Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Anthropologists as Spies


By David Price

This article appeared in the November 20, 2000 edition of The Nation.

On December 20, 1919, under the heading "Scientists as Spies," The Nation published a letter by Franz Boas, the father of academic anthropology in America. Boas charged that four American anthropologists, whom he did not name, had abused their professional research positions by conducting espionage in Central America during the First World War. Boas strongly condemned their actions, writing that they had "prostituted science by using it as a cover for their activities as spies." Anthropologists spying for their country severely betrayed their science and damaged the credibility of all anthropological research, Boas wrote; a scientist who uses his research as a cover for political spying forfeits the right to be classified as a scientist.

The most significant reaction to this letter occurred ten days later at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), when the association's governing council voted to censure Boas, effectively removing him from the council and pressuring him to resign from the national research council. Three out of four of the accused spies (their names, we now know, were Samuel Lothrop, Sylvanus Morley and Herbert Spinden) voted for censure; the fourth (John Mason) did not. Later Mason wrote Boas an apologetic letter explaining that he'd spied out of a sense of patriotic duty.

A variety of extraneous factors contributed to Boas's censure (chief among these being institutional rivalries, personal differences and possibly anti-Semitism). The AAA's governing council was concerned less about the accuracy of his charges than about the possibility that publicizing them might endanger the ability of others to undertake fieldwork. It accused him of "abuse" of his professional position for political ends.

In 1919 American anthropology avoided facing the ethical questions Boas raised about anthropologists' using their work as a cover for spying. And it has refused to face them ever since. The AAA's current code of ethics contains no specific prohibitions concerning espionage or secretive research. Some of the same anthropologists who spied during World War I did so in the next war. During the early cold war Ruth Benedict and lesser-known colleagues worked for the RAND corporation and the Office of Naval Research. In the Vietnam War, anthropologists worked on projects with strategic military applications.

Until recently there was little investigation of either the veracity of Boas's accusation in 1919 or the ethical strength of his complaint. But FBI documents released to me under the Freedom of Information Act shed new light on both of these issues.

The FBI produced 280 pages of documents pertaining to one of the individuals Boas accused--the Harvard archeologist Samuel Lothrop. Lothrop's FBI file establishes that during World War I he indeed spied for Naval Intelligence, performing "highly commendable" work in the Caribbean until "his identity as an Agent of Naval Intelligence became known." What is more, World War II saw him back in harness, serving in the Special Intelligence Service (SIS), which J. Edgar Hoover created within the FBI to undertake and coordinate all intelligence activity in Central and South America. During the war the SIS stationed approximately 350 agents throughout South America, where they collected intelligence, subverted Axis networks and at times assisted in the interruption of the flow of raw materials from Axis sources. Lothrop was stationed in Lima, Peru, where he monitored imports, exports and political developments. To maintain his cover he pretended to undertake archeological investigations.

From his arrival in Lima in mid-December 1940, Lothrop was dogged by constant worries that his communications with Washington were being intercepted by British, Peruvian, Japanese or German intelligence operatives. By August 1941 he became concerned that his lack of significant archeological progress might lead to the discovery of his true work in Peru. Lothrop reported his fears of being detected to FBI headquarters: "As regards the archaeological cover for my work in Peru, it was based on the understanding that I was to be in the country six months or less. It is wearing thin and some day somebody is going to start asking why an archaeologist spends most of his time in towns asking questions. This won't happen as soon as it might because the Rockefeller grant for research in Peru makes me a contact man between the field workers and the government."

Lothrop was referring to the Rockefeller Foundation, which financed twenty archeologists who were excavating in Peru, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Venezuela and Central America. He also used his ties to a variety of academic and research institutions--including Harvard, the Peabody Museum, the Institute of Andean Research and the Carnegie Institute--as cover in Peru. Archeologist Gordon Willey, who worked on an Institute of Andean Research Project in Peru and had some contact with Lothrop at this time, recalled that "it was sort of widely known on the loose grapevine that Sam was carrying on some kind of espionage work, much of which seemed to be keeping his eye on German patrons of the Hotel Bolivar Bar."

