Wikipedia and a few other Googles

The Sentinelese (also Sentineli, Senteneli, Sentenelese, North Sentinel Islanders) are one of the Andamanese indigenous peoples and one of the most uncontacted peoples of the Andaman Islands, located in India in the Bay of Bengal. They inhabit North Sentinel Island which lies westward off the southern tip of the Great Andaman archipelago. They are noted for vigorously resisting attempts at contact by outsiders. The Sentinelese maintain an essentially hunter-gatherer society subsisting through hunting, fishing, and collecting wild plants; there is no evidence of either agricultural practices or methods of producing fire. Their language remains unclassified.

 

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The present population of the Sentinelese is not known with any great degree of accuracy. Estimates have been produced ranging from lower than 40, through a median of around 250, and up to a maximum of 500. In the year 2001, the Census of India officials recorded 39 individuals (21 males and 18 females); however, out of necessity this survey was conducted from a distance and almost certainly does not represent an accurate figure for the population who range over the 72 km² (17,800 acres) island. Any medium- or long-term impact on the Sentinelese population arising from the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and resulting tsunami remains unknown, other than the confirmation obtained that they had survived the immediate aftermath.

On previous visits, groups of some 20–40 individuals were encountered regularly. Habitations of 40–60 individuals were found on two occasions. As some individuals are almost certainly hiding, a better approximation of group size cannot be determined. This would suggest that some 2–6 groups occupy the island. The rule of thumb population density of 1.5 km² (370 acres)/individuals in comparable hunter-gatherer societies indicates that one such group could live off the land alone. A significant amount of food is derived from the sea. It seems that the groups encountered, at any one time, could only have come from a rather small part of the island. There appear to be slightly more males than females. At any given time, about half of the couples seemed to have dependent children or the women were pregnant.

North Sentinel Island

The Sentinelese and other indigenous Andamanese peoples are frequently described as negritos, a term which has been applied to various widely separated peoples in Southeast Asia, such as the Semang of the Malay archipelago and the Aeta of the Philippines, as well as to other peoples as far afield as Australia (notably former populations of Tasmania). The defining characteristics of these “negrito” peoples (who are not a monophyletic group) include a comparatively short stature, dark skin and “peppercorn” hair, qualities also found commonly across the continent of Africa. No close contacts have been established, but the author Heinrich Harrer described one man as being 1.6 m (5′ 4″) tall and apparently left handed.

Negrito people of the Andaman Islands

From 1967 onwards, the Indian authorities in Port Blair embarked on a limited programme of attempts at contacting the Sentinelese, under the management of the Director of Tribal Welfare and anthropologist T. N. Pandit. These “Contact Expeditions” consisted of a series of planned visits which would progressively leave “gifts”, such as coconuts, on the shores, in an attempt to coax the Sentinelese from their hostile reception of outsiders. For a while, these seemed to have some limited success; however, the programme was discontinued in the late 1990s following a series of hostile encounters resulting in several deaths.

In 2006, Sentinelese archers killed two fishermen who were fishing illegally within range of the island. The archers later drove off, with a hail of arrows, the helicopter that was sent to retrieve the bodies.  To this date, the bodies remain unrecovered, although the downdraught from the helicopter’s rotors at the time exposed the two fishermen’s corpses, which had been buried in shallow graves by the Sentinelese.

On 2 August 1981, the ship Primrose grounded on the North Sentinel Island reef. A few days later, crewmen on the immobile vessel observed that small black men were carrying spears and arrows and building boats on the beach. The captain of the Primrose radioed for an urgent airdrop of firearms so the crew could defend themselves, but did not receive them. Heavy seas kept the islanders away from the ship. After a week, the crew were rescued by a helicopter working under contract to the Indian Oil And Natural Gas Commission (ONGC).

