Australasia
As I have previously reported here: https://www.stephenmaybury.co.uk/time-to-throw-the-human-evolution-books-out/
Yes, my words were strong but I made my point.
And here: https://www.stephenmaybury.co.uk/human-arrival-in-australia-80000-years-earlier-than-thought/
More and more evidence is surfacing of human beings evolving in various parts of the world, disproving beyond doubt the out-of-Africa theory. However, scientists still insist on that theory and continuously change the dates to fit new findings, which is extremely irritating at the very least. I wish someone would finally stand up and say, “Er, actually, maybe we didn’t evolve in Africa…”
Ironically this article includes the findings from Morocco, pushing anatomically modern humans back 300,000 years and helping to promote an earlier date in Africa, but it fails to mention the human ancestor bones found in Germany that date back millions of years which, of course, place human ancestors outside of Africa. I doubt for one second human ancestors left Africa millions of years ago and then decided to turn around and go back to continue evolving until such a time that they became anatomically human. Of course, this ancestral line may have died out completely but if we start bringing that argument into the equation then the entire human evolution theory has absolutely no evidence and no grounding in truth whatsoever. Also, it means they left Africa millions of years ago! Oh, the irony!
Again I stick to my guns that humans evolved outside of Africa and in different places, Australia included.

https://theconversation.com/worlds-scientists-turn-to-asia-and-australia-to-rewrite-human-history-88697

Jordan
It wasn’t just a crude dwelling place made from wooden posts, this site near Amman in Jordan contained a carefully put together stone floor and walls, a fire pit, various works of art and stone tools.
Dating to 12600 to 10000 BC, the site known as Shubayqa 1 is stretching the imagination of all concerned. If Gobekli Tepe wasn’t enough of a mind bender, Shubayqa 1 brings the same level of paradigm-shifting data, but once again we find evidence that blows away the age-old theory of human beings running around forests during the time the pyramids were built.
Gobekli Tepe put those ideas to bed long ago, but as it appeared to be a unique site there was nothing to suggest the practice of settled groups was widespread during the ending of the ice age outside of Asia Minor. Now we have that evidence – clearly people were settled in places and practising religious rituals, or at least had formed complex thought patterns linked to the care of the dead. If you are burying your dead, you are clearly concerned about the care of that person in death. But this should be nothing new, for it has been proven that Neanderthals were also burying their dead, or at least caring for their dead, 30,000 years ago. This brings forth the possibility that humans also had such rituals, and therefore religious systems may have been in place far back into antiquity.
The point is while these new sites keep surfacing and shaking our historical foundations, they should no longer have such an effect on us for they are becoming the norm. I am sure more sites will be discovered, and it’s lucky we have carbon dating otherwise these places would be fitted into pre-conceived notions that all sites must be inside the 5,000-year-old time barrier, which is the common date given to most sites when there is no scientific data to prove otherwise. Even the term “hunter-gatherers” is becoming a misnomer.
What we are seeing is an ongoing paradigm shift and a rapid change in our thinking of where we came from, and that is a very good thing for the history we are taught – usually wrapped around Biblical dates – is about as reliable as a politician’s promise.

https://www.seeker.com/archaeology/newly-unearthed-remains-reveal-the-complexity-of-levantine-hunter-gatherers