In fact, Lothrop was considered a valuable agent who collected important information on Peruvian politics and leading public figures of a nature usually difficult to secure. An FBI evaluation reported that headquarters "occasionally receive[s] information of sufficient importance from Mr. Lothrop to transmit to the President." Lothrop's principal source was an assistant to the Peruvian minister of government and police. In the spring of 1944 this informant resigned his governmental position and began "working exclusively under the direction of Dr. Lothrop." In May 1944 the US Embassy reported that Lothrop's principal informant was fully aware of Lothrop's connection to the SIS and FBI. Lothrop's cover was compromised by four Peruvian investigators in the employ of his top informant. His informant had been heard bragging to the Peruvian police that he made more by working for the US Embassy than the police made working for the Peruvian government.

The FBI decided to test the reliability of Lothrop's key informant by assigning him to collect information on nonexistent events and individuals. The informant was given background information about a nonexistent upcoming anti-Jewish rally that he was to attend, including a list of specific individuals who would be present. Though the rally did not occur, the informant provided a full report on it. He also filed detailed reports on a nonexistent commemorative celebration of the bombing of Pearl Harbor held in a distant town, and on a fictitious German spy who supposedly had jumped ship in Peru.

Lothrop was instructed not to tell the informant that his duplicity had been detected; instead, he was to say he was out of funds to pay for informants. Lothrop refused to believe his informant was lying and sent a letter of resignation to J. Edgar Hoover. His resignation was accepted and he returned to the United States to resume his academic duties at Harvard's Peabody Museum and the Carnegie Institute.

What is now known about Lothrop's long career of espionage suggests that the censure of Boas by the AAA in 1919 sent a clear message to him and others that espionage under cover of science in the service of the state is acceptable. In each of the wars and military actions that followed the First World War anthropologists confronted, or more often repressed, the very issues raised by Boas in his 1919 letter to The Nation.

While almost every prominent living US anthropologist (including Ruth Benedict, Gregory Bateson, Clyde Kluckhohn and Margaret Mead) contributed to the World War II war effort, they seldom did so under the false pretext of fieldwork, as Lothrop did. Without endorsing the wide variety of activities to which anthropological skills were applied in the service of the military, a fundamental ethical distinction can be made between those who (as Boas put it) "prostituted science by using it as a cover for their activities as spies" and those who did not. World War II did, however, stimulate frank, though muted, discussions of the propriety of anthropologists' using their knowledge of those they studied in times of war, creating conditions in which, as anthropologist Laura Thompson put it, they became "technicians for hire to the highest bidder." Although the racist tenets of Nazism were an affront to the anthropological view of the inherent equality of humankind, Boas (who died in 1942) would probably have condemned anthropologists who used science as a cover for espionage during World War II. Approximately half of America's anthropologists contributed to the war effort, with dozens of prominent members of the profession working for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), Army and Navy intelligence and the Office of War Information.

In the following decades there were numerous private and public interactions between anthropologists and the intelligence community. Some anthropologists applied their skills at the CIA after its inception in 1947 and may still be doing so today. For some of them this was a logical transition from their wartime espionage work with the OSS and other organizations; others regarded the CIA as an agency concerned with gathering information to assist policy-makers rather than a secret branch of government that subverted foreign governments and waged clandestine war on the Soviet Union and its allies. Still other anthropologists unwittingly received research funding from CIA fronts like the Human Ecology Fund.

The American Anthropological Association also secretly collaborated with the CIA. In the early 1950s the AAA's executive board negotiated a secret agreement with the CIA under which agency personnel and computers were used to produce a cross-listed directory of AAA members, showing their geographical and linguistic areas of expertise along with summaries of research interests. Under this agreement the CIA kept copies of the database for its own purposes with no questions asked. And none were, if for no other reason than that the executive board had agreed to keep the arrangement a secret. What use the CIA made of this database is not known, but the relationship with the AAA was part of an established agency policy of making use of America's academic brain trust. Anthropologists' knowledge of the languages and cultures of the people inhabiting the regions of the Third World where the agency was waging its declared and undeclared wars would have been invaluable to the CIA. The extent to which this occurred is the focus of ongoing archival and FOIA research. When the CIA overthrew Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, an anthropologist reported, under a pseudonym, to the State Department's intelligence and research division on the political affiliations of the prisoners taken by the military in the coup.

