Podcasts about Neolithic

A Hole in the Head is a 1998 documentary film produced and executive produced by filmmaker and author Cevin Soling. Directed by Eli Kabillio, the 54-minute film examines the controversial practice of trepanation—the process of boring a hole into the human skull. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]Core Premise and HistoryThe documentary explores both the historical roots and the modern subculture surrounding voluntary trepanation. [1]Ancient Origins: The film highlights how the procedure is one of the oldest known surgical practices, utilized by ancient Egyptians, Incas, and Neolithic civilizations. [1, 2, 3]The Modern Goal: It focuses heavily on individuals in the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Netherlands who choose to perform or undergo the procedure on themselves. [1, 2]The Underlying Theory: Advocates in the film believe that removing a small piece of bone restores the "brain pulsations" lost when the skull fully hardens in adulthood. They argue this increases brain blood volume and oxygenation, leading to a permanent "high" or a permanently expanded state of consciousness. [1]Featured SubjectsThe documentary includes interviews and historical footage of prominent figures within the modern trepanation movement: [Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-opperman-report--1198501/support.

My recent chat with Jordan E. Petersen on the excellent Gods, Ghosts and UFOs Podcast. Follow them on substack: https://ggupodcast.substack.com/ What's Jo's Favorite Fairy Sighting? "This week, Jordan finally gets to ask the host of the singular Modern Fairy Sightings Podcast the most annoying question he can come up with, and she does not disappoint. Jo Hickey-Hall has been collecting these stories for years. And the one she leads with is hers: a stick being made of literal sticks, running down a beach in Jersey with a gait so strange it made everyone watching laugh. Years later, a man in northeast England describes seeing almost exactly the same thing.  We talk about why these things, these beings, whatever they are, resist being accurately described or depicted. They're so vivid in the moment, but as soon as you start to try to put words on them, they seem to slip away.  But we're doing our best. You can come judge for yourself. Highlights: Jo Hickey-Hall, folklorist, social historian, host of The Modern Fairy Sightings Podcast (also find her at scarlettofthefae.com and preorder her book here) Nerd Critic Jo's favorite fairy sighting The shadow-cutters A stick being made of sticks The Brazilian Ent (a tree trunk that walked, then tried to become a man, and didn't quite get it right) The disconnect between perception and description “I can see it in my head, but it just doesn't seem to translate into words or drawings” Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy Mysterium tremendum and mysterium fascinans Why one guy runs away and the other is filled with awe Conditioning, inheritance, and the holding place we make for the uncanny Orbs in the context of UFOs, fae, and consciousness Conscious plasma :) Different witnesses, different filters/stations/signals How to learn to see auras (try it at a conference with a white screen behind the speaker) The Genius Loci Two strangers see the same being in the same place, twenty years apart “Your daemon is really driving you” How to actually meet the fae Picking up litter is an offering Thresholds: doorways, dawn and dusk, the line where the beach meets the sea, the transitions in your own life Theosophy and the elemental beings — Blavatsky, Steiner, Paracelsus The London flat haunted by goblins (near a crossroads, near water) Are the fae hitching lifts on trains and trucks? Fairies as emergent phenomena of place (this is what humans are, actually) Part two maybe? (with Mal (and Tom???)) And in the epilogue…on Gods, Ghosts and UFOs A disembodied head in a kitchen window Why you can't tear down a house to make a haunting go away How UFOs are seen so often over a Neolithic burial chamber that locals don't bother to look up anymore ⭐️ JOIN THE MODERN FAIRY SIGHTINGS COMMUNITY ⭐️ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/c/themodernfairysightingspodcast/membership⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ If you're looking for exclusive bonus material, monthly zoom chats with like-minded folks, access to the Discord chat channels, quiet meditation gatherings and meeting other members, join us at: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.patreon.com/c/themodernfairysightingspodcast/membership⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ S U P P O R T If you'd prefer to support the Modern Fairy Sightings with a one off donation, you can ‘buy me a coffee' and I'd be very grateful

Historian, author and Britain Palestine Project patron William Dalrymple opens the Recognition is the Beginning conference with a sweeping exploration of Palestinian history, identity and Britain's historic role in the region.Drawing on archaeology, genetics, historical records and personal testimony, Dalrymple challenges narratives that deny Palestinian continuity and traces the story of Palestine from the Bronze Age to the present day. Beginning with the story of the village of Isdud (modern-day Ashdod), he examines how communities endured for millennia before being displaced during the Nakba of 1948.The keynote explores:The historical continuity of Palestinian communities over more than 3,000 years.Archaeological and genetic evidence linking modern Palestinians to ancient Levantine populations.The shared ancestral heritage of Palestinians and many Israeli Jews.The origins and enduring history of the name “Palestine” from the Bronze Age to today.Palestine's role as a centre of trade, culture, religion and scholarship throughout antiquity and the medieval world.The impact of the Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate on Palestinian self-determination.Britain's historic and contemporary responsibilities regarding Palestine.Why recognition of Palestine is only a starting point and must be accompanied by meaningful action.Dalrymple argues that understanding the depth of Palestinian history is essential to understanding the present crisis and to building a future based on justice, accountability and equal rights. He concludes by reflecting on the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and the importance of transforming recognition into practical support for Palestinian self-determination.This keynote was recorded at the Britain Palestine Project annual conference, Recognition is the Beginning, held at the Greenwood Theatre, London, on 2 June 2026.William Dalrymple is an award-winning historian, broadcaster and bestselling author whose books include The Anarchy, The Last Mughal, White Mughals and From the Holy Mountain. He is co-host of the hugely popular Empire podcast and a patron of the Britain Palestine Project. His current research focuses on the history of Palestine from the Neolithic period to the Nakba.

If you enjoy this episode, we're sure you will enjoy more content like this on The Occult Rejects.  In fact, we have curated playlists on occult topics like grimoires, esoteric concepts and phenomena, occult history, analyzing true crime and cults with an occult lens, Para politics, and occultism in music. Whether you enjoy consuming your content visually or via audio, we've got you covered - and it will always be provided free of charge.  So, if you enjoy what we do and want to support our work of providing accessible, free content on various platforms, please consider making a donation to the links provided below.  Thank you and enjoy the episode!Links For The Occult Rejectshttps://linktr.ee/theoccultrejectsOccult Research Institutehttps://www.occultresearchinstitute.org/Substackhttps://substack.com/@theoccultrejects?r=7auau0&utm_campaign=profile&utm_medium=profile-pageCash Apphttps://cash.app/$theoccultrejectsVenmo@TheOccultRejectsBuy Me A Coffeebuymeacoffee.com/TheOccultRejectsPatreonhttps://www.patreon.com/TheOccultRejectsBIBLIOGRAPHYLoaded Ground and Temple GrammarBradley, Richard. An Archaeology of Natural Places. Key use: Natural features as ritual centers: springs, caves, mountains, watery places, unusual stones, and the way landscape itself becomes an active participant in sacred behavior.Bradley, Richard. The Significance of Monuments: On the Shaping of Human Experience in Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe. Key use: Monumentality, repeated movement, ritual landscapes, and how built earth/stone structures anchor memory and collective story.Scarre, Chris, ed. Monuments and Landscape in Atlantic Europe: Perception and Society During the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age. Key use: Landscape archaeology, perception, monument placement, sacred routes, and social memory.Tilley, Christopher. A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments. Key use: Embodied movement through sacred landscapes. Good for explaining why approach, walking, turning, climbing, entering, and returning matter as much as the site itself.Ruggles, Clive. Ancient Astronomy: An Encyclopedia of Cosmologies and Myth. Key use: Archaeoastronomy, horizon alignment, sky events, and methodological caution against sloppy “everything is a star map” claims.Ruggles, Clive. Astronomy in Prehistoric Britain and Ireland. Key use: Prehistoric monuments, solar/lunar alignments, and sky-ground relationships.Watson, Aaron, and David Keating. “Architecture and Sound: An Acoustic Analysis of Megalithic Monuments in Prehistoric Britain.” Antiquity 73, no. 280 (1999): 325–336. Key use: Archaeoacoustics, megalithic sound environments, echo, resonance, and how ancient monuments may have shaped movement and perception through sound as well as sight.Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Key use: Sacred space, center, axis mundi, threshold, and the difference between ordinary space and holy space.Smith, Jonathan Z. To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual. Key use: Ritual as place-making. Useful for the idea that sacred places are not merely found; they are produced through repeated action, interpretation, and return.Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Key use: Lived place, memory, orientation, and the difference between abstract space and meaningful place.van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. Key use: Separation, threshold, and incorporation. Useful for crossings, caves, temples, initiation, and the movement from ordinary to sacred space.Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Key use: Liminality, betweenness, communitas, and why thresholds create psychological and social transformation.Vitruvius. Ten Books on Architecture / De Architectura. Key use: Classical architecture, proportion, order, temple siting, and the ancient architectural concern with harmony, geometry, and orientation.Scully, Vincent. The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods: Greek Sacred Architecture. Key use: Greek temples in relation to landscape, sightlines, deity, terrain, and sacred placement.Ward-Perkins, J. B. Roman Imperial Architecture. Key use: Roman monumental space, basilicas, civic authority, imperial architecture, and the built environment Christianity later inherits.Wycherley, R. E. How the Greeks Built Cities. Key use: Greek civic and sacred urban planning, temple placement, public space, and the relationship between architecture and city order.Onians, John. Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. Key use: Classical orders as carriers of meaning, authority, proportion, and inherited architectural language.Assmann, Jan. The Search for God in Ancient Egypt. Key use: Egyptian sacred space, temple theology, divine presence, ritual service, and cosmic order.Shafer, Byron E., ed. Temples of Ancient Egypt. Key use: Egyptian temple structure, processional access, restricted interiors, ritual activity, light/dark progression, and the temple as cosmic environment.Levenson, Jon D. Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible. Key use: Temple, mountain, divine presence, sacred center, covenant, and the biblical imagination of holy place.Levine, Lee I., ed. Jerusalem: Its Sanctity and Centrality to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Key use: Jerusalem, sacred center, Temple memory, pilgrimage, and the later religious mapping of holiness.The Bible, especially Exodus, Leviticus, 1 Kings, Ezekiel, Psalms, the Gospels, Hebrews, and Revelation. Key use: Tabernacle, Temple, altar, priesthood, sacrifice, holiness, veil, divine presence, living water, pilgrimage, heavenly city, and sacred orientation.Misstear, Bruce. “The Hydrogeology of Sacred Wells: Insights from Ireland.” Hydrogeology Journal, 2024. Key use: Sacred wells as real groundwater systems, including hydrogeological settings, water chemistry, cultural meaning, and anthropogenic impacts. This supports the line that holy wells are both sacred sites and physical water systems.Bord, Janet, and Colin Bord. Sacred Waters: Holy Wells and Water Lore in Britain and Ireland. Key use: Holy wells, healing traditions, local water lore, offerings, vows, and repeated devotional return.Rattue, James. The Living Stream: Holy Wells in Historical Context. Key use: Historical context for holy wells, Christianization, local devotion, and the persistence of sacred water sites.Ray, Celeste. The Origins of Ireland's Holy Wells. Key use: Irish holy wells, sacred water, pilgrimage, healing, local tradition, and the complex relation between Christian practice and older water sites.National Churches Trust. “Medieval Bridge Chapels.” Key use: Bridge chapels as medieval crossing sites, often chantry chapels connected to prayers for founders, benefactors, travelers, and pilgrims.Green, Edward. “Bridge Chapels.” Building Conservation. Key use: Bridge chapels as Christian worship sites built on or near bridges for travelers, safe arrival, and the sacralization of movement.Research report. The Bridge Chapels of Medieval Britain. Key use: Bridge construction and maintenance as pious and charitable work, chapels and crosses at bridges, safe passage, tolls, repairs, and the link between devotion and infrastructure.Walsham, Alexandra. The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland. Key use: How sacred geography, wells, crosses, shrines, roads, memory, and local religious landscapes were reclassified and contested during the Reformation.Ren, L., et al. “GIS-Based Viewshed Analysis on the Visibility of Historic Towns.” ISPRS Archives, 2021. Key use: Viewshed analysis, line-of-sight, historic structures, and the use of GIS to study visibility in built heritage environments. Useful for keeping claims about towers, spires, and landmark dominance grounded in method.Vaz de Freitas, I. “Historical Landscape: A Methodological Proposal to Characterise the Landscape of Monasteries in Early Medieval Portugal.” Religions 15, no. 10 (2024): 1158. Key use: Early medieval monastic landscapes, GIS method, religious siting, and environmental variables. Useful for sacred visibility, water proximity, slope, altitude, and landscape choice.Kilde, Jeanne Halgren. Sacred Power, Sacred Space: An Introduction to Christian Architecture and Worship. Key use: Broad Christian architecture source for power, worship, sacred space, and the way buildings shape religious experience.Kieckhefer, Richard. Theology in Stone: Church Architecture from Byzantium to Berkeley. Key use: Church architecture as theology in built form. Useful as a bridge from ancient sacred grammar into later Christian architectural expression.Also want to remind people about the website, if you're into reading we have tons of information by multiple contributors, and we got t-shirts up on the site if you're interested. Fun fact, the art is all based on the eyeball. A

Nick the Rat Radio Episode 541 Scientists just confirmed it: a entire civilization built 35,000 stone monuments across Europe, dragged quartz boulders 60 miles to place them on fault lines with surgical precision — and then disappeared without a war, without a fire, without a single written word. No genetic trace in anyone alive today. A University of Copenhagen study dropped this year and barely anyone's talking about it. Nick the Rat is. Tonight we get into the piezoelectric grid theory, the Kyoto University solar flare research, and why a Neolithic infrastructure project might have cooked its own builders from the inside out. Plus mammoth bones that turned out to be a whale, a caller from inside a correctional facility, and Jane Hanoi reports from the Dark Sewer Network on Antarctic mole cities and alien dairy farmers who don't know what they're doing. #AncientCivilization #LostCivilization #Megaliths #Stonehenge #Carnac #AncientDNA #Conspiracy #NickTheRat #PiezoElectric #SolarStorm #UnexplainedHistory #AlternativeHistory #ConspiracyPodcast #UndergroundMedia #DarkSewerNetwork #sewerchat A paranoid rat discusses conspiracies, secret agendas, and things they don't want you to know — while playing hand-picked underground music. Call in live: 1-917-719-5923 Originally aired: 05/27/20 All music is Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0). All artists are credited during the episode. For more info: www.nicktherat.com

Faced with this prehistoric setting, the Academic Adventurers head into the unknown. Johanna Howes - Meredith, Kate O'Sullivan - Potentia, Ross Balch - Harold, Ben Keirnan - DM/NPCs

Part 4 of my review of David Wengrove and David Graeber's The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. As we come to the close of this book we begin to go deeper into the Neolithic and explore urban forms and political systems, asking the question if anything has an origin and if not, how can we tell the story of early humanity?  

