Abraham Scientific Market Dynamics Dossier

1. 6-Month Narrative Velocity vs. Exposure Friction

2. Theater of Competition Matrix (90-Day Trajectory)

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Workers put up flags in preparation for “The Negev Summit” to be hosted by Israel’s Foreign Minister Yair Lapid and …...

It can be said that those advocating for mobilization against Iran may view Israel as a loser, regardless of the or strategic impact of the loss with new diplom...

Structure of Highlights · Ebola Emergency DRC · Run-up to the UN HL meeting on PPPR (Sept 25) · Run-up to new round in the PABS negotiations (14-18 Sept) · More on PPPR & GHS · Global Health Reform (+ post-2030 brainstorm) · WHO DG race · More on Global Health Governance & Finance/Funding · [...

On paper, a select group of Louisiana university leaders has been tasked with finding ways to maximize one of the state’s premier scientific research institutes.

A test to determine if people who report out-of-body experiences could identify objects in another room produced results no better than chance, but...

Stand tall as Jews. Be proud of who you are, even when it is difficult.

A Global News investigation found an Edmonton resident won millions in federal contracts while under investigation for allegedly helping Iran's missile program.

The unexplained results could enhance future efforts to study out-of-body experiences, researchers say.

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Untitled Stream Node

Workers put up flags in preparation for “The Negev Summit” to be hosted by Israel’s Foreign Minister Yair Lapid and …

It can be said that those advocating for mobilization against Iran may view Israel as a loser, regardless of the or strategic impact of the loss with new diplom...

Hold fast to your values, even when they are challenged. Do so knowing that the same God who sustained our ancestors through generations of uncertainty continues to sustain us today.

Boris Johnson, Deborah Lipstadt, Sir Niall Ferguson, Shari Redstone, Steven Pinker, Benny Morris, Sherry Lansing, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein, Irwin Cotler, Debra Messing and thousands of others reject the genocide accusation against …

“The truth of a theory can never be proven, for one never knows if future experience will contradict its conclusions.” — Albert Einstein The post Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #704 appeared first on Watts Up With That?.

A long-forecast civilizational struggle increasingly plays out not in the Middle East but in Western countries themselves. Published in 1996, Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations predicted that, with the end of the Cold War, global conflict would center…

Jérôme Dupras spent much of his twenties on the road, playing bass guitar across Quebec and beyond.