During the Korean War linguists and ethnographers assisted America's involvement with little vocal conflict of conscience. Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung's revelations in 1965 of Project Camelot, in which anthropologists were reported to be working on unclassified counterinsurgency programs in Latin America, ignited controversy in the AAA. During America's wars in Southeast Asia the AAA was thrown into a state of upheaval after documents purloined from the private office of UCLA anthropologist Michael Moerman revealed that several anthropologists had secretly used their ethnographic knowledge to assist the war effort.

As a result of inquiries made into these revelations, the 1971 annual meeting of the AAA became the scene of a tumultuous showdown after a fact-finding committee chaired by Margaret Mead maneuvered to create a report finding no wrongdoing on the part of the accused anthropologists. An acrimonious debate resulted in the rejection of the Mead report by the voting members of the association. As historian Eric Wakin noted in his book Anthropology Goes to War, this "represented an organized body of younger anthropologists rejecting the values of its elders." But the unresolved ethical issue of anthropologists spying during the First and Second World Wars provided a backdrop to the 1971 showdown. Almost two decades later, during the Gulf War, proposals by conservatives in the AAA that its members assist allied efforts against Iraq provoked only minor opposition.

Today most anthropologists are still loath to acknowledge, much less study, known connections between anthropology and the intelligence community. As with any controversial topic, it is not thought to be a good "career builder." But more significant, there is a general perception that to rake over anthropology's past links, witting and unwitting, with the intelligence community could reduce opportunities for US anthropologists to conduct fieldwork in foreign nations.

In the course of research in this area I have been told by other anthropologists in no uncertain terms that to raise such questions could endanger the lives of fieldworkers around the globe. This is not a point to be taken lightly, as many anthropologists work in remote settings controlled by hostile governmental or guerrilla forces. Suspicions that one is a US intelligence agent, whether valid or not, could have fatal consequences. As Boas prophetically wrote in his original complaint against Lothrop and his cohorts, "In consequence of their acts every nation will look with distrust upon the visiting foreign investigator who wants to do honest work, suspecting sinister designs. Such action has raised a new barrier against the development of international friendly cooperation." But until US anthropology examines its past and sets rules forbidding both secret research and collaboration with intelligence agencies, these dangers will continue.

Over the past several decades the explicit condemnations of secretive research have been removed from the AAA's code of ethics--the principles of professional responsibility (PPR). In 1971 the PPR specifically declared that "no secret research, no secret reports or debriefings of any kind should be agreed to or given" by members of the AAA. By 1990 the attenuation of anthropological ethics had reached a point where anthropologists were merely "under no professional obligation to provide reports or debriefing of any kind to government officials or employees, unless they have individually and explicitly agreed to do so in the terms of employment." These changes were largely accomplished in the 1984 revision of the PPR that Gerald Berreman characterized as reflecting the new "Reaganethics" of the association: In the prevailing climate of deregulation the responsibility for ethical review was shifted from the association to individual judgments. As anthropologist Laura Nader noted, these Reagan-era changes were primarily "moves to protect academic careers...downplaying anthropologists' paramount responsibility to those they study." The current PPR may be interpreted to mean that anthropologists don't have to be spies unless they want to or have agreed to do so in a contract. A 1995 Commission to Review the AAA Statements on Ethics declared that the committee on ethics had neither the authority nor the resources to investigate or arbitrate complaints of ethical violations and would "no longer adjudicate claims of unethical behavior and focus its efforts and resources on an ethics education program."

