Category Archives: NORTH AMERICA

Giant “Skeletons of Enormous Size” Discovered In New Mexico – New York Times Article From 1902

Giant “Skeletons of Enormous Size” Discovered In New Mexico – New York Times Article From 1902

Researcher Graham Hancock coined the phrase, ‘we’re like a species with amnesia,’ and it’s true. Despite the fact that it seems the story of human history is well uncovered, every single year there are new discoveries made that challenge what we once held to be true. In some cases, there are discoveries which are concealed from the general public for various reasons, a great example of that would be the black budget world.

There also seem to be amazing discoveries that are completely ignored by mainstream media and most of these discoveries would shake the foundations of human history. Another great example is the bodies recently discovered in Nazca, Peru – three-fingered/towed humanoid beings whose physical anatomy is far different from that of a human. Another example would be the stories regarding intelligent ancient civilizations, like Atlantis, for example, which many scholars now believe to have actually existed.

Out of all the information that’s out there regarding intelligent ancient civilizations, and more, even if just one of these stories is true, it would completely change what we thought we knew about human history and the history of our planet. I believe the story of our past might be different from what seems to be the only two available options, creationism and evolution. There may be a myriad of other factors involved.

These discoveries would also shake the foundations of many people’s belief systems. The human race has been kept from so much information, and forced into a specific worldview that’s designed to benefit the ‘1%.’

In today’s day and age, it’s always best to keep an open mind, especially when new information is constantly emerging (for those who are curious enough to actually look) which challenges the old.

Giants?

Did giants once roam the Earth? It’s been in the literature and lore of multiple cultures throughout human history, from the Maya, the global indigenous populations, the Bible, and more since what we perceive as the beginning of time. For example, the Bible tells us that when the Gods were on Earth, they were giants. “This, when you bring up in conversation, normally brings up, you know, laughter and people giggling and thinking you’re joking, and yet, the Bible is full of references of giants in our history.” – Michael Tellinger

Tellinger is referring to the Nephilim, as referenced in Numbers 13:33 of the Bible: “We saw the Nephilim there (the defendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.”

Again, it’s not just the bible, it’s lore from cultures that pre-dated religion as well as the indigenous.

Tellinger is a renowned author/politician who has made several groundbreaking discoveries regarding lost ancient civilizations that once roamed the Earth. Here’s an article about him, with a picture of him standing next to a giant footprint, almost the size of a full human being.

There are several examples of physical evidence which exists to support the idea that giants once roamed the Earth. For example, stored in the vaults of the medical school at WITS University, Johannesburg, there is part of an upper leg bone with a hip-joint that would have stood approximately 12 feet tall. It’s been there since the early 1960s and was found by miners in Northern Namibia. It is one of the most precious and rare specimens available today that clearly indicates the existence of giants in Southern Africa more than 40,000 years ago.

Apparently, in 1883 the Smithsonian, a United States government/military led organization at the time sent a team of archaeologists to South Charleston Mound. According to the official report, the team discovered a number of giant skeletons ranging from 7 to 9 feet tall. Some of them had a “compressed or flat-head type” which would resemble similar skeletal characteristics to those found in Egypt and South America.

Whether or not this is ‘fake news’ is highly debatable, as there is a lot of evidence to suggest it’s not. The list goes on and on, and what’s interesting is an article published in the New York Times in 1902 that also deals with the subject.

The article goes on to describe two stones with “curious inscriptions” and underneath were the bones of a body that “could not have been less than 12 feet in length.” According to the NY Times article, “the men who opened the grave say that the forearm was 4 feet long and that in a well-preserved jaw the lower teeth ranged from the size of a hickory nut to that of the largest walnut in size .”

Apparently, the chest of the body had a circumference of 7 feet.

The bodies were first discovered by Luciana Quintana, it was on his ranch these specific bodies were found, according to the article, “Quintana, who has uncovered many other burial places, expresses the opinion that perhaps thousands of skeletons of a race of giants long extinct will be found. This supposition is based on the traditions handed down from the early Spanish invasion that have detailed knowledge of the existence of a race of giants that inhabited the plains of what now is Eastern New Mexico. Indian legends and carvings also in the same section indicate the existence of such a race.” 

Here’s another New York Times article about skeletons that were discovered in 1885. Going back further still, in 1774 settlers found what they called “The Giant Town,” which housed several gigantic skeletons, one being an eight-foot-tall male.