“Every single person that we meet was both the endpoint of thousands of years that brought them there, and the midpoint of some other process, and was the beginning of something else entirely. Think of yourselves as the middle and the beginning, not just the end.” — Patrick Wyman History, we are often told, is a simple story of progress — from caves and villages to cities; from forests and farms to factories; from chieftains and kings to democracies. But, for Patrick Wyman, host of the enormously popular Tides of History and Fall of Rome podcasts, that's far too linear a narrative. In his new book, Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World, Wyman argues that rather than a teleological inevitability, civilization is a chaotic ten thousand year story of improvisation, experiment, failure, and unintended consequence. It is never ending. We are always in the middle of it. Dramatic advances in archaeological technology triggered Wyman's argument in Lost Worlds. Ancient DNA, isotope analysis, LiDAR, cutting-edge excavation are all opening up what Wyman calls “a golden age for popular historians.” We can now trace the lives of individuals in ways that were inconceivable just a generation ago. Wyman's star is Ötzi the Iceman — a man murdered 5,300 years ago in the Alps, whose gut contents, DNA, last meal, and likely killers we now know. Rather than a symbol of prehistoric life, Ötzi the Iceman reveals why history keeps happening. Five Takeaways •       The Prelapsarian Fallacy: Hunter-Gatherers Weren't Paradise: The romantic idea — popular in the last decade as people read Graeber and Wengrow or Yuval Noah Harari — is that hunter-gatherers had it better. Farming made us smaller, sicker, more crowded, more unequal. Wyman's counter: yes, on some metrics early farmers were less healthy than foragers. But farming also supported enormously larger populations. It expanded the possibilities of human life in ways that foraging never could. Looking back at the past and calling it paradise says more about the critique of the present than about the actual realities of past lives. •       Civilization Was Not Inevitable: We have a story about how we got from foragers to cities: people settled, started farming, produced surplus, developed specialisation, built states. But Wyman's new archaeology shows that this story is wrong at every step. Farming didn't always replace foraging. Villages didn't automatically spark agriculture. Cities didn't necessitate rigid hierarchies. For every society that moved from one stage to the next, there are others that moved in different directions, collapsed, hybridised, or simply chose something else. The line of progress is a retrospective fiction. •       Ötzi the Iceman: A Man With a Story: Wyman's most vivid example of what the new archaeology makes possible: Ötzi, a man murdered 5,300 years ago in the Alps, whose mummified body was found in 1991. From isotope analysis of his teeth, we know where he grew up. From his gut contents, we know what he ate in his last meal — venison and ibex. From his DNA, we know his ancestry. From the arrow in his back, we know how he died. We don't know his name, but we know enough to recognise him as fully human. That is what the new tools give us: not symbols of a lost world, but individual people with individual stories. •       The Fall of Rome Was Not a Tragedy: Wyman spent fifteen years of his life thinking about the fall of the Roman Empire and hosting a podcast about it. Writing this book changed how he sees it. He used to view it as a tragedy — something lost. Now he views it as a natural part of the rhythms that pulse through human societies over long periods of time. The remarkable thing about Rome is not that it fell. All empires fall. All societies eventually reach the limits of their technologies, their environments, their ways of organising life. The remarkable thing is that it lasted as long as it did. Six hundred years. That's the story. •       Think of Yourself as the Middle, Not the End: Wyman's message for the AI apocalypticists — and for everyone else who believes they're living at the final chapter of human history. Every person at every point in the past believed the same thing. The Neolithic farmers Wyman studies. The Bronze Age city-dwellers. The Romans. Every one of them was both an endpoint and a beginning. The AI revolution may transform the world. But it will not end it. Stop thinking in terms of next quarter. Start thinking of yourself as part of something much, much bigger — that will extend long after your name has been forgotten. About the Guest Patrick Wyman is the host of the Tides of History, Fall of Rome, and Past Lives podcasts, and the author of Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World (Harper, May 5, 2026) and The Verge: Renaissance, Reformation, and Forty Years That Shook the World. He has a PhD in History from USC and lives in Phoenix, Arizona. References: •       Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World by Patrick Wyman (Harper, May 5, 2026). •       Tides of History podcast by Patrick Wyman — currently covering the Iron Age. •       Fall of Rome podcast by Patrick Wyman. •       Episode 2891: John Steele Gordon on information technology and American unity — the companion piece on how technology changes history at the deep level. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - Introduction: from the Ice Age to the Bronze Age...

Neolithic peoples made the transition from being nomadic hunter-gatherers to crop-growing farmers, and their diets are the subject of numerous studies.Archaeological evidence informs us about the farming and foraging activities of these ancient peoples, but it's unusual to get a first hand taste of how it might have been to forage on the shore and land! On the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, the arts organisation, Haar, facilitated an opportunity to sit down to an interpretation of a Stone Age feast - albeit with considerable artistic and culinary licence! The event was centered around the 5000-year-old Calanais standing stone circle. Nancy Nicolson joined the foragers to find out about the farming and feasting habits of our ancestors, and met one of the crofters whose sheep today graze the machair, the strip of flower and herb-rich land that borders the sea and which it is believed contributed to the flavours and nutrition of the food Neolithic people ate.Produced and presented by Nancy Nicolson.

The first ever outbreak of 'plague' - Yersinia Pestis, the most feared disease in human history - was long thought to be the Plague of Justinian in 541 AD. But new studies of ancient DNA have revealed traces of Yesinia Pestis dating back more than 5,000 years. In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by Laura Spinney to explore the origins of prehistoric plague. How did this pestilence emerge to blight the Neolithic world? Where did it come from? And could it have triggered a Stone Age collapse which signalled the dawn of the Bronze Age in Europe? Discover how this deadly pathogen reshaped entire Stone Age societies, long before the advent of written history. MOREDid Plague Destroy the Roman Empire?Listen on AppleListen on Spotify The Birth of Indo-EuropeanListen on AppleListen on SpotifyPresented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Audio for Uploader: Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Send us Fan MailFind Michele at bookclues.comThe world you take for granted is younger than you think and it was never guaranteed. We sit down with Patrick Wyman, creator of Tides of History and Past Lives and author of Lost Worlds; How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World to trace the volatile 10,000-year span after the last Ice Age when farming, herding, villages, social hierarchies, and writing begin to reshape human life. Along the way, we confront a simple driver behind almost everything: the hunt for calories and the constant fear of starvation that organized societies for millennia.Patrick explains why the Neolithic period isn't a clean “before and after” moment, but a messy overlap of experiments, migration, and collapse. Ancient DNA technology, isotope analysis, and paleoenvironmental research now let historians see population replacement, unexpected ancestry, and the ways demography responds to perceived scarcity. We talk about the Anzick child in Montana and what one 13,000-year-old burial reveals about the deep roots of Indigenous history across North America.Subscribe for more conversations like this, share the episode with a history-loving friend, and leave a review so more listeners can find the show.Find Patrick at  instagram.com/wyman_patrick/

Johnny Mac shares five good news stories: Gerie, a pet chicken in Maine, is recognized as the world's oldest living pet chicken at 15 years and 100 days, with owner Frank saying she became flock leader and now enjoys an indoor life and human company ahead of turning 16 in July. In Georgia, 12-year-old Macy is praised for running into her burning home to alert her two older brothers and help them escape as firefighters contained the blaze and the cause remains under investigation. In England, archaeologists surveying for a wind power project unexpectedly uncovered a Roman villa and bathhouse, an Iron Age farming estate, a bronze handle nicknamed “Norfolk Na,” plus Neolithic, Bronze Age, and medieval finds. In the UK, recycled urine from major events is processed into fertilizer to grow 4,500 trees. In New Zealand, 101-year-old Neville becomes the world's oldest competitive croquet player.John also hosts Daily Comedy NewsUnlock an ad-free podcast experience with Caloroga Shark Media!  For Apple users, hit the banner which says Uninterrupted Listening on your Apple podcasts app. Subscribe now for exclusive shows like 'Palace Intrigue,' and get bonus content from Deep Crown (our exclusive Palace Insider!) Or get 'Daily Comedy News,' and '5 Good News Stories' with no commercials! Plans start at $4.99 per month, or save 20% with a yearly plan at $49.99. Join today and help support the show!Get more info from Caloroga Shark Media and if you have any comments, suggestions, or just want to get in touch our email is info@caloroga.com

What the Stone Did Not ForgetThe lineage of the sacred feminine from Neolithic Europe all the way to the Stardust Lineage.There is an image of a woman small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. She is less than four and a half inches tall, carved from Neolithic limestone over 28,000 years ago near the Danube River in what is now called Austria. She is all curved. A sacred feminine body with a round belly, full breasts, wide hips, a body in its fullness and generative power, honored in the most permanent material available.She has no face. She does not need one. She is not a portrait of an individual woman. She is every woman. And she is a statement about what the female body means, what it carries, what it represents, and the cosmology of the people who made her. She is, of course, the Venus of Willendorf.She was once tinted with red ochre, the same iron-rich pigment as human blood, and women's blood. Even in the act of carving, there was an awareness of the connection between body, earth, and cosmos. The stone itself was not incidental. The stone holds what time cannot otherwise keep. The stone holds the story and remembers.Across a vast arc of prehistoric Europe and Asia, from France to Siberia, archaeologists have uncovered hundreds of similar figurines spanning thousands of years of human creative life. Each one encoded the same understanding. The female body is sacred. It doesn't represent the sacred. It is the sacred and created from the sacred. She is the source. She is the organizing principle of human life.Honoring the feminine because of matriarchy was not something radical, was not feminism. It was not simply embedded into the fabric of early human cultures. It was actually what the fabric was woven from — not just embedded, woven from. It is the very fibers of the tapestry.And this story lasts for thousands and thousands and thousands of years before the eventual widespread emergence of organized warfare, before the legal and theological structures that would later declare the female body a problem to be managed and named, before the invention of land ownership.The stone did not forget, even as later cultures obscured, suppressed, and reinterpreted and renamed what these figurines meant. The stone holds the story. The clay holds the imprint.Marija Gimbutas and the Language of the Sacred BodyMuch of what we know about these ancient cultures comes from the work of Marija Gimbutas, the Lithuanian-American archaeologist, Professor Emeritus at UCLA, and one of the most important and most contested scholars in the 20th century. She spent decades excavating what she called Old Europe, the Neolithic cultures of prehistoric Europe that flourished before the arrival of the patriarchal peoples from the Pontic-Caspian steppes beginning around 4000 BCE. In the regions of what is now known as Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania, the Cucuteni-Trypillia era, she documented cultures that developed sophisticated symbolic systems over thousands of years, deeply rooted in agricultural art and the cyclical understandings of life.In thousands of figurines, burial sites, ceremonial objects, and symbolic markings, she identified a coherent visual language — circles, spirals, triangles, and the female form encoding an entire civilization's understanding of life, death, the regeneration cycle, and the sacred. This is not primitive decoration. These are not fertility charms made for male desire. These are acts of reverence and collaboration, a co-creative relationship, symbols encoded into stone and clay, telling a story about who we were and perhaps who we could be.And she found no weapons there until later.Her interpretation, by the way, has been challenged and debated by subsequent scholars. Her naming, her description of the archaeomythology of the ancient mothers — to this day, archaeologists are trying to disprove her theories and relabel her findings.And yet the figurines — it's even hard to call them that. The mother. She just exists. The symbols recur across vast distances and thousands of years with a consistency that really demands no explanation. We honored her and her body. Whatever the precise nature of the social structures that produced them, the female body represented in these artifacts is the power. She is the primary symbol through which a civilization found its meaning.That understanding did not disappear when the cultures that held it were disrupted. It went underground, literally, and it survived in objects and then modern day practices that the dominant culture wasn't successful in stamping out.So much they took from us. So much we remembered. The stone remembers, and the stardust bones remember.Lenore Thomas Straus — Choosing the MotherThis is how it leads into our Stardust Lineage.In 1937, sculptor Lenore Thomas Straus received a commission through the Public Works Administration — sometimes called the Works Progress Administration — in Greenbelt, Maryland. This is one of the New Deal communities being built during the Depression, supported by the Roosevelts' vision for an American public life. Lenore worked on multiple projects connected to this era of public art, and photographs document her alongside Eleanor Roosevelt in a hard hat.Lenore also made a note that these communities were being built for white people, but by Black people. That is part of the story. The untold story.For the Greenbelt commission, Lenore was given latitude to choose her subject. It was going to go in the town square. She chose a mother and child — not a warrior, not a statesman for the area, not an allegory of progress or industry. A mother kneeling, with her child holding a cup with both hands. It is carved across three four-foot limestone blocks from Indiana, twelve feet of stone placed in public space, and functional — a water fountain. Just like a woman, she wanted to make sure it made sense. Utility and reverence made inseparable, the act of offering water given permanent form in stone. The sculpture was commissioned in 1937 and completed in 1939.This is, of course, a conscious choice. With the full range of American civic iconography available to her, with the imprimatur of federal commission behind her, Lenore Thomas Straus chose to place the sacred feminine body in a public square — a mother and a child.She also carved in a separate commission the Preamble to the Constitution in stone, also in Maryland.She knew what she was doing. She was doing what the Neolithic carvers had done across thousands of years — inscribing the female body and the values of a society that honors life in the most permanent material available.She wrote of her relationship to carving stone as an artist: Quietly, I bow to the stone.To our community, this summarizes the root system of Intentional Creativity. The sentence holds an entire philosophy. The sculptor does not dominate the material. She listens to it. She honors what it carries. She brings her full devotion to bear before she raises a hand to shape it.Greenbelt, Maryland is where Lenore Thomas Straus is from — Prince George's County, Maryland.Lenore Thomas Straus became the teacher of a young artist named Sue Hoya Sellers. She recognized Sue when Sue was seventeen years old. Sue had ridden seven miles on dirt roads to find her, a portfolio strapped to her bicycle, clothes starched and ironed, two years of preparation. Lenore called her a young artist, and Sue was one.Among the things Lenore passed to Sue was an understanding that the sacred feminine image belonged in the hands of women — that carving was not decoration, that it was transmission, and honestly, a form of decolonizing the female body.Sue carried this forward in her own large-scale work, including a monumental pregnant woman carved in wood commissioned for Alice Walker that stands at Stardust Ranch in Sonoma — the sacred feminine body again in the most permanent material available, given to the woman who had sat at the table with Sue, given to the writer who told me that to be happy is one of the most revolutionary acts.And Sue passed this assignment to me when I was twenty-four. Sue co-mothered me, and this was among the most sacred things she passed forward.A Cold Day and a Palm-Sized PrayerI remember the day.It was cloudy and cold on the mountain. Sue and I, months before, had gone out to dig the very clay from the earth — red clay. She wanted me to understand the whole cycle of making. Finally, the clay was made. It was placed in my hands, and she said: make it fit the palm of your hand. For prayer. Put your intention into it.I brought the clay into my hands and began to shape it. I didn't know what it would become, but I knew that I was called to make the Sacred Mother. It was the first thing I ever made out of clay.Amazingly, years after Sue's death, Lenore's daughter Nora sent me a small figurine carved in stone — one of Sue's earliest works — a goddess figurine, small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. It was only then, holding that piece, understanding what Sue had been handed and what she handed to me, that I received the full weight of the assignment — not as an instruction, as a lineage, as a specific, unbroken transmission of an understanding that Lenore had carried from her own teachers, and they from theirs, all the way back to the women who pressed their hands into cave walls and shaped limestone into figurines small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.It makes me think of my recent visit to Malta — how the Sleeping Lady of Malta is so tiny she can almost fit in the palm of your hand. But there were also sculptures so huge they were claimed to be made by giantesses. Lenore and Sue did the same thing — made the tiny and the large.Lenore was a Norwegian woman. She decided to carve an enormous sculpture, a mother and child. She went on to carve the Preamble to the Constitution in stone. She taught Sue and Sue taught me — from hand to hand and really from heart to heart.And when I think of this teaching and share it with my students today, I feel the throughline of the sacred feminine image always emerging and becoming and arriving in and through our hands. Back at the beginning, right at the time I made that sculpture, I knew I wanted to change the way that women were treated and the way that the face of the feminine was regarded in my lifetime.Thousands of paintings are part of it. The carrying on of a Stardust Lineage — from Neolithic limestones to these stardust bones.Us. We.Footnotes(1) The Venus of Willendorf is housed in the Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria. On the red ochre tinting and its connection to blood symbolism in prehistoric ritual contexts, see: Jill Cook, Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind (British Museum Press, 2013); Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess (HarperCollins, 1989).(2) On the geographic distribution of similar prehistoric female figurines: Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess (1989), Introduction; Cook, Ice Age Art (2013).(3) Marija Gimbutas, The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe (HarperCollins, 1991). On the Kurgan hypothesis and the cultural transition beginning around 4000 BCE.(4) On the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture: Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess (1989). See also: John Chapman, Fragmentation in Archaeology (Routledge, 2000) for a more recent treatment.(5) Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess (1989). On the visual symbolic language of prehistoric European artifacts.(6) For scholarly critique of Gimbutas's methodology, see: Lynn Meskell, “Goddesses, Gimbutas and ‘New Age' Archaeology,” Antiquity 69 (1995): 74–86. For a balanced recent assessment, see: Douglass Bailey, Prehistoric Figurines: Corporeality and Representation in the Neolithic (Routledge, 2005).(7) Lenore Thomas Straus, Mother and Child, Indiana limestone water fountain, commissioned 1937, completed 1939, Greenbelt Homes Inc., Greenbelt, Maryland. Commissioned through the Public Works Administration / Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project. Photographic documentation of Straus with Eleanor Roosevelt held in the Stardust Lineage archive. For archival verification, consult Greenbelt Museum records.(8) Lenore Thomas Straus, Preamble to the Constitution, stone, Greenbelt, Maryland. Documented by personal visit. For archival citation, consult Greenbelt Museum records and WPA Federal Art Project documentation.(9) Lenore Thomas Straus, Stone Dust. Exact page number to be confirmed before publication. Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