England
Excavation of the 6,000-year-old “Cat’s Brain” long barrow in the Vale of Pewsey is offering a new insight into these ancient structures. Long thought to be places where tribal leaders and their families were buried – a conclusion I was never happy with due to the sheer number of them around the Stonehenge area – the lack of burial goods including bodies has brought that entire notion into question. In fact, this is one of the most important findings in British archaeology this century.
Cat’s Brain long barrow was clearly never a tomb but contained an internal structure and was most likely a place where people gathered. The sheer size of it (60 x 30 ft) suggests it was actually a timber hall.
Suddenly we jump from Mike Parker-Pearson’s theory of Stonehenge being a place of the dead (a theory I have dismissed at every turn and has made me quite irate at times!), to now seeing the huge amount of Long Barrows in the area as possible contemporary hotels – if these structures were lived in then clearly they were used during festivities, and perhaps all year round. There is no evidence of permanent settlement in the long barrows, but now there is evidence they were used for people to stay in. This idea would work wonders for the problem of placing people in a warm environment during, say, the winter solstice – Stonehenge has never been considered as a permanently used placed – 365 days a year – but if people gathered for the solstice and they arrived here for a celebration then temporary housing would have been necessary. The long barrows would have housed a large number of people at any given time, and also in the case of Stonehenge a commanding view of the surroundings. Although Cat’s Brain barrow is not as close to Stonehenge as many of the other barrows, the fact there are no burial goods changes Stonehenge from a dreary, dark, morbid place used by a death cult (if you get sucked into Parker-Pearson’s world), into a colourful, year-round place where people gathered and celebrated life itself and temporarily lived together in barrows.
So the new evidence to me suggests long barrows were ancient hotels!
I would like to be a little cautious here though. Cat’s Brain long barrow (4000 BC) existed before Stonehenge (3600 BC) was built, if one is to believe the chronology of the area. However, I think the use of long barrows likely did not change from living places into burial places in the space of 400 years and more. In fact, there has never really been any evidence to show that Stonehenge was a “place of the dead”, as some archaeologists will have us believe, which makes me wonder why some of them are in the positions they hold. If anything they are guilty of promoting false histories, and bad guesswork is not a welcome philosophy when we are dealing with one of the world’s most important ancient monuments. Scant evidence should not be used as an opportunity for those in prominent places to fill in the gaps with whatever ideas they please. If there’s anything we’ve learned about Stonehenge research over the last couple of hundred years is that no one has any idea what this site was used for or why it was built, and it’s ironic that the structures around the site have given us the clues.

https://www.salon.com/2017/12/02/monument-offers-glimpse-of-britains-neolithic-civilization_partner/

China
Once again the subject of giants appears in the news – ancient human beings who should not have been as tall as they were, and this is often brushed aside as a dietary issue, a conclusion I do not agree with.
I have followed the fascinating work of Jim Vieira and spoke with him several times, and his research has uncovered a similar story all over the United States. Hundreds of giant skeletons were uncovered during excavations of the great native American mounds. Once all over the newspapers in the 19th and early 20th Century, with the skeletons displayed in museums, suddenly all was removed from show and the entire subject was hushed up. Am I pointing to a conspiracy to remove the truth? Yes, I am, and the reason is that giants in North America do not fit at all into Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection.
This subject is a minefield and not one that is relevant to discuss here, but yet again we find an excuse from the archaeologists who use diet as the reason for the elevated height. The height of these Chinese skeletons at 6’3″ is not really in the realms of the hushed up American giants who exceeded 7 feet tall in most cases – try explaining that away with diet.
There are enough extremely tall Chinese people living today that suggest the height of these individuals is not even noteworthy in the grand scheme of things. I suspect these individuals were not such a rarity in ancient China. However, there is more than a half-foot height difference between the 5,000-year-old skeletons and the modern average. That is quite a difference. However, the North American giants were more than one-foot taller than modern native American populations.
What bothers me though is the idea that diet had a part to play in the height of these individuals. If we are seeing the average height of the local population to be more than the national average, it has taken 5,000 years of evolution for this to happen. So how long did it take those people to reach their dizzy heights in the first place? That’s why the diet argument is not applicable. It’s highly unlikely there were such rich foods available solely for these individuals that they reached these heights but other populations were not affected. We are talking here of many thousands of years of isolation from everyone else, and I do not buy the idea that these were elite people who had a better diet than their subjects. Again, the time scales do not match.
What we find are giants all over the world and where we don’t have physical evidence we do have myths. There is no doubt that this part of history has been pushed aside to allow Darwin’s theory to prevail. However, time and time again we see new evidence disproving the nonsense of 19th Century scientists. Why their ideas are still held in high regard I have no idea.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/07/05/incredible-graveyard-5000-year-old-giants-found-china/?WT.mc_id=tmg_share_fb

Europe
This news is of no surprise to anyone I should expect, but viewing the data really brings this to life.
A study of bones from females from the Neolithic period shows they were up to 30% stronger in their upper arms. This result is somewhat similar to medieval archers who had much stronger arms and bigger bones than modern men. What is surprising is that while they were 30% stronger than female university students, they were also 11-16% stronger than female rowers!
The study of Neolithic women dating from 5400 – 5000 BC shows they “had similar leg bone strength to modern rowers, but their arm bones were 11-16% stronger than than rowers.”
Bronze Age (2300 – 1500 BC) women, however, showed a different result. They had 9-13% stronger arm bones than rowers but their leg bones were 12% weaker.
Either way this result is conclusive – Neolithic and Bronze Age women in Europe were as tough as modern female wrestlers, and even most males today aren’t as strong as they were!