The Sentinelese apparently survived the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and its after-effects, including the tsunami and the uplifting of the island. Three days after the event, an Indian government helicopter observed several of them, who shot arrows and threw stones at the hovering aircraft with the apparent intent of repelling it. Although the fishing grounds of the Sentinelese were disturbed, they appear to have adapted to the island’s current conditions.

In the spring of 1974, a National Geographic film crew came to the island, in what was one of the most unsuccessful expeditions made on the island. North Sentinel was visited by a team of anthropologists filming a documentary, Man in Search of Man. The team was accompanied by armed police officers and a National Geographic photographer. When the motorized boat broke through the barrier reefs, locals emerged from the jungle. The Sentinelese responded with a curtain of arrows. The boat landed at a point on the coast out of range of the arrows and the police (dressed in jackets with padded armour) landed and left gifts in the sand: a miniature plastic car, some coconuts, a live pig tied, a doll, and aluminium cookware. The policemen returned to the boat and waited to see the locals’ reaction to the gifts. The reaction was to launch another round of arrows, one of which struck the documentary’s director in the left thigh. The man who wounded the director withdrew and laughed proudly, sitting in the shade while others speared, then buried, the pig and the doll. Afterwards, everyone left, taking with them only the coconuts and aluminium cookware.

In the early 1990s, the Sentinelese began allowing the boats to come closer to the shore, and sometimes greeted them unarmed. However, after a few minutes, the Sentinelese would warn them off by making menacing gestures and firing arrows without arrowheads. In 1996, the Indian government ended the “Contact Expeditions” following a series of hostile encounters resulting in several deaths in a similar programme practised with the Jarawa people of South and Middle Andaman Islands and because of the danger of introducing diseases.

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Their island is legally a part of, and administered by, the Indian Union Territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands. In practice, however, the Sentinelese exercise complete autonomy over their affairs and the involvement of the Indian authorities is restricted to occasional monitoring, even more infrequent and brief visits, and generally discouraging any access or approaches to the island. The possibility of future contact, whether violent or non-violent (armed/unarmed) has been discussed by various organizations and nations.

Updated April 10, 2016

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Amazing that in 2013 there is still a tribe that has had virtually no contact with the outside world.  To resist contact in such a vigilant way.  Reminds me of the scene from Mutiny On The Bounty with Anthony Hopkins.

 

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See also: https://markosun.wordpress.com/2014/04/23/ancient-and-isolated-tribes-and-ethnic-groups-of-the-world/

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George W. Bush was the worst President the United States ever had. Plain stupid.  How he got elected to two terms is a complete mystery. Maybe the country was paranoid after 9/11 and didn’t think about leadership.

Cutting to the chase, Jeb Bush, Doubya’s older and taller brother who is running for the president, has brought Doubya into the race as his support mechanism. Doubya is a rotten stupid moron that killed 4,500 American soldiers and 80,000 Iraqis in his quest to make America safe.  But he invaded the wrong fricken country!

He invaded Iraq, which he thought was behind the attempt on his Daddies life. Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11.  19 of the 20 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. But George liked Saudi Arabia.

This is what George Doubya left as his legacy: he left office in 2008, the economy was in complete shambles, he had 2 foreign wars going full-time and he enjoyed disco music.

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A chronology of human evolution

BBC

Homo naledi has a mixture of primitive and more modern features

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Scientists have discovered a new human-like species in a burial chamber deep in a cave system in South Africa.  The discovery of 15 partial skeletons is the largest single discovery of its type in Africa.

The researchers claim that the discovery will change ideas about our human ancestors. The studies which have been published in the journal Elife also indicate that these individuals were capable of ritual behaviour.

The species, which has been named naledi, has been classified in the grouping, or genus, Homo, to which modern humans belong.

The researchers who made the find have not been able to find out how long ago these creatures lived – but the scientist who led the team, Prof Lee Berger, told BBC News that he believed they could be among the first of our kind (genus Homo) and could have lived in Africa up to three million years ago.

