This is a horrifying story, but....


... it is also a fascinating example of what it means to live in an "honor/shame" society.

//An unelected all-male village council in India also ordered that 23-year-old Meenakshi Kumari and her 15-year-old sister are paraded naked with blackened faces.

The horrific order was revealed by Amnesty International which said the sisters and their family have fled their village in the Baghpat district, just outside of Delhi.

According to news site Zee Media, the sisters' brother Ravi fell in love with a girl from the Jat caste, a higher social caste than Ravi and his family, who are Dalit, once known as the 'untouchables', who are at the bottom of India's caste system.

The Jat woman's family married her off to someone else in February but she later escaped and eloped with Ravi in March.

As punishment, on July 31 a village council decided Ravi's sisters should be raped to avenge his actions.

Since the family fled their village their home has been ransacked.

Sumit Kumar, another brother of Meenakshi, told Amnesty that members of the Jat caste were powerful members of the village council, saying: "The Jat decision is final."//

In an honor/shame society, there is only so much honor to go around.  The Jat society feels it has been dishonored by marriage of one of its women to a lower caste man.  Since it has been dishonored as a community, the answer to this communal dishonor - to regain honor - is to dishonor the Dalit community by raping the Dalit women.

I just finished listening to an audiobook that discusses how the Bible reflects the understanding of an "honor/shame" society, rather than a guilt/innocence culture like our own. In that society, Jesus had to die because he had been dishonoring the pharisaic leadership.

Of course, individuals are the casualty in this culture, but in traditional societies, individuals are simply a subordinate part of the community.

The power of a metaphor is directly proportional to its ability to be turned into a science fiction film.

Io9 offers this up in explaining the divergence and evolution and re-union of the various subspecies of humanity circa 100,000 years ago:

As early as 700,000 years ago, a group of humans left Africa and spread out across Europe and Central Asia. These people became Neanderthals and Denisovans, and the people they left behind in Africa became modern Homo sapiens. These groups were not different species, but rather different human groups who were separated from each other for hundreds of thousands of years. When modern Homo sapiens came trooping out of Africa about 100 to 80 thousand years ago, they would have looked very different from their Neanderthal and Denisovan cousins. Neanderthals were short and barrel chested, pale-skinned with large jaws and sloping foreheads. Denisovans, who lived exclusively in Asia, may have been darker skinned but we don't have enough fossil evidence to say for sure what their bodies would have looked like.

What is certain is that when the dark-skinned, tall Homo sapiens met the Neanderthals, it was probably like two alien groups meeting on Star Trek. By that I mean one group had head lumps in slightly different places than the other — but both were both humanoids, capable of bearing children together.

OK, now that makes sense.

American Indians arrived to find North America already inhabited.

Or at least that is the theory being forwarded based on new DNA research:

The so-called "Clovis First" theory had until 2008 been accepted as unquestioned truth among archaeologists, who considered that the Clovis people - so called from 13,000 year old archaeological finds near the village of Clovis in New Mexico - were the true native Americans. When the still more ancient 14,000-year-old excrement was found at the Paisley caves, it was pointed out by disgruntled boffins that no stone tools or other evidence of the type seen at Clovis had been found, and that the DNA poo evidence could have been erroneous.

Dr Dennis Jenkins of Copenhagen uni was having none of that, however, and he continued to poke about in the caves. Now he and his team are back, this time packing stone artifacts including "Western stemmed" stone projectiles and new, more comprehensive DNA dating.

According to a Copenhagen uni statement:

The new study refutes every one of the critics’ arguments and uses overwhelming archaeological, stratigraphic, DNA and radiocarbon evidence to conclusively state that humans — and ones totally unrelated to Clovis peoples — were present at Paisley Caves over a millennium before Clovis.

"During our excavations in the Paisley Caves we’ve found a completely different type of dart points," enthuses Jenkins.

"These new points are of a completely different construction from those found in the Clovis culture. As our radiocarbon dating shows, the new finds are as old, or possibly older than the Clovis finds, this proves that the Clovis culture cannot have been the 'Mother technology' for all other technologies in America. Our results show, that America was colonized by multiple cultures at the same time. And some perhaps even earlier than Clovis."

"Humans were present in North America at least one thousand years before Clovis and these earlier peoples probably had no technological or genetic similarity to the iconic Clovis Culture," adds the prof's colleague Thomas Stafford. "The Clovis First debate has ended. The theory is now dead and buried."

WTF? History.

According to this Cracked piece - and they are usually pretty accurate in posting humorous stories of the weird - ancient Egyptian mummies tested positive for tobacco and cocaine - which are both found only in the Americas.