“In addition to the human skeletons found in NY State, there is also the famous case of ‘The Cardiff Giant,’ a white alabaster-like statue of an 11-foot man who showed an exposed penis and hieroglyphic inscriptions. This statue caused a worldwide sensation and was exhibited in New York City to thousands of paying customers before it was declared a fake by the NY newspapers, despite the fact that scholars from Harvard and elsewhere insisted that the statue was genuine.” – Richard Dewhurst

Dewhurst is an Emmy Award-winning writer. He’s a  graduate of NYU with degrees in journalism, film, and television, he has written and edited for the History Channel, the Arts & Entertainment Channel, PBS, Fox Television and Fox Films, ABC News, TNT, Paramount Pictures, and the Miami Herald. He himself is well research and you can read his article on the topic here: “The Ancient Giants Who Ruled America

The Story of Human History

As mentioned earlier, we don’t really know the full story of human history, and when new evidence and information pops up, either from the past or today, which challenges the current accepted framework, it seems like people lose their minds. What we have today, in large part, is dogma, instead of actual fact.

With all of the discoveries being made and all the discoveries that have been made which mainstream media completely ignores, we are clearly not being told something about the true origins of humanity. The idea that a powerful group of people protecting their interests by suppressing information in multiple fields is unsettling. For a plant and its people to thrive, it must live in complete transparency.

Mysterious Secret Tunnel Discovered Under Ancient Pyramid in Mexico

Mysterious Secret Tunnel Discovered Under Ancient Pyramid in Mexico

Hidden passage to the underworld could just have been found, at least according to the mysterious ancient civilization that built it.

A secret tunnel leading down a chamber deep underneath the Pyramid of the Moon, a massive temple located in the ancient city of Teotihuacán, near what is now Mexico City, confirmed by the Archaeologists

The research team believes that the chamber may be used as a funeral ritual, while the tunnel may have represented the route to the underworld—a powerful concept for the Aztecs, Maya, and other pre-Columbian societies.

Gomes Believe that the tunnel is one of the most important discoveries in the history of Mexico.
Gomes Believe that tunnel is one of the most important discoveries in the history of Mexico.

Using a technique called electrical resistance technology, researchers from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) and Institute of Geophysics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) mapped an image of the earth beneath the pyramid without breaking any ground.

This is how they discovered the hollowed-out chamber about 26 feet under the pyramid, with a diameter of 49 feet, as well as the subterranean tunnel.

The Pyramid of the Moon.

First settled as early as 400 B.C., Teotihuacán became the thriving center of the ancient Mesoamerican world by 300 A.D., around the time the city’s largest structures, including the Pyramid of the Moon, were completed.

No one knows for sure who founded Teotihuacán, or why the civilization centered there suddenly and mysteriously collapsed starting around A.D. 600. By A.D. 750, the surviving members of a population that at its height may have numbered some 200,000 had dispersed, leaving their once-great metropolis and its sacred pyramids behind.

The Aztecs first found the city’s ruins around 1300, and gave it its name, which means “the place where men become gods” in their Nahuatl language.

Since the 17th century, the temple known in the pre-Hispanic world as Meztli Itzácual has been the site of dozens of archaeological excavations.

Built on elevated ground, the Pyramid of the Moon is the highest point in the ancient complex. This pyramid towers above 12 smaller pyramid platforms believed to be stages where both animal and human sacrifices took place. It is located at the opposite end of the so-called Avenue of Death from Teotihuacán’s largest structure, the Pyramid of the Sun.

Aerial view of Aztec Pyramids, including the Moon Pyramid, in San Juan de Teotihuacan, Mexico

Earlier tombs found inside the Pyramid of the Moon have contained sacrificial remains, including deformed human skulls, as well as jewelry and other grave objects made of greenstone.

According to Verónica Ortega, director of the Integral Conservation Project for the Plaza of the Moon, excavations of the newly discovered chamber will likely turn up similar objects.

“These large offering complexes constitute the sacred heart of the city of Teotihuacán, the reason why everyone saw it as the mecca of the civilization,” Ortega said in a statement. “What can be found inside them will help unravel the relationship this ancient metropolis had with other regions of Mesoamerica.”

Ship Found 20 Feet Below World Trade Center Site

Ship Found 20 Feet Below World Trade Center Site

Builders stopped the backhoe during massive reconstruction efforts at the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan when they uncovered something surprising just south of where the Twin Towers once stood.