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Naledi may have looked like this

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Like all those working in the field, he is at pains to avoid the term “missing link”. Prof Berger says naledi could be thought of as a “bridge” between more primitive bipedal primates and humans.

“We’d gone in with the idea of recovering one fossil. That turned into multiple fossils. That turned into the discovery of multiple skeletons and multiple individuals.

“And so by the end of that remarkable 21-day experience, we had discovered the largest assemblage of fossil human relatives ever discovered in the history of the continent of Africa. That was an extraordinary experience.”

Prof Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum said naledi was “a very important discovery”.

“What we are seeing is more and more species of creatures that suggests that nature was experimenting with how to evolve humans, thus giving rise to several different types of human-like creatures originating in parallel in different parts of Africa. Only one line eventually survived to give rise to us,” he told BBC News.

I went to see the bones which are kept in a secure room at Witwatersrand University. The door to the room looks like one that would seal a bank vault. As Prof Berger turned the large lever on the door, he told me that our knowledge of very early humans is based on partial skeletons and the occasional skull.

The haul of 15 partial skeletons includes both males and females of varying ages – from infants to elderly. The discovery is unprecedented in Africa and will shed more light on how the first humans evolved.

“We are going to know everything about this species,” Prof Berger told me as we walked over to the remains of H. naledi.

“We are going to know when its children were weaned, when they were born, how they developed, the speed at which they developed, the difference between males and females at every developmental stage from infancy, to childhood to teens to how they aged and how they died.”

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Ardipithecus ramidus (4.4 million years ago) : Fossils were discovered in Ethiopia in the 1990s. Pelvis shows adaptations to both tree climbing and upright walking.

Australopithecus afarensis (3.9 – 2.9 million years ago) : The famous “Lucy” skeleton belongs to this species of human relative. So far, fossils of this species have only been found in East Africa. Several traits in the skeleton suggest afarensis walked upright, but they may have spent some time in the trees.

Homo habilis (2.8 – 1.5 million years ago) : This human relative had a slightly larger braincase and smaller teeth than the australopithecines or older species, but retains many more primitive features such as long arms.

Homo naledi (Of unknown age, but researchers say it could be as old as three million years) : The new discovery has small, modern-looking teeth, human-like feet but more primitive fingers and a small braincase.

Homo erectus (1.9 million years – unknown) : Homo erectus had a modern body plan that was almost indistinguishable from ours. But it had a smaller brain than a modern person’s combined with a more primitive face.

Homo neanderthalensis (200,000 years – 40,000 years) The Neanderthals were a side-group to modern humans, inhabiting western Eurasia before our species left Africa. They were shorter and more muscular than modern people but had slightly larger brains.

Homo sapiens (200,000 years – present) Modern humans evolved in Africa from a predecessor species known as Homo heidelbergensis. A small group of Homo sapiens left Africa 60,000 years ago and settled the rest of the world, replacing the other human species they encountered (with a small amount of interbreeding).

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Another species discovered decades ago: the Redneck homo mullet apian.

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North Korean Sun-Times

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U.S. Diplomatic Delegation in Germany 2014, 3 757’s and 2 737’s

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Dangerous Minds

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The Phynx (pronounced like “The Finks,” as in stool pigeons) is a mind-bending 1970 comedy about a Monkees-like prefab rock group, who are also trained as spies. The Phynx are sent undercover to communist Albania in order to spring political prisoners who you might mistake for aging showbiz folks found in a Hollywood unemployment line of the era. It’s a jaw-dropping, eye-popping camp spectacle as you watch one paycheck collecting Hollywood has-been after another shuffle before you in an unfunny film that can probably only be compared to or categorized alongside of Otto Preminger’s Skidoo, with its star-studded cast and general “counter culture as seen by Hollywood” tone.

