News in General

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had the hots for Shelley McGillis after watching that movie

Evidence of surgery carried out nearly 7,000 year ago has emerged – suggesting our Stone Age ancestors were more medically advanced than first thought.

Early Neolithic surgeons used a sharpened flint to amputate the left forearm of an elderly man, scientists have discovered.

And, more remarkable yet, they ensured the patient was anaesthetised and the limb cut off cleanly while the wound was treated afterwards in sterile conditions.

Scientists unearthed evidence of the surgery during work on tomb discovered at Buthiers-Boulancourt, about 40 miles south of Paris.

It suggests an incredible degree of medical knowledge was available in 4900BC and the revelation could force a reassessment of the history of surgery.

Researchers have also recently reported signs of two other Neolithic amputations in Germany and the Czech Republic.

It was known that Stone Age doctors performed trephinations, cutting through the skull, but not amputations.

‘The first European farmers were therefore capable of quite sophisticated surgical acts,’ said a spokesman for the French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research.

Cécile Buquet-Marcon and Anaick Samzun, both archaeologists, and Philippe Charlier, a forensic scientist, discovered the Neolithic surgery while researching the tomb of an elderly man.

The man, who lived in the Linearbandkeramik period, when European hunter-gatherers settled down to agriculture, stock-breeding and pottery, was clearly important.

His grave was 6.5ft long - bigger than most - and contained a schist axe, a flint pick and the remains of a young animal, which are evidence of high status.

The most intriguing aspect, however, was the absence of forearm and hand bones.

Tests showed that the humerus bone had been cut above the trochlea indent at the end ‘in an intentional and successful amputation’.

Mrs Buquet-Marcon said that the patient, who is likely to have been a warrior, might have damaged his arm in a fall, animal attack or battle.

‘I don’t think you could say that those who carried out the operation were doctors in the modern sense that they did only that, but they obviously had medical knowledge,’ she said.

A flintstone almost certainly served as a scalpel.

Mrs Buquet-Marcon said that pain-killing plants were likely to have been used, perhaps the hallucinogenic Datura.

‘We don’t know for sure, but they would have had to find some way of keeping him still during the operation,’ she said.

Other plants, possibly sage, were probably used to clean the wound.

‘The macroscopic examination has not revealed any infection in contact with this amputation, suggesting that it was conducted in relatively aseptic conditions,’ said the scientists in an article for the journal Antiquity.

The patient survived the operation and, although he suffered from osteoarthritis, he lived for months, perhaps years, afterwards, tests revealed.

Despite the loss of his forearm, the contents of his grave showed that he remained part of the community.

‘His disability did not exclude him from the group,’ the researchers said.

A lion headed figure, first called the lion man (German: Löwenmensch, literally "lion person"), then the lion lady (German: Löwenfrau), is an ivory sculpture that is the oldest known zoomorphic (animal-shaped) sculpture in the world and one of the oldest known sculptures in general. The sculpture has also been interpreted as anthropomorphic, giving human characteristics to an animal, although it may have represented a deity. The figurine was determined to be about 32,000 years old[1][2] by carbon dating material from the same layer in which the sculpture was found. It is associated with the archaeological Aurignacian culture.[3]
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History

Its pieces were found in 1939 in a cave named Stadel-Höhle im Hohlenstein (Stadel cave in Hohlenstein Mountain) in the Lonetal (Lone valley) Swabian Alb, Germany. Due to the beginning of the Second World War, it was forgotten and only rediscovered thirty years later. The first reconstruction revealed a humanoid figurine without head. During 1997 through 1998 additional pieces of the Sculpture were discovered and the head was reassembled and restored.

The sculpture is 29.6 cm (11.7 inches) in height, 5.6 cm wide. and 5.9 cm thick. It was carved out of mammoth ivory using a flint stone knife. There are seven parallel, horizontal, carved gouges on the left arm.

Originally, the figure was classified as male by Joachim Hahn. From examination of some additional parts of the sculpture found later, Elisabeth Schmid decided that the figure was a woman with the head of a "Höhlenlöwin" (female Cave Lion).[4] Both interpretations lack scientific evidence.[4] European cave lions, male and female, lacked the distinctive manes of the African male lion, and so its absence here cannot lead to an interpretation of 'lioness'.

Recently the ancient figurine is more often called a lion headed figurine, rather than the title 'lion man'. The current German name, "Löwenmensch"—meaning "lion-human"—similarly, is neutral.

Interpretation is very difficult. The sculpture shares certain similarities with French cave wall paintings, which also show hybrid creatures. The French paintings, however, are several thousand years younger than the German sculpture.