At a depth of 22 metres (6.7 metres) below the current level on the street, in a pit that would become an underground security and parking complex, excavators found the mangled skeleton of a long-forgotten wooden ship.

A recent study found that the ship was actually constructed in 1773 or shortly after, on a small shipyard near Philadelphia, in the tree rings in those waterlogged shores. Moreover, the ship is made of the same type of white oaks used to construct parts of Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution were signed, according to the study published in the journal Tree-Ring Research.

The entire ship was scanned before its removal to create a precise record of where each of its pieces were originally found
Ship Found 20 Feet Below World Trade Center Site
Four years after a shipwreck was revealed at Ground Zero, a new report details how tree rings helped establish the origins of the wooden vessel.

Archaeologists had been on-site throughout the excavation of the World Trade Center’s Vehicular Security Center. They had found animal bones, ceramic dishes, bottles and dozens of shoes, but the excitement really kicked up when the 32-foot-long (9.75 m) partial hull of the ship emerged from the dirt.

The vessel was quickly excavated, to prevent damage from exposure to the air. Piece by piece, the delicate oak fragments were documented and taken out of the rotten-smelling mud.

The timbers were sent to the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory, where they would be soaked in water to keep the wood from cracking and warping.

A few timbers were sent back to New York, just 20 miles (32 kilometers) north of the World Trade Center, to the Tree Ring Laboratory at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York. Researchers at the lab dried the fragments slowly in a cold room and cut thick slices of the wood to get a clear look at the tree rings.

The team established that the trees used to build the ship — some of which had lived to be more than 100 years old — were mostly cut down around 1773. Then, to determine where the wood came from, the researchers had to find a match between the ring pattern in the timbers and a ring pattern in live trees and archaeological samples from a specific region.

“What makes the tree-ring patterns in a certain region look very similar, in general, is climate,” said the leader of the new study, Dario Martin-Benito, who is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich.

Regional ring patterns arise from local rain levels and temperatures, with wetter periods producing thicker rings and drier periods producing smaller rings, he said.

Martin-Benito and his colleagues at Columbia’s Tree Ring Lab narrowed their search to trees in the eastern United States, thanks to the keel of the ship, which contained hickory, a tree found only in eastern North America and eastern Asia. Otherwise, the researchers would have had much more difficulty in limiting their search, as oak is found all over the world. 

The ship’s signature pattern most closely matched with the rings found in old living trees and historic wood samples from the Philadelphia area, including a sample taken during an earlier study from Independence Hall, which was built between 1732 and 1756.

“We could see that at that time in Philadelphia, there were still a lot of old-growth forests, and [they were] being logged for shipbuilding and building Independence Hall,” Martin-Benito told Live Science.

“Philadelphia was one of the most — if not the most — important shipbuilding cities in the U.S. at the time. And they had plenty of wood so it made lots of sense that the wood could come from there.”

Historians still aren’t certain whether the ship sank accidently or if it was purposely submerged to become part of a landfill used to bulk up Lower Manhattan’s coastline. Oysters found fixed to the ship’s hull suggest it at least languished in the water for some time before being buried by layers of trash and dirt.

Previous investigations found that the vessel’s timbers had been damaged by burrowing holes of Lyrodus pedicellatus, a type of “shipworm” typically found in high-salinity, warm waters — a sign that the ship, at some point in its life, made a trip to the Caribbean, perhaps on a trading voyage. Martin-Benito speculated that the infestation might have been one of the reasons the ship met its demise just 20 or 30 years after it was built.

“I don’t know much about the life expectancy for boats, but that doesn’t seem like too long for something that would take so long to build,” Martin-Benito said.

Possible War of 1812 Cemetery Found in Vermont

Possible War of 1812 Cemetery Found in Vermont

Vermont Public Radio reports that the possible remains of soldiers who died during the War of 1812 were found buried in rows at a construction site in northwestern Vermont.

They’re human remains, bones that researchers say that have been around for a while. In fact, they say they’re the remains of a soldier from the War of 1812 and there could be others buried nearby. The project is ongoing and is being overseen by the University of Vermont’s Consulting Anthropology Program, with support from the State Division for Historic Preservation.

