Newsdesk Archive
Read this article at New Scientist by clicking the link below
The following link to an article from the Independent presents the counter-argument to that expressed in the article posted on December 7 regarding the discovery of a Cuban Atlantis...
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A scholarly journal, Human Immunology, has tried to retract its publication of a genetics study which shows Palestinians and Jews to be virtually identical in terms of genetics.
The journal has asked any academics who have received the offending issue to tear out the article and throw it away.
Robin McKie, science editor at the Observer wrote:
"Such a drastic act of self-censorship is unprecedented in research publishing and has created widespread disquiet, generating fears that it may involve the suppression of scientific work that questions Biblical dogma."
Many right-wing Jews in Israel believe that they are children of God, whereas the Palestinians are children of the Devil. This latest paternity test shows they actually have the same father.
Read McKie's full article at the Observer by following the link below...
Click on the link below to read this at the New York Times website.
Click on the link below to read this article from the Xinhua News Agency
Read this review at Northern Light by clicking on the link below
Read this article at the Telegraph by clicking on the link below
Read this article at the National Geographic website by following the link below...
Read this article at the Lebanese Daily Star by following the link below...
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Read this article at BBC News Online by following the link below...
This article is about real wizards in ancient Northern Europe. You can read it at The Telegraph website by following the link below...
Read this articel at the New York Times by clicking on the link below.
Click on the link below to read this article at Alphagalileo.
This is a great article about the recent discovery of Meteoric Impact Crater in Iraq and its possible relationship to the obliteration of sophisticated societies around 2350BC. Read it at Yahoo! by following the link below...
Read this article at CNN.com by following the link below...
Read this article at TheScotsman.co.uk by following the link below...
Read this article at the Telegraph by clicking on the link below.
Click on the link below to read this at the BBC
Read this at the People's Daily by clicking on the link below
Read this article at Archaeology Today by clicking on the link below.
Click the link below to read this at the Guardian.
Read this wierd and fascinating article at EarthFiles.com by following the link below...
Read this article at the National Geographic website by following the link below...
Read this article at The China Daily by following the link below...
Read this article at Science Daily by following the link below...
Read this article at the Japan Times Online by clicking on the link below
Click on the link below to listen to this interview on the Archaeology Channel.
Click the link below to read this article at Ananova
Read this article at InScight by following the link below...
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi archaeologists in a new find have uncovered a temple dedicated to the goddess Ishtar at the ancient city of Babylon, 56 miles south of Baghdad, the weekly Tikrit newspaper reported Sunday.
"Cuneiform inscriptions on the 25 artifacts found at the temple indicate that the building dates back to the old Babylonian era, and to the reign of King Hammurabi (179-1750 BC) in particular," Tikrit quoted a source at the Antiquities and Heritage Department as saying.
Ishtar was the goddess of love in Babylonia and Assyria. Under various names, the cult of the mother goddess was universal in the ancient Near East.
Tikrit reported that excavation teams had also discovered a house with an open courtyard, a number of rooms and graves inside the house in the temple area. "Artifacts included a relief on a clay tablet of a woman breast-feeding her child, the first ever to be found," it quoted the source as saying.
The excavations also yielded a number of jars, clay tablets, seals used at that time, and toys. A well and two canals used to carry water to the temple and the houses and clay basins to collect water were uncovered.
Read this article at Independent.co.uk by following the link below...
Click on the link below to read this article at the Guardian website.
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Click on the link below to read this article at Kathimerini...
Read this fascinating article at BBC News Online by following the link below...
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To read this article at the New Scientist website, follow the link below...
Read this article at the Guardian website by following the link below...
From Egyptian State Information Service:
A survey was launched yesterday to discover and record submerged antiquities along the Mediterranean coast between Alexandria's Sidi Gabr and El-Shatby districts.
"This marine archaeological survey aims at confirming that the area is clear of antiquities so as to preserve the archaeological heritage of Alexandria's coast," said Ibrahim Darwish, head of the Submerged Antiquities Department.
The survey precedes plans to begin the fifth stage of expansion to Alexandria's Corniche road. The project has made considerable efforts to prevent damage to submerged antiquities lying just offshore.
Foreign marine archaeological teams are preparing for a new season, Darwish said. French, American, Italian and Greek missions will participate in excavations in Alexandria Governorate.
Read this new article in our forum section by clicking the link below...
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You can also read a critique of Spence's ideas by Robert Bauval in the Forum section of this website.