Join Global Treasures to learn about the Hypogeum of Ħal Saflieni, a Neolithic underground burial complex. Abigail covers the history and travel tips for visiting this one of a kind UNESCO world heritage site, added to the list in 1980. Tours: https://trip.tpk.mx/dlADpZT8  Homestay Options: https://vrbo.tpk.mx/luZMQeJw  Hotels: https://trip.tpk.mx/MaAiCiaF  Travel Charger: https://amzn.to/4tvXP9v  ESim: https://drimsim.tpk.mx/7T27eEcf  Barvita (Code ABIGAILVACCA gets you 15% off your first order): https://barvita.co/?ref=ABIGAILVACCA Follow Global Treasures on Social Media and check out my blog: Blog: Globaltreasurestravel.com  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?tid=100093258132336 Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@globaltreasurespodcast   *I may receive compensation if you make a purchase at no extra cost to you

What's the sound of hardcore in 2026? Is there just one? Hell nah, what are you thinking. We explore the patchwork of punk hc this year with tracks from HAYWIRE, BAD BEAT, ANGEL DU$T, COLLATERAL, BETON ARME, POISON RUIN, SPEED, SCARAB, C4, DRAIN, FATAL REALM, FENTANYL, HOME FRONT, NEOLITHIC, and COMBUST.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

News items read by Laura Kennedy include: Isotopic analysis illuminates 10,000-year European gender gap in meat consumption (details) (details) Ancient humans ran stone factory for 100,000 years (details) (details) Ancient DNA reveals population collapse in northern France near the end of the Neolithic (details) (details) Ancient Maya architecture reveals shift in style of governance (details) (details)

In this episode, George is joined by archaeologist Professor Duncan Garrow to explore how archaeologists turn fragments of evidence into meaningful stories about the past. From soil layers to artefacts and landscapes, they discuss how we piece together human lives from what remains—and the creativity, curiosity, and pattern recognition that make this possible. The conversation also touches on how different ways of thinking, including neurodivergent traits, can be a real strength in archaeology. And at the heart of it all is uncertainty. Even with careful methods and decades of research, some questions remain unanswered—like how the first Neolithic farmers managed to get cows across the sea to Britain. It's a light moment, but it captures something essential: Archaeology isn't just about answers… It's about embracing the mystery of the past. Transcripts For rough transcripts head over to https://www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com/adhdbce/202 Contact George Lomas (@adhd_bce_podcast) • Instagram profile Saša Harper | ADHD Coach (@sasaharper) • Instagram profile ArchPodNet APN Website: https://www.archpodnet.com APN on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/archpodnet APN on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/archpodnet APN on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/archpodnet APN Shop Music Your Story by MusicbyAden | https://soundcloud.com/musicbyaden Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/ Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ Affiliates Motion Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Niuheliang: The Ancient Discovery That Pushed China's Civilization Back 1,000 YearsToday, we'll talk about Niuheliang, an ancient remote landscape north of the Great Wall that's rediscovery transformed our understanding of China's earliest civilization by challenging the long-held belief that it had emerged only from the great river valleys.For a long time, the story of Chinese civilization seemed settled. According to conventional wisdom, its origins lay firmly in the great river valleys of central China, especially along the Yellow River and the Yangtze River. It was there, scholars believed, that agriculture first flourished, settlements grew into cities, writing emerged, and early states took shape. Regions beyond these river basins, particularly the lands north of the Great Wall, were usually treated as marginal zones, places influenced by the center rather than sources of innovation themselves.That narrative began to change slowly and unevenly during the twentieth century, and one of the most powerful challenges to it emerged from an unexpected place: a remote, wind-swept landscape in western Liaoning Province in northeast China, known today as Niuheliang.The first attempts to understand the ancient past of this region were marked by ambition and frustration. In the early 1930s, 26-year-old Liang Siyong, a young Chinese archaeologist trained in the United States, returned home determined to apply modern archaeological methods to China's prehistoric past. At the time, archaeology in China was still in its infancy. Scholars were beginning to move away from relying solely on ancient texts and were turning instead to the material evidence buried underground. This shift reflected a broader intellectual belief that history had to be reconstructed from tangible remains rather than inherited narratives.Liang Siyong set his sights on northeastern China, an area that had attracted the attention of foreign researchers who reported traces of Neolithic cultures scattered across hills and riverbanks. These early clues suggested that the region might hold answers to questions about China's earliest societies. Yet conditions on the ground were unforgiving. Disease outbreaks blocked travel routes, extreme cold froze the soil solid, and bandit activity made long journeys dangerous. Even when excavation was possible, it was often cut short by weather or logistics.Political events soon brought all such efforts to an abrupt end. In 1931, the Japanese invasion of northeastern China plunged the region into war and occupation. Archaeological research ceased almost overnight. For years afterward, the ancient cultures of the northeast remained largely inaccessible, their secrets buried once more beneath earth, snow, and silence.In the decades that followed, only scattered individuals continued to pay attention to this neglected region. A few local educators and amateur researchers conducted small surveys in their spare time, recording pottery fragments and stone tools, and occasionally publishing brief reports. Some even speculated that major discoveries might one day emerge from places like Niuheliang. But their voices were easily drowned out by the turmoil of war and the predominance of established academic assumptions. The idea that a highly developed prehistoric culture might have flourished north of the Great Wall remained, at best, a fringe possibility.After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, archaeology entered a new phase. Systematic excavations expanded, and major sites from the central plains reinforced the belief that Chinese civilization had a single core. Although prehistoric cultures in the north were increasingly recognized and given names, they were still often described as regional or peripheral, developing under the influence of more advanced societies farther south. Jade objects found in private collections and museums hinted at a so

The old chapter closed. The new one hasn't opened. And the intelligent, productive part of you is getting restless — because it knows how to act and plan and figure things out. It does not know how to wait.In this eighth and final episode of The Soul's Eight Thresholds of Transformation, Nina Hirlaender OFS arrives at Yule — the Winter Solstice, the longest night, and the turning point where darkness reaches its maximum and the light begins, quietly, to return. Through the Neolithic darkness of West Kennet Long Barrow, a personal story of being forced into stillness during the 2020 pandemic, and the steady theology of Julian of Norwich, Nina explores why this threshold catches high-functioning seekers off guard — and what it means to practice trust when nothing visible confirms progress. This episode completes the full revolution of the Celtic Wheel of the Year and offers a grounded, practical way to inhabit the seasons of your life when clarity hasn't arrived yet and the only honest posture is presence.What You'll Learn:The difference between genuine trust and passive stagnation.What John of the Cross discovered about hope as a loosening of the grip — and how white-knuckling a specific outcome blocks what's actually trying to reach youWhy Julian of Norwich's "All shall be well" is a radical theological claim forged in plague and grief, and how to let it hold you in your own long winterHow a five-thousand-year-old burial chamber engineered for the midwinter sunrise teaches your body what your mind keeps refusing to learnYour Next Steps:The Celtic Shamanism in England pilgrimage (May 23 – June 2, 2026) is now SOLD OUT. To join the waitlist, reply to Nina directly: nina@dancingspirittours.comExplore all Dancing Spirit Tours pilgrimages: https://dancingspirittours.comListen to the full 8-episode series from Episode 1: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/holy-rebels-podcast/id1654779565?i=1000747635070Support the showRate, Review & FollowIf Holy Rebels has helped you practise your spirituality in real life, would you take 30 seconds to leave a quick rating and review? Your review helps new listeners decide to press play.Not sure what to write? Try one sentence:“Holy Rebels helps me ________.”And hit Follow so new episodes show up automatically in your feed.Show Notes: holyrebelspodcast.comConnect: Instagram | Facebook

There's a version of you that's already over. You can feel it in the quiet dread of playing a role that stopped fitting somewhere along the way. What you haven't done yet is give it a proper ending.In this sixth episode of The Soul's Eight Thresholds of Transformation, Nina Hirlaender OFS takes you inside West Kennet Long Barrow — a 5,000-year-old Neolithic chamber in the English countryside — to explore the Autumn Equinox, the Celtic threshold of release. Through the story of Helen, a professor who spent two years carrying a devastating institutional betrayal entirely alone, Nina traces what becomes possible when you finally set down an identity that's already run its course. Drawing on Thomas Merton's theology of the true self and false self, somatic body wisdom, and the rhythms of autumn itself, this episode offers a grounded path from exhausted performance to genuine, recovered selfhood.What You'll Learn:The somatic signals your body sends when an identity has expired — and why the tiredness you feel isn't physical What Thomas Merton's theology of the true self reveals about which roles actually belong to you and which are performances you've been maintaining out of fearHow mature, conscious release differs from clinging to what's expired or letting go in a panic — and what it feels like when grief and freedom arrive togetherA 5-minute practice for releasing the false self and returning to the true self that remains underneathYour Next Steps:ONE SPOT LEFT! Register for the final Celtic Shamanism in England pilgrimage (May 23 – June 2, 2026): https://dancingspirittours.com/journeys/england/Support the showRate, Review & Follow If Holy Rebels has helped you practise your spirituality in real life, would you take 30 seconds to leave a quick rating and review? Your review helps new listeners decide to press play. Not sure what to write? Try one sentence:“Holy Rebels helps me ________.” And hit Follow so new episodes show up automatically in your feed. Show Notes: holyrebelspodcast.comConnect: Instagram | Facebook