The Phynx plays like a substandard (but big budget) Get Smart episode meets (a low budget) Around the World in 80 Days with a succession of (once) famous faces like Dorothy Lamour, Georgie Jessel, Kentucky Fried Chicken magnate Colonel Harlan Sanders, Butterfly McQueen, Xavier Cugat (sans Charo, who you’d expect to see in a film like this), Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, an Andrews Sister, Johnny “Tarzan” Weissmuller, Maureen O’Sullivan (who played “Jane”), Busby Berkeley, Ruby Keeler, Rudy Vallée, Louis Hayward, Guy Lombardo, Andy Devine, Clint Walker, Cass Daley, Pat McCormick, boxer Joe Louis, Pat O’Brien (who quips about how if he’d played his cards differently, it would have been Ronald Reagan in this thing and not him), the Bowery Boys’ Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall (grandfather of DM’s own Oliver Hall), out lesbian actress Patsy Kelly, Larry Hankin (playing “Philbaby” a barely fictionalized version of Phil Spector, who declined to participate), Trini Lopez, Sally Struthers, Susan Bernard (from Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!), Martha Raye, gossip columnist Rona Barrett, George Tobias (henpecked Abner Kravitz from Bewitched), Joan Blondell and even the fucking Lone Ranger and Tonto.

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Human punch lines? Oh, The Phynx has got ‘em. It practically invented the concept!

And did I mention that Richard Pryor (as the band’s sort of “soul consultant”) and James Brown (as the ambassador from the reord industry) do their thangs in The Phynx? I didn’t? Well they do! And the dude who played “Oddjob” in Goldfinger is in there, too. And Dick Clark and Ed Sullivan play themselves. Rich Little (who else) plays Richard Nixon. Warhol superstar Ultra Violet is present, too.

A picture is starting to emerge here, is it not? Even if this movie is shit—which it basically is—how can you possibly go wrong with a cast like this one? (You have to give them credit, though, they tried…)

The Phynx is unique. So much so that it’s never really been that easy to see. The studio knew they had a bomb on their hands. I don’t think it was ever properly released in theaters, at least not in America. Until a few years ago, when Warner Brothers finally put it out via their Warner Archive bespoke DVD service (for movies so unknown and culty that producing even a small batch of them is probably more than the public is willing to absorb) it had never come out before on home video either and the bootlegs you could find on eBay were always super crappy.

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Island Home, Finland

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Methodist Church, Gary, Indiana

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Soviet naval testing station in Makhachkala, Russia

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Church steeple in the middle of a frozen lake, Reschen, Italy

Lake Reschen is an artificial reservoir. When it was built, it submerged many villages, including a 14th century church.

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Victorian-style tree house, Florida, USA

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An abandoned hallway, France.

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Spreepark, Berlin, Germany

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Poveglia Island, Italy

This island was used by Napoleon Bonaparte to isolate those with the plague from those who were healthy. It was later used as an asylum for those struggling from extreme mental health issues.

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Abandoned bumper cars, Chernobyl, Ukraine

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Overgrown palace, Poland

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An abandoned house in the forest. Location unknown.

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Abandoned Movie theater in Detroit, Michigan

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Church in St. Etienne, France

Update: after doing some research I discovered the above church is a composite photograph. I was curious as to why a small stream went through a church.

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Shipwrecks on a sandbar in the Bermuda Triangle

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Staircase to nowhere, Pismo Beach, California

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Out of Africa

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I contend that there is a 99.9 percent chance that Sasquatch/Bigfoot exists. There is just too much evidence to dismiss it willy nilly. The naysayers have strong opinions that the creature doesn’t exist. Yet all the naysayers I have met never researched the topic to any level of detailed study.  Just superficial observations that allow them to dismiss the topic out of hand. Once the evidence that includes, but not limited to, footprints, tree structures and the thousands of sightings is looked into, it appears there may be something here.