After this artifact was identified, a similar, but smaller, lion-headed sculpture was found, along with other animal figures and several flutes, in another cave in the same region of Germany. This leads to the possibility that the lion-figure played an important role in the mythology of humans of the early Upper Paleolithic. The sculpture can be seen in the Ulmer Museum in Ulm, Germany.

After this artifact was identified, a similar, but smaller, lion-headed sculpture was found, along with other animal figures and several flutes, in another cave in the same region of Germany. This leads to the possibility that the lion-figure played an important role in the mythology of humans of the early Upper Paleolithic.

The late pope had a particular belt for self-flagellation and brought it with him to his summer residence, according to the book, "Why he is a Saint: The True story of John Paul II."

"As some members of his own entourage were able to hear with their own ears, both in Poland and in the Vatican, Karol Wojtyla flagellated himself," the book says, using the name the pope was given at birth.

"In the closet, among the cloaks, a particular pant-belt hung from a hook, which he utilized as a whip and one which he always had brought to Castel Gandolfo," the book says.

The book was written by a Vatican insider, Slawomir Oder, with Italian journalist Saverio Gaeta of the Catholic weekly Christian Family. Oder is head of the Vatican committee investigating whether John Paul II should be declared a saint. John Paul died in 2005.

The evil albino monk in Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" may be the best-known example of self-flagellation these days, but the practice is not unusual in Catholicism -- or nearly as extreme as it is shown in the movie.

"When members or former members [of Opus Dei] see the monk go at it in the movie, they just burst out laughing, it's so nutty," said the Rev. Michael Barrett, a priest of the Catholic Opus Dei sect.

In actual Catholic self-flagellation, "there is no blood, no injury, nothing to harm a person's health, nothing traumatic. If it caused any harm, the Church would not allow it," he wrote on Opus Dei's Web site when the movie came out in 2006.

"This voluntarily accepted discomfort is a way of joining oneself to Jesus Christ and the sufferings he voluntarily accepted in order to redeem us from sin. 'The Da Vinci Code's' masochist monk, who loves pain for its own sake, has nothing to do with real Christian mortification," Barrett said.

Mother Teresa is among famous Catholics who self-flagellated in some way, Barrett said.

Catholics are not alone in choosing to inflict pain on themselves for religion reasons. Some Shiite Muslims lash themselves until they bleed when marking the mourning period of Ashura, while fasting is practiced by people in several religions, including Jews on Yom Kippur, the day of atonement.

David Gibson, a journalist who worked for Vatican Radio when John Paul II was pope, pointed out that the pontiff wrote an apostolic letter -- essentially a papal position paper -- on suffering in 1984.

"Christ did not conceal from his listeners the need for suffering. He said very clearly: 'If any man would come after me ... let him take up his cross daily,' " the pope wrote, quoting the Gospel of Luke.

Jesus, the pope wrote, "suffered in place of man and for man. Every man has his own share in the Redemption. Each one is also called to share in that suffering through which the Redemption was accomplished.

"In bringing about the Redemption through suffering, Christ has also raised human suffering to the level of the Redemption. Thus each man, in his suffering, can also become a sharer in the redemptive suffering of Christ," says the letter, Salvifici Doloris, On the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering.

"John Paul was a product of a very Old World Polish Catholicism," said Gibson, who now writes on religion for Politics Daily.

"He was a very disciplined man and a very rigorous man in his personal spirituality," he said.

The authors of the new book clearly approve of any whipping the pope did of himself, he added.

"Even though it's going to weird people out, it's obviously seen by his postulators as a sign of his holiness," he said, using the technical term for the person who investigates a person's qualifications for sainthood.

He said the idea is not as bizarre as it might sound to contemporary ears.

"The idea of fasting, renouncing something, giving up your Starbucks latte so you can send money to Haiti -- you can't simply look down your nose at it without rejecting a lot of other ideas about self-sacrifice," he said.

The authors of the book based it on interviews with 114 "witnesses" and access to unedited documents in the Vatican's archives, according to the publisher, Rizzoli.

The book is available only in Italian, but the publisher is having it translated into Polish and other languages.

The Senate voted to reappoint Ben Bernanke for a second four-year term as chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Earlier, senators voted 77-23 to end debate, clearing the way for a final vote. During more than two hours of debate on the Senate floor, Bernanke backers warned that voting him down risked sparking turmoil in U.S. and foreign markets and thwarting a budding economic recovery. They said the Fed chairman deserved an opportunity to finish what he started.The Senate voted to reappoint Ben Bernanke for a second four-year term as chairman of the Federal Reserve.

quicksilvercrescendo wrote:Like I pointed out in several posts on the MTSAR forum...there is something deeply wrong and corrupt about Alex Jones.

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