"SATURN NEPTUNE IMPACTFUL VIBRATIONS" with Linda Berry and Robert Pacitti unraveling revelations about the pivotal Saturn Neptune conjunction at the World Point of 0° Aries.Amazingly, the last time Saturn and Neptune were conjunct at 0° Aries was during Neolithic times in 4,361 BCE. A period shifting from nomadic life to cultivating agriculture creating the foundations for building civilizations. Humanity domesticated animals and crops, forming settlements and villages. There is no way to truly calculate the distant past. However, each chart represents a seed energy indicating profound themes that will resonate as we pursue a collective and individual path towards a new identity consciousness. Through the cutting-edge techniques of Vibrational Astrology, we learn about predominate behavior patterns shaping our collective consciousness during this 36-year Saturn Neptune conjunction cycle at World Aries Point.About Vibrational Astrology (VA): VA is an exciting ‘evidence-based' system focusing on deep energetic vibrational frequency behavior patterns far within and beyond the natal chart.LINDA BERRY, PAC, MSSW: received her Professional Astrology Certificate (PAC) in Vibrational Astrology January 2015 from Avalon School of Astrology studying with David Cochrane the Founder of Vibrational Astrology (VA). They continue to share their research material to build Vibrational Astrology knowledge. Linda created “Frequency Finder”, a VA Add-on to Sirius and Kepler Astrological Software.Linda's an International Consultant with clients worldwide, Teaches VA classes, the VA Research Group Moderator, and Author. Website: Astrosleuth.org | Fractal Cosmos Vibrational Astrology Conference - Annual. Website: fractalcosmos.comLinda teaches Vibrational Astrology introductory year course starting in January & June; mentors advanced students at her "School of The Astrology of Vibrational Energetics (STAVE)" at AstroSleuth.org. For those desiring certification it is the first year of a three-year program.Her free Daily Blog: “The Vibrational Astrology Diary” Vibrational Astrology & Sabian Symbols, and for her Personalized paid monthly report. email: Linda @ AstrologicalDepth dot com.Co-author with David Cochrane of Vibrational Astrology: Interpreting Aspects, and author of Awakening from a Deep Sleep, a spiritual book on remembering who we are. She has an older site, Astrological Depth with Transneptunian Objects 2008-2012. ROBERT PACITTI: Professional consulting astrologer; visionary behind Deep Earth Astrology. Specializing in vibrational and psychological techniques. Over a decade of experience in the world of natural magic. Grand Pendragon in the Ancient Order of Druids in America & Director of the MAGUS Druid Gathering in Gore, VA. Co-Director of the Fractal Cosmos Vibrational Astrology Conference. Faculty for the Centre for Relationships and Astrology. Consultations focus, Archetypal & Harmonic.Studying Vibrational Astrology with leading researcher Linda Berry. Rob is publishing his new Deep Earth Astrology Tarot deck in 2025, a divination tool and teaching aid that integrates astrology, herbalism, and nature reverence. Email: deepearthastrology@gmail.com. Website: deepearthastrology.com | Facebook.com/SacredConnections13; Facebook.com/rjpacitti fractalcosmos.org SUE ‘ROSE' MINAHAN: Evolutionary Astrologer & Consultant. Speaker, Writer. Student of Vibrational Astrology with Linda Berry, Dwarf Planet University graduate, Kepler Astrologer Toastmaster (KAT); Wine Country Speakers; Associate of Fine Arts Music Degree; a Certificate of Fine Arts in Jazz. Artist, Musician. Founder of Talk Cosmos since April 7, 2018. Weekly conversations awaken heart and soul consciousness, TalkCosmos.com | YouTube.com/@TalkCosmos.#saturnneptunearies #VibrationalAstrology #astrology2026 #talkcosmos #lindaberry #astroslueth #RobertPacitti #SueMinahan #deepearthastrology #newconsciousnessSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In the depths of ancient Jericho, beneath layers of earth dating back 10,000 years, archaeologists uncovered something extraordinary: human skulls cast in plaster, their faces carefully reconstructed and their eyes set with shells. Who were these haunting figures meant to represent?In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by archaeologist Raven Todd DaSilva to explore the mysterious plastered skulls of Jericho. Dating to the Neolithic period, these striking objects reveal complex beliefs about memory, identity and the dead in some of the world's earliest farming communities. How were they made? What did they mean? And why did this unusual practice spread across the Levant? Join us to dive into one of prehistory's most compelling archaeological discoveries.MOREJericho:Listen on AppleListen on Spotify Origins of the Inuit:Listen on AppleListen on Spotify Watch this episode on our YouTube channel: @TheAncientsPodcastPresented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here:https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode offers a critical examination of the question of “the most ancient forms of magic” by interrogating the category of magic itself as a historically contingent and analytically unstable concept. Rather than assuming magic as a universal or transhistorical phenomenon, the discussion situates ritual practices within their specific social, cosmological, and epistemic contexts, beginning with evidence for symbolic and ritual behaviour in deep prehistory and moving through animistic and shamanic worldviews, Neolithic monumental ritual landscapes, and the first literate traditions of Mesopotamia, Egypt, South Asia, and early China.Engaging with archaeological data, comparative anthropology, and the history of religions, the episode explores how practices often labelled as magical functioned as socially embedded techniques for negotiating uncertainty, misfortune, and relational disruption in worlds understood to be animate and morally responsive. Particular attention is given to the role of materiality, speech, and ritual expertise, as well as to the gradual processes of textualisation and institutionalisation that reshape ritual efficacy in early complex societies. Rather than identifying a single origin or essence of magic, the episode argues for understanding ancient magic as a set of historically situated practices through which humans acted effectively within precarious and relational cosmologies.CONNECT & SUPPORT

fWotD Episode 3206: Saxe–Goldstein hypothesis Welcome to featured Wiki of the Day, your daily dose of knowledge from Wikipedia's finest articles.The featured article for Friday, 13 February 2026, is Saxe–Goldstein hypothesis.In archaeology, the Saxe–Goldstein hypothesis is a prediction about the relationship between a society's funerary practices and its social organization. It predicts a correlation between two phenomena: the use of specific areas to dispose of the dead, and the legitimation of control over restricted resources through claims of descent from dead ancestors. The hypothesis was first formulated by the American anthropologist Arthur Saxe in 1970, as the last in a series of eight, and was refined by Lynne Goldstein later in the 1970s. In reference to its origin, it is sometimes known as Hypothesis Eight.Saxe's work drew on the ethnographic work of Mervyn Meggitt and the role theory developed by Ward Goodenough. He predicted that, if a society contained groups of people with a shared identity (known as "corporate groups") that legitimized their claims to important, restricted resources by claiming ties to ancestors, that society would be more likely to use formal areas, such as cemeteries, for the disposal of the dead. Conversely, societies using such areas would be more likely to contain such corporate groups. His work coincided with that of Lewis Binford, who argued that funerary practices provided useful evidence for social organization and for the status of the deceased in life. Studying the treatment of the dead to investigate these areas came to be known as the Saxe–Binford program. Lynne Goldstein modified the hypothesis to stipulate that formal disposal areas were only one possible means of claiming ties to ancestors, and therefore that the lack of such areas need not imply the lack of corporate groups using those ties to compete over resources. As a result, it became known as the Saxe–Goldstein hypothesis. The Saxe–Goldstein hypothesis was credited with revitalizing interest in funerary archaeology. It was widely adopted, particularly by adherents of processual archaeology, a body of theory that sought to bring archaeology closer to the natural sciences. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was applied to (among others) the distribution of megalithic tombs in the European Stone Age, to prehistoric Aboriginal burial grounds near Australia's Murray River, and to the different levels of state control over cemeteries in classical Athens and ancient Rome. Within the processual movement, it was criticized for failing to account for practices that do not leave traces in the archaeological record. It was also criticized by post-processual archaeologists, such as Ian Hodder, who viewed it as ignoring the beliefs, motivations and competing interests of those responsible for disposing of the dead. By the twenty-first century, explicit use of the hypothesis was considered a minority pursuit. However, it was also described as part of the "theoretical unconscious" of Neolithic archaeologists by James Whitley in 2002, and as part of "the realm of archaeological common sense" by Robert Rosenswig, Margaret Briggs, and Marilyn Masson in 2020.This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 00:29 UTC on Friday, 13 February 2026.For the full current version of the article, see Saxe–Goldstein hypothesis on Wikipedia.This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.Visit our archives at wikioftheday.com and subscribe to stay updated on new episodes.Follow us on Mastodon at @wikioftheday@masto.ai.Also check out Curmudgeon's Corner, a current events podcast.Until next time, I'm long-form Ruth.

Dive into the mythology of Mari, an ancient and obscure goddess from the Basque people. Found in regions of Portugal, Spain, and France, Mari is a Neolithic deity who embodies all elements and controls weather among other natural forces. Unlike typical mythologies, Mari's traditions and stories are based purely on nature and are independent of other spiritual or mythological systems. Much of Mari's legend, including her shapeshifting abilities and role as a goddess of justice and natural order, has survived through the ages despite attempts by the church to erase her from history. Mari has a beautiful consort, Sugaar, who is a dragon who also appear as a pillar of fire, as does Mari. She embodies the primordial fire, the natural world and when her consort and her connect, fire and lightening and many storms are created to create rain, storms, and weather that support the natural flow of agriculture and sustenance for her world. Mari is the primary deity of an ancient culture that is pure, raw, and connected to the natural order of life. If you are loving this podcast and you feel really motivated or compelled to share, please donate to this podcast: Donate here Connect with the Goddesses:  https://www.goddesswitchwomb.com  Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goddesswitchwomb/  Follow us on TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@goddesswitchwomb

What was life like before farming? Was it nasty, brutish, and short? Or did our hunter-gatherer ancestors live lives that were relatively free, affluent, and ecologically stable?In the lack of a time machine, many anthropologists have sought answers from studying the few hunter-gatherer communities that still exist today. In 1966, several leading names in the field were invited to present their results at a symposium at the University of Chicago. This “Man the Hunter” conference became a landmark event, but what exactly were the results? And have they stood the test of time? To mark the 60th anniversary of the "Man the Hunter" symposium, On Humans is glad to share the first-ever long-form podcast with the legendary anthropologist and co-organiser of the symposium, Richard B. Lee. We discuss the legacy of the conference, Lee's own experiences living with hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari, and his reflections on what we do and do not know about the ancient lifeways of hunter-gatherers. As we do so, we also discuss various controversies and mysteries, from women's roles to Native American farmers, and from archaeological black holes toThe Dawn of Everything.Enjoy!FACT-CHECKINGNo factual errors have been detected so far. If you see an error, you can get in touch using the form below.LINKSSupport: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon.com/OnHumans⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Get in touch: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://forms.gle/h5wcmefuwvD6asos8⁠⁠⁠MENTIONSThe Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (Jared Diamond) https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race-12157The Original Affluent Society (Marshall Sahlins) https://www.uvm.edu/~jdericks/EE/Sahlins-Original_Affluent_Society.pdfFor my previous coverage on “woman the hunter” controversies, see “Is Man the Hunter Dead” and my interviews with Cara Ocobock and Katie Starkweather, all available here: ⁠https://onhumans.substack.com/p/is-man-the-hunter-dead⁠For Richard Lee's own comments on the controversy, see his interview with Vivek Venkataraman ⁠https://osf.io/x7ar3_v1/Names: Richard B. Lee | James Suzman | Marshall Sahlins | David Graeber | David Wengrow | Jared Diamond | Sarah Blaffer Hrdy | Jerome Lewis | Colin Turnbull | James Woodburn | Eleanor Leacock | Louis Henry Morgan | Karl Marx | George Armelagos | Irvin DeVore | Sherwood Washburn | Jay Desmond Clark | Harriet Rosenberg | Lawrence K. Marshall | Elizabeth Marshall | John Marshall | Greta Thunberg | Vivek VenkataramanEthnic groups: San | Ju/'hoansi | !Kung | Khoisan | Khoikhoi | “Bushmen” | “Hottentots” | First Nations | Tlingit | Haida | Inuit | Australian Aboriginal peoples | Bayaka| Batek | Huron-Wendat | Iroquois | Six Nations | Plains Indians | Hopi | Navajo | CherokeeKEY WORDSanthropology | archaeology | ethnography | human origins | human behavioural ecology | hunter-gatherers | paleolithic | neolithic transition | original affluent society | Kalahari Desert | Botswana | Namibia | paleogenetics | gathering vs hunting | gender roles | women hunting | egalitarianism | origins of hierarchy | surplus | food storage | salmon economies | Northwest Coast hunter-gatherers | archaeology of early farmers | bioarchaeology | stature/height decline | teeth health | disease burden | zoonoses | cross-species infection | Neolithic fertility increase | population pressure and “intensification” | chiefdoms | states | empires | ecology vs culture debate | materialist vs idealist | concentration–dispersion | colonialism | exploitation | land rights | climate change | human futures

News items read by Laura Kennedy include: Researchers unearth oldest handheld tools made of wood (details) Zapotec tomb in Oaxaca features symbolic owl carving (details) Ancient Taş Tepeler pillars found in Adiyaman point to an expansive Neolithic culture (details) Advanced stone technology found in China poses new questions about early East Asians (details)(details)

In this episode from our archive we spoke to the archeologist and broadcaster Neil Oliver, a figure familiar to millions in the UK. While Oliver's television work has taken him around the world, he retains a special connection to his Scottish homeland. One historical site, in particular, continues to enchant him: Skara Brae. Skara Brae on the wind scoured Orkney Islands is the best-preserved Neolithic settlement in all of western Europe. Embedded inside its stone houses and in the surviving monuments are tantalising clues to how our ancient ancestors lived and how they died. In this episode Oliver takes us back four and a half millennia to around 2,500BC to see Skara Brae as a dynamic, living community. He then explains the mysteries that surround its abandoment and considers the significance of the settlement to us today. Show notes Scene One: A day in the life of Skara Brae Scene Two: The great mystery of the settlement's abandonment Scene Three: Where did the people go? Memento: A sharp stone knife People/Social Presenter: Peter Moore Guest: Neil Oliver Production: Maria Nolan Podcast partner: Unseen Histories

In this episode Chris interviews the gnosis-bringer himself--Neal Sendlak--aka Gnostic Informant. You know him from his riveting documentaries on YouTube where he tracks myths and religious ideas across cultures and eons and from his interviews with critical scholars, but this time we dive deeply into his origin story and into the origin of religion itself! We discuss the ancient Greek "mysteries," psychedelic experience, Neolithic cave paintings and the half-man, half-beast imagery that spans from the Stone Age right up through the classical religions of the Bronze Age. Strap in ladies and gents; this one was real journey! Check out the Gnostic Informant on YouTube: Gnostic Informant - YouTube And support his excellent work on Patreon Neal Sendlak | creating Gnostic Informant - Videos on History, Mythology & Reli | Patreon Enjoy ;)  

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk during the Winter Practice Period at Upaya, Sensei Wendy Johnson explores Dōgen's Tenzo Kyokun (Instructions for the Cook) through the metaphor of standing stones like those erected in England and the British Isles by Neolithic ancestors—ancient, grounded monuments embodying power and presence. She traces the text's origins to Tang Dynasty monastics who created… Source

Over the past decade, archaeogenetics has analyzed more than 15,000 ancient genomes spanning 45,000 years of western Eurasian prehistory, uncovering dozens of migrations that reshaped Europe. Johannes Krause, Max Planck Institute, traces the earliest, unsuccessful attempts of modern humans to settle Europe after leaving Africa around 50,000 years ago, when they also interbred with Neandertals. Krause examines two major genetic turnovers of the Neolithic: the spread of early farmers from Anatolia about 8,000 years ago, who brought agriculture and domesticated animals and later mixed with indigenous hunter-gatherers; and the arrival of mobile herders from the Pontic steppe around 5,000 years ago, who introduced pastoralism and possibly Indo-European languages. Finally, he considers migrations triggered by the collapse of the Roman Empire, showing how large-scale mobility created the multiple ancestral strands found in modern Europeans. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 41198]

Over the past decade, archaeogenetics has analyzed more than 15,000 ancient genomes spanning 45,000 years of western Eurasian prehistory, uncovering dozens of migrations that reshaped Europe. Johannes Krause, Max Planck Institute, traces the earliest, unsuccessful attempts of modern humans to settle Europe after leaving Africa around 50,000 years ago, when they also interbred with Neandertals. Krause examines two major genetic turnovers of the Neolithic: the spread of early farmers from Anatolia about 8,000 years ago, who brought agriculture and domesticated animals and later mixed with indigenous hunter-gatherers; and the arrival of mobile herders from the Pontic steppe around 5,000 years ago, who introduced pastoralism and possibly Indo-European languages. Finally, he considers migrations triggered by the collapse of the Roman Empire, showing how large-scale mobility created the multiple ancestral strands found in modern Europeans. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 41198]