Members of the current ethics committee believe that even though the AAA explicitly removed language forbidding secretive research or spying, there are clauses in the current code that imply (rather than state) that such conduct should not be allowed--though without sanctions, this stricture is essentially meaningless. Archeologist Joe Watkins, chairman of the ethics committee, believes that if an anthropologist were caught spying today, "the AAA would not do anything to investigate the activity or to reprimand the individual, even if the individual had not been candid [about the true purpose of the research]. I'm not sure that there is anything the association would do as an association, but perhaps public awareness would work to keep such practitioners in line, like the Pueblo clowns' work to control the societal miscreants." Watkins is referring to Pueblo cultures' use of clowns to ridicule miscreants. Although it is debatable whether anthropologist intelligence operatives would fear sanctions imposed by the AAA, it is incongruous to argue that they would fear public ridicule more. Enforcing a ban on covert research would be difficult, but to give up on even the possibility of investigating such wrongdoing sends the wrong message to the world and to the intelligence agencies bent on recruiting anthropologists.

Many factors have contributed to the AAA's retreat from statements condemning espionage and covert research. Key among these are the century-old difficulties inherent in keeping an intrinsically diverse group of scholars aligned under the framework of a single association. A combination of atavistic and market forces has driven apart members of a field once mythically united around the holistic integration of the findings of archeology and physical, cultural and linguistic anthropology. As some "applied anthropologists" move from classroom employment to working in governmental and industrial settings, statements condemning spying have made increasing numbers of practitioners uncomfortable--and this discomfort suggests much about the nature of some applied anthropological work. The activities encompassed under the heading of applied anthropology are extremely diverse, ranging from heartfelt and underpaid activist-based research for NGOs around the world to production of secret ethnographies and time-allocation studies of industrial and blue-collar workplaces for the private consumption of management.

As increasing numbers of anthropologists find employment in corporations, anthropological research becomes not a quest for scientific truth, as in the days of Boas, but a quest for secret or proprietary data for governmental or corporate sponsors. The AAA's current stance of inaction sends the dangerous message to the underdeveloped world that the world's largest anthropological organization will take no action against anthropologists whose fieldwork is a front for espionage. As the training of anthropology graduate students becomes increasingly dependent on programs like the 1991 National Security Education Program--with its required governmental-service payback stipulations--the issue takes on increased (though seldom discussed) importance.

It is unknown whether any members of the AAA are currently engaged in espionage, but unless the scientific community takes steps to denounce such activities using the clearest possible language and providing sanctions against those who do so, we can anticipate that such actions will continue with impunity during some future crisis or war.

Many in the American Anthropological Association are frustrated with its decision neither to explicitly prohibit nor to penalize secretive government research. It is time for US anthropologists to examine the political consequences of their history and take a hard, thoughtful look at Boas's complaint and the implications implicit in the association's refusal to condemn secret research and to re-enact sanctions against anthropologists engaging in espionage.

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Desmond Morris - “The Human Sexes“ – (Part 6/6) - The Gender Wars

Desmond Morris - “The Human Sexes“ – (Part 5/6) - The Maternal Dilemma

Desmond Morris - “The Human Sexes“ – (Part 4/6) - Passages Of Life

Desmond Morris - “The Human Sexes“ – (Part 3/6) - Patterns Of Love

Desmond Morris - “The Human Sexes“ – (Part 2/6) - The Language Of The Sexes

Desmond Morris - “The Human Sexes“ – (Part 1/6) - Different But Equal

Tom Harrisson

First contact with a Tribe

Sunday, May 17, 2009

ABUSE OF SCIENCE - Anthropologists as Spies


Anthropological Intelligence supports Military Occupation: Engineering "Trust of the Indigenous Population"
How Some Anthropologists Have Learned to Stop Worrying and Start Loving the Army


Global Research, May 16, 2009

Anthropologist Audrey Roberts works for Human Terrain System (HTS), a Pentagon program. Referring to the information produced by HTS scholars, she says, "If it's going to inform how targeting is done - whether that targeting is bad guys, development or governance - how our information is used is how it's going to be used. All I'm concerned about is pushing our information to as many soldiers as possible. The reality is there are people out there who are looking for bad guys to kill. I'd rather they did not operate in a vacuum."