In honor of Father’s Day, I’m making a post about the fascinating Y-chromosome, and how DNA studies performed over the last 20 years have quietly shed light on humanity’s greatest mysteries. Men inherit nearly identical copies of their father’s Y-chromosome. It therefore serves as a living recordkeeping system. To fully appreciate the significance of this, one first must understand the other kinds of DNA we inherit from our parents.  All humans inherit “autosomal” DNA from both parents. This is your “ancestry” DNA. There are about 3 billion base pairs in your aDNA, but they get mixed every generation, like shuffling the cards of a deck. After 20-30 generations (<1,000 years), the DNA that one inherits from a particular great-great-etc. grandparent becomes difficult or impossible to trace. All humans also inherit mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from their mother’s egg. Like Y-DNA, mtDNA passes identically from the mother to all of her children. Therefore, it is possible to determine one’s maternal lineage from mtDNA. But there are only about 30,000 base pairs in our mtDNA, so this ability is limited. You likely share an identical mtDNA genome with hundreds or even thousands of other people. The Y-chromosome, on the other hand, contains about 60 million base pairs. No two men have exactly matching Y-chromosomes, because, while the structure stays intact, tiny mutations still occur in each generation. Thus, the Y-chromosome alone can distinguish paternity with total accuracy. In theory, if all living men took a full-sequence Y-DNA test, we could build a chart that shows exactly when each man on Earth branched off from the others. Many have already, and it is from this biological database that scientists have determined that humanity branched off from Neanderthals and Denisovans about 600,000 years ago. We have discovered well-preserved biological remnants of those groups and performed Y-DNA analysis on them. The rate with which mutations occur is predictable over fairly long periods of time. By counting the number of unique mutations that have occurred between two samples, we can deduce approximately when the two men shared a paternal-line ancestor. The Book of Genesis does **not** say that the Earth is 6,000 years old. However, it **does** imply that all men, other than Noah and his sons, died in the Flood. And, it gives a genealogy from Noah to historical figures and events, from which we can conclude that Noah is being alleged to have lived sometime around 2,000-4,000 BC, depending on which version of the Bible you refer to.   If all humans other than Noah and his sons had died, then the Y-chromosome pool would have bottlenecked at that generation. All living males would have Y-chromosomes that are identical, with the exception of a small number of mutations in the last 6,000 years. Assuredly, we do not see this in the testing results. The first and second waves out of Africa are genetically observed around 65,000-70,000 years ago and 40,000-45,000 years ago, respectively. The typical Finnish Y-DNA profile branched off from the typical German Y-DNA profile about 45,000 years ago. We determine this by the roughly 300 mutations known as single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that have occurred along those branches in the interim. At the same time, we have living examples of individuals with common last names and reliable paper trails showing a common paternal ancestor around 200-300 years ago, who have only a few of these SNP mutations. And, along certain branches, we see enough sub-branches being formed over this time period that the longevity here is not in serious question. But we DO see that something very big happened around 4,000-4,500 BC. Enormous Y-DNA branches get created around this time. In the course of a couple of centuries, the Y-DNA gene pool in Eurasia was essentially overwritten. This is probably related to the invention of copper, the taming of the horse, and the widespread slaughter of men at the hands of men that followed. We even know who was responsible for it! According to the latest publicly available scientific estimate (I can provide links in the comments), there was a man who lived around 4,400 BC and carried a set of Y-DNA mutations that have been inherited by nearly all men indigenous to Western Europe. His descendants fall into a Y-haplogroup called R-M269. Most American presidents have belonged to this group, but over half of Spanish males also fall into this group, so it is common throughout the Americas. He belonged to the R1b haplogroup (“**Mr. R1b**”).   There was another man, who lived around 3,300 BC, whose genetic mutations are carried by the majority of men in many Eastern European nations and some parts of India and Iran. His descendants fall into a Y-haplogroup called R-M417. If you took a DNA test a long time ago know that you belong to the R1a haplogroup, then you almost certainly descend from the man who first carried the R-M417 mutations (“**Mr. R1a**”). Both Mr. R1a and Mr. R1b came out of nowhere. Mr. R1b’s particular subbranch (M269) formed around 13,300 years ago. This means that Mr. R1b did not have an uncle, or grand-uncle, or great-grand uncle who left an extant trace of their male line, unless you go back about 7,000 years. Mr. R1a’s line (M417) formed around 8,600 years ago, so this thought experiment applies to him for only 3,000 years, but M417 and his descendants represent virtually all of the R1a found today, and their impact is geographically broader. Although Mr. R1a and R1b, and their apparent empires, are responsible for shaping the course of Eurasian history over the last 5,000 to 6,000 years, bringing the Indo-European languages and Corded Ware culture to Europe, what’s curious is that the R1a and R1b haplogroups are not closely linked chronologically. Despite the nomenclature, they branched apart around 23,000 years ago. Yet, when you look at a map of the frequency of these haplogroups, it is apparent that R1a and R1b dominated where the other did not. [Left: Frequency map of R-M269 \(R1b\) | Right: Frequency map of R1a](https://preview.redd.it/54snrayero8h1.png?width=1923&format=png&auto=webp&s=f08562e53e05c879f5b3ce296d8ef1b841e4bd46) Were these two tribes, living along side each other, aware of their deep paternal ancestry? Maybe not, but it is not difficult to imagine two separate historical narratives taking shape around men of renown from a prior era, both of which recall the survival of some great flood event. One may have borrowed from the other, and there's literary evidence of this. Perhaps the most fascinating finding is R1a’s high frequency among the Brahmin class in India. This is the same branch shared by Levites, who claim descent from Abraham, who is said to have come from Ur (or Iraq). Brahma's female counterpart was Saraswati; the Bible says Abraham underwent a name change and was married to a woman named Sara. R1a is common in Iran, and it is not hard to make the argument that Mr. R1a was the primary progenitor of Aryan culture. So, while it is not the case that all male lines (save Noah's) were eliminated 4,000-6,000 years ago, nor even that all descendants of Abraham bear the same haplogroup, it is the case that there was just one guy (Mr. R1a) responsible for a lot of success in the very recent history. It is also the case that this guy had a whole bunch of distant cousins who themselves all descended from just one guy (Mr. R1b’s descendants and/or rival branches of R1a). The recent predominance of these two paternal branches is, to my knowledge, has no parallel anywhere else on the human family tree. It’s the stuff of stories and legends, and I don’t know why people don’t talk about it more! Thanks for reading.