Read this article at The Times by following the link below...
Read this article at the Biblical Archaeology Website by following the link below...
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Well-known and controversial astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle has died at age 86.
Benny J Peiser, editor of CCNet, wrote these words about him:
"Sir Fred, who contributed to a number of issues and debates on CCNet, was known for his opposition to the Big Bang theory and his critical views on Darwinism. Moreover, the cometary resesarch by Fred Hoyle (and Chandra Wickramasinghe) have also been extremely instrumental in the development of astrobiology and scientific neo-catastrophism far back in the mid 70s. Fred's quintessentially British eccentricity and his courageous opposition to a number of mainstream paradigms will always remain an inspiration for people interested in science in general and researchers in particular. I hope that Fred's path-breaking influence on the development of cosmic catastrophism will be described and outlined ino greater detail at some time."
You can read more about Sir Fred at BBC News Online by following the link below...
The GHMB has now been de-regulated for longer than the intended trial period. The results have been generally positive, with increased popularity among a greater diversity of posters. In view of this, the de-regulation will continue indefinitely.
Following the link below will take you directly to the GHMB...
Read this article at the Times website by following the link below...
Read this article at the New York Times website by following the link below...
Read this at the New York Time website by following the link below.
Read this at Excite.co.uk by following the link below...
Read this articlea at MSNBC by following the link below...
Read this article at NOLA.com by following the link below...
The message below was posted to the GHMB to explain the decision to temporarily de-regulate.
--------------------
Author: Sharif
Date: 08-Aug-01 22:38-
In recent days there have been a number of allegations that views contrary to those of Hancock are blocked from the GHMB. All of these allegations of censorship came from people who frequent or have frequented this board.
These allegations are false. No messages have been modified or deleted that did not severely break the Code of Conduct outlined on the MB's intro page. In the last two months, as far as I can recall, only one post has been deleted and two or three have been edited (i.e. an offensive word or sentence was removed). In every case, the author of the effected post was sent an e-mail by me explaining my moderation. Edited messages had a message placed by me at the bottom warning that the message had been edited, and giving the reason.
Ironically, the fact that moderation has been minimal in recent months could be taken as evidence that moderation isn't necessary. I certainly don't like moderating - I wish that people could just moderate themselves, according to our Code of Conduct. Could this board survive without moderation?
Could it, for that matter, survive without registration? In contrast to the false accusations of censorship, some constructive comments have recently been made about possible negative results of our registration system. Basically, the suggestion is that the registration itself creates, for some people, a sense of exclusivity. The truth is that only a single individual has ever been refused an account. But when it comes to encouraging contributions from many people with different backgrounds and viewpoints, it is perception rather than truth that really matters.
History says the GHMB can't survive without moderation and registration, or at least one of the two. But on the other hand, tomorrow is always another day.
So, we're going to have an experiment. For seven days, there will be no need to register in order to post, and not a single message will be edited or deleted. Members may well be exposed to all kinds of nastiness. Alternatively, we might escape the attention of fools and instead get contributions from well-intentioned people who would not have otherwise joined in. Depending on how it goes, we will re-implement registration after 7 days, or let the experiment continue as long as it is successful.
I hope it goes well. All views on this experiment are welcome.
Regards,
Sharif Sakr
Moderator of the GHMB
--------------------
Follow the link below to be taken to the appropriate page at Amazon.co.uk
Publisher Comment
From Mark Booth at Random House, 25 May, 2001 [email protected] ,
Every once in a while there is a book that places a very large question mark against the accepted view of history. An example is Ignatius Donnelly's Atlantis, which was published in 1882, and inspired a whole new genre of book in the late Victorian era.
The equivalent book today is Graham Hancock's Fingerprints of the Gods. Since its publication in 1995, hundreds of writers have followed in Hancock's footsteps, but he has sold and continues to sell more than any of his followers, and on the 'alternative history' lecture circuit he remains the greatest draw.
There are several reasons for this, I believe. As a former Financial Times journalist, Hancock did not enter the subject area as a 'believer', and the text has all the excitement of discovery about it. The reader is drawn in to the theories in tandem with the author, who writes in such a way that the reader's mind races ahead, trying to get to all the connections before the author does - a are gift in narrative non-fiction. Quite difficult ideas are dealt with deftly and in a way which does not impede the narrative flow. And lastly there is the book's ambition, its boldness. Here is a complete history of everything in the world ever. Very few writers can pull this off, but when they do, they are usually rewarded with very large sales.