Weird, if true.

Here is an academic paper on the subject, which seems to debunk efforts to debunk the finding.

The scientific consensus seems to be "what a weird finding...oh, look, squirrels!" According to Straight Dope, the finding has been dismissed out of hand as too outre but not disproven:

There the matter rests. According to Emily Teeter, an Egyptologist at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, the Germans' work has been dismissed by mainstream archaeologists. No discussion of it is to be found in recent surveys of the field. Theories about transoceanic trade in ancient times are considered too outré to warrant serious consideration. To defenders of Balabanova, Parsche, and company, this suggests a pigheaded refusal to reexamine entrenched beliefs. I disagree. If the Germans aren't being taken seriously, it's largely their own fault.

Goshwow Science.

Scientists discover evidence that human ancestors used fire 1 million years ago - 300,000 years earlier than previously believed.

Not your father's cave man.

This guy is either gobsmackin' nuts or he's the only guy who knows the truth about what Neanderthals really looked like.



Whatever the answer, it makes for a fun science fiction plot-line.

Here's his web site.

All religions are the same, but Eastern religions are better because they are about "spirituality."

Indian girl, 7, murdered and sacrificed for better harvest.

A girl of seven in India was murdered and had her liver cut in a ritual sacrifice to ensure a better harvest.

Two men, both poor farmers, have now been arrested in central India for allegedly carrying out the killing, police said today.

Lalita Tati disappeared in October and her dismembered remains were found a week later, said Rajendra Narayan Das, a senior police officer in the Bijapur district of Chhattisgarh state.

The state is the tenth largest in the country and beliefs in traditional healers runs deep.

Police arrested the men last week and they told officers they killed the girl to appease their gods and get a better harvest.

Tati was walking home after watching TV at a neighbour's house when she was kidnapped, Das said.

The two men confessed to cutting her open and removing her liver as an offering.

Das said the police had gathered enough evidence, apart from the confessions, to charge the two with murder.

They would face life in prison or even the death sentence if convicted.
The men were described as 'tribals', a term referring to the region's indigenous people, most of whom remain mired in poverty and illiteracy.

And this:

In December of last year seven people were imprisoned in the state of Maharashtra for the human sacrifice of two children aged seven and three. While two years ago in West Bengal the head and torso of a man was found in a temple to the goddess Kali.

Yikes.

Sometimes the scientific consensus is just wrong.

Apparently the theory that human immigrated into the Americans much earlier than previously believed is gaining traction.  This story indicates that a 1977 find of a mammoth bone with a projectile point lodged in actually does indicate that humans were in Washington state 800 years before the commonly accepted time frame:

It’s not unusual for an archaeologist to get stuck in the past, but Carl Gustafson may be the only one consumed by events on the Olympic Peninsula in 1977.


That summer, while sifting through earth in Sequim, the young Gustafson uncovered something extraordinary _ a mastodon bone with a shaft jammed in it. This appeared to be a weapon that had been thrust into the beast’s ribs, a sign that humans had been around and hunting far earlier than anyone suspected.

Unfortunately for Gustafson, few scientists agreed. He was challenging orthodoxy with less-than-perfect evidence. For almost 35 years, his find was ridiculed or ignored, the site dismissed as curious but not significant. But earlier this month, a team that re-examined his discovery using new technology concluded in the prestigious journal Science that Gustafson had been right all along.

The pierced bone was clear evidence that human beings were hunting large mammals in North America 13,800 years ago _ about 800 years before the so-called Clovis people were thought to have migrated across the Bering land bridge from Asia.

The announcement came as sweet vindication for the now-retired Washington State University professor.

“I was pretty bitter about the whole thing for a long time,” Gustafson, 75, recalled last week. “I don’t like saying it. I never really admitted it except to my wife. It was so frustrating. But I’m very humbled and happy it turned out this way.”

This find seems to push the human arrival into North America back several thousand years earlier than the standard model and may indicate that humans were responsible for the extinction of American mega-fauna.

The Circle of Life.

Tribes in Ancient Mexico are confirmed as having been cannibals:

It was only the Xiximes and the like-minded Acaxées who are said to have been cannibals, though no archaeological evidence for the practice has been found for the Acaxées, said Punzo, of the Durango office of the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).


"Through their rituals, cannibalism, and bone hoarding, they marked a clear boundary between an 'us' and 'them,'" Punzo said—"us" being the Acaxées and Xiximes, and "them" being everybody else.

The two groups fought and killed members of other groups, he said. But the Acaxées and Xiximes ate only their own kind, specifically men. Other native groups and Spanish colonizers were apparently ritually worthless, according to historical studies.