I think it's a crucial gap that's simply ignored; if the origin story, i.e., the myths, aren't true, then everything the Abrahamic religions refer to collapses, doesn't it? creation, Noah's Ark, etc. How can these religions believe in these myths? Firstly, they sound absurd, but secondly, there's no evidence for them (except for the books, but those can't be used as sources since they're religious and not historical). Besides that, these stories are too similar and have a lot of parallels to older mesopotamian myths. For example, the most noticeable similarity exists between the biblical flood narrative of Noah (Genesis 6–9) and the 11th tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh, as well as the older Atramchasis Epic. Or the Creation and Enuma Elisch, The story of the infant Moses, who is set adrift on the Nile in a reed basket coated with bitumen and rescued , is identical in detail to the much older birth legend of the Akkadian king Sargon of Akkad (c. 2300 BC), who was also set adrift as a baby in a reed basket on the Euphrates. And then there's Moses and the Exodus, which has also been disproven. Heck, there There isn't even any archaeological evidence for the existence of Moses. Yet muslims rather believe these nonsense stories instead science and mock the evolution theory. Or they say "yea but religion and science can work together, in fact- illiterate Mohammad predicted science that is proven today"

**Picture Credit:** Indian pictographs from \~100 BCE at the Devil's Looking Glass, Mammoth Cave, KY. (thanks, OSU legend [James St John](https://www.flickr.com/photos/jsjgeology/) for being the go-to on all things Eastern Woodlands pictorially). Okay, so before someone comes with a sniveling “*technically,*” I’ll do it for you: **TL;DR:** *Technically (\*sniff\*),* between roughly 1000 and 200 BCE, young men in what is now south-central Kentucky crawled into the absolute darkness of Mammoth Cave, scraped [gypsum](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gypsum_speleothem_) off the walls with mussel-shell tools, ate naturally occurring mineral salts that caused violent and thorough diarrhea, probably hallucinated in total sensory deprivation, scratched their hallucinations on the walls like you see above, (it's the black drawings, because apparently people think the proper response to seeing sacred art thousands of years old is to immediately desecrate it) and emerged carrying white powder that they ground into body paint for ceremonies that expressed a cosmological framework so coherent and so durable that it organized religious life across eastern North America for the next three thousand years. There, are you fucking happy? No? Alright, fuck it, let’s get religious and talk about the North American indigenous cosmology that makes the Mayan look like a horoscope columnist threw their weed-addled ideas into Grok and sold it as their new suicide cult. Let’s start with the basics. One day, around 800 BCE in what is now Kentucky, a young man, maybe fifteen, maybe twenty, is brought to the entrance of [Mammoth Cave](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Historic_Entrance_(Mammoth_Cave,_Kentucky,_USA)_18_(37773997432).jpg) by older men who have made this journey before. He carries a bundle of [cane torches](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:American_Indian_artifact_(Main_Cave,_Mammoth_Cave,_Kentucky,_USA)_5_(38238047686).jpg) and a mussel-shell scraper. He may already be dosed; more on that later. He descends. [The daylight falls behind him and the passage narrows](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mammoth_cave,_Kentucky,_US,_tourists_inside.jpg). The temperature drops to 54 degrees. His torch smokes against the ceiling. As the last daylight vanishes, he can feel the darkness against his skin, the damp wrapping around him as the light burns lower. He crawls through passages less than a meter high with his torch as his only, dying companion. At some point in the deep interior, he eats [mirabilite](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mirabilite,_gypsum-470611.jpg) scraped from the cave wall. Within as little as thirty minutes, his digestive system evacuates completely. In total darkness. In a crawlway. This is not dignified. It is not supposed to be. The body is being emptied, purged, and stripped of its contents in preparation for what comes next. In the darkness, after hours of crawling and purging, after the exhaustion and the cold and the fear, he begins to see shapes. They first show as spirals. Then concentric arcs and circles. Grids. Zigzags. Dots. Imagery cascades across his visual field like the world’s worst Paleolithic screensaver. He scrabbles to a wall [and begins to draw these patterns on the cave walls in charcoal](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Indian_pictographs_(~2100_years_old)_(Devil%27s_Looking_Glass,_Main_Cave,_Mammoth_Cave,_Kentucky,_USA)_2_(38238017936).jpg). He scrapes [gypsum](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gypsum_speleothem_(Cleaveland_Avenue,_Mammoth_Cave,_Kentucky,_USA)_39_(38869820072).jpg) from the walls with his mussel shell. He emerges, carrying the gypsum out. The white mineral is ground into powder and applied to his body as paint. The white, Crothers argues, marks him as one who has been to the Lower World and returned. He is initiated. He now possesses knowledge that those who have not descended do not possess. The gypsum is, as archaeologist George Crothers described it, “a tangible object that signified the bearer was in possession of that knowledge” (Crothers 2012, 535). This cosmological system ran for, at minimum, a thousand years, and maybe *much, much* longer. It operated across hundreds of sites, from the caves of Kentucky to the mounds of Ohio to the rock shelters of Tennessee. It produced engraved stone tablets that appear to have worked as printing plates, their designs pressed into leather in what amounts to intaglio printing roughly two millennia before Gutenberg (Penney 1980, 17-20). It produced a soul ontology so detailed that dot-within-circle motifs on carved figures marked the specific anatomical locations where multiple souls were believed to reside (Carr and Smyth 2019, 174-175). It was the underpinning religious framework of a region the size of Western Europe. And it all starts with shitting yourself. # The Part Where the Universe Has Three Floors, No Elevator, and 426 Miles of “Nope” The Eastern Woodlands is the part of North America that was covered in trees before Europeans showed up and started having feelings about them (the sort of feelings that included “wow! Such wilderness!” while ignoring all the domesticated plants, and “dibs” while ignoring the frowning indigenous man and his nine dead relatives). From the Great Lakes to the Gulf was roughly a million square miles of forest so dense that the old joke about a squirrel crossing from the Atlantic to the Mississippi without touching the ground is an exaggeration, but a useful one. Within these vast forests were dozens of language families, hundreds of distinct nations, and thousands of years of cultural development. **And yet, across all of that diversity, a single cosmological framework persisted.** It probably wasn’t aliens. Probably. Charles Hudson, the anthropologist whose 1976 *The Southeastern Indians* remains the foundational ethnographic synthesis of the region, described the three-tiered cosmos as the organizing principle of Southeastern life, a structure archaeologists keep finding underneath the region’s art, burials, and landscapes (Simek et al. 2013, 443). The universe had three layers, like Dante’s *Divine Comedy,* stacked on top of each other in a cosmological sandwich, except the sandwich is a floating island suspended by cords from a stone sky vault over a primordial sea (Mooney 1900, 239), so maybe don’t push the sandwich thing too hard. The **Upper World** (*Galunlati,* in Cherokee; the terminology varies by nation but the structure we’re about to describe does not for most of the Eastern Woodlands prehistory) was the realm of order, permanence, and cosmic regularity. The sun and moon lived there. The stars ran through it like celestial infrastructure, and the dead traveled a road across that sky: in Osage star lore, the dead rest at Sirius, the Dog Star, before their translation into the afterlife in the nearby Milky Way (Brown and Kelly 2020, 205). The [Thunderbirds](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_American_Museum_journal_(c1900-(1918))_(17972314750).jpg) lived there, enormous raptorial beings whose wingbeats were literal thunder and whose eyes flashed literal lightning, like an indigenous Zapdos; across the Eastern Woodlands ethnographic record, thunderbirds and falcons belong to the Upper World the way giant serpents belong to the Lower (Romain 2009, 35). The Upper World was associated with the color red, which meant life, power, and triumph. In Cherokee shamanistic tradition, the Red Man, living in the East, was the spirit of power, triumph, and success (Mooney 1891, 342-343).  Red was the color of the East. Red was the color of life. The **Lower World** (the Beneath World, the Under World) was the Upper World’s mirror opposite. It was the realm of chaos, transformation, danger, fertility, death, and renewal. It was also damp as fuck. In Cherokee cosmology, for example, the earth itself was a flat island floating on a surrounding primordial sea, and the Lower World was down there, beneath the water and earth, accessible through caves, springs, deep pools, and whirlpools (Mooney 1900, 239-240). The great horned serpent, the [*Uktena*](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Horned-Serpent-SanRafaelSwell-Utah-100_1933.jpg)*,* lurked down there, in the deep pools and lonely passes. It was a great snake, “as large around as a tree trunk, with horns on its head, and a bright, blazing crest like a diamond upon its forehead, and scales glittering like sparks of fire,” plus an attitude problem that made it the single