Over the past decade, archaeogenetics has analyzed more than 15,000 ancient genomes spanning 45,000 years of western Eurasian prehistory, uncovering dozens of migrations that reshaped Europe. Johannes Krause, Max Planck Institute, traces the earliest, unsuccessful attempts of modern humans to settle Europe after leaving Africa around 50,000 years ago, when they also interbred with Neandertals. Krause examines two major genetic turnovers of the Neolithic: the spread of early farmers from Anatolia about 8,000 years ago, who brought agriculture and domesticated animals and later mixed with indigenous hunter-gatherers; and the arrival of mobile herders from the Pontic steppe around 5,000 years ago, who introduced pastoralism and possibly Indo-European languages. Finally, he considers migrations triggered by the collapse of the Roman Empire, showing how large-scale mobility created the multiple ancestral strands found in modern Europeans. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 41198]

Author, inventor, and co-writer of the iconic Star Trek episode “The Tholian Web,” Chester L. Richards continues his acclaimed Treks Beyond the Great Potato memoir series with "The Trek Continues: More Memoirs of a Rocket Scientist," releasing worldwide October 7, 2025.In this second volume, Richards expands on the journey he began in From the Potato to Star Trek and Beyond, blending pulse-pounding adventure with poignant reflections on life, love, and loss. From near-death experiences with crocodiles in Africa to a white-knuckle flight back home in California, The Trek Continues dives deep into the real-life escapades of a man who helped imagine the universe onscreen—and then went out and lived it.Richards shares what it meant to survive, to grieve, and to grow. Central to the memoir is his late wife Sarah, a brilliant and spirited presence readers first glimpsed in Book 1. Responding to fan letters asking to learn more about her, Richards infuses this new collection with her voice, her stories, and the extraordinary impact she had on his life. There are also stories of eccentric animals (including cats, a dog named Hector, and a horse—almost), scientific breakthroughs in aerospace and on earth, close calls with Neolithic tribes, and the unexpected wisdom of failure.“Every story is a letter of love to Sarah,” Richards writes. “Each stand on its own. Each is an adventure. And each is true.”Known for his witty, self-deprecating style and cinematic detail, Richards proves again that memoir can be both thrilling and intimate. A scientist by training and adventurer by instinct, he invites  readers to see life not as a linear path—but as a series of treks, each one worth telling.“Adventure starts when your gut clenches and you do it anyway,” says Richards. “That's when you find out who you really are.”The Trek Continues: More Memoirs of a Rocket Scientist is published by Pawpress. The book is now available in paperback, hardcover, and eBook for pre-order on Amazon. Advanced review copies may be requested through NetGalley.    Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/arroe-collins-unplugged-totally-uncut--994165/support.

The first archaeological evidence we have that points to organized observances of the winter solstice come from the Neolithic period—that era from about 12,000 to 6,500 years ago which hastened the Stone Age into those of Copper and Bronze

What if the most magical crystal in your collection… is the one you've been ignoring?This week we're joined by crystal scholar, museum specialist, and magical science nerd Nicholas Pearson, author of The Witching Stones. Nicholas shares how he accidentally went from music major to museum earth-science expert, and how that twisty path led him to become one of today's leading voices in crystal magic.We explore the place where science and spirituality don't just coexist, they amplify each other. And how treating magic like data collection can make your practice more intuitive and more accurate.Nicholas then takes us into the mind-bending world of flint, the “ordinary” stone that literally changed human evolution, birthed early ritual, and forms in liminal spaces beneath the earth. He also reveals the real history of moonstone, the Roman obsession with jet, and the discovery of a Neolithic emerald crown. His take on emerald as a stone of radical self-worth and world-shifting love is one of the most powerful crystal teachings we've ever heard.Whether you're crystal-curious or crystal-obsessed, this episode will completely change how you relate to the mineral kingdom, and why the simplest stones often hold the most magic.Nicholas' book The Witching Stones is out now, and you can find Nicholas at @theluminouspearl or theluminouspearl.com. As always, we'd love to know your magical moment of the week.This week's sponsor is Libro.fm: Support your local bookstore and this podcast by grabbing your audiobooks through Libro.fm. If you're a NEW Libro.fm member you can use the code DEMYSTIFY to get three audiobook credits for the price of one when you sign up. Click here to sign up https://tidd.ly/44l9SdQ (*Note: code only works on one credit a month plan and past members are not eligible.)If you're looking for some witchy books to listen to: Our audiobook recs can be found here!Pre-order Molly's book Mundane Magic A Lazy Witch's Guide to Hacking Your Brain, Building a Daily Practice, and Getting Stuff DonePreorder Mundane Magic & Join the Virtual Book Tour⁠: Celebrate the release of Molly's new book with an exclusive online event on Feb 21, 12 PM EST. Get behind-the-scenes insights, live Q&A, and your copy shipped on release day.

Kinship, Culture and Death in Neolithic Ireland Dig into the Story in Amplify Archaeology Podcast Episode 50 with Dr Jessica Smyth, Dr Neil Carlin & Dr Susan Greaney In this episode of Amplify Archaeology Podcast, Neil chats with Dr Jessica Smyth, Dr Neil Carlin and Dr Susan Greaney about [...] The post Kinship Culture and Death in Neolithic Ireland Amplify Archaeology Podcast appeared first on Abarta Heritage Home.

We might have gotten weird, or we were just a bit wired, but who can say. There's tracks, I stand by it. Stand by with songs new and old (mostly new) from NEOLITHIC, FEELS LIKE HEAVEN, ANGEL DU$T, REMEMBER SPORTS, TOTAL FLESH, EXCIDE and more.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In our penultimate episode on point of view in fiction, we load you up with omniscient narrator tips. We discuss everything from the Quran to Tolkien as we tackle third person omniscient in our craft discussion. When do you limit, and when do you embrace the godlike power of omniscience? What are the biggest traps writers fall into with omniscient narrators? We discuss it all.And we have mulled cider, which was extremely pleasant for us, but I doubt it translates to audio particularly well.Stories begin around the 17:10 mark and include Like this weeks episode and wish you could read as well as listen? Subscribe to our Substack for a summary of our opening discussion, a story from the episode, and a writing prompt! Be sure to follow us on Instagram (if that's your sort of thing). Please do send us an email with your story if you write along, which we hope you will do. Episodes of Radio FreeWrite are protected by a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-ND 4.0) license. All Stories remain the property of their respective authors.

In this episode, Finnish folklorist, artist, and pagan practitioner Niina Niskanen joins us to explore the ancient waters of Finnish mythology and the animistic worldview that shaped her homeland. We dive deep into her upcoming book Soul of Vellamo Journey with the Finnish Gods of the Sea—a work that traces the evolution of Finland's sea deities from their Neolithic, shamanic roots to the later poetic, song-based traditions that survive today.Niina guides us through the three-layered Finnish cosmos, where sea goddesses like Vellamo and the thunder god Ukko still ripple through the culture, and where every element—fire, earth, air, and water—holds its own väki, a sacred animating force. We talk offerings, sauna rites, hair magic, and the rituals woven into daily life by fishermens, hunters, and healers who lived in relationship with the spirits around them.From underwater kingdoms and cows of the sea, to the boundary-walking goddesses of healing and travel, Niina offers a rare glimpse into the living heart of Suomenusko, Finnish pre-Christian belief. She shares personal experiences with deities like Vellamo, Loviatar, and Mielikki, and reflects on how modern environmental spirituality echoes these ancient traditions.We also explore the deep cultural importance of the sauna as a liminal, ritual space—birthplace, death house, and magical threshold—and uncover surprising resonances between Finnish folklore and Irish, Baltic, Slavic, and Scandinavian traditions.Show notes:https://fairychamber.org/en-eurhttps://www.instagram.com/fairychamberart/Keep in touch?https://linktr.ee/darraghmason

Please join my mailing list here

First up on the podcast: the mysterious fate of Europe's Neolithic farmers. They arrived from Anatolia around 5500 B.C.E. and began farming fertile land across Europe. Five hundred years later, their buildings, cemeteries, and pottery stopped showing up in the archaeological record, and mass graves with headless bodies started to appear across the continent. Contributing Correspondent Andrew Curry talks with host Sarah Crespi about what this strange transition might mean. Next on the show, Editor for Life Sciences Sacha Vignieri discusses recent dog research published in Science, including tracing the movement of dogs alongside ancient human populations, examining when dogs first diversified, and probing the relationship between modern dogs' breeds and their dispositions. This week's episode was produced with help from Podigy. About the Science Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Perhaps most famous as the home of the druids, Ynys Môn, also known as Anglesey, occupies 275 square miles just off the north Wales coast. It is an ancient place. Archaeologists found Neolithic settlements at Llanfaethlu, making these some of the oldest villages in Wales. The Neolithic Castell Bryn Gwyn site remained in use until the Roman period. Bryn Celli Ddu is one of the most famous Bronze Age burial mounds. This passage tomb is around 5000 years old, and aligns with the sunrise on the summer solstice. Its name means 'the Mound in the Dark Grove', and it was first excavated in 1865. With so much history everywhere you turn, finding folklore and legend is to be expected. Let's explore legends of witches, saints, ghosts, and druids in this week's episode of Fabulous Folklore… Find the images and references on the blog post: https://www.icysedgwick.com/anglesey-folklore/ Book tickets for The Haunted Landscape: Ghosts, Magic and Lore: https://www.conwayhall.org.uk/whats-on/event/the-haunted-landscape-ghosts-magic-and-lore/ Buy Ronald Hutton's Blood & Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain: https://uk.bookshop.org/a/12992/9780300267754 Get your free guide to home protection the folklore way here: https://www.icysedgwick.com/fab-folklore/ Become a member of the Fabulous Folklore Family for bonus episodes and articles at https://patreon.com/bePatron?u=2380595 Buy Icy a coffee or sign up for bonus episodes at: https://ko-fi.com/icysedgwick Fabulous Folklore Bookshop: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/fabulous_folklore Pre-recorded illustrated talks: https://ko-fi.com/icysedgwick/shop Request an episode: https://forms.gle/gqG7xQNLfbMg1mDv7 Get extra snippets of folklore on Instagram at https://instagram.com/icysedgwick Find Icy on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/icysedgwick.bsky.social 'Like' Fabulous Folklore on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fabulousfolklore/

Shoutout to the classics. Paper, chairs, utensils, etc.   Intro Music: The Soviettes- Paranoia Cha Cha! Submit music to demolistenpodcast@gmail.com. Become a patron at https://www.patreon.com/demolistenpodcast. Leave us a message at (260)222-8341 Queue: Panel, Scab City, Neolithic, I.C.B.M., If It Rains, Shark Attack, Plastika, My Own Rules, The Shape, Headshrinker https://panelpanelbobanel.bandcamp.com/album/a-great-time-to-be-an-empath https://scabcity661.bandcamp.com/album/reverie-2 https://neolithichc.bandcamp.com/album/demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVFYEvMrBc0 https://delayedgratificationrecords.bandcamp.com/album/hows-it-going-to-end-2  