University of Vermont Anthropology Asst. Professor John Crock spoke with VPR’s Mitch Wertlieb about the find and what it means. crock is the director of UVM’s Consulting Anthropology Program. Their interview is below. It has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Mitch Wertlieb: So what exactly has been found here and when was this discovery made?

John Crock: The discovery was made last week. Initially, an excavator – and I’d like to give him credit: Mike Weston, at Don Western Excavating – noticed human bone in one of the first or second backhoe pulls from a proposed house addition in Burlington and did the right thing: he called the police.

The police came and looked at it and recognized it as likely human remains. They called the medical examiner, who then came in to basically clarify that it wasn’t a recent human. Then, they called the state archeologist who then called us at UVM to further investigate.

How do you know what era the remains are from?

The War of 1812 had a battery in Burlington, basically a big army base that we now know mainly from Battery Park, which kind of memorializes that. There was a large hospital barracks. Although Burlington was only fired upon once in 1813, it was a major base, with as many as 4,000 people that were serving other battles, including one in Plattsburgh.

Archaeologists from UVM’s Consulting Archaeology program work at a site in Burlington, where remains that likely date back to the War of 1812 were recently discovered.

But the main function was actually that there was a military hospital here and a lot of people were treated there for injuries that were incurred during warfare. There were references to people being buried in a cemetery on private property not too far from that hospital. But the exact boundaries of that [are unknown] – there were no records. Essentially, the military did not keep records of cemeteries or burials until the Civil War. So this is essentially an unmarked burial ground.

I don’t know what the scientific method is for checking this – maybe it’s carbon dating – but had the bones been checked for that to say, “OK, they are this many hundreds of years old”?

Carbon dating is a little bit… It’s harder… with this archeologically recent timeframe of only a couple hundred years.

Previously we found some remains related to the same period of time on a project on North Street and these had preserved with them, military buttons. In one case, an individual was buried with musket balls and a pocketknife that further led us to conclude that these were indeed military burials.

In this case, we’ve identified a number of them in a cluster, in cemetery rows, within just a small area of the landowner’s addition, which leads us to believe that this indeed is part of the larger cemetery that was referenced in historical documents.

According to the state archeologist, there could be around 700 soldiers buried around the city at this time. Why so many?

That’s possible. [There were] a lot of diseases. You know, there was an epidemic in the winter of 1812-1813 of pneumonia or influenza. Soldiers were also battling typhus.

The majority of those who died were really deaths that resulted from this kind of close-quarters living with epidemic disease raging through these camps. [These are] things that we’re more familiar with now in the era of COVID, [where we’re] reflecting on how these things get transmitted so quickly in crowds.

How confident are you that these are definitely the remains of an American soldier? And is there any way of determining, if so, who that soldier might have been?

We’re very confident, I’d say, at this point, that these are remains of soldiers and there are ways.

We have the enlistment records that our program historian has really [curated]. She combed through microfilm back in the microfilm era to get the list of enlistment records. So we know the stature of individuals, their surname and we know their occupation prior to becoming soldiers. That gives some indication of what their human remains might look like.

And then there are other things that we can do with bone chemistry to try to figure out what area person was from. If, for example, these weren’t Vermonters, we could easily identify those that enlisted, for example, from North Carolina or farther south because their bone signature through isotope studies has a different pattern than those who would have grown up here in New England.

What do you ultimately hope to learn, to find?

You know: the whole package. Where did these people come from? What communities did they represent? Many of them were farmers. How did that affect the farming communities of New England, to send all of their able-bodied men, including what we would consider adolescents now? Some as young as 12 were enlisting. We hope to learn more about that.

Also: the burial practices. Was there ceremony involved? We found an individual in the previous case on North Street that was buried, for example, with a gun sling under their head as a pillow. So it was clear that people were presiding over the funeral or burial. That’s telling us things that just aren’t in the written records and things that only archeology can tell us as we learn more.

The coffins, for example, weren’t mass-produced. They were built to-size; they were built for individuals. And interestingly – we’re just coming up with this information this week – in some of the grave shafts that we’re investigating, that we’ve exposed, we’re finding that the individual had already been exhumed. This is likely from UVM medical students in the 1820s and 1830s who were using this burial ground to access anatomical specimens. So some of these soldiers effectively donated themselves to science without knowing it.

And how long do you think this overall project will take, now that these bones have been discovered?

We’re hoping to get done with it within the week. That’s the best we can do, as fast as we can go, being careful and also honoring what is really the country’s first veterans.