The sentence - "The two groups fought and killed members of other groups, he said. But the Acaxées and Xiximes ate only their own kind, specifically men" - is hopelessly tangled.  Did the Acaxees only eat Acaxees and the Xiximes only Xixemes? That seems odd, and a reason to defect to the other tribe.  Or is that Acaxees only ate Xiximes and vice versa, but the that the two groups are of one "kind" in the mind of the writer.  And how does "specifically men" fit into this formula?  Is "specifically men" a "kind"?

Pagan Parallels.

This is a good site for debunking the tired wheeze that the life of Christ is reconstructed pagan myths.

Wow! Science.

Human civilization may have emerged 11,000 years ago - or approximately six thousand years before Egypt and Sumeria.

There is a site in southeastern Turkey called Gobekli Tepe that has many intricately carved stone pillars which have been dated, according to Smithsonian magazine, to 11,000 years ago:

Six miles from Urfa, an ancient city in southeastern Turkey, Klaus Schmidt has made one of the most startling archaeological discoveries of our time: massive carved stones about 11,000 years old, crafted and arranged by prehistoric people who had not yet developed metal tools or even pottery. The megaliths predate Stonehenge by some 6,000 years. The place is called Gobekli Tepe, and Schmidt, a German archaeologist who has been working here more than a decade, is convinced it's the site of the world's oldest temple.

Guten Morgen," he says at 5:20 a.m. when his van picks me up at my hotel in Urfa. Thirty minutes later, the van reaches the foot of a grassy hill and parks next to strands of barbed wire. We follow a knot of workmen up the hill to rectangular pits shaded by a corrugated steel roof—the main excavation site. In the pits, standing stones, or pillars, are arranged in circles. Beyond, on the hillside, are four other rings of partially excavated pillars. Each ring has a roughly similar layout: in the center are two large stone T-shaped pillars encircled by slightly smaller stones facing inward. The tallest pillars tower 16 feet and, Schmidt says, weigh between seven and ten tons. As we walk among them, I see that some are blank, while others are elaborately carved: foxes, lions, scorpions and vultures abound, twisting and crawling on the pillars' broad sides.


Schmidt points to the great stone rings, one of them 65 feet across. "This is the first human-built holy place," he says.

Interesting.  I'm not sure about the dating methodology, though:

Schmidt returned a year later with five colleagues and they uncovered the first megaliths, a few buried so close to the surface they were scarred by plows. As the archaeologists dug deeper, they unearthed pillars arranged in circles. Schmidt's team, however, found none of the telltale signs of a settlement: no cooking hearths, houses or trash pits, and none of the clay fertility figurines that litter nearby sites of about the same age. The archaeologists did find evidence of tool use, including stone hammers and blades. And because those artifacts closely resemble others from nearby sites previously carbon-dated to about 9000 B.C., Schmidt and co-workers estimate that Gobekli Tepe's stone structures are the same age. Limited carbon dating undertaken by Schmidt at the site confirms this assessment.

Gobekli Tepe may require a re-thinking of the origins of civilization:

To Schmidt and others, these new findings suggest a novel theory of civilization. Scholars have long believed that only after people learned to farm and live in settled communities did they have the time, organization and resources to construct temples and support complicated social structures. But Schmidt argues it was the other way around: the extensive, coordinated effort to build the monoliths literally laid the groundwork for the development of complex societies.


The immensity of the undertaking at Gobekli Tepe reinforces that view. Schmidt says the monuments could not have been built by ragged bands of hunter-gatherers. To carve, erect and bury rings of seven-ton stone pillars would have required hundreds of workers, all needing to be fed and housed. Hence the eventual emergence of settled communities in the area around 10,000 years ago. "This shows sociocultural changes come first, agriculture comes later," says Stanford University archaeologist Ian Hodder, who excavated Catalhoyuk, a prehistoric settlement 300 miles from Gobekli Tepe. "You can make a good case this area is the real origin of complex Neolithic societies."

I thought that the Gobekli Tepe story might be a nonsense story fabricated by loons, but it seems authentic enough to interest some fairly legitimate mainstream media sources, such as the National Geographic magazine.

Puzzle piled upon puzzle as the excavation continued. For reasons yet unknown, the rings at Göbekli Tepe seem to have regularly lost their power, or at least their charm. Every few decades people buried the pillars and put up new stones—a second, smaller ring, inside the first. Sometimes, later, they installed a third. Then the whole assemblage would be filled in with debris, and an entirely new circle created nearby. The site may have been built, filled in, and built again for centuries.