https://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/bone-study-reveals-prehistoric-women.html#zVXQmaFvtPKMQ1dz.97

Peru
Without comparison the darkest culture I have ever come across in all my years travelling is that of the Moche in northern Peru, whose vast territory stretched for several hundred miles along the desert coast.
Huaca de la Luna (The Pyramid of the Moon) is definitely the most sinister temple I have ever visited, and a sense of its dark past is clearly apparent. My good friend Michael White will certainly recall my attempts to stay overnight atop the pyramid, but we couldn’t formulate a viable plan to get past the guards without having to bribe them! The reason for that was during a visit earlier in the day I could sense the powerful, dark energy of the pyramid and wanted to stay alone overnight to get a more direct feel of the place. The pit where prisoners were held has an especially dark and powerful feeling attached to it. The stories of victims being left in there to bleed heavily from inflicted cuts to their genitals before being hauled out to be sacrificed by throat cutting and then throwing off the mountain behind the pyramid has stayed with me and certainly gives one a sense of what was going on there.
It appears Huaca de la Luna was steeped in sacrifice and torture, so it’s not surprising to see that the face of The Lady of Cao is a little bit unnerving! Her body was found at the El Brujo (The Witch) site, inside Huaca Cao Viejo, both of which are a 25-mile distance from Huaca de la Luna and Huaca del Sol (The Pyramid of the Sun), as the crow flies (37 miles by modern road).
Without knowing anything about the history of the Moche it’s difficult to perceive the feeling when looking into this woman’s face. The Moche were a barbaric, sinister and seemingly warlike culture who appeared to rule with an iron fist, and bloodletting was an everyday occurrence. At least that’s the impression one can get when visiting these sinister places. The Moche, however, were highly advanced in many architectural and engineering feats. Huaca del Sol is the largest adobe brick structure in the world, and is still yet to be excavated. Their irrigation canals were also totally innovative in the south American region, and it’s likely all later cultures (including the Chimu and Inca) adopted their engineering knowledge to build their empires, without which they may not have been possible.
My point is there are almost two versions of the Moche – the one you read about, with great innovation and advances in technology and organisation, and then there’s the one you sense when you visit the sites – a sinister, sacrificing culture who had a thirst for torture and blood. It’s hard to know whether the Moche ruled through brute force and achieved their amazing feats only due to an iron fist and the threat of torture and sacrifice if the population did not comply, or whether they were a happy, cooperative culture who worked together to achieve great engineering feats and only their enemies were the unfortunate victims of their macabre rituals. Most likely it was a combination of the two, but I guess we’ll never know.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/face-of-mummified-leader-reconstructed/ar-BBDM8ts?OCID=ansmsnnews11

India
All ancient cultures, and thus later modern cities, sprung up because of running water. In other words, they were originally built next to rivers. Natural fresh, running water is a vital element of every day life, and the bigger the settlement, the bigger the water supply that is required. A small stream is not an adequate supply for a large city, hence why such water supplies exist in small villages. Larger cities, however, have expanded because they exist alongside large rivers (London, New Delhi, and so on).
Therefore I am just as shocked as anyone to read that several Indus Valley cultures existed long after river beds had dried up! I’ve had to read this article three times just to get my head around the idea, to try and envisage how they lived. While the dates of the cultures may be wrong, the river data probably is not, so even with a reasonable amount of error or doubt this problem still remains. I do like the idea that these people made use of fresh water from monsoon rains that would have provided drinking water and also crops, but certainly this does not explain how they survived in the hotter months of December towards June. There is no doubt in my mind that these cultures accessed underground water supplies as this is the only explanation for their existence. Monsoon rains flooding the area with fresh rain water would have provided an ample supply, and with temperatures exceeding 50 degrees Celsius there is just no way these people were able to live without a year-round supply of water.
However, this is a remarkable discovery and an insight into the ingenuity of Indus cultures. I stick to my guns that civilisation started here, and most modern “inventions” can be attributed to the ancient Indians. In this case, the area of Rajasthan and Haryana in which the Palaeo Channel runs through. “Tanks”, large swimming-pool sized (sometimes smaller and often many times larger) man-made reservoirs, were invented here in the Indus Valley at least 6,000 years ago, so I would imagine an earlier form of these was being used to ensure adequate water supply. If there is no evidence of these, then clearly ample water was available underground and they used wells to access it.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-42157402