In a recent article on this site I have described HTS as comprising American scholars, primarily in the field of anthropology, along with sociologists and social psychologists, embedding themselves with the US military in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Their brief is to enable the military to make better decisions by helping it to understand the social mores and customs of the cultures it is occupying.

As a program that is likely to have a long tenure, it deserves further examining. The US military would like the US public to believe it is a benevolent program, but it does not require a crystal ball to recognize the insidious reality. HTS teams actively engage in targeting the "enemy" in Iraq and Afghanistan. Team members often wear military uniforms and body armor, and even carry weapons. Like Ms. Roberts, they are not overly concerned about the fact that the "intelligence" they produce is instrumental in capturing and killing people. The social scientists who choose to employ themselves within HTS clearly are not having a moral struggle with the fact that they are allowing their knowledge to be used as a weapon of war.

The military's benign description specifies that HTS will "improve the military's ability to understand the highly complex local social-cultural environment in the areas where they are deployed." Proponents of the program go as far as to claim that its goal is to help the military save lives.

Those who know better, like US Army Lt. Col. Gian Gentile, will tell you, "Don't fool yourself, these Human Terrain Teams, whether they want to acknowledge it or not, in a generalized and subtle way, do at some point contribute to the collective knowledge of a commander, which allows him to target and kill the enemy in the Civil War in Iraq."

The two highest ethical principles of anthropology are protection of the interests of studied populations, and their safety. All anthropological studies consequently are premised on the consent of the subject society. Clearly, the HTS anthropologists have thrown these ethical guidelines out the window. They are to anthropology what state stenographers like Judith Miller and John Burns are to journalism.

I consulted David Price, author of "Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War" and a contributor to the Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual, a forthcoming work of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, of which he is a member.

According to Price, "HTS presents real ethical problems for anthropologists, because the demands of the military in situations of occupation put anthropologists in positions undermining their fundamental ethical loyalties to those they study. Moreover, it presents political problems that link anthropology to a disciplinary past where anthropologists were complicit in assisting in colonial conquests. Those selling HTS to the military have misrepresented what culture is and have downplayed the difficulties of using culture to bring about change, much less conquest. There is a certain dishonesty in pretending that anthropologists possess some sort of magic beans of culture, and that if only occupiers had better cultural knowledge, or made the right pay-offs, then occupied people would fall in line and stop resisting foreign invaders. Culture is being presented as if it were a variable in a linear equation, and if only HTS teams could collect the right data variables and present troops with the right information conquest could be entered in the equation. Life and culture doesn't work that way; occupied people know they are occupied, and while cultural knowledge can ease an occupation, historically it has almost never led to conquest - but even if it could, anthropology would irreparably damage itself if it became nothing more than a tool of occupations and conquest."

The Handbook for the HTS offers the Human Terrain "toolkit" for the US military to understand subjects living in militarily occupied areas. It states:

"HTTs will use the Map-HT Toolkit of developmental hardware and software to capture, consolidate, tag, and ingest human terrain data. HTTs use this human terrain information gathered to assist commanders in understanding the operational relevance of the information as it applies to the unit's planning processes. The expectation is that the resulting courses of actions developed by the staff and selected by the commander will consistently be more culturally harmonized with the local population, which in Counter-Insurgency Operations should lead to greater success. It is the trust of the indigenous population that is at the heart of the struggle between coalition forces and the insurgents." (Emphasis added.)

The mission of the Human Terrain social scientists gains legitimacy and credibility when expressed in terms of engineering the "trust of the indigenous population."

It is obvious that for the neo-colonialist, the HTS is a form of "soft power." In addition to dropping 2,000-pound bombs in civilian areas, occupation forces now see fit to use HTS to get into the minds of the people of the occupied country.

Price avers, "The problem with anthropology being used in counterinsurgency isn't just that anthropologists are helping the military to wear different cultural skins; the problem is that it finds anthropologists using bio power and basic infrastructure as bargaining chips to force occupied cultures to surrender."