The Patterson-Gimlin film is very strong evidence in my opinion. Patterson was a rodeo rider and Gimlin was a blue collar guy who lacked any kind of sophistication. They filmed something significant. Many special effects people, including some from Disney, contended that they could not have created such an amazing and sophisticated gorilla suit back in 1967. The muscle movement, gait, breasts, hand movement, arm length and other perplexing features of the creature in the film were astounding for 1967. Remember the early ‘Planet of the Apes’ movies from the early 1970’s? Those suits were primitive compared to the hairy big creature in the Patterson film. How would these two cowboys have developed an ape suit light years ahead of anything at the time? And if it was a suit, where the hell is it? The bloody thing would be worth millions of dollars.

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Original Patterson-Gimlin film

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I have always agreed with the group that thinks the creature is related to the big apes.  One of the best Sasquatch footprint analysts, the late Professor Grover Krantz was an advocate of this theory. He was convinced Bigfoot is a version of  gigantopithecus blacki, a huge gorilla that lived in Asia and believed to have went extinct roughly a hundred thousand years ago.

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Gigantopithecus blacki on the right

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It is very possible Sasquatch is an ape. But a very intriguing new hypothesis has surfaced that may make some sense. This idea helps to understand how the creature is so adept at being stealthy and so extremely hard to track. The Bigfoot/Sasquatch phenomenon may be Homo Ergaster.

Homo ergaster (meaning “working man”) or African Homo erectus is an extinct chronospecies of Homo that lived in eastern and southern Africa during the early Pleistocene, between 1.8 million and 1.3 million years ago.

There is still disagreement on the subject of the classification, ancestry, and progeny of H. ergaster, but it is now widely accepted to be the direct ancestor of later hominids, such as Homo heidelbergensis, Homo sapiens, and Homo neanderthalensis and Asian Homo erectus.

Homo ergaster evolved during an accelerated period of global cooling and drying that cleared more and more tropical rainforest from Africa and created a desert in the northern half of the continent.

One of the best sources of information about Homo ergaster is a skeleton discovered in 1984 by Alan Walker and Kamoya Kimeu at Nariokotome in West Turkana, Kenya. The remains were found to be those of a teenage boy between the ages of 11 and 13 when he died. Around 1.5 million years ago, the boy’s body sank into the marsh where he died and became fossilised. His teeth show signs of an abscess where his milk teeth fell out, indicating that he may have died from septicaemia (blood poisoning).

Nariokotome Boy, as he has been dubbed, was already developing a thick, bony ridge across his eyes. A pair of buck teeth stuck out from a large, projecting mouth below a long, wide nose.

He was about 160 centimetres (5 feet 3 inches) tall and would have stood at 185 centimetres (6 feet 1 inch) had he reached adulthood.

This was clearly a strapping lad, with a body shape that was perfectly adapted to an active life in the sun. Human populations living on equatorial grasslands today, such as the Masai in Kenya, have the same tall, linear physique.

This body shape creates a large surface area over which the body can cool itself more easily, preventing Nariokotome Boy from overheating under the blazing Sun.

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Conceptual image

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Shortly after Homo ergaster appeared 1.9 million years ago, humans began to leave Africa for the first time and migrate to other continents. Early humans reached Dmanisi in ex-Soviet Georgia around 1.8 million years ago. Here, they encountered cool, seasonal grasslands where African animals such as ostriches and giraffes mingled with Eurasian species such as wolves and the sabre-toothed cat Megantereon.

Humans quickly spread east as far as the Indonesian island of Java. The hominids that inhabited subtropical Asia at this time belong to the species Homo erectus. This early human learned to survive in the bamboo forests that covered this region of Asia. The paucity of stone tools from Southeast Asian hominid sites suggests that erectus may have created a technology based on bamboo, a strong and versatile material.

“They may have used bamboo to make spears for hunting and poles to knock animals down from the tall trees”, says Professor Russell Ciochon of the University of Iowa.

Homo erectus shared these bamboo forests with pigs, a type of elephant called Stegodon and the biggest primate that has ever lived – the giant vegetarian ape Gigantopithecus. It’s possible that Gigantopithecus may even have been hunted by early humans in Asia. “They probably wouldn’t have taken on the big adults, but they may have targeted juveniles. If we look at people who live in forests today, they also eat apes”, says Ciochon.