This week we talk about OxyContin, opium, and the British East India Company.We also discuss isotonitazene, fentanyl, and Perdue.Recommended Book: The Thinking Machine by Stephen WittTranscriptOpioids have been used as painkillers by humans since at least the Neolithic period; there's evidence that people living in the Iberian and Italian Peninsulas kept opium poppy seeds with them, and there's even more evidence that the Ancient Greeks were big fans of opium, using it to treat pain and as a sleep aid.Opium was the only available opioid for most of human history, and it was almost always considered to be a net-positive, despite its downsides. It was incorporated into a mixture called laudanum, which was a blend of opium and alcohol, in the 17th century, and that helped it spread globally as Europeans spread globally, though it was also in use locally, elsewhere, especially in regions where the opium poppy grew naturally.In India, for instance, opium was grown and often used for its painkilling properties, but when the British East India Company took over, they decided to double-down on the substance as a product they could monopolize and grow into a globe-spanning enterprise.They went to great lengths to expand production and prevent the rise of potential competitors, in India and elsewhere, and they created new markets for opium in China by forcing the product onto Chinese markets, initially via smuggling, and then eventually, after fighting a series of wars focused on whether or not the British should be allowed to sell opium on the Chinese market, the British defeated the Chinese. And among other severely unbalanced new treaties, including the ceding of the Kowloon peninsula to the British as part of Hong Kong, which they controlled as a trading port, and the legalization of Christians coming into the country, proselytizing, and owning property, the Chinese were forced to accept the opium trade. This led to generations of addicts, even more so than before, when opium was available only illicitly, and it became a major bone of contention between the two countries, and informed China's relationship with the world in general, especially other Europeans and the US, moving forward.A little bit later, in the early 1800s, a German pharmacist was able to isolate a substance called morphine from opium. He published a paper on this process in 1817, and in addition to this being the first alkaloid, the first organic compound of this kind to be isolated from a medicinal plant, which was a milestone in the development of modern drug discovery, it also marked the arrival of a new seeming wonder drug, that could ease pain, but also help control cold-related symptoms like coughing and gut issues, like diarrhea. Like many such substances back in the day, it was also often used to treat women who were demonstrating ‘nervous character,' which was code for ‘behaving in ways men didn't like or understand.'Initially, it was thought that, unlike with opium, morphine wasn't addictive. And this thinking was premised on the novel application method often used for morphine, the hypermedia needle, which arrived a half-century after that early 1800s isolation of morphine from opium, but which became a major driver of the new drug's success and utility. Such drugs, derived scientifically rather than just processing a plant, could be administered at specific, controllable doses. So surely, it was thought, this would alleviate those pesky addictive symptoms that many people experienced when using opioids in a more natural, less science-y way.That, of course, turned out not to be the case. But it didn't stop the progression of this drug type, and the further development of more derivations of it, including powerful synthetic opioids, which first hit the scene in the mid-20th century.What I'd like to talk about today is the recent wave of opioid addictions, especially but not exclusively in the US, and the newest concern in this space, which is massively more powerful than anything that's come before.—As I mentioned, there have been surges in opioid use, latent and externally forced, throughout modern human history.The Chinese saw an intense wave of opioid addiction after the British forced opium onto their markets, to the point that there was a commonly held belief that the British were trying to overthrow and enslave the Chinese by weighing them down with so many addicts who were incapable of doing much of anything; which, while not backed by the documentation we have from the era—it seems like they were just chasing profits—is not impossible, given what the Brits were up to around the world at that point in history.That said, there was a huge influx in opioid use in the late-1980s, when a US-based company called Purdue Pharma began producing and pushing a time-released opioid medication, which really hit the big-time in 1995, when they released a version of the drug called OxyContin.OxyContin flooded the market, in part because it promised to help prevent addiction and accidental overdose, and in part because Purdue was just really, really good at marketing it; among other questionable and outright illegal things it did as part of that marketing push, it gave kickbacks to doctors who prescribed it, and some doctors did so, a lot, even when patients didn't need it, or were clearly becoming addicted.By the early 2000s, Purdue, and the Sackler family that owned the company, was spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year to push this drug, and they were making billions a year in sales.Eventually the nature of Purdue's efforts came to light, there were a bunch of trials and other legal hearings, some investigative journalists exposed Purdue's foreknowledge of their drug's flaws, and there was a big government investigation and some major lawsuits that caused the collapse of the company in 2019—though they rebranded in 2021, becoming Knoa Pharma.All of which is interesting because much like the forced legalization of opium on Chinese markets led to their opioid crisis a long time ago, the arrival of this incredibly, artificially popular drug on the US market led to the US's opioid crisis.The current bogeyman in the world of opioids—and I say current because this is a fast-moving space, with new, increasingly powerful or in some cases just a lot cheaper drugs arriving on the scene all the time—is fentanyl, which is a synthetic opioid that's about 30-50 times more potent than heroin, and about 100 times as potent as morphine. It has been traditionally used in the treatment of cancer patients and as a sedative, and because of how powerful it is, a very small amount serves to achieve the desired, painkilling effect.But just like other opioids, its administration can lead to addiction, people who use it can become dependent and need more and more of it to get the same effects, and people who have too much of it can experience adverse effects, including, eventually, death.This drug has been in use since the 1960s, but illicit use of fentanyl began back in the mid-1970s, initially as its own thing, but eventually to be mixed in with other drugs, like heroin, especially low-quality versions of those drugs, because a very small amount of fentanyl can have an incredibly large and potent effect, making those other drugs seem higher quality than they are.That utility is also this drug's major issue, though: it's so potent that a small amount of it can kill, and even people with high opioid tolerances can see those tolerances pushed up and up and up until they eventually take a too-large, killing dose.There have been numerous efforts to control the flow of fentanyl into the US, and beginning in the mid-20-teens, there were high-profile seizures of the illicitly produced stuff around the country. As of mid-2025, China seems to be the primary source of most illicit fentanyl around the world, the drug precursor produced in China, shipped to Mexico where it's finalized and made ready for market, and then smuggled into the US.There have been efforts to shut down this supply chain, including recent tariffs put on Chinese goods, ostensibly, in part at least, to get China to handle those precursor suppliers.Even if that effort eventually bears fruit, though, India seems to have recently become an alternative source of those precursors for Mexican drug cartels, and for several years they've been creating new markets for their output in other countries, like Nigeria, Indonesia, and the Netherlands, as well.Amidst all that, a new synthetic drug, which is 40-times as potent as fentanyl, is starting to arrive in the US, Europe, and Australia, and has already been blamed for thousands of deaths—and it's thought that that number might be a significant undercount, because of how difficult it can be to attribute cause with these sorts of drugs.Nitazenes were originally synthesized back in the 1950s in Austria, and they were never sold as painkillers because they were known, from the get-go, to be too addictive, and to have a bad tradeoff ratio: a little bit of benefit, but a high likelihood of respiratory depression, which is a common cause of death for opioid addicts, or those who accidentally overdose on an opioid.One nitazene, called isotonitazene, first showed up on US drug enforcement agency radars back in 2019, when a shipment was intercepted in the Midwest. Other agencies noted the same across the US and Europe in subsequent years, and this class of drugs has now become widespread in these areas, and in Australia.It's thought that nitazenes might be seeing a surge in popularity with illicit drugmakers because their potency can be amped up so far, way, way higher than even fentanyl, and because their effects are similar in many ways to heroin.They can also use them they way they use fentanyl, a tiny bit blended into lower-quality versions of other drugs, like cocaine, which can save money while also getting their customers, who may not know what they're buying, hooked, faster. For context, a fifth of a grain of nitazene salt can be enough to kill a person, so it doesn't take much, less than that, if they want to keep their customers alive, to achieve the high they're looking for. A little bit goes a long, long way.This class of drugs is also difficult to detect, which might be part of the appeal for drug makers, right now. Tests that detect morphine, heroin, and fentanyl do not detect natazines, and the precursors for this type of drug, and the drugs themselves, are less likely to be closely watched, or even legally controlled at the levels of more popular opioids, which is also likely appealing to groups looking to get around existing clampdown efforts.Right now, drug agencies are in the process of updating their enforcement and detection infrastructure, and word is slowly getting out about nitazenes and the risk they potentially pose. But it took years for sluggish government agencies to start working on the issue of fentanyl, which still hasn't been handled, so it's anyone's guess as to when and if the influx of nitazenes will be addressed on scale.Show Noteshttps://www.wired.com/story/a-new-type-of-opioid-is-killing-people-in-the-us-europe-and-australia/https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02161116https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(24)00024-0/fulltexthttps://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/nov/03/nitazenes-synthetic-opioid-drug-500-times-stronger-than-heroin-fatalhttps://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03280-5https://theconversation.com/10-times-stronger-than-fentanyl-nitazenes-are-the-latest-deadly-development-in-the-synthetic-opioid-crisis-265882https://www.cato.org/blog/fentanyl-nitazenes-why-drug-war-keeps-making-danger-worsehttps://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/fentanyl-and-us-opioid-epidemichttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purdue_Pharmahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxycodonehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fentanylhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitazeneshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioidhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_opioid_epidemichttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe

At the dawn of human history, on a sun-blazed hill in Southeastern Anatolia, an ancient mystery was carved into stone. Göbeklitepe, older than Stonehenge and the Pyramids, stands as a silent witness to the birth of belief itself. Yet beyond its massive pillars and enigmatic carvings lies another story, one of human longing, memory, and return.Damla Selin Tomru invites readers on a journey that transcends time and geography. Her exploration begins as a personal pilgrimage and expands into a dialogue with archaeologists, mystics, and scientists who each see Göbeklitepe through different eyes.Through these voices the reader discovers not only the earliest temple known to humankind but also the enduring human need to create meaning amid the unknown.This is not merely a book about archaeology; it is an intimate meditation on transformation. From the dust of the Fertile Crescent to the silence of the excavation trenches, Tomru uncovers how faith, art, and civilization were born together.Göbeklitepe reminds us that every journey outward, to ancient ruins and forgotten symbols, is also a journey inward. In the meeting between past and present, Göbeklitepe: Mysteries of the Neolithic Era opens the door to a profound realization that what we seek in the stones of history has always lived within us.Damla Selin Tomru is one of Turkey's most vocal experts on the subject of Tas Tepeler, the high culture that created extraordinary ritual centres at places like Gobekli Tepe, Karahan Tepe and Sayburc. Her aim is to bring together the archaeologists working at these sites and the ancient mystery writers that see them as evidence of a lost page of human history. Her new book, titled Gobekli Tepe, does just that giving equal time to both sides of the divide so that the reader can make their own minds up on the true nature of this gradually emerging picture of discovery, which is constantly revealing new finds and new mysteries.https://www.instagram.com/damla_selin_tomru/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/earth-ancients--2790919/support.

Over 3,000 stones rise from the fields of Carnac. They stand silent, waiting, like the trees of Fangorn Forest, patient and alive beneath their stillness. In this episode of Quest & Chorus, we walk among ancient alignments, uncover old legends, and listen to what endures. Featuring music from The Irish Lassies, Dublin Gulch, and Brobdingnagian Bards. This is Quest & Chorus #310 0:27 - The Irish Lassies "Hammer Up Whisky Down" from Immigration Stories 5:20 - WELCOME TO QUEST & CHORUS Welcome to Quest & Chorus, where ancient stones still speak and songs remember what trees never forget. I'm your bard, Marc Gunn, also host of the Irish & Celtic Music Podcast, and typically host of this show as Folk Songs & Stories, but today, we call it Quest & Chorus. Quest & Chorus is a 6-part podcast series. I fuse Celtic and folk music, science fiction and fantasy, and travel into a podcast with a quest. In each episode, you will get a clue to unlock a secret reward. And at the end of the season, you will combine all of those clues to unlock an even bigger amazing reward. And today we walk not into a forest—but into a field that feels like one. The Alignments of Carnac stretch across the land like rows of rooted giants. They are silent. But not still. And if you listen… they speak in echoes. Today we talk of nature, of memory, and also of what I learned about food waste. WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT MAKING THE MOST OF YOUR FOOD Freezing fruit Composting Planting Pickling vs fermenting Soups Granola You don't have to do it in one day. It's taking me several years. And it doesn't have to be perfect. You just have to be open to learning. Check out Sustainable Jungle and One5C. They have a lot of real, practical and non-judgemental tips on how to be more eco-friendly with your food and your life. If you're new to the show, please follow us. You can do that at PubSong.com. UPCOMING SHOWS NOV 8: IrishFest Atlanta, Roswell, GA with Inara NOV 14-16: CONjuration, Duluth, GA NOV 22: Georgia Renaissance Festival Fall Fling, Fairburn, GA DEC 6: Georgia Renaissance Festival Fall Fling, Fairburn, GA DEC 7: Nerdy Wonderland at The Lost Druid, Avondale Estates, GA @ 12 - 5 PM. 15:37 - Dublin Gulch "Sarah Daly/The Copper King's Daughter" from Tap 'Er Light Please leave a comment on the podcast show notes at pubsong.com or wherever you listen. Email pictures of where you're listening to follow@celtfather . I'll send you a free gift and you can learn more about how to follow this podcast. 19:59 - NEWS Celtic Christmas Music releases the first official episode of the season. Looking for volunteers to work the Nerdy Wonderland table and promote the event. It takes place Dec 7. New Band with Inara–May Bloom. Planning to release an Album Pin and Single A big thanks to my… GUNN RUNNERS ON PATREON If you enjoy this podcast or you love listening to my music, please follow my Celtfather Patreon page. You can sign up for free and get updates on what's new and you can get an ad-free edition of this podcast before public listeners. But you get so much more when you become a Patron of the Arts. Patreon is one of the ways modern musicians and podcasters make a living. For just $5 per month, you'll get exclusive, unreleased songs, podcasts, video concerts, bootleg concerts, and so much more. Email follow@celtfather to get more details! TODAY'S SHOW IS BROUGHT TO BY CELTIC INVASION VACATIONS Every year, I take a small group of people on a relaxing adventure to one of the Celtic nations. We don't see everything. Instead we stay in one area. We get to know the region through its culture, history, and legends. You can join me with an auditory and visual adventure through podcasts, blogs, videos, and photos. Sign to the Celtic Invasion Vacations mailing list at CelticInvasion.com. In 2017, I led a Celtic Invasion of Brittany. You can read about our search for the Holy Grail in France. In the meantime, it's time for the… QUEST & CHORUS of ALIGNMENTS OF CARNAC Over 3,000 standing stones stretch in careful lines through the fields of Carnac. No one knows exactly why they're here. Were they a celestial map? Some say they mark burial grounds. But walking by them, I didn't feel like I was in a graveyard. I felt like I was among the elders. It reminded me of Fangorn Forest, home of the Ents. In The Lord of the Rings, Fangorn is a place where time moves slowly. Trees remember battles that men have forgotten. Carnac is a lot like that. The stones are not dead. They're just waiting. I can't help but wonder who placed them here, so careful and deliberate. The stones of Carnac weren't raised by elves or Ents, but by real people. Neolithic builders, thousands of years before written history. Here's what we know about them. HISTORY OF THE ALIGNMENTS OF CARNAC The Alignments of Carnac in Brittany, France, are one of the most remarkable prehistoric monuments in Europe. They consist of long rows of standing stones (menhirs) and other megalithic features that stretch across the landscape. Archaeological studies show that many of the stones date from between about 4,800 and 3,500 BC — some recent research suggests parts were erected as early as 4,600 BC. The site is not a single line but a complex of alignments: four major groups (for example, Ménec, Kermario, Kerlescan, Petit Ménec) that lie in the commune of Carnac and its surroundings. Originally, these stones were erected by Neolithic peoples who lived in what we now call Brittany. Their purpose remains a subject of debate: some propose they were ritual or ceremonial, others suggest funerary meaning, or perhaps linked to astronomical patterns or seasonal calendars. Over the millennia, many stones were removed, toppled, or reused in local buildings, especially in historic times. The word "alignments" refers to the visible rows of standing stones that still remain. Today, the Alignments of Carnac are protected as important heritage sites. Research continues to refine their dating and function, and the monuments remain a remarkable testimony to the ambition and organisation of prehistoric communities. References: Musee de Prehistoire:The Carnac Alignments Göteborgs universite: Menhirs of Carnac Alignments of Carnac Wikipedia Carnac Tourism: The World Famous Standing Stones Internet Sacred Text Archive: Menhirs and Dolmens LEGENDS & MYTHS OF CARNAC There are actual legends connected to the Carnac stones. One of the most widely told involves Saint Cornély. According to Breton tradition, Cornély was being pursued by soldiers. He and his oxen fled, and the stones of Carnac are said to be the soldiers turned to stone as a result of divine intervention. Another version says the stones were dancing at midnight on Christmas Eve, and people who saw them would be crushed beneath as the stones marched to the sea. While these legends don't claim to explain the actual Neolithic origins of the stones, they illustrate how later generations understood and imagined the dramatic rows of stones in their landscape. MY THOUGHTS on CARNAC Your walk through Carnac: Describe how it feels to be watched by stone that might remember more than you do. PLUS Environmental reflection: These monuments lasted thousands of years. What are we building that will last that long? "Heart of Fangorn" as a prayer for the planet: This song speaks for trees, for roots, for voices we ignore in our haste. In Fangorn, the Ents stand watch over the woods. At Carnac, the menhirs stand silent on the moor. If they could speak, what would their witness be? The Ents of Fangorn resist change; the stones of Carnac endure it. When do you find yourself standing still while everything else moves? 27:48 - Brobdingnagian Bards "Heart of Fangorn" from Memories of Middle Earth Get the "They Come In Pints" album pin to own Memories of Middle Earth and enter the forest Listen to the song recorded live at Dragon Con 2024 in a Bootleg Concert from our Podcast. You can also hear the song on a past Bards podcast episode that was recorded right before we flew off on the second Brobdingnagian Tour of Ireland in 2008. HEART OF FANGORN Lyrics and music Marc Gunn Long before men tread Middle-Earth, Before the dwarves and elves gave birth, There sprouted a race for the trees' defense In the heart of Fangorn, there live the Ents. Ha-room… Ha-da-ra-room. Ha-room… Ha-da-ra-room. Patient farmers they tend the woods. Gaurdians of stems and of roots. They hear the arbors' laments and wails From falling axes and tearful trails. Ha-room… Ha-da-ra-room. Ha-room… Ha-da-ra-room. For Living Creatures all roam the land, But hasty judgements make careless hands. One thoughtless word from a thoughtless king A thousand creatures die beneath the trees. Ha-room… Ha-da-ra-room. Ha-room… Ha-da-ra-room. The rivers will flow though their course may change. The birds are born and will fly away. Men will come and men will go, But the Ents remain through the melting snow. Ha-room… Ha-da-ra-room. Ha-room… Ha-da-ra-room. Mark it down. Because the stones are not silent. They're just slow to speak. This is the final episode named Quest & Chorus. For that matter, it's also the final episode of Folk Songs & Stories, at least by those names. I ran a poll on Patreon to see what name people liked the most. The most popular name was Pub Songs & Stories. So we're moving back to that name. That said, Quest & Chorus is not gone forever. This is just the beginning. I really liked this special feature and so in some episodes in the future, I hope to include a quest and chorus for you. I also realized that the Irish & Celtic Music Podcast, my award-winning flagship program, is a great show. But over the past decade, the podcast has become more and more dominated by instrumental Celtic music. Which is fantastic. I love a great set of tunes as much as the songs. But I feel like the singers and the songwriters lost out a bit. I started playing music because I wanted to be a songwriter. I love all styles of music. I love learning how to write songs. Writing Celtic and folk songs are one of the reasons I continue to create music. So another thing I will be doing with a section of the podcast is to continue to promote the singers, songs, and songwriters that I find whether on the Irish & Celtic Music Podcast or wherever. A great example is the interview that I'm sharing next time on the podcast. I interviewed Mikey Mason about his songwriting techniques. The things that inspire him to write a new song and share it each and every week for several years now. I'm trying to write more songs myself, and I will continue to share them over on Patreon but hopefully every month I will have a new song that I can share in this podcast as well. Additional References: Listen to History of Celtic Brittany on the Celtfather Travel Podcast Postcard: Fortresse Largoet + 2022 Podcast Planning & Strategies Pub Songs Podcast #162: Carnac Celtic Concert Celtfather: Secret History of the Celts Revealed CIV 2017: Arrived in Paris 31:10 - CREDITS Thanks for listening to Pub Songs & Stories. This episode was edited by Marc Gunn & Mitchell Petersen. You can follow and listen to the show on my Patreon or wherever you find podcasts. Sign up to my mailing list to learn more about songs featured in this podcast and discover where I'm performing. Clean energy isn't just good for the planet, it's good for your wallet. Solar and wind are now the cheapest power sources in history. But too many politicians would rather protect billionaires than help working families save on their bills. Real change starts when we stop allowing the ultra-rich to write our energy policy and run our government. Let's choose affordable, renewable power. Clean energy means lower costs, more freedom, and a planet that can actually breathe. Join the Quest and Sing Along at www.pubsong.com! #pubstories  