Archaeologists explore a rural field in Kansas, and a lost city emerges

Archaeologists explore a rural field in Kansas, and a lost city emerges

In the Great Plains of Kansas, archaeologists have made an innovative and unlikely discovery: a vast town lost centuries ago. Donald Blakeslee discovered a few years ago the lost city of Etzanoa in Arkansas City, Kan, a Wichita State University anthropologist, and an archaeology professor. 

Anthropologist and archaeology professor Donald Blakeslee in one of the pits being excavated in Arkansas City, Kan.

In that small city in south-central Kansas, local residents found the arrowhead and the gold mine underneath their town, pottery, and other ancient artifacts, for decades, in the fields and rivers of the region.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Blakeslee used newly translated documents written by the Spanish conquistadors who came across the land over 400 years ago to determine that these artifacts were once part of the Native American lost city of Etzanoa.

Kacie Larsen of Wichita State University shakes dirt through a screened box to see what artefacts may emerge.

“‘I thought, ‘Wow, their eyewitness descriptions are so clear it’s like you were there,’” Blakeslee told the Times about reading the conquistador’s accounts. “I wanted to see if the archaeology fit their descriptions. Every single detail matched this place.”

The city of Etzanoa is believed to have been around from 1450 to 1700 and was home to approximately 20,000 people. Blakeslee said that the city was the second-largest settlement in the present-day United States at the time and spanned across at least five miles of the space between the Walnut and Arkansas rivers.

The 20,000 inhabitants of Etzanoa were said to have lived in “thatched, beehive-shaped houses.”

In 1541, conquistador Francisco Vazquez de Coronado came to the town hoping to discover its fabled gold but instead found Native Americans in a collection of settlements that he called Quivira.

Sixty years later in 1601, Juan de Oñate led a team of 70 conquistadors from New Mexico to Quivira, also hoping to find its gold but they ran into a tribe called the Escanxaques, who told them of the nearby city of Etzanoa.

Oñate and his team arrived at the city and were greeted peacefully by the inhabitants of Etzanoa. However, things quickly went south when the conquistadors started taking hostages, which then caused the city’s residents to flee in fear.

The group of conquistadors explored the vast area of more than 2,000 houses but feared an attack from the peoples they dislodged and decided to return home.

On their return trip, they were attacked by some 1,000 members of the Escanxaque tribe and a huge battle took place. The conquistadors lost and returned home to New Mexico, never to come back to the area again.

French explorers came nearly a century later to that part of south-central Kansas but did not find any evidence of Etzanoa or its people. It is believed that disease caused the untimely demise of the population.

However, traces of the people and their city would not stay hidden forever. Blakeslee and a team of excavators found the site of the ancient battle in a neighborhood in Arkansas City and found remanents from the battle.

Locals in the area had been uncovering artifacts from the lost city for decades but didn’t understand why until evidence of the city itself was discovered by Blakeslee.

“Lots of artifacts have been taken from here,” Warren “Hap” McLeod, a resident of Arkansas City who lives on the spot where the battle took place, told the Times. “Now we know why. There were 20,000 people living here for over 200 years.” One local resident said that the sheer amount of artifacts that people in the area have is mindblowing.

Russell Bishop, a former Arkansas City resident, shows off the arrowheads he found in the area as a kid.
Professor Donald Blakeslee of Wichita State University shows a black pot unearthed by student Jeremiah Perkins, behind him.

“My boss had an entire basement full of pottery and all kinds of artifacts,” Russell Bishop told the Times. “We’d be out there working and he would recognize a black spot on the ground as an ancient campfire site … I don’t think anyone knew how big this all was. I’m glad they’re finally getting to the bottom of it.”

The Great Plains were long-regarded as huge, empty spaces in ancient times that were populated mainly by nomadic tribes. But Blakeslee’s discovery of Etzanoa could prove that some of the tribes in the area weren’t nomadic and were actually more urban than previously believed.

Blakeslee has also discovered evidence that similar, large-scale lost cities could be located in nearby counties which might have been around during the time of Etzanoa.

These latest groundbreaking archaeological finds are helping researchers fill in huge blanks in early American history.

The 290 Million Year Old Fossil Human Footprint

The 290 Million Year Old Fossil Human Footprint

There is a story going around, that up in the Robledo Mountains of southern New Mexico exists a mind-bending fossilised impression. Why should this be of interest you wonder? The answer is because it is seemingly the print of a human being wandering the area some 290 million years ago.