Dates for the arrival of Homo erectus in subtropical Asia are highly controversial. While erectus was clearly established throughout the region by 1.8 million years ago, some sites suggest an even earlier date for its arrival. A hominid jaw and stone tools unearthed at Longuppo Cave, China, may date to as early as 1.9 million years ago.

Similar dates have been established for hominid sites at Mojokerto and Sangiran in Java. This newfound wanderlust may have been dictated by an increasing reliance on meat for food. Carnivores generally need much larger home ranges than similar-sized herbivores because carnivores have fewer total calories available to them per unit area of their territory.

H. ergaster remained stable for ca. 500,000 years in Africa before disappearing from the fossil record around 1.4 million years ago. No identifiable cause has been attributed to this disappearance; the later evolution of the similar H. heidelbergensis in Africa may indicate that this is simply a hole in the record, or that some intermediate species has not yet been discovered.

Could Bigfoot be a relic of an ancient human species? Walking upright, throwing rocks at human intruders, uncanny and amazing abilities to hide etc. Who knows? Only time will tell.

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Famous Bigfoot photo from Silver Star Mountain, Washington.

Homo Ergaster?

 

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Oh by the way, Albert Einstein was never a British citizen. He became an American citizen. Add one for the Yanks.

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Insect season is around the corner. Keep your eyes open and your mouths shut.

 

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Gizmodo.com

One of the artifacts found at the base of a pyramid at the archealogical site. It’s suggested it could be the effigy of a “were-jaguar,” part of a still-buried ceremonial seat, or “metate.”

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The City of the Monkey God. La Ciudad Blanca, or The White City. All the names given to the lost city rumored to exist in a pristine Honduran rainforest sound mythical, but Nationl Geographic reports that now we have evidence that the legendary city was real.

This week, an expedition returned from a remote—and still secret—Honduras location where they confirmed the long-rumored existence of not just a hidden city, but a whole civilization, one that is so foreign to archaeologists that it doesn’t even have a name yet. It’s an incredible discovery, but before we get to the details, let’s look at how long this news has been coming.

Photo by Dave Yoder, used with permission by National Geographic

What Is the City of the Monkey God?

For a long time, it was just a rumor—a so-called lost city in the remote jungle of a part of Honduras called La Mosquitia, on the eastern coast of the country. The city has been sought after by explorers for hundreds of years, and was rumored to be a pre-Colombian community of considerable size and wealth dating from around 1,000 AD. The moniker “City of the Monkey God” originated from one American explorer who claimed locals called it by that name.

The Mosquitia rain forests of Honduras and Nicaragua are, to put it mildly, thick jungle. As one travel guide notes, “While the edges of the Mosquitia can be reached by pickups driving along the beach, the vast majority of the region is accessible only by plane, boat, or foot, lending it the feel of a separate country, cut off from the rest of Honduras and the world.”

The lushness of this biosphere — at 32,000 square miles, “the largest remaining expanse of virgin tropical jungle in Central America” — draws its share of adventurers and nature lovers each year, but that is not its most remarkable appeal. Over the past century, archaeologists have set their sights on that dense vegetation, hoping that beneath it they would find the ruins of Ciudad Blanca, a fabled ancient settlement seemingly swallowed by the Earth. In 1526, Spanish explorer Hernan Cortes wrote to emperor Charles V, relaying word of a purported province, deep in Honduras, that “will exceed Mexico in riches, and equal it in the largeness of its towns and villages.”

Today, at the American Geophysical Union’s meeting in Cancun, scientists have released images of what they believe to be that lost city, discovered not by machete-hacking their way through the jungle, but from above, in a tiny Cessna plane, the bottom of which had been cut open to make room for a million-dollar LIDAR machine, which can see through the forest canopy and map the topography below.

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