Archaeologists in France have uncovered rare monolith stones for the first time in the central part of the country at a site containing a skeleton from the Neolithic era.
Found across Western Europe from the United Kingdom to Italy and even as far away as Northern Africa and India, standing stones known as menhirs are common sights that attract tourists and researchers alike.
A series of such standing stones makes up what we know as Stonehenge.
But such stones are not found in central France. That is, until now.
The excavation of 1.6 hectares revealed about thirty monoliths, from 1m to 1.60m. These menhirs form a more or less rectilinear and continuous alignment, stretching 150m in the grip of the excavation and probably beyond. They are lined with another alignment of large blocks of stone, in the continuity of which, five stones make up a set of horseshoes. Finally, six blocks, regularly spaced, form a circle of 15m in diameter.
Highly visible in the landscape, the largest alignment presents an astonishing prospect: the largest menhirs are mainly at the top of the slope to the north, the smaller ones to the south, less spaced from each other. This alignment follows a north-south axis, close to the passage of a pass.
The discovery was made near Veyre-Monton during the widening of a major highway.
Aerial view of the Neolithic site in central France. Image via INRAP.
Unfortunately, like other monoliths, the stones were apparently brought down and covered up as if the community wanted to bury past beliefs, most likely by early Christians, and the site reminds the researchers of other similar sites.
Like some monuments, including Belz in the Morbihan, the menhirs of Veyre-Monton were shot down. Pushed into large pits, sometimes mutilated or covered with earth, monoliths seem to have been intentionally removed from the landscape.
This ensemble first evokes the great Armorican megalithic monuments, notably that of Carnac, but it is part of a dense network of megalithic expressions present throughout Western Europe.
Located in northwest France in Brittany, the Carnac stones are an amazing example of still-standing monoliths that represent Neolithic peoples in the present day.
The Carnac stones in northwest France stand as an example of Neolithic monoliths. This would be how the recently found central France stones would have looked had they been undisturbed. Image via Wikimedia.
INRAP points out that the menhirs would have taken much effort to transport to the site and stand them up, and they have a good idea where they came from.
The menhirs of basalt come from different origins. Their weight less than a tonne does not imply technical prowess for their transport, but nevertheless represents a considerable human investment. Among other things, we can imagine that different communities have contributed to the alignment by bringing stones from their territory. Two of the possible extraction sites, the Crest and Corent plateaus, are important places of occupation during the Neolithic and Protohistory periods.
And that’s not all. Sometimes, menhirs are carved to be anthropomorphic, and one menhir found on the site is exactly that.
Rough anthropomorphic, the statue has a rounded eminence, placed on shoulders summarily sided, and two small breasts. These reliefs were obtained by cutting the entire surface of the stone. Fifty centimeters under the breasts, symmetrical abductions, very eroded, but forming an engraved chevron could correspond to forearms placed on the abdomen.
A menhir carved into what appears to be an anthropomorphic figure. Image via INRAP.Another view of the anthropomorphic menhir stone. Image via INRAP.
The team also found the remains of a cairn, which often served as stone burial mounds during Neolithic times, a few of which can still be seen today.
Example of a complete Neolithic stone cairn located in northwest France. Image via Wikimedia.
Unfortunately, even the cairn appears to have been dismantled and buried to erase it from the landscape.
Like the alignment of menhirs, the cairn was finally deliberately removed from the landscape. The stones that constituted its elevation were torn from the monument and thrown into a large pit next to it.
The team estimates that at least 30 tons of stones were used to construct the cairn and had been transported from a few miles away.
And like a true burial cairn, the team soon found a skeleton.
The cairn, 14 m long and 6.5 m wide, quadrangular, is built around a tomb. This burial welcomes the remains of a tall man. His body was protected by a receptacle of wood now disappeared, surrounded and wedged blocks. Given their size, some of these blocks may correspond to displaced or even deliberately fragmented menhirs.
Aerial image of the cairn remains complete with an open grave containing a skeleton. Image via INRAP.A view of the cairn and grave from higher up. Image via INRAP.
INRAP has hailed the site as the first of it’s kind unearthed in the area.
“This is the first time that such alignments, cairn and statue-menhir, are brought to light in Auvergne, and more widely in central France,” the institute said.
We know almost nothing about the people who erected the menhirs. We don’t know their language, nor do we know their religious beliefs. We can presume, however, the early Christians believed them to be pagans. Archaeologists believe that there used to be far more monolith sites in the world than the 10,000 that currently stand today. So, perhaps one day, they will uncover a monolith that provides us the knowledge we crave about these prehistoric humans from several thousand years ago. Until then, it’s just another major mystery waiting to be solved.
More discussion on the megaliths from FRANCE 24 English below
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Archaeologists were recently exploring in Croatia when the happened upon something that immediately caught their eye and has subsequently set off debate about what they found, according to Ancient Origins:
“(The researchers) unearthed three ancient alien-like skeletons and two have artificially elongated skulls. Since 12,000-years-ago in ancient China, all over the ancient world, from Eurasia and across Africa to South America, people deliberately deformed the shapes of their children’s skulls.