I for one support a revised view of human origins, one that is very controversial, it is my publicly stated opinion that human beings, of one sort or another, go back further than currently believed and that Homo sapiens go back several hundred thousand years beyond the current consensus dating. Despite all of that, I admit it is a struggle to believe a man much like myself was wandering around New Mexico long before even dinosaurs had arisen on our planet!

What is to be made of this story, indeed of the photographic evidence also provided to accompany it?

To make any sense of the matter we need to go back to 1987, it was in that year that a sociologist (and amateur ichnologist) by the name of Jerry Paul MacDonald discovered a plethora of fossilised animal tracks high up in that mountain range. The rock strata, a type of mudstone found at the site, was reliably dated to the Permian Period.

This vast sweep of time covers approximately the era between 300 million and 250 million years before the present. There is no controversy over the dating of the many fossil prints at the site, they are accepted to be from creatures that must have existed in the Permian period, even if some are from creatures not as yet identified (which seemingly remains the case).

There certainly is some head-scratching associated with fossilised prints at the location, a number are seen as ‘problematica’ due to their similarity to those of animals from much later periods, including prints akin to modern birds (small three-toed impressions) and even bears (deep five arched toe marks along with nail impressions). Keep in mind that the Permian is a time long before even dinosaurs, let alone the much more recent appearance of birds and mammals.

These prints certainly suggest that there were animals walking the earth during the Permian period of which we know nothing, but is that such a shock when you take into account how little we can ever know of events over 250 million years ago? Perhaps not.

In and of themselves these prints are pretty revolutionary, simply because they suggest life forms that had much more anatomical similarity to modern animals than we would ever have imagined possible at that early point.

That does not necessarily mean a brown bear was chasing a chicken for its dinner, without fossilised skeletons we can only hazard a guess at what these creatures really looked like, to rebuild an entire lost species from a footprint seems at best an outlandish exercise in wishful thinking. With that thought in mind let us now turn our attention back to the supposed ‘human’ footprint.

What does Jerry MacDonald say about the human footprint he supposedly discovered? The answer appears to be, nothing at all. That in itself should through up some major red flags.

It also seems that the photograph supplied along with the claims of a prehistoric human footprint has no connection to MacDonald or his research work, in fact, it is seemingly supplied by a chap named Don Patton. Now, Don Patton is a self-admitted creationist and young earth theorist, on a number of occasions he has claimed to hold degrees and even Ph.D. qualifications in geology and archaeology, these have later been investigated and shown to be academically invalid (related to unaccredited Christian institutions). In fact, there is actually a second image of the footprint, shown accompanied by Don Patton, and the image is itself an example of ‘problematica’. It looks very much more like a separate slab of stone, or some kind of plaster cast, rather than an in situ print.

The footprint also looks very small, smaller than Don’s hand, with no sign of matching left print despite the fact such a small being’s prints should both comfortably fit on that slab (at least in partial). It should however be noted that there are some responding claims made that this was a very young child and that a partial left print snapped off from the ledge where the initial print was found.

If one digs deeper the entire story starts to fall apart, the print transpires to have been purportedly found by a mysterious hunter (no connection to Jerry MacDonald) and only ever investigated by Don Patton and his associate Carl Baugh (another creationist known to have claimed dodgy academic credentials).

They tell us that they were not able to do any real documenting of the find due to the sudden appearance of an angry landowner with a shotgun. What further adds to the fishy smell this story now begins to produce is the fact they state the print was made in a limestone layer, one dated to the Permian period.

“While the team was working, they were confronted by a local landowner who was armed with a shotgun. The landowner claimed that they were trespassing and that they were on his property. They showed the landowner the mining permit and stated that the property they were on was BLM (Bureau of Land Management) property. The armed landowner insisted that they leave immediately.”

Exactly how this stone layer could have been so accurately dated, by two falsely credentialed amateur geologists, busy running away from an armed man, really begs belief (let alone how they had time to make a cast). The second red flag is the very fact that the layer of the purported print is identified as being limestone, as we have already noted earlier that the layer in which MacDonald found his prints was mudstone, suggesting that this is an entirely different site with no connection at all if it even exists.