Part 2 of this installment of Unearthed! features animals, swords, art, shoes, shipwrecks, and the miscellany category of potpourri. Research: Abrams, G., Auguste, P., Pirson, S. et al. Earliest evidence of Neanderthal multifunctional bone tool production from cave lion (Panthera spelaea) remains. Sci Rep 15, 24010 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-08588-w Addley, Esther. “English warship sunk in 1703 storm gives up its secrets three centuries on.” The Guardian. 7/31/2025. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/jul/31/british-warship-hms-northumberland-1703-storm-archaeology Alberge, Dalya. “New research may rewrite origins of the Book of Kells, says academic.” The Guardian. 9/26/2025. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/sep/26/new-research-may-rewrite-origins-of-the-book-of-kells-says-academic Alex, Bridget et al. “Regional disparities in US media coverage of archaeology research.” Science Advances. Vol. 11, No. 27. July 2025. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adt5435 American Historical Association. “Historians Defend the Smithsonian.” Updated 8/15/2015. https://www.historians.org/news/historians-defend-the-smithsonian/#statement Anderson, Sonja. “Underwater Archaeologists Capture Photos of Japanese Warship That Hasn’t Been Seen Since It Sank During World War II.” Smithsonian. 7/23/2025. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/underwater-archaeologists-capture-photos-of-japanese-warship-that-hasnt-been-seen-since-it-sank-during-world-war-ii-180987026/ “Ancient DNA provides a new means to explore ancient diets.” Via PhysOrg. 7/1/2025. https://phys.org/news/2025-06-ancient-dna-explore-diets.html Archaeology Magazine. “Roman Workshop Specialized in Manufacturing Nails.” 9/11/2025. https://archaeology.org/news/2025/09/11/roman-workshop-specialized-in-manufacturing-nails-for-army-boots/ Arnold, Paul. “DNA analysis reveals insights into Ötzi the Iceman's mountain neighbors.” Phys.org. 7/22/2025. https://phys.org/news/2025-07-dna-analysis-reveals-insights-tzi.html Arnold, Paul. “Prehistoric 'Swiss army knife' made from cave lion bone discovered in Neanderthal cave.” Phys.org. 7/9/2025. https://phys.org/news/2025-07-prehistoric-swiss-army-knife-cave.html Associated Press. “Divers recover artifacts from the Titanic’s sister ship Britannic for the first time.” 9/16/2025. https://apnews.com/article/britannic-titanic-shipwreck-recovery-9a525f9831bc0d67c1c9604cc7155765 Breen, Kerry. “Woman's remains exhumed in Oregon's oldest unidentified person case.” CBS News. 9/24/2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/oak-grove-jane-doe-remains-exhumed-oregon-unidentified-person-homicide/ Croze, M., Paladin, A., Zingale, S. et al. Genomic diversity and structure of prehistoric alpine individuals from the Tyrolean Iceman’s territory. Nat Commun 16, 6431 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-61601-8 Davis, Nicola. “Even Neanderthals had distinct preferences when it came to making dinner, study suggests.” The Guardian. 7/17/2025. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/jul/17/even-neanderthals-had-distinct-preferences-when-it-came-to-making-dinner-study-suggests Durham University. “Bronze and Iron Age cultures in the Middle East were committed to wine production.” EurekAlert. 9/17/2025. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1098278 “Archaeologists discover four at-risk shipwrecks on colonial waterfront at Brunswick Town/Fort Anderson State Historic Site.” 8/4/2025. https://news.ecu.edu/2025/08/04/archaeologists-discover-four-at-risk-shipwrecks-on-colonial-waterfront-at-brunswick-town-fort-anderson-state-historic-site/ Fratsyvir, Anna. “Polish president-elect urges Ukraine to allow full exhumations of Volyn massacre victims, despite resumed work.” 7/12/2025. https://kyivindependent.com/polands-president-elect-urges-zelensky-to-allow-full-exhumations-in-volyn-as-work-already-resumes/ Fry, Devin and Jordan Gartner. “Coroner’s office identifies man 55 years later after exhuming his body from cemetery.” 7/19/2025. https://www.kltv.com/2025/07/19/coroners-office-identifies-man-55-years-later-after-exhuming-his-body-cemetery/ Guagnin, Maria et al. “12,000-year-old rock art marked ancient water sources in Arabia's desert.” Phys.org. 10/1/2025. https://phys.org/news/2025-10-year-art-ancient-sources-arabia.html History Blog. “Medieval leather goods found in Oslo.” 7/15/2025. https://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/73641 Jana Matuszak, Jana. “Of Captive Storm Gods and Cunning Foxes: New Insights into Early Sumerian Mythology, with an Editoin of Ni 12501.” Iraq. Vol. 86. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/iraq/article/of-captive-storm-gods-and-cunning-foxes-new-insights-into-early-sumerian-mythology-with-an-edition-of-ni-12501/391CFC6A9361C23A0E7AF159F565A911 Kuta, Sarah. “Cut Marks on Animal Bones Suggest Neanderthal Groups Had Their Own Unique Culinary Traditions.” Smithsonian. 7/17/2025. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/cut-marks-on-animal-bones-suggest-neanderthal-groups-had-their-own-unique-culinary-traditions-180987002/ Kuta, Sarah. “Seventy Years Later, They Finally Know What It Is.” Smithsonian. 8/1/2025. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-found-sticky-goo-inside-a-2500-year-old-jar-70-years-later-they-finally-know-what-it-is-180987088/ Kuta, Sarah. “Underwater Archaeologists Were Looking for a Lost Shipwreck in Wisconsin. They Stumbled Upon a Different Vessel Instead.” Smithsonian. 7/16/2025. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/underwater-archaeologists-were-looking-for-a-lost-shipwreck-in-wisconsin-they-stumbled-upon-a-different-vessel-instead-180986990/ Linköping University. “Ancient crop discovered in the Canary Islands thanks to archaeological DNA.” Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-ancient-crop-canary-islands-archaeological.html Lucchesi, Madison. “More layoffs at GBH as ‘Defunded’ sign goes viral.” Boston.com. 7/24/2025. https://www.boston.com/news/media/2025/07/24/gbh-layoffs-defunded-sign/ Luscombe, Richard. “‘It’s incredibly exciting’: ancient canoe unearthed after Hurricane Ian stormed through Florida.” The Guardian. 9/28/2025. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/28/florida-ancient-canoes Margalida, Antoni et al. “The Bearded Vulture as an accumulator of historical remains: Insights for future ecological and biocultural studies.” Ecology. Volume 106, Issue 9. 9/11/2025. https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecy.70191 Metcalfe, Tom. “300-year-old pirate-plundered shipwreck that once held 'eyewatering treasure' discovered off Madagascar.” Live Science. 7/3/2025. https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/300-year-old-pirate-plundered-shipwreck-that-once-held-eyewatering-treasure-discovered-off-madagascar Mondal, Sanjukta. “Ancient Romans likely used extinct sea creature fossils as amulets.” Phys.org. 7/28/2025. https://phys.org/news/2025-07-ancient-romans-extinct-sea-creature.html Morris, Steven. “Iron age settlement found in Gloucestershire after detectorist unearths Roman swords.” The Guardian. 7/4/2025. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/jul/04/roman-swords-gloucestershire-villa-iron-age-settlement-discovery Mullett, Russell et al. “Precious finger traces from First Nations ancestors revealed in a glittering mountain cave in Australia.” Phys.org. 7/28/2025. https://phys.org/news/2025-07-precious-finger-nations-ancestors-revealed.html Ocean Exploration Trust. “Expedition reveals 13 shipwrecks from WWII battles off Guadalcanal.” Phys.org. 8/4/2025. https://phys.org/news/2025-08-reveals-shipwrecks-wwii-guadalcanal.html Oster, Sandee. “Study translates fragmentary ancient Sumerian myth around 4,400 years old.” Phys.org. 7/22/2025. https://phys.org/news/2025-07-fragmentary-ancient-sumerian-myth-years.html Paul, Andrew. “130-year-old butter bacteria discovered in Danish basement.” Popular Science. 9/15/2025. https://www.popsci.com/science/old-butter-basement-discovery/ Penn, Tim. “Big Roman shoes discovered near Hadrian's Wall—but they don't necessarily mean big Roman feet.” Phys.org. 7/20/2025. https://phys.org/news/2025-07-big-roman-hadrian-wall-dont.html#google_vignette Pogrebin, Robin and Graham Bowley. “Smithsonian Responds to Trump’s Demand for a Review of Its Exhibits.” New York Times. 9/3/2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/03/arts/design/smithsonian-bunch-trump.html Preston, Elizabeth. “Scientists found a 650-year-old shoe in a vulture nest. That’s just the start of it.’ National Geographic. 10/1/2025. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/vulture-nest-was-hiding-a-650-year-old-shoe Reilly, Adam. “GBH lays off 13 staff at American Experience, pauses production of new documentaries.” GBH. 7/22/2025. https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/2025-07-22/gbh-lays-off-13-staff-at-american-experience-pauses-production-of-new-documentaries Richmond, Todd. “Searchers discover ‘ghost ship’ that sank in Lake Michigan almost 140 years ago.” Associated Press. 9/15/2025. https://apnews.com/article/lake-michigan-schooner-shipwreck-door-county-ccff930d8cd87f3597483938f8fb4fd6 Savat, Sarah. “Discovery expands understanding of Neolithic agricultural practices, diets in East Asia.” EurekAlert. 9/24/2025. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1099662 Seb Falk, James Wade, The Lost Song of Wade: Peterhouse 255 Revisited, The Review of English Studies, Volume 76, Issue 326, October 2025, Pages 339–365, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgaf038 Smith, Kiona N. “Oldest wooden tools in East Asia may have come from any of three species.” Ars Technica. 7/7/2025. https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/07/did-denisovans-or-homo-erectus-make-the-oldest-wooden-tools-in-east-asia/ The Catholic Herald. “Plans in train to exhume holy remains of martyr St Thomas More.” 7/14/2025. https://thecatholicherald.com/article/plans-in-train-to-exhume-holy-remains-of-martyr-st-thomas-more The History Blog. “1600-year-old iron scale, weights found in Turkey.” 7/10/2025. https://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/73597 The History Blog. “2,500-year-old honey identified in ancient offering.” 7/31/2025. https://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/73776 The History Blog. “Kushan vessel inscribed with woman’s name found in Tajikistan.” 7/8/2025. https://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/73582 The History Blog. “Medieval sword fished out of Vistula in Warsaw.” 7/7/2025. https://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/73574 The History Blog. “Unique 3D mural 3,000-4,000 years old found in Peru.” 7/30/2025. https://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/73769 The White House. “Letter to the Smithsonian: Internal Review of Smithsonian Exhibitions and Materials.” 8/12/2025. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/2025/08/letter-to-the-smithsonian-internal-review-of-smithsonian-exhibitions-and-materials/ Thorsberg, Christian. “A Tiny Typo May Explain a Centuries-Old Mystery About Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’ and ‘Troilus and Criseyde’.” Smithsonian. 7/16/2025. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-tiny-typo-may-explain-a-centuries-old-mystery-about-chaucers-canterbury-tales-and-troilus-and-criseyde-180986991/ University of Cambridge. “Scholars just solved a 130-year literary mystery—and it all hinged on one word.” 7/16/2025. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/07/250716000855.htm Vindolanda Trust. “Magna Shoes.” 7/2/2025. https://www.vindolanda.com/news/magna-shoes Whiddington, Richard. “$2 Thrift Store Plate Turns Out to Be Rare Chinese Porcelain Worth Thousands.” Artnet. 8/21/2025. https://news.artnet.com/market/chinese-porcelain-uk-thrift-store-auction-2680013 Whiddington, Richard. “Famed Antikythera Shipwreck Yields More Astonishing Discoveries.” Artnet News. 7/16/2025. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/antikythera-shipwreck-more-discoveries-2668217 Whiddington, Richard. “Scholars Crack 130-Year-Old Mystery Behind a Lost Medieval Epic.” 7/17/2025. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/song-of-wade-mystery-chaucer-2668558 Whiddington, Richard. “Sunken Clues Reveal Identity of Mysterious Scottish Shipwreck.” Artnet. 7/25/2025. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/scotland-shipwreck-sanday-2671342 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Part one of this quarter's installment of Unearthed! features things related to books and letters, and edibles and potables, and as we usually do, we are starting this installment of Unearthed with updates. Research: Abrams, G., Auguste, P., Pirson, S. et al. Earliest evidence of Neanderthal multifunctional bone tool production from cave lion (Panthera spelaea) remains. Sci Rep 15, 24010 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-08588-w Addley, Esther. “English warship sunk in 1703 storm gives up its secrets three centuries on.” The Guardian. 7/31/2025. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/jul/31/british-warship-hms-northumberland-1703-storm-archaeology Alberge, Dalya. “New research may rewrite origins of the Book of Kells, says academic.” The Guardian. 9/26/2025. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/sep/26/new-research-may-rewrite-origins-of-the-book-of-kells-says-academic Alex, Bridget et al. “Regional disparities in US media coverage of archaeology research.” Science Advances. Vol. 11, No. 27. July 2025. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adt5435 American Historical Association. “Historians Defend the Smithsonian.” Updated 8/15/2015. https://www.historians.org/news/historians-defend-the-smithsonian/#statement Anderson, Sonja. “Underwater Archaeologists Capture Photos of Japanese Warship That Hasn’t Been Seen Since It Sank During World War II.” Smithsonian. 