“Most archaeologists associate this with an effort to identify one’s cultural origins and/or to indicate social status. Using tightly tied leather and cloths, earth filled bag-headdresses, or rigid wooden blocks, skulls could be altered into bizarre shapes if the method was applied to malleable infant’s skulls when they still had plasticity.”
The burial pit where the individuals were found (Via PLOS.org)
Elongated skulls have been found before, most notably the Paracas skulls unearthed along the coast of Peru. For years, it was speculated that the Paracas skulls were proof that aliens did indeed visit Earth.
The Croatian skulls turned out to be of children aged between 12 and 16. They had lived between 415 and 560 AD and suffered from malnutrition. And all died suddenly, according to researchers:
“The team of scientist believe they could have had a disease like the plague ‘that killed them quickly and didn’t leave any traces on their bones.’ It is known that they died at the same time as the Great Migration Period, a very turbulent period in European history when after the fall of the Roman Empire entirely new cultures arrived in Europe with new traditions.”
CT reconstruction showing one of the elongated skulls (Via PLOS.org)
After further examination of the skulls, it was determined that that one of the skulls belonged to a child of West Eurasian ancestry and didn’t contain any cranial elongation.
A second skull showed a person of East Asian ancestry who had “oblique deformation” meaning that the skull was elongated upward.
The third child was of Near Asian ancestry and had circular-erect type cranial deformation. In this soft of deformation, the bone behind the forehead is flattened, which increased the height of the skull “significantly.”
“(In) the migration period of Europe (4 th – 7 th century AD) … the practice of intentional cranial modification ‘was common among several nomadic groups, but was strongly associated with the Huns from the Carpathian Basin in Hungary, where modified crania are abundant in archaeological sites.’”
CT scans of the so-called circular-erect type cranial deformation (Via PLOS.org)
Deformation of skulls was practiced by the Huns during a period around 453 AD. But why was this done? Merely for cosmetic reasons, or was there another purpose?
Oddly enough, it’s now believed that skull elongation was a sort of status symbol among ancient peoples which “helped foster a sense of community and collective identity.”
“Bioarchaeologist Matthew Velasco of Cornell University said that some 300 years before the Inca Empire swept the southwestern Americas the powerful social elite in a small ethnic community known as the ‘Collagua,’ who lived in the Colca Valley in south-eastern Peru, intentionally shaped their heads to ‘polarize other groups, resulting in social inequality.’”
Child in the process of having its head flattened, and an adult after the process (Via Trzęsacz /Public Domain)
Accounts from Spanish explorers also mention a group known as the ‘Cavanas,’who also deformed their skulls, but not the tall, narrow way the Collagua did. Instead, the Cavanas “modified their skulls by widening and flattening them.”
While such cranial modifications seem bizarre to us when we examine thousands of years after they occurred, they may well have helped ancient people build a sense of community and better fit into the places they lived, even assuring cooperation which led to their survival:
“These studies all suggest head shaping among those with power may have paved the way for a ‘peaceful incorporation for the Collagua into the Inca Empire’ and that standardization of head-shaping practices echoes broader patterns of identity formation across the south-central highlands. What’s more, it may have provided ‘a symbolic basis for the cooperation of elite groups during an era of intensive conflict.’”
Survival is man’s most basic instinct, and humans will do whatever is necessary to protect themselves and their families. That even includes something as strange as changing the shape of their skulls. It doesn’t prove alien life on Earth, but it does reinforce the notion that mankind is resilient and ever changing as conditions warrant.
The Egyptian pyramids are miracles of construction and scientific achievement, which is even more amazing when you consider that they were built thousands of years ago, long before we had the extensive knowledge that has been acquired over centuries.
But were the pyramids also constructed to produce sound waves that would literally alter consciousness and produce a mystical, out of body experience in anyone who was inside the structure?
As Ancient Origins explains, infrasound (sometimes referred to as low-frequency sound) is known to directly affect the human brain:
“It can induce feelings of nausea, anxiety, paranoia, as well as a sense of dread. In more sensitive individuals this can lead to a feeling of disconnection with the material world, accompanied by a very real sense of otherworldliness.”
Remarkably, the ancient Egyptians may also have understood that infrasound could play tricks on the mind and lead to a higher state of mental activity:
“If correct, then were the pyramid builders of ancient Egypt aware not only of some very expressive forms of sound technology, but also of the impact of infrasound on human bodily systems? Is this why the Dead-end Passage in the Subterranean Chamber was deliberately designed to generate infrasound, and why other of its chambers produced it on a slightly lower level?”
Were passages in the Great Pyramid of Giza designed to resonate with low-frequency sounds that altered the state of mind? (Via YouTube)
The Dead-End Passage
Of particular interest is the “Dead-End Passage” in the Great Pyramid of Giza. Science and history author Andrew Collins had a chance to enter this passage and then theorized as to the purpose of the narrow passageway:
“As the only thing a person can do when in the Dead-end Passage is either sit cross-legged or lie down lengthways, then it really does make sense that its original function involved a person, an initiate or priest perhaps, entering inside it and achieving some kind of altered state of consciousness. This might have been achieved through either the use of meditational practices or the achievement of non-REM sleep, enhanced, of course, by the effects of the tube’s own inherent infrasound; the two resonating in sympathy with each other.”