As ever it seems that when we dig for the truth we often have to shovel through a whole heap of disinformation and misinformation. Probably, like me, you are left shaking your head at this entire story and ready to through the whole matter into your mental dustbin. But before we leave this tale let us return to a very intriguing find genuinely made at the location where MacDonald was investigating.

In 1992 Jerry MacDonald took Doug Stewart (a regular contributor to the Smithsonian magazine) up to his site and allowed Doug to participate in making new finds as well as an independent examination of existing discoveries.

It is actually from Doug Stewart’s later report to the Smithsonian that we hear of the strange bird-like and bear-like footprints. One line in this report does leave us wondering whether some strange vaguely-humanoid type of creature perhaps walked the earth in the distant times of the Permian:

‘He’s got several tracks where creatures appear to be walking on their hind legs, others that look almost simian.’

The reality is of course that without even a photograph of the prints mentioned in the report, we can do little but speculate on what type of creature, some 250 million years ago, left tracks ‘kinda similar’ to those of a monkey. Whatever it was, I am betting it was nothing like we humans.

Ancient Maya Worshipped ‘Batman God’ 2,500 Years Ago

Ancient Maya Worshipped ‘Batman God’ 2,500 Years Ago

A peculiar religious cult grew up among the Zapotec Indians of Oaxaca, Mexico in 100 A.D.

The dangerous cave-dwelling bat creature – which the Zapotecs believed represented night, death, and sacrifice – was eventually adopted into the pantheon of the K’iche’, a Mayan tribe inhabiting modern-day Guatemala and Honduras. The legends of the bat god were later recorded in Popol Vuh, a Mayan sacred book.

Camazotz, which translates to ‘death bat‘ (K’iche’ word ‘kame‘ means “death”, while ‘sotz’ means “bat”), originated deep in Mesoamerican mythology as a dangerous cave-dwelling bat creature.

The K’iche’ identified the bat-deity with their god Zotzilaha Chamalcan, the god of fire. Camazotz, which inhabited Xibalbá, is also commonly depicted holding a sacrificial knife in one hand and a human heart or sacrificial victim in the other.

Templo Mayor, located in downtown Mexico City, has an adjacent museum that displays artifacts and renditions of items from the Mesoamerican civilizations. The top floor of this museum contains a recreated statue of Camazotz.

One of the most prominent and commonly mentioned features of the Camazotz is “a nose the shape of a flint knife”, which could be an exaggerated interpretation of the nose-leaf possessed by members of the Phyllostomidae or leaf-nosed bats.

Maya sculpture that depicts the vampire bat god, Camazotz.

Traces

In 1988, a fossil of a giant vampire bat was discovered in the Mongas province of Venezuela. The bat was larger than the modern vampire bat by 25% and was dubbed D. Draculae.  Its recent age and large range suggest that the bat could have co-existed with the K’iche’, giving rise to the legends of the Camazotz.

In 2000, a tooth from D. Draculae was found in Argentina – much farther south of the modern range of the Desmodus genus. The latest age found for a D. Draculae site is circa 1650 AD. These dates make it very possible that D. Draculae coexisted with humans in South America and Central America.

The common vampire bat, D. Rotundus, has an eight-inch wingspan. Since D. Draculae was 25% larger, it would have required more blood and probably would have attacked larger animals – and possibly even humans. It is undoubtable that an attack by a rare giant bat would give rise to legends of supernatural monsters.

In 2014, Warner Brothers gathered as many as 30 artists to reinterpret Batman on the occasion of its 75th anniversary. Christian Pacheco, one of the artists, recalled that Batman is not the first reference of an enigmatic anthropomorphic being with a man’s body and a bat’s head. It is was indeed the feared Camazotz.

Pacheco’s Yucatán [Mexico]-based design firm Kimbal made a replica of the bust with which Bruce Wayne disguises the character and molded it with Maya motifs and references to the ancient Camazotz.

The designed gave a heads up to many people that the very first batman can be traced back to the ancient Maya, more than 2,500 years ago.

Maya style Batman suit recreated by Christian Pacheco

In the Popol Vuh, Camazotz was a common name making reference to the bat-like monsters that the Mayan twin heroes Hunahpú and Ixbalanque stumbled across, during their trials in Xibalbá, the Mayan underworld.

Camazotz was said to attack victims by the neck and decapitate them. In the Popol Vuh, it is recorded that the deity decapitated Hunahpú and is also one of the four animal demons responsible for wiping out mankind during the age of the first sun.

