necessarily healthy or adaptive - for instance the widespread habit in many cultures of denying women, even pregnant women, equal access to high quality foods.

One of the benefits of multiculturalism is that the NHS has finally woken up to the problem of jinns and the evil eye, a topic they have been neglecting for decades. Here we see an NHS workshop correcting this oversight, helpfully delivered only in Bengali. Bangladeshis, Pakistanis and other 'Asian Muslims' actually suffer worse mental health outcomes compared to other ethnicities - exacerbated no doubt by our ethnocentric blind spot over black magic and jinn affliction.

"The lieutenant had written that the men no longer feared dying but were afraid they would be buried in a foreign land and forgotten"

Some WW1 battlefield archaeology for you on this Remembrance Sunday. World War One might seem a strange moment in time for the archaeologist to focus on, after all we have records and photographs and even living people who can testify to the conditions and organisation of combat.

James Mellaart (1925-2012) was the pioneering archaeologist who discovered Çatalhöyük. He was also a forger and fantasist, creating an elaborate universe of fake artefacts and citations which are yet to be fully unravelled. Mellaart cut his teeth in field archaeology in Turkey, as a young researcher he identified hundreds of pre Classical sites, including the Bronze Age settlement of Beycesultan.

Paglia on ancient Egyptian aesthetics:

"A black line on a white page. The Nile, cutting through the desert, was the first straight line in
western culture. Egypt discovered linearity, a phallic track of mind piercing the entanglements of
nature...." "An absolutist
geography produced an absolutist politics and aesthetics. At its height in the Old Kingdom, pharaonic power created the pyramid, a mammoth design of converging lines. Egyptian linearity cut the knot of nature; it was the eye shot forward into the far distance"

Let's take a look at some of the data from this new paper:

"Selection Landscape and Genetic Legacy of Ancient Eurasians"

The legacy of milk drinking, anxiety, the metabolic shift to agriculture, height, diabetes, lipid processing and more. To start, a nice visual for the ancestral make-up of modern Europe and esp Britain and Ireland. Britain has a deep Neolithic/Steppe division between the Celtic areas and southern/eastern England. Meanwhile WHG ancestry is highest in central/northern England.

Ten times Herodotus was proved right.

Despite being called a liar, the Father of History was right more often than not, even if archaeology and science has taken a while to catch up.

Let's look at ten times he was actually right. Gold-Digging Ants: Herodotus describes ants bigger than foxes in India, who throw up gold when digging, which is collected by locals.

Fact: Marmots in the Himalayas throw up gold when burrowing, which is collected by the local Minaro people.