Bewilderingly, the people at Göbekli Tepe got steadily worse at temple building. The earliest rings are the biggest and most sophisticated, technically and artistically. As time went by, the pillars became smaller, simpler, and were mounted with less and less care. Finally the effort seems to have petered out altogether by 8200 B.C. Göbekli Tepe was all fall and no rise

The National Geographic article also has an interesting observation about why we should be careful when a scientific theory that just fits so nicely into the politically correct theory of the scientists' own culture:

The idea that the Neolithic Revolution was driven by climate change resonated during the 1990s, a time when people were increasingly worried about the effects of modern global warming. It was promoted in countless articles and books and ultimately enshrined in Wikipedia. Yet critics charged that the evidence was weak, not least because Abu Hureyra, Mureybet, and many other sites in northern Syria had been flooded by dams before they could be fully excavated. "You had an entire theory on the origins of human culture essentially based on a half a dozen unusually plump seeds," ancient-grain specialist George Willcox of the National Center for Scientific Research, in France, says. "Isn't it more likely that these grains were puffed during charring or that somebody at Abu Hureyra found some unusual-looking wild rye?"


As the dispute over the Natufians sharpened, Schmidt was carefully working at Göbekli Tepe. And what he was finding would, once again, force many researchers to reassess their ideas.

Anthropologists have assumed that organized religion began as a way of salving the tensions that inevitably arose when hunter-gatherers settled down, became farmers, and developed large societies. Compared to a nomadic band, the society of a village had longer term, more complex aims—storing grain and maintaining permanent homes. Villages would be more likely to accomplish those aims if their members were committed to the collective enterprise. Though primitive religious practices—burying the dead, creating cave art and figurines—had emerged tens of thousands of years earlier, organized religion arose, in this view, only when a common vision of a celestial order was needed to bind together these big, new, fragile groups of humankind. It could also have helped justify the social hierarchy that emerged in a more complex society: Those who rose to power were seen as having a special connection with the gods. Communities of the faithful, united in a common view of the world and their place in it, were more cohesive than ordinary clumps of quarreling people.

Göbekli Tepe, to Schmidt's way of thinking, suggests a reversal of that scenario: The construction of a massive temple by a group of foragers is evidence that organized religion could have come before the rise of agriculture and other aspects of civilization. It suggests that the human impulse to gather for sacred rituals arose as humans shifted from seeing themselves as part of the natural world to seeking mastery over it. When foragers began settling down in villages, they unavoidably created a divide between the human realm—a fixed huddle of homes with hundreds of inhabitants—and the dangerous land beyond the campfire, populated by lethal beasts.

Interesting.

More Wow! Science.

Giant Storks may have preyed on "hobbit" humans.  

The fossil remains of what may have been a hobbit-like species of human were discovered in 2003 at the Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores. In that cave, scientists also unearthed a large number of bird fossils — including 20,000- to 50,000-year-old wing and leg bones from what appears to have been a stork nearly 6 feet tall (1.8 meters).


"From the size of its bones, we initially were expecting a giant raptor, which are commonly found on islands, not a stork," said Hanneke Meijer, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

Weird.

More "Gosh, Wow!" Science News.

Early Europeans unwarmed by fire.

So much for the "Out of Africa" Theory.

Homo Erectus may have evolved outside of Africa.

Archaeologists have long thought that Homo erectus, humanity's first ancestor to spread around the world, evolved in Africa before dispersing throughout Europe and Asia. But evidence of tool-making at the border of Europe and Asia is challenging that assumption.

Untouchables outside of India.

In Japan, the untouchable class was - and to some extent still is - the Buraku.

The burakumin are descendants of outcast communities of the feudal era, which mainly comprised those with occupations considered "tainted" with death or ritual impurity (such as executioners, undertakers, workers in slaughterhouses, butchers or tanners), and traditionally lived in their own secluded hamlets and ghettos.


They were legally liberated in 1871 with the abolition of the feudal caste system. However, this did not put a stop to social discrimination and their lower living standards, because Japanese family registration (Koseki) was fixed to ancestral home address until recently, which allowed people to deduce their Burakumin membership. The Burakumin were one of the several groups discriminated against within Japanese society.

The Buraku information linked to what was supposedly an indigenous European untouchable commuity, the Cagot.

As Marie-Pierre avers, the truth about the Cagots is obscure. The people first emerge in documents around the 13th century. By then they are already regarded as an inferior caste, the "untouchables" of western France, or northern Spain. In medieval times the Cagots – also knows as Agotes, Gahets, Capets, Caqueux, etc – were divided from the general peasantry in several ways. They had their own urban districts: usually on the malarial side of the river. These dismal ghettoes were known as Cagoteries; traces of them can still be found in Pyrenean communities such as Campan or Hagetmau.