National Geographic Writes:

“The Maya hero twins were placed inside a bat house—a cave filled with death bats, called Camazotz by the Maya.

The bats had snouts like blades, which they used to kill people and animals. To escape, the twins crawled inside their blowguns, and all night long the bats terrorized them. Toward dawn, one of the twins said he would check to see if it was safe to leave. He raised his head out of his gun—and promptly had it cut off by a Camazotz.”

In 2018, it was reported that two species of carnivorous bats were found from southern Mexico to Bolivia and Brazil – the woolly bat (the toothy, hungry bats with long bunny-like ears and a lance-shaped nose leaf found in a Maya temple) and the spectral bat.  According to biologist Rodrigo Medellín, woolly and spectral bats are likely the bats described in the Popol Vuh:

“These bats do the same thing. They stalk their prey, land on them with half-spread wings, locking them with the thumb claws, and deliver a death bite to the back or top of the head. Camazotz was not an invention.”

The Forgotten Culture That Built America’s “Pyramids” of Dirt

The Forgotten Culture That Built America’s “Pyramids” of Dirt

American history students know of the ancient Egyptians,  the Incas of Peru, and of the Aztecs of Mexico, but less know a major civilization that extends through the eastern United States from around 800 to 1600 CE. Meet the Mississippians.

Years before the European immigrants planted the seeds of modern civilization in North America, the Mississippi culture spread from the Florida Panhandle all the way to southern Minnesota.

Defining the dozens of discovered settlements are distinct earthwork mounds that resemble pyramids of dirt. Various structures were regularly constructed atop these mounds. Chiefs presided over individual settlements and were thought to regulate trade, particularly of maize, which archaeologists believe was the primary staple crop.

The rise of centralized agriculture is the most agreed-upon explanation for the evolution of the Mississippian culture. Settlements were set up near rivers to take advantage of fertile farmland. Food was grown and shared under the altruistic watch of the settlement chief.

With a reliable source of food, the Mississippians could undertake other pastimes. Metalworkers fashioned stone tools for farming and etched ornate copper plates for adornment.

Three examples of Mississippian culture avian themed repousse copper plates. The righthand figure is from the Spiro Mounds in Oklahoma. The left-hand figure Wulfing plate A, one of Wulfing cache from Malden, Missouri. The middle plate is Rogan plate 1, from Etowah Mounds in Georgia. Examples of this type of artwork have been found as artifacts in several states in the Midwest and Southeast.

Artists crafted necklaces and pottery out of riverine shells. Spectators watched athletes compete in a game known as chunkey, in which players tried to hurl a spear closest to a thrown disc-shaped stone.

Chunkey was often played in immense arenas. The largest was in the Mississippian capital of Cahokia, situated in southern Illinois just across the Mississippi River from modern-day St. Louis. At its peak around 1100 CE, the city was home to as many as 20,000 people.

Most residents lived in humble, thatched-roof dwellings near the outskirts of the sprawling city, but they would regularly venture to the heart of the settlement to visit markets set up in the four open plazas or to view religious ceremonies.

Cahokia featured at least 109 raised mounds, the largest of which had a base almost as expansive as the Great Pyramid at Giza. Atop these mounds were grand structures. Some may have been temples, places of politics,  or finer dwellings for higher-status residents.

An artist’s re-creation of Cahokia with the great Monk’s Mound in the distance.

The Mississippians thrived through the 13th century, but started declining thereafter. Floods associated with the Little Ice Age may have swamped their signature mounds. Other climatic events may have threatened the foundational maize agriculture that maintained their flourishing society.

Cahokia was abandoned in the later half of the fourteenth century, sending migrants roaming across the land to seek new starts at other settlements.

The diaspora brought with it political turmoil and warfare. By the time Europeans began actively colonizing North America in the 16th century, the Mississippian culture was torn, ragged, and disconnected, a shadow of its former self.

While there has been no shortage of beautiful artifacts recovered from Cahokia and other Mississippian settlements, there’s been a complete absence of any form of writing. It seems the Mississippians lacked a writing system.

This critical dearth of information helps explain why the Mississippians rarely make it into textbooks of American history, and why only 2,600 words are written about them on Wikipedia compared to 13,000 for Ancient Egypt.  

And so, we’re left wondering about the Mississippians… What were their names? What were their stories? What did they believe in? We may never know for sure.