All this not only makes Fingerprints the biggest best-seller in the area, it also makes it the book that career academics hate the most. It is not that it espouses levitating blocks of granite or channelled agony aunt advice from an ancient Egyptian priestess or Atlantean black magic bringing on the floods, but in view of the howls of execration it provokes, it might as well do. Perhaps these academics' reasoning runs along similar lines to 'if smoke dope, you'll be on heroine next'?
My own interpretation is that the people who hate Hancock - as I say, mostly academics - are militant materialists who have a horror of the spiritual. They may say they are spiritual, but what they mean by that word is something like 'keen on finding moral and aesthetic values', such as having a feeling of wonder when they look at a night sky, which isn't what the word means at all. Now again, Fingerprints isn't a book that espouses spiritual values, at least not openly, but Hancock has since become something of a spiritual leader to his many followers.
The odd thing about these purportedly high-minded militant materialists is that they are prepared to resort to dishonesty in debate, so keen are they to stamp out the spiritual element. No doubt it's all for a higher good.
In December 2000 a BBC Horizon programme about Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval, author of another ground-breaking book in the area, The Orion Mystery and co-author with Graham of Keeper of Genesis, made them look bad. The programme was based largely on interviews with them which they felt had been edited in an unfair way. Their complaint to the Broadcasting Standards Commission was in part upheld, and when the documentary was re-shown, it was with changes, but not as many as the authors would have liked. This new edition contains the full transcripts of the tapes so that the reader can make up his/her mind, together with a new introduction which gives the state of play in the arguments for and against the antediluvian civilisation. It also contains 16 pages of beautiful new photographs by Graham's wife Santha.
Fingerprints of the Gods was the book which started the debate in our time, and this new edition also makes it the most up-to-date book on the vital issues.
Read this article at Al-Ahram Weekly Online by following the link below...
You can read this article at Egypt Revealed by following the link below.
Dr. Janis Jacobs, Vice President of Administration at Pennsylvania State University, sent the following letter to Robert Bauval:
---------------
Sent: Thursday, August 02, 2001 9:50 PM
Subject: Re: (no subject)
Dear Mr. Bauval:
Thank you for your email sharing your concerns about the promotion for the Egyptian Pyramids and The Sphinx conference on our Website. Your email has been referred to me.
You have not indicated if you have brought your concerns to the attention of the conference planner, Dr. Garrett Fagan. I will share your email with Dr. Fagan and Dr. Patricia Book, Associate Vice President of Outreach and Executive Director of Continuing Education, and will ask that they respond to you directly.
I can certainly understand your concern about the presentation of the information on the Website. I am sure that the conference organizers did not intend to minimize your contributions to the conference, and I am sure
that they will want to remedy the situation as soon as possible.
Thank you for writing to bring this to our attention.
Sincerely,
Janis E. Jacobs, Ph.D.
Vice President for Administration
----------------
This letter shows that the University administration were not prepared to support Prof. Garrett Fagan regarding the biased publicity.
They recognise the fact that the advertising of the conference as "science vs. pseudoscience" had the potential to "minimise the contributions" of the alternative panel. Apparently still unaware of the conference's abrupt cancellation, the University administration expected those responsible to "remedy the situation as soon as possible", presumably with a retraction and apology as Hancock and Bauval had asked.
Hancock has said that he is very pleased that Dr. Jacobs sent this letter to Bauval, particularly because it shows "genuine empathy" and confirms that he and Bauval were right to make a stand against the biased advertising.
The official reason for the cancellation given by conference planner Katie Earley was "low enrollments", even though there were still two months to go before the conference and enrollment was expected to pick up considerably when students returned to the university for the beginning of term. If the conference had not been cancelled "due to low enrollments", Jacobs's letter now makes it clear that Fagan would have been expected by his University to back down over the biased advertising, lest it prejudice the conference by minimising the contributions of the alternative contributors. Hancock remarked that the conference "would probably still be going ahead, in good will, if Garrett Fagan had had the courage to provide an unprejudiced forum for debate".
Robert Bauval has replied to Janis Jacobs, questioning her assumption that the organisers "did not intend" to minimise the contributions of the alternative panel. You can read his reply on the GHMB by following the link below...
The "Egyptian Pyramids and the Sphinx" conference, due to be held at Pennslyvania State University on September 29th, was cancelled today.