Although he says it is too soon to gauge [a] possible increase in HTS operations since Obama took office, Price is convinced that the president is falling for the claim that a smart counterinsurgency can lead not just to easier occupations, but to victory.

For the military to find regionally competent anthropologists to work for them is unlikely. Price is convinced that, "most (American) anthropologists understand the obvious ethical problems in working for HTS. The real risk lies in the likelihood that anthropologists will be seduced by arguments to support soft-power projects tied to occupation and counterinsurgency - especially when these projects are increasingly being presented as "helping" the occupied.

"Those favoring soft-power forms of counterinsurgency are going to need anthropologists and other social scientists," Price said, "Narratives of aid and assistance, of building hospitals and schools will replace the strategic narratives of soft-power counterinsurgency manipulation of occupied people by occupiers. When you add to this the grim job prospects many anthropologists face in this economy, you can see how easy it is for the US administration to sell these soft-power programs."

As the new administration adopts less-violent manipulations of the environments and peoples in Iraq and Afghanistan, Price is concerned that anthropologists will fail to see the distinction between military coercion of occupied peoples and publicized acts of "humanitarianism."

As in most matters related to the occupation, the corporate media are squarely responsible for selling the HTS program to the American public. Price has written, "... the media has become a key supportive enabler of HTS. In the last two years I have probably spent twenty to thirty hours speaking with journalists from NPR, Elle, USA Today, Newsweek, Time, AP, New York Times, Wired, Harpers, Washington Post, etc. patiently explaining what the critical issues for anthropologists are when a program like Human Terrain Systems embeds anthropologists with troops engaged in counterinsurgency operations in occupied battle settings in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sometimes portions of these critiques show up along the way in the final stories, but in most cases, the arguments and critiques against the efficacy, ethical, neocolonial politics as well as the practical impossibility of HTS working as advertised are ignored, or worse yet, they are presented as absurd caricatures."

Corporate media coverage of the program conveniently does not indicate that HTS ignores basic anthropological principles of ethics, such as voluntary informed consent, issues of secrecy, and doing no harm, among others. Most anthropologists concur with Price that HTS is also part of a domestic propaganda project, "that tells the Americans that wars for the hearts and minds of the people of Iraq and Afghanistan can be won. History argues against any such outcome, but HTS becomes part of a lie to the American people that helps keep us fighting these already lost causes. It is so poorly designed that HTS has no hope of actually working as advertised, yet both the Bush and Obama administrations have sold us a false hope that such counterinsurgency programs can lead to an eventual victory."

As Price wrote recently, the media stance does not bode well for the future, or for President Obama. "The real bad news for American foreign policy is that given President Obama's commitment to "soft power" and his open endorsements of counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan, we can expect more of this uncritical coverage on HTS as a crucial tool needed for America's occupations in foreign lands. I am left to wonder how anthropologist Ann Dunham, Barack Obama's mother, would have reacted to her son's reliance on such clearly unethical anthropological means to achieve political ends so aligned with neocolonialist goals of occupation and subjugation?"

Visit Dahr Jamail's website http://dahrjamailiraq.com **

Dahr Jamail's new book, /Military Resisters: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan/, is now available for pre-order

Pre-order book here
http://tinyurl.com/cnlgyu

As one of the first and few unembedded Western journalists to report the truth about how the United States has destroyed, not liberated, Iraqi society in his book Beyond the Green Zone, Jamail now investigates the under-reported but growing antiwar resistance of American GIs. Gathering the stories of these courageous men and women, Jamail shows us that far from “supporting our troops,” politicians have betrayed them at every turn. Finally, Jamail shows us that the true heroes of the criminal tragedy of the Iraq War are those brave enough to say no.