For hundreds of years, Cagots were treated as different and inferior. In the churches, they had to use their own doors (at least 60 Pyrenean churches still boast "Cagot" entrances); they had their own fonts; and they were given communion on the end of long wooden spoons. Marie-Pierre adds: "When a Cagot came into a town, they had to report their presence by shaking a rattle. Just like a leper, ringing his bell."

Daily Cagot life was likewise marked by apartheid. Cagots were forbidden to enter most trades or professions. They were forced, in effect, to be the drawers of water and hewers of wood. So they made barrels for wine and coffins for the dead. They also became expert carpenters: ironically they built many of the Pyrenean churches from which they were partly excluded.

I am dubious about the story of the Cagot.  It seems that it might be an anachronistic invention by someone seeking victim status.  It also seems to run counter to the ethos of Christian teaching which didn't view occupations, food, occupations or religions in terms of "clean" and "unclean."  Certainly, there was prejudice and discrimination against Jews, but that was based on religion, and Jews who converted were not viewed as carrying a taint of "uncleaniness," as is the case with untouchability.

Likewise, the prejudice against Gypsies arises literally from their not being part of the host culture.  Untouchables are indistinguishable from the host culture in terms of genetics, culture, language or religion.  Consider the Buraku, for example, who are identified only by the fact that their ancestors lived in Buraku communities.

If the story about the Cagot is true, it is an interesting anthropological insight into human nature.

Flores "Hobbits" were distinct species.

Scientists claim to have ruled out the idea that their small size was due to an iodine deficiency.

A person can be arrogant or a person can be stupid, but a person should never be both at the same time.

A Stanford study on personality offers insight to the phenomenon of "internet trolls."

In the study students were asked to offer their opinion on drinking.  The study observed that people with extreme pro-drinking positions were quickest and loudest in offering their opinion, until they were shown that they were in the minority.  The author observed:

It is only when they have this sense that they are in the majority that extremely pro-alcohol students are more willing to express their views on the issue.

And:

You have a cycle that feeds on itself: the more you hear these extremists expressing their opinions, the more you are going to believe that those extreme beliefs are normal for your community.

Which certainly explains the phenomenon of the obnoxious internet atheist/Calvinist/etc.

The Return of the Witch.

This story reports on the beating and abuse in India of five Muslim widwos for allegedly being witches:

"On Sunday morning the victims were taken to a playground where hundreds had assembled to watch the ghastly incident," deputy inspector general of police Murari Lal Meena told the BBC.


"No one in the mob came forward to rescue the victims as they were being stripped and beaten up," he said.

The victims are now under police protection.

Police say that people in Pattharghatia believe that certain women in their village are possessed by a "holy spirit" that can identify those who practise witchcraft.

"These women recently identified five women from the same village as being witches who practised witchcraft and brought miseries to the area," a police official said.

Soon, an unruly mob broke into their huts, dragged them out and started beating them up.

***********

Hundreds of people, mostly women, have been killed in India because their neighbours thought they were witches.

Experts say superstitious beliefs are behind some of these attacks, but there are occasions when people - especially widows - are targeted for their land and property.

An interesting feature of the video is that the beating and stripping being shown in the video - which must have been but a small part of the women's ordeal - is being done by a woman.  That would suggest that narratives about the concept of witchcraft being used as an excuse to engage in the systemmatic suppression of women or woman spirituality are probably nonsense; the better explanation remains human nature, such as greed, jealousy or good old fashioned malice.

Infanticide

Philip Blosser has a fascinating post on the history of infanticide, particularly as it pertains to the Japanese custom of Kokeshi dolls.

In our enlightened time we tend to forget how prevalent infanticide has been as a human institution. Although the tradition of infanticide was condemned and driven into the dark by Christianity in Christian cultures, it is a temptation that has always remained. As I recall, the anthropologist Marvin Harris demonstrated in one of his books that in Nineteenth Century America cases of "overlaying" - where a mother would "accidentally" roll over her child while sleeping and thereby smother the child - were in the same sex selection ratio as that of farmers who culled cow herds based on sex.

Homo Sapiens: an Endangered Species

70,000 years ago, the human species numbered as few as 2,000 members.

It is mind-blowing to think that the human species had a smaller population than my high school.

I don't think that this is a new finding. It sounds like this finding relates to the "Toba Bottleneck" that occured - according to scientists - when Mt. Toba erupted 70,000 to 75,000 years ago, causing a kind of "nuclear winter" that nearly exterminated humanity.

Science is so cool.