most dangerous entity in the indigenous cosmos (Mooney 1900, 297-298). It would fuck Cerberus up and make Anubis his bitch in the most Dragonball way. The Lower World was associated with the color black, which meant death and the dissolution of form (Mooney 1891, 342-343; Simek et al. 2013, 443). Black is the color of the underground. Black is the color of death. **This World**, the middle layer, was where you and I are sitting right now, metaphysically speaking. It was the realm of the ordinary, of human life, of plants and animals and daily activity, of things you can see and touch and eat. This World was the domain of balance, the tense, negotiated middle ground between the cosmic order above and the cosmic chaos below. As Simek and his colleagues described it, humanity and the natural world of observable plants and animals occupied a middle world with an essentially profane character, although supernatural forces and powers permeated it (Simek et al. 2013, 443). Importantly, the three worlds were not sealed off from each other. They were permeable. There was no barrier between the world around you and *you*. Your skin meant nothing in this conception of “self.” Neither did physical reality. Boundaries could be crossed. Birds could fly between This World and the Upper World. Fish could swim between This World and the Lower World. Certain creatures, like the great horned serpent and the Thunderbird, could move between all three (Simek et al. 2013, 443). And certain humans, the ones who had been trained, initiated, and transformed, could cross the boundaries too, and may have been compelled by their faith to do it (Simek et al. 2013, 444). That crossing was the entire point of the ritual system. (How humans crossed is its own future anecdote.) The axis mundi, the cosmic axis, connected all three layers. A column of smoke is one of the classic forms the axis takes in shamanic cosmologies, alongside the world tree and the ladder (Romain 2009, 20): the sacred fire consumed material from below while its smoke rose from This World toward the Upper. And the crossing itself got carved. On the [Berlin Tablet](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Berlin_Tablet.JPG), an Adena engraved stone from Jackson County, Ohio, a raptorial bird wears a masked human face inside its eye, a human being mid-transformation into a bird, its joints and body openings marked with the dot-within-circle motifs where the souls sit (Carr and Smyth 2019, 174). As someone who studies social history and *in particular* the sociological underpinnings of religion in society, I have to back the fuck up and make clear: this doesn’t look like your grandpappy’s religion. This isn’t a causal belief system, like “believe in Jesus and you’ll be saved.” This was not “mythology” in the way that word is popularly misused to mean “cute stories that primitive people made up so we can turn them into harem doujinshi.” This was a working model of reality so internally consistent that it governed your entire architecture, burial, art, exchange, medicine, agriculture, and navigation for cultures spanning half a continent across three millennia. It was a working cosmology on the level of the Aztecs, the Egyptians, and the Greek, just minus the gods and with a lot more drugs.c That’s not a dig, by the way. I cannot stress how almost no person reading this Reddit thread can conceptualize what religion felt and looked like to the human species without going and reading something like Charles Taylor’s [*A Secular Age*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Secular_Age)*,* which is a 900-page tome on the history and philosophy of religion in Western Christendom (I promise, it gets good after 150 pages!). Even historians of religious history don’t quite understand the underpinnings of why rooting out and killing a witch in a village in eastern Germany was literally the life or death of the village itself unless they’ve been reading some [Carlo Ginzburg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Battles) or dabbling in folk religions. Religion was the operating system of not just individuals or groups, but *everything* in life. It was your fucking reality. It was as unquestionable as your physical reality is now. You didn’t notice it most of the time, but without it, nothing worked. If this all seems confusing, that’s okay. It hurts historians’ brains, too. Only the sociologists aren’t perturbed, because they’re fucking sociologists and they’ll fucking let you know it. Now. Where does one access the Lower World? I’ll give you one guess. …. Caves. You access the Lower World through fucking caves. [Mammoth Cave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammoth_Cave_National_Park) is the longest known cave system on Earth. That is not an exaggeration. As of this writing, more than 426 miles of surveyed passageway have been mapped beneath the karst plateau of south-central Kentucky, and the number keeps growing because cavers are crazy dumbasses who never watched the [*Descent*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Descent) (or did watch it and said “fuck it, we ball”) and keep finding *more of it.