Order /Beyond the Green Zone/
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"International journalism at its best." --Stephen Kinzer, former bureau chief, New York Times; author /All the Shah's Men/

Winner of the prestigious 2008 Martha Gellhorn Award for Journalism


Saturday, May 9, 2009

Sacrificial Cannibalism in Central America


CN. SAN MARCOS, Guatemala. Nested in the mountains, 100 miles west of Guatemala city, is the town of San Marcos. All seems quiet and serene in this picturesque part of the world. The new world meets the old as new automobiles drive a slow pace to allow families with their pack-donkeys to make their weekly visit to the markets.

But the serenity was shattered for three visiting anthropologists from the University of Chicago, who witnessed and documented what they felt had disappeared from the Mesoamerican culture: human sacrifice.

Hear Dr.Lebrevski describe his eating of human flesh in RealAudio Click Here

University of Chicago anthropologist's, Dr. Marvin S. Lebrevski and graduate students Sheila Rodriguez and Kevin Daily, found themselves taken back to pre-Christian times where human sacrifice was a necessary part of religious life. It was the just the beginning of their month long nightmare.

One week after the trio of anthropologists had arrived in San Marcos, to study a small group of purported primitive Aztec/Maya descendants who called themselves Coaltls (pron: CO-tells), Kevin Daily succumbed to a rare form of malaria and died within a few days. The Coaltls maintained that the rare form of malaria would quickly spread and that the body must be buried immediately (first picture above was the casket used for Kevin Daily's body).

Dr. Lebrevski explained, "The day after Kevin was put into the casket, the Coaltls held a feast. Sheila and I, of course, took part in the feast. When I think about it, I feel sick."

Dr. Lebrevski and Sheila Rodriguez feared for their lives. But the Coaltls were, except for eating their colleague, friendly and talkative. The Coaltls feel that technology is killing their way of life and is caused by demon infestation in the cities. And the only way to appease the demonic is to sacrifice to the gods to intervene. The Coaltls have used human sacrifice for thousands of years.

When the Coaltls' high priest was asked if he thought ritual sacrifice was wrong, the priest replied "We have never been able to figure out just what the gods and the demons really want of us. We understand that in the western world you have God, Holy Spirit, Jesus, Lucifer and Satan. When you people figure out what is going on with your gods and demons, could you please tell us? And would you PLEASE stop asking us for money on those Christian TV shows. We have no money."

Intelligence in Nature - The Big Cat Example

Friday, May 8, 2009

Eve To Now (part 2)

Eve To Now (part 1)

Alien Anthropology


CN Conjecture News. The Stone Age Laboratory and The Molecular Anthropology Laboratory, Harvard University. The idea of the human race being a hybrid of primitive man and an extraterrestrial race has been a point of conjecture every since the term "flying saucer" was coined in the late 1940s. Those individuals who feel they have been abducted by an extraterrestrial race report that hybrid experiments have been going on for thousands of years. The scientific world has laughed at such notions until a group of scientists from Harvard published their findings in the journal Nature.

"But from the very beginning there has been some very mysterious findings."

CN interviewed Dr. Martha Rabinowitz, head of the Molecular Anthropology Lab at Harvard, to help us understand the findings and what this monumental discovery implies. Although the interview has not as yet been approved for publication, we are able to reprint some of Dr. Rabinowitz's remarks. When the Doctor was asked what led to the discovery she replied "DNA. Yep, DNA. Human Genome Project. Yep. Sumer. Government cover-ups. Dwarf race in the mountains of China. Montauk. Crazy Gray creatures scaring the hell out of people in their sleep telling us we have to clean up the environment. Like they're telling us something we don't already know. Like it's some kind of goddamn secret. Shit."

Dr. Rabinowitz, speaking on the behalf of her colleagues, stated the discovery began while she was speaking at a conference in Beijing when approached by a group of anthropologists who called themselves "The Clan". The group was composed of some very well respected individuals who wanted Dr. Rabinowitz's expertise and to accompany them on a mountain trek to study an isolated group of 120 dwarfs in the Bayan- Kara-Ula mountains in the Sichuan province in central China. The group informed the Doctor of what has become known as the "Chinese Roswell", complete with alien (gray) appearing skeletal remains and some interesting items called the "Stone Disks" that contained ancient, bizarre hieroglyphics. The Doctor along with The Clan visited the area, bringing back small articles from the dwarf tribe; including some hair samples for DNA testing.