The Dead-End Passage of the Great Pyramid is located beneath the dead center of the structure (Via YouTube)
The fact that the Dead-End Passage is located beneath the center of the pyramid speaks to the larger purpose of the structure: Transporting the pharaoh to other worlds:
“This deep cosmic journey involved an ascent to the constellation of Orion, and then an onward passage via the Milky Way to the constellation of Cygnus, the entrance to the sky world proper. It is a process outlined in the 4,300-year-old Pyramid Texts, found inscribed on the interior walls of several Old Kingdom pyramids, whereby in death every pharaoh automatically becomes the god Osiris.
“In this guise, the soul’s primary goal was to achieve rebirth in the womb of Osiris’s mother. She was the sky-goddess Nut, who was herself a personification of the Milky Way, her womb synonymous with the fork in the Milky Way marked by the stars of Cygnus. Having achieved entry to the afterlife, the ascended soul of the pharaoh was reunited with both the gods and the ancestors.”
All of this does lend itself to the possibility that Egyptian priests were indeed under the influence of infrasound as a method of also transporting themselves to the stars where they could oversee the pharaoh’s transformation and rebirth as a god.
As we all know, sound can transport us in ways other things cannot. Most of us have experienced hearing a song from our youth and recalling exactly where we were and what we were doing when we first heard it. Of all our senses, sound may even have the greatest impact on us. And it seems perfectly logical that the ancient Egyptians knew this, too, and incorporated that knowledge into the pyramids.
Here’s more on the acoustic resonance testing of an Egyptian pyramid
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In 2019, Serbian-American Nikola Tesla has never been more famous or appreciated, yet in his day he was ridiculed as a mad scientist. Why? As anyone who has ever explored the idea of extraterrestrial life knows, it can be a taboo subject of scorn by mainstream society. That’s changing rapidly, as the US government has finally admitted that the study of unidentified aerial phenomena is ongoing and progressed to official changes in reporting procedures.
However, with Tesla, (1856-1943), we can see he seems to have been lightyears ahead of his time, using his radical thinking to come up with invention after invention. One ubiquitous example is the alternating-current (AC) electrical system we use daily. Others are radio technology, and wireless power systems we take for granted today.
Tesla had no reservations about discussing his thoughts on extraterrestrial life, or even that he could make contact and learn from higher intelligence in the universe.
In 1899, the Red Cross asked Tesla to “predict man’s greatest possible achievement in the next century.” Tesla responded that he had already done it by receiving a signal from another world.
“To the American Red Cross, New York City.
The retrospect is glorious, the prospect is inspiring: Much might be said of both. But one idea dominates my mind. This — my best, my dearest — is for your noble cause.
I have observed electrical actions, which have appeared inexplicable. Faint and uncertain though they were, they have given me a deep conviction and foreknowledge, that ere long all human beings on this globe, as one, will turn their eyes to the firmament above, with feelings of love and reverence, thrilled by the glad news: “Brethren! We have a message from another world, unknown and remote. It reads: one… two… three…”
By 1910, Tesla told the New York Times that he believed the signals were coming from Mars and that “all doubt in this regard will soon be dispelled.”
As brilliant and as prolific as he was, Tesla was driven by ideas, not by commercial, corporate success. He was laser-focused on delivering free energy and global, wireless communication to every person.
This pursuit, as well as his open belief in extraterrestrials, appear to have been his biggest weaknesses. Both free energy and talk of aliens were topics that were easy for his enemies to exploit against him, and that’s still true today.
Tesla received the mad scientist treatment, and his ideas about aliens and free energy were considered just crazy talk, although certainly entertaining.
“With funding from a group of investors that included financial giant J. P. Morgan, in 1901 Tesla began work on the free energy project in earnest, designing and building a lab with a power plant and a massive transmission tower on a site on Long Island, New York, that became known as Wardenclyffe.
However, doubts arose among his investors about the plausibility of Tesla’s system. As his rival, Guglielmo Marconi — with the financial support of Andrew Carnegie and Thomas Edison — continued to make great advances with his own radio technologies, Tesla had no choice but to abandon the project.”
Tesla had a falling out with the investors and with mainstream giants like Thomas Edison and financier and banker, J.P. Morgan. Later, when his ideas about Mars became public, it seems to have sealed his fate. Rumors that Tesla would be given a Nobel Prize vanished into nothing, as well as the proof of free energy technology.
Today, the concepts of free energy and aliens are not quite so fringe, with the rise of Tesla Motors in 2003 and the ongoing search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) in the universe. Tesla has gone from a cult figure to a mainstream hero, and one day, we hope his dreams become realized for the benefit of all life on Earth.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials stated they received 220,000 applications and hired 12,000 additional ICE officers and agents in less than 12 months
