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

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.

Since Bully XL dogs are on the TL, we should look at some of the dogs that are banned in the UK, and why?

Dogs are not equal in their capacities, and nothing shows this better than the history of one banned breed - the Dogo Argentino - and its ancestor, the Córdoba fighting dog The UK Dangerous Dogs Act 1991 lists four specific breeds to be made illegal to own, breed or sell:

- Pit Bull Terrier
- Japanese Today
- Fila Brasileiro
- Dogo Argentino

My 'Lykov Family' theory of agriculture

One possible explanation for the domestication of wild cereals comes from reading the story of the Russian Old Believer Lykov family, who struggled to survive in the colds of Siberia. The earliest agricultural site - Tell Abu Hureyra - shows a sequence of foraging to farming, prompted by the intense cold weather of the Younger Dryas.

Philosopher Christine Korsgaard writes that “human beings seem psychologically damaged, in ways that suggest some deep break with nature”

Researchers working on evolutionary cognition suggest the campfire was the 'dawn of morality', the point of no return for the human species. One such argument rests on the transition from arboreal nests and beds to sleeping on the ground. Although this brought Homo erectus closer to the predators, it actually improved overall sleep quality.

In 1996 rumours were swirling around the Brazilian state of Rondônia - a wild man was living in the jungle, alone. Govt tribal officials went to investigate, eventually tracking him down.

The story of the Man-of-the-Hole: The Brazilian Amazon has long been under threat from illegal logging and mining, much of which is in conflict with the tribes who live on the land.

In 1981 a cargo ship, the MV Primrose, ran aground just off the coast of North Sentinel island. The crew, mostly Hong-Kongers, did not expect conflict - but they soon saw men arming themselves and their canoes on the nearest beach.

https://twitter.com/historyinmemes/status/1693080538838425917

The crew urgently requested an airdrop of firearms, feeling desperately vulnerable that the tribesmen would soon board their ship.

The news of a fortified Neolithic stilt village surrounded by 10,000 spiked planks on the edge of Lake Ohrid, Albania, is worth exploring in more detail.

For a start, the village has been dated to between 5800-6000 BC. This places it into the early Neolithic period, and the first example of such stilt lakeside architecture.

We know that the Neolithic pioneers emerged on the Greek coast around 6,800 BC...

https://twitter.com/hermahai/status/1643255730621894656?t=iLwzZGvxtsF7Y951B3PqMA&s=19

The connection between surnames and genetics is an interesting topic to read about.

Since surnames are typically inherited from the male line, they should link with particular paternal Y-haplogroups?

What else can they tell us? In 2006 a study was conducted in Britain, 150 random pairs of men sharing the same surname had their Y-haplogroup tested. The results showed that, on average, 24% of pairs share recent ancestry (a maximum of 20 generations)

The Evolution Of The Pointed Stick

A thread concerning humanity's greatest invention - a long stick with a sharp bit on the end. Sharp sticks are not unique to humans of course, the most rudimentary and ad hoc spears are made by chimps. See how the stick is used to skewer a bush baby.

What happens when you combine high quality genomic data from a Neolithic cemetery with individual dietary isotope results?

We're suddenly not guessing with grave goods anymore, we can see pedigrees, family trees, who moved from where, how they organised their families? Now we have age of death, sex ratios, mobility over a single lifetime, kinship networks, structure over time, inheritance and power.

Continuing on the theme of archaeological fakes and forgeries, here's just a flavour of what's going on out there: Repatriating artefacts is a hot topic atm, returning 'stolen' objects back to their countries of origin. It can get a little awkward when it turns out this precious national heritage is fake.