The reason given by Katies Earley, the conference planner, was "low enrollments".
Many will find this strange, since PSU previously suggested that they expected enrollments to pick up next month, when students returned for the beginning of term.
It has been suggested on the GHMB that, rather than due to low enrollments, the cancellation is due to a severe mistake made by PSU in their advertising literature. The official registration information suggested that high-school teachers should bring their kids to show of "science vs. psuedoscience". This raised suspicions that the debate was going to take place in a prejudiced climate. Members of the 'alternative' panel, including Hancock and Bauval, considered the comment unacceptable. They told PSU that they would only attend the conference if the offending comment was removed from the official literature and an appropriate public apology made. If PSU hadn't cancelled "due to low enrollment", they would have had to apologise for their mistake or allow it to ruin the conference.
A report in today's edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) is suggesting that Jomon people from Japan may have migrated to America 15,000 years ago.
Until very recently, the orthodox view has been that the first settlers came from mainland Asia, across the Bering Strait, only 11,200 years ago. Only a handful of academics have been brave enough to present evidence of a connection between the Jomon and cultures of South America. Betty Meggars, for example, presented strong evidence of Jomon pottery in Ecuador, but this evidence was never incorporated into the orthodox framework.
A Jomon presence in America provides possible answers to a lot of questions, even beyond those raised by Betty Meggars' pottery evidence. For example, might Kennewick Man display European-like features because he was Jomon rather than mainland Asian? (The Jomon, like their modern descendents, the Ainu, look more European than mainland Asians.)
This new evidence presented in PNAS is very relevant to our current project, Underworld. Flooding at the end of the last Ice Age, especially associated with a severe meltwater pulse around 14-15 thousand years ago, submerged a lot of resource-rich land in Japan and across the Sunda Shelf. If an advanced Jomon culture existed at this time, wouldn't it have been severely affected by this flooding? Wouldn't it's architecture have been submerged? Might these early Jomon have sailed away from Japan in search of refuge? Might they be the ancestors of early Meso- and South American settlers? Might the real origins of American civilisation actually lie submerged off the coast of Japan?
You can read an article summarising the PNAS article at the Washington Post by following the link below...
September 21st will see live debate between alternative researchers and orthodox academics at a Pennsylvania State University conference.
The conference has been organised by Garrett Fagan, an assistant professor of classics and ancient history at Penn State and a fierce critic of the ideas and approaches of Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval. Fagan has chosen Bernard P. Fishman to moderate the debate. Fishman is the Executive Director of the Lehigh County Historical Society.
There will be two panels. On one side will be researchers with unorthodox theories: Robert Bauval, Robert Schoch, John Anthony West, and Graham Hancock (speaking in that order). On the other side will be defenders of the orthodox theories: Ed Krupp, Clair Ossian, Don Redford and Garrett Fagan (speaking in that order). These people will be paired in order to discuss one theory at a time: the Orion Correlation Theory (Bauval vs. Krupp); geological evidence for the age of the Sphinx (Schoch vs. Ossian); symbolist Egypt (West vs. Redford); the Lost Civilisation hypothesis (Hancock vs. Fagan).
Participants on the 'alternative' panel have voiced suspicions that the debate will be prejudiced by its organiser Garrett Fagan (see newsflash "Bauval voices suspicion about Penn State Conference"). Indeed, the conference is being officially advertisted as "science vs. psuedoscience", suggesting that the alternative researchers will be forced to defend their integrity as well as their theories.
More details about the conference, including registration information, can be found at the official website by clicking the link below...
Robert Bauval has posted a message on this website's Message Board expressing his feelings about the upcoming debate between alternative and orthodox researchers at Pennsylvania State University.
In his post, Bauval distinguishes between 'debate' and 'debunking' as different mentalities in the criticism of new theories and ideas. He recounts experiences with two self-proclaimed 'debunking' groups, CSICOP and the IAB Debunking Website, which Bauval says show extreme prejudice in their attacks on unorthodox ideas. Bauval expresses concern that due to affiliations of certain PSU debate participants with these debunking groups, their prejudice might contaminate the PSU conference. Bauval says he will tackle head-on issues relating to the 'debunking' mentality when he speaks at the conference.
You can read and reply to Bauval's post by clicking the link below. (First-time posters will need to register before they can post.)
Everyone is encouraged to use the MB to discuss the PSU conference and its objectives.
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