La Liberaci
Earlier here.
Earlier here.
The bombing of the Askariya Shrine in Samarra effectively escalates the Iraqi Civil War from low-level insurgency to open conflict. It was a nice building as well.
The golden dome on one shrine was presented by Nasr al-Din Shah and completed under Muzaffar al-Din Shah in the year 1905 A.D. Beneath the golden dome are four graves, those of Imam Ali al-Naqi (10th Imam) and his son, Imam Hasan al-Askari (11th Imam). The other two are of Hakimah Khatoon, the sister of Imam Ali al-Naqi who has related at length the circumstances of the birth of Imam al-Mahdi and the fourth grave is of Nargis Khatoon, the mother of Imam al-Mahdi, peace be upon him.
I saw someone write this, apparently convinced of their own wisdom: People who live in the Arctic evolved to eat loads of fish and red meat, very few grains and produce.
Human cultures capable of living in Arctic conditions are a relatively modern invention. Human colonisation of the Arctic seems to have begun only a few centuries before 500 CE (the Dorset Culture) and definitely by 500CE, which is when the Thule Culture began displacing the Arctic aborigines. Around the same time as the Vikings arrived in Southern Greenland, the Inuit were arriving in Northern Greenland…
There is a theory that it is the emergence of stable, permanent Arctic cultures that effectively “cut off” North America from further migrations via the Bering Straits. Prior to that period, it was possible for Mongoloian and Siberian cultures to “make a dash” across the icy coast, grimly surviving as they made their way south into warmer territories. The new permanent inhabitants of the Arctic regions of the straits made that impossible by out-competing the migrants for resources, and possibly using aggressive action against them to deter them further. Thus the Americas became isolated from the great Eurasian Migrations just as the Classical Era really got going…
Anyway, the point is, a couple of thousand years isn’t enough time for human metabolism to “evolve” to eat meat. It already possessed that ability.
Ah poor Harrison Ford, how far have you fallen from Solo and Jones…
1997, Air Force One. “Get off my PLANE!”
2006, Firewall. “Get off my SERVER!”
One thing that has always bothered me about the extreme replacement hypothesis of the “Out of Africa” essentialists is that the idea that thousands of humans (or pre-humans) emerging from their African homes would find archaic proto-humans abounding throughout Eurasia and South Asia and fail to shag them. The replacement advocates want to believe that our ancestors, finding their new lands occupied by hordes of autochthonous inhabitants, proceeded to kill and eat all these people without exception.
I find that idea absurd. I’m sure there were many wars, some to extinction, but I’m equally sure that there were many more fusions of disparate groups into new cultural formations, and that some of these events happened rapidly. The absolutists also want to believe that our all our ancestors were somehow so puritan that they would refuse to mate or have sex with these archaic humans who would have looked slightly “different” to themselves. Obviously, these people have never been at a club near closing, when even extreme flogging with the ugly stick is insufficient to deter some hookups. Also, to this day, some people have sex with animals, or balloons, or even Baptists, so I really don’t think that species as as strong as barrier as they would like to believe.
So I was interested to see today an elegant statistical analysis that veers towards the integration rather than replacement continuum of the Out of Africa hypothesis.
A new, more robust analysis of recently derived human gene trees by Alan R. Templeton, Ph.D, of Washington University in St Louis, shows three distinct major waves of human migration out of Africa instead of just two, and statistically refutes strongly the ‘Out of Africa’ replacement theory. That theory holds that populations of Homo sapiens left Africa 100,000 years ago and wiped out existing populations of humans. Templeton has shown that the African populations interbred with the Eurasian populations thus, making love, not war.