7/23/2025. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/underwater-archaeologists-capture-photos-of-japanese-warship-that-hasnt-been-seen-since-it-sank-during-world-war-ii-180987026/ “Ancient DNA provides a new means to explore ancient diets.” Via PhysOrg. 7/1/2025. https://phys.org/news/2025-06-ancient-dna-explore-diets.html Archaeology Magazine. “Roman Workshop Specialized in Manufacturing Nails.” 9/11/2025. https://archaeology.org/news/2025/09/11/roman-workshop-specialized-in-manufacturing-nails-for-army-boots/ Arnold, Paul. “DNA analysis reveals insights into Ötzi the Iceman's mountain neighbors.” Phys.org. 7/22/2025. https://phys.org/news/2025-07-dna-analysis-reveals-insights-tzi.html Arnold, Paul. “Prehistoric 'Swiss army knife' made from cave lion bone discovered in Neanderthal cave.” Phys.org. 7/9/2025. https://phys.org/news/2025-07-prehistoric-swiss-army-knife-cave.html Associated Press. “Divers recover artifacts from the Titanic’s sister ship Britannic for the first time.” 9/16/2025. https://apnews.com/article/britannic-titanic-shipwreck-recovery-9a525f9831bc0d67c1c9604cc7155765 Breen, Kerry. “Woman's remains exhumed in Oregon's oldest unidentified person case.” CBS News. 9/24/2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/oak-grove-jane-doe-remains-exhumed-oregon-unidentified-person-homicide/ Croze, M., Paladin, A., Zingale, S. et al. Genomic diversity and structure of prehistoric alpine individuals from the Tyrolean Iceman’s territory. Nat Commun 16, 6431 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-61601-8 Davis, Nicola. “Even Neanderthals had distinct preferences when it came to making dinner, study suggests.” The Guardian. 7/17/2025. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/jul/17/even-neanderthals-had-distinct-preferences-when-it-came-to-making-dinner-study-suggests Durham University. “Bronze and Iron Age cultures in the Middle East were committed to wine production.” EurekAlert. 9/17/2025. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1098278 “Archaeologists discover four at-risk shipwrecks on colonial waterfront at Brunswick Town/Fort Anderson State Historic Site.” 8/4/2025. https://news.ecu.edu/2025/08/04/archaeologists-discover-four-at-risk-shipwrecks-on-colonial-waterfront-at-brunswick-town-fort-anderson-state-historic-site/ Fratsyvir, Anna. “Polish president-elect urges Ukraine to allow full exhumations of Volyn massacre victims, despite resumed work.” 7/12/2025. https://kyivindependent.com/polands-president-elect-urges-zelensky-to-allow-full-exhumations-in-volyn-as-work-already-resumes/ Fry, Devin and Jordan Gartner. “Coroner’s office identifies man 55 years later after exhuming his body from cemetery.” 7/19/2025. https://www.kltv.com/2025/07/19/coroners-office-identifies-man-55-years-later-after-exhuming-his-body-cemetery/ Guagnin, Maria et al. “12,000-year-old rock art marked ancient water sources in Arabia's desert.” Phys.org. 10/1/2025. https://phys.org/news/2025-10-year-art-ancient-sources-arabia.html History Blog. “Medieval leather goods found in Oslo.” 7/15/2025. https://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/73641 Jana Matuszak, Jana. “Of Captive Storm Gods and Cunning Foxes: New Insights into Early Sumerian Mythology, with an Editoin of Ni 12501.” Iraq. Vol. 86. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/iraq/article/of-captive-storm-gods-and-cunning-foxes-new-insights-into-early-sumerian-mythology-with-an-edition-of-ni-12501/391CFC6A9361C23A0E7AF159F565A911 Kuta, Sarah. “Cut Marks on Animal Bones Suggest Neanderthal Groups Had Their Own Unique Culinary Traditions.” Smithsonian. 7/17/2025. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/cut-marks-on-animal-bones-suggest-neanderthal-groups-had-their-own-unique-culinary-traditions-180987002/ Kuta, Sarah. “Seventy Years Later, They Finally Know What It Is.” Smithsonian. 8/1/2025. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-found-sticky-goo-inside-a-2500-year-old-jar-70-years-later-they-finally-know-what-it-is-180987088/ Kuta, Sarah. “Underwater Archaeologists Were Looking for a Lost Shipwreck in Wisconsin. They Stumbled Upon a Different Vessel Instead.” Smithsonian. 7/16/2025. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/underwater-archaeologists-were-looking-for-a-lost-shipwreck-in-wisconsin-they-stumbled-upon-a-different-vessel-instead-180986990/ Linköping University. “Ancient crop discovered in the Canary Islands thanks to archaeological DNA.” Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-ancient-crop-canary-islands-archaeological.html Lucchesi, Madison. “More layoffs at GBH as ‘Defunded’ sign goes viral.” Boston.com. 7/24/2025. https://www.boston.com/news/media/2025/07/24/gbh-layoffs-defunded-sign/ Luscombe, Richard. “‘It’s incredibly exciting’: ancient canoe unearthed after Hurricane Ian stormed through Florida.” The Guardian. 9/28/2025. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/28/florida-ancient-canoes Margalida, Antoni et al. “The Bearded Vulture as an accumulator of historical remains: Insights for future ecological and biocultural studies.” Ecology. Volume 106, Issue 9. 9/11/2025. https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecy.70191 Metcalfe, Tom. “300-year-old pirate-plundered shipwreck that once held 'eyewatering treasure' discovered off Madagascar.” Live Science. 7/3/2025. https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/300-year-old-pirate-plundered-shipwreck-that-once-held-eyewatering-treasure-discovered-off-madagascar Mondal, Sanjukta. “Ancient Romans likely used extinct sea creature fossils as amulets.” Phys.org. 7/28/2025. https://phys.org/news/2025-07-ancient-romans-extinct-sea-creature.html Morris, Steven. “Iron age settlement found in Gloucestershire after detectorist unearths Roman swords.” The Guardian. 7/4/2025. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/jul/04/roman-swords-gloucestershire-villa-iron-age-settlement-discovery Mullett, Russell et al. “Precious finger traces from First Nations ancestors revealed in a glittering mountain cave in Australia.” Phys.org. 7/28/2025. https://phys.org/news/2025-07-precious-finger-nations-ancestors-revealed.html Ocean Exploration Trust. “Expedition reveals 13 shipwrecks from WWII battles off Guadalcanal.” Phys.org. 8/4/2025. https://phys.org/news/2025-08-reveals-shipwrecks-wwii-guadalcanal.html Oster, Sandee. “Study translates fragmentary ancient Sumerian myth around 4,400 years old.” Phys.org. 7/22/2025. https://phys.org/news/2025-07-fragmentary-ancient-sumerian-myth-years.html Paul, Andrew. “130-year-old butter bacteria discovered in Danish basement.” Popular Science. 9/15/2025. https://www.popsci.com/science/old-butter-basement-discovery/ Penn, Tim. “Big Roman shoes discovered near Hadrian's Wall—but they don't necessarily mean big Roman feet.” Phys.org. 7/20/2025. https://phys.org/news/2025-07-big-roman-hadrian-wall-dont.html#google_vignette Pogrebin, Robin and Graham Bowley. “Smithsonian Responds to Trump’s Demand for a Review of Its Exhibits.” New York Times. 9/3/2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/03/arts/design/smithsonian-bunch-trump.html Preston, Elizabeth. “Scientists found a 650-year-old shoe in a vulture nest. That’s just the start of it.’ National Geographic. 10/1/2025. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/vulture-nest-was-hiding-a-650-year-old-shoe Reilly, Adam. “GBH lays off 13 staff at American Experience, pauses production of new documentaries.” GBH. 7/22/2025. https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/2025-07-22/gbh-lays-off-13-staff-at-american-experience-pauses-production-of-new-documentaries Richmond, Todd. “Searchers discover ‘ghost ship’ that sank in Lake Michigan almost 140 years ago.” Associated Press. 9/15/2025. https://apnews.com/article/lake-michigan-schooner-shipwreck-door-county-ccff930d8cd87f3597483938f8fb4fd6 Savat, Sarah. “Discovery expands understanding of Neolithic agricultural practices, diets in East Asia.” EurekAlert. 9/24/2025. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1099662 Seb Falk, James Wade, The Lost Song of Wade: Peterhouse 255 Revisited, The Review of English Studies, Volume 76, Issue 326, October 2025, Pages 339–365, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgaf038 Smith, Kiona N. “Oldest wooden tools in East Asia may have come from any of three species.” Ars Technica. 7/7/2025. https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/07/did-denisovans-or-homo-erectus-make-the-oldest-wooden-tools-in-east-asia/ The Catholic Herald. “Plans in train to exhume holy remains of martyr St Thomas More.” 7/14/2025. https://thecatholicherald.com/article/plans-in-train-to-exhume-holy-remains-of-martyr-st-thomas-more The History Blog. “1600-year-old iron scale, weights found in Turkey.” 7/10/2025. https://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/73597 The History Blog. “2,500-year-old honey identified in ancient offering.” 7/31/2025. https://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/73776 The History Blog. “Kushan vessel inscribed with woman’s name found in Tajikistan.” 7/8/2025. https://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/73582 The History Blog. “Medieval sword fished out of Vistula in Warsaw.” 7/7/2025. https://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/73574 The History Blog. “Unique 3D mural 3,000-4,000 years old found in Peru.” 7/30/2025. https://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/73769 The White House. “Letter to the Smithsonian: Internal Review of Smithsonian Exhibitions and Materials.” 8/12/2025. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/2025/08/letter-to-the-smithsonian-internal-review-of-smithsonian-exhibitions-and-materials/ Thorsberg, Christian. “A Tiny Typo May Explain a Centuries-Old Mystery About Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’ and ‘Troilus and Criseyde’.” Smithsonian. 7/16/2025. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-tiny-typo-may-explain-a-centuries-old-mystery-about-chaucers-canterbury-tales-and-troilus-and-criseyde-180986991/ University of Cambridge. “Scholars just solved a 130-year literary mystery—and it all hinged on one word.” 7/16/2025. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/07/250716000855.htm Vindolanda Trust. “Magna Shoes.” 7/2/2025. https://www.vindolanda.com/news/magna-shoes Whiddington, Richard. “$2 Thrift Store Plate Turns Out to Be Rare Chinese Porcelain Worth Thousands.” Artnet. 8/21/2025. https://news.artnet.com/market/chinese-porcelain-uk-thrift-store-auction-2680013 Whiddington, Richard. “Famed Antikythera Shipwreck Yields More Astonishing Discoveries.” Artnet News. 7/16/2025. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/antikythera-shipwreck-more-discoveries-2668217 Whiddington, Richard. “Scholars Crack 130-Year-Old Mystery Behind a Lost Medieval Epic.” 7/17/2025. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/song-of-wade-mystery-chaucer-2668558 Whiddington, Richard. “Sunken Clues Reveal Identity of Mysterious Scottish Shipwreck.” Artnet. 7/25/2025. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/scotland-shipwreck-sanday-2671342 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This conversation with Peter delves into the rich history and culture of Britain, exploring the interplay between myth and reality, particularly through the lens of Arthurian legends and the influence of Christianity. We also delve into the exploration of ancient civilizations, focusing on archaeological finds, the Neolithic period, and the connections between zodiac symbols and historical narratives. We discuss the significance of cultural exchanges, the influence of geography on ancient societies, and the legacy of figures like Arthur in the context of myth and history. Peter also touches on the idea of secret knowledge being passed down through generations, highlighting the intertwining of history and mythology in understanding our past. We look for connections between the Holy Grail, the Bronze and Iron Ages, and the historical context of King Arthur.   Join our Patreon, support the show, get extra content and early access! https://www.patreon.com/brothersoftheserpent Support the show with a paypal donation: https://paypal.me/snakebros   Chapters 00:00 Introduction to the Brothers of the Serpent Podcast 04:43 The Legends of Lud and His Sons 12:04 Historical and Mythological Figures in Welsh Tradition 16:29 The National vs. Regional Arthur 18:12 The Significance of Memorials and Inscriptions 20:59 Discussion on Archaeological Findings 25:36 The Significance of Burial Practices 27:26 Christianity's Arrival in Britain 30:11 Joseph of Arimathea's Role in Early Christianity 33:07 Cultural Interactions and Language Barriers 36:01 Legends of Jesus' Missing Years 38:33 Neolithic Monuments and Their Mysteries 43:00 The Zodiac and Ancient Mapping 47:16 Exploring the Legacy of Arthurian Legends 47:45 Exploring Ancient Monuments and Zodiacs 49:12 The Transition from Neolithic to Bronze Age 51:17 The Story of Queen Albine and Her Legacy 52:39 Cultural Exchanges and Influences in Ancient Britain 56:20 The Role of Adventurers in Knowledge Exchange 01:01:25 Connecting Myths: The Epic of Gilgamesh and Welsh Traditions 01:07:23 The Significance of Mapping and Surveying in Ancient Cultures 01:12:16 Hidden Knowledge and Ancient Traditions 01:15:25 The Glastonbury Zodiac and Its Significance 01:19:10 Arthurian Legends and Secret Knowledge 01:22:38 The Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail 01:24:45 The Bronze Age and Trade Routes 01:32:39 Hillforts and Their Historical Context 01:38:40 Political Upheaval and Innovation 01:40:59 Chariots: A Historical Perspective 01:42:58 The Continuation of Ancient Traditions 01:44:06 The Etruscans and the Fall of Troy 01:44:57 The Legend of King Arthur 01:48:09 Mythologizing Historical Figures 01:52:00 The Role of Oral Tradition 02:00:00 Druidism and Its Evolution 02:10:00 Cultural Interactions and Historical Contexts