* The cave system formed over millions of years as slightly acidic groundwater dissolved the St. Louis, Ste. Genevieve, and Girkin limestones that are Mississippian-age formations roughly 330 million years old, carving out a labyrinth of horizontal passages, vertical shafts, crawlways, domes, and pits beneath what looks, from the surface, like perfectly ordinary Kentucky farm country. The Green River runs through the middle of it, and cattle graze above. You would never know, standing in a pasture in Edmonson County, that beneath your feet is a three-dimensional underworld that has been explored by humans for at least four thousand years (Crothers 2012, 529). Prehistoric peoples discovered over nineteen miles of passageway within what is now Mammoth Cave National Park (Kentucky Archaeological Survey). They did this without maps, without compasses, without GPS, without hard hats, without headlamps, and without any of the gear that modern cavers consider the minimum threshold for not dying underground or being dragged into the darkness by whatever nightmare creatures exist down there (guys, for real, *why do we keep trying to make Ebola happen?!* [*That's not a joke*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hot_Zone)*! Seriously, stop it!*). What they had to combat the Night Creatures were bundles of river cane (*Arundinaria gigantea*), a native bamboo that grows along waterways throughout the Southeast, dried and tied into [torch bundles](https://www.nps.gov/maca/learn/historyculture/images/DSCN0301.JPG?maxwidth=650&autorotate=false&quality=78&format=webp) (Crothers 2012, 525-526). Cane burns bright and burns out fast, so they carried spares by the armload and lit each new torch from the embers of the last. When the last torch burned out, the darkness was absolute. Not dim. Not dark. Absolute. If you’ve ever done this in a cave yourself, you know immediately what I mean (ah, there’s that traumatic childhood memory about Carlsbad Caverns lurking in the back of my head!). If you haven’t, this is the kind of darkness where you cannot see your hand touching your face, where the concept of “seeing” ceases to have meaning, where the only sensory input left is the sound of dripping water and your own breathing echoing off limestone walls you can feel but cannot see. They also carried mussel-shell scrapers, digging sticks, [woven slippers made from rattlesnake master plant fibers](https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/images/33348435048_90f5a19242_k.jpg?maxwidth=650&autorotate=false&quality=78&format=webp) (a lovely regional craft that looks exactly as cool as it sounds), [gourd containers](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:American_Indian_artifact_(Main_Cave,_Mammoth_Cave,_Kentucky,_USA)_1_(24421944288).jpg), and, occasionally, [wooden climbing poles for navigating vertical drops](https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/images/DSCN3610.JPG?maxwidth=650&autorotate=false&quality=78&format=webp) (Watson 1974, 31, 38; Kentucky Archaeological Survey). The temperature in the deep cave holds steady near 54 degrees Fahrenheit year-round. It would be cold enough to chill a sweating body and warm enough that you won’t freeze to death, which is a low bar for comfort but an important one when you’re four miles from daylight. The passages they entered range from [cathedral-scale domes](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mammoth_Cave_Rotunda_(USGS_Lwt02830).jpg) and corridors to crawlways less than a meter high, where the only way forward is on your belly, torch held to the side because holding it in front of you means burning your own face, which is generally considered a poor start to a religious experience. Imagine the ceiling presses against your back as the floor presses against your chest. The limestone is rough, damp, and unyielding. You move by pulling with your elbows and pushing with your toes, inch by inch. You are now in more than a cave. You are in the dark zone. You are in the Lower World. *This* is where the initiation happened. # The Part Where 3,000-Year-Old Feces Settle a Theological Debate Because Some Dudes Ate The Cave Walls Enter George Crothers, an archaeologist at the University of Kentucky, who published a paper in *American Antiquity* in 2012 titled “Early Woodland Ritual Use of Caves in Eastern North America” that changed how archaeologists understand prehistoric cave activity in the Eastern Woodlands. The old interpretation, going back to Patty Jo Watson’s pioneering work at Mammoth Cave and Salts Cave in the 1960s and 1970s, was that the cave mining was essentially economic. People went into caves to get useful minerals like gypsum for pigment, mirabilite for medicine or food preservation, or maybe some trade goods (Watson 1974, 20). It was a rational, utilitarian explanation, like most archaeological theories. Also, like most archaeological