" As you know," Dr. Rabin explained, "we have mapped the genes in human DNA and we are now trying to understand the map. But from the very beginning there has been some very mysterious findings. When we took a look at the DNA structure of the dwarf hairs we brought back from China, that's when we started shaking with fear. The mysterious looking maps that separate us from the lower primates has been a puzzle from the first, but the dwarf DNA contained a far greater amount of the map. The fact of the matter is the DNA that separates monkeys from man is found to be much greater in the Chinese dwarfs. In other words, the "missing link" gene is far more pronounced in the dwarfs. Why in the hell should that be? On this planet, a human is a human. Are we to classify these dwarfs as more than human?"

The Chinese dwarf tribe believes that people from the sky called the "Dropa" crashed in their mountain area long ago. Most of the Dropa died from the crash, but a few of them lived and stayed in the mountain community. The dwarf's folklore describes the Dropa as being small, skinny, with big clumsy heads and weak extremities.

CN asked Dr. Rabinowitz if this is absolute proof of human/alien hybrids. "Nope" said the Doctor. "If anything, it may mean we are alien/primate hybrids or perhaps something like alien/Neanderthal hybrids. It really doesn't matter. We have simply made another discovery within the mystery that just leads to another mystery. And that, my friend, is science at its best."

1.5 million-year-old humans walked on modern feet


Ancient footprints found at Rutgers' Koobi Fora Field School show that some of the earliest humans walked like us and did so on anatomically modern feet 1.5 million years ago.

Published as the cover story in the Feb. 27 issue of the journal Science, this anatomical interpretation is the conclusion of Rutgers Professor John W.K. Harris and an international team of colleagues. Harris is a professor of anthropology at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, member of the Center for Human Evolutionary Studies and director of the Koobi Fora Field Project.

Harris is also director of the field school which Rutgers University operates in collaboration with the National Museums of Kenya. From 2006 to 2008, the field school group of mostly American undergraduates, including Rutgers students, excavated the site yielding the footprints.

The footprints were discovered in two 1.5 million-year-old sedimentary layers near Ileret in northern Kenya. These rarest of impressions yielded information about soft tissue form and structure not normally accessible in fossilized bones. The Ileret footprints constitute the oldest evidence of an essentially modern human-like foot anatomy.

To ensure that comparisons made with modern human and other fossil hominid footprints were objective, the Ileret footprints were scanned and digitized by the lead author, Professor Matthew Bennett of Bournemouth University in the United Kingdom.

The authors of the Science paper reported that the upper sediment layer contained three footprint trails: two trails of two prints each, one of seven prints and a number of isolated prints. Five meters deeper, the other sediment surface preserved one trail of two prints and a single isolated smaller print, probably from a juvenile.

In these specimens, the big toe is parallel to the other toes, unlike that of apes where it is separated in a grasping configuration useful in the trees. The footprints show a pronounced human-like arch and short toes, typically associated with an upright bipedal stance. The size, spacing and depth of the impressions were the basis of estimates of weight, stride and gait, all found to be within the range of modern humans.

Based on size of the footprints and their modern anatomical characteristics, the authors attribute the prints to the hominid Homo ergaster, or early Homo erectus as it is more generally known. This was the first hominid to have had the same body proportions (longer legs and shorter arms) as modern Homo sapiens. Various H. ergaster or H. erectus remains have been found in Tanzania, Ethiopia, Kenya and South Africa, with dates consistent with the Ileret footprints.

Other hominid fossil footprints dating to 3.6 million years ago had been discovered in 1978 by Mary Leakey at Laetoli, Tanzania. These are attributed to the less advanced Australopithecus afarensis, a possible ancestral hominid. The smaller, older Laetoli prints show indications of upright bipedal posture but possess a shallower arch and a more ape-like, divergent big toe.

Rutgers University [1]