theories, it was wrong. Most scientific theories are not wrong about the facts. They are wrong about the framework. The problem is said frameworks tend to last about 40 years, which, coincidentally, is the length of an anthropologist’s academic career. Shocker, that. Crothers marshaled evidence from multiple lines of analysis, but let’s talk shit about the shit. In the deep passages of Mammoth Cave, prehistoric visitors left behind [desiccated human feces,](https://n) (yup, that’s a pic of fossilized shit). These paleofecal deposits were preserved by the cave’s stable, dry environment for roughly two to three thousand years. This is not a normal find, by the way. Finding ancient human shit in a cave is, in archaeological terms, roughly equivalent to finding a glove that fits at a crime scene (okay, bad comparison). The cave’s environment preserved not only the feces *themselves* but their *chemical signatures.* Twelve paleofecal samples, six from Mammoth Cave and six from Salts Cave, were recovered from the deep passages and analyzed for steroid hormones. Specifically, they were tested for the ratio of testosterone to estradiol, the primary androgen and estrogen, respectively, which differ systematically between biological males and females. All twelve samples showed testosterone-to-estradiol ratios within the expected range for males (Crothers 2012, 529). All twelve. Every single one. Zero samples showed female-range hormone ratios. The best evidence anyone has for who was doing this is, quite literally, the steroid chemistry of ancient shit. **The mining was exclusively male. Whatever was happening in the dark zone of Mammoth Cave was happening only to men and boys (Crothers 2012, 529).** What is clear is that this wasn’t a mining crew. Earlier, pre-mining exploration parties in the region’s caves included both men and women; the prehistoric footprints preserved in Jaguar Cave, Tennessee, record mixed parties (Watson et al. 2005, 38, cited in Crothers 2012, 536), a distinctly different pattern from the exclusively male Early Woodland mining activity. This was an all-male activity occurring in a specific cosmological space (the Lower World, accessed through caves) using specific tools (cane torches, mussel-shell scrapers) to extract a specific material (white gypsum) across a specific and extraordinarily long time span (roughly a thousand years, from about 1200 to 200 BCE; Crothers 2012, 529). The pattern and temporal period is consistent with the introduction of initiation rites in Eastern Woodlands cosmology overall. These were young men sent into the underworld to retrieve sacred material, with their ordeal constituting the transformative experience that made them adults, practitioners, or ritual specialists (Crothers 2012, 524-541). Now, before you doubt me, remember, the shit? The minerals they were after included gypsum, a soft white calcium sulfate that can be scraped from cave walls with mussel shells and ground into a brilliant white body paint. But the cave walls *also* contained mirabilite, which is the naturally occurring mineral form of sodium sulfate decahydrate, which pharmacists know as Glauber’s salt, and which your body knows as a laxative of such terrifying efficiency that it can clear your entire digestive system in as little as thirty minutes (Crothers 2012, 532). So Patty Jo Watson, the Washington University archaeologist who basically invented American cave archaeology as a rigorous discipline, confirmed this by doing the most hardcore thing a scientist can do: she recruited volunteers to eat the cave minerals and then recorded what happened next. Oh, I’m sorry, I meant *cowardly.* The most *cowardly* thing an archaeologist can do. Sorry Patty, you aren’t [Daniel fucking Fisher](https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryAnecdotes/s/Pt0IJsqHeU). At least *he* ate the damn horse to prove his theory right. The mirabilite performed exactly as expected on the unfortunate volunteers. Which is to say, rapid, complete, catastrophic bowel evacuation. Watson’s experiment is one of a tiny handful of cases in North American archaeology where the evidence for an ancient sacred practice was established by getting modern people to replicate the ancient pharmacological experience and then taking notes (Watson 1969, 58, as reported in Crothers 2012, 532). But peer review must have been a hell of a read. Now, *why the fuck would you eat something that does that?* If you’re in a cave for economic purposes, if you’re just there to get gypsum for paint, you don’t *eat* the mirabilite. Literally, *last fucking thing* you'd do if you're there for trade goods or materials. You don’t find dwarves chewing on the goddamn mithril and chugging MiraLax while they work. They'd never be able to mine with that much effort going into emptying their innards out. You scrape the gypsum off the wall, you put it in your gourd, and you fucking skedaddle before *Uktena* gets you. The mirabilite ingestion only makes sense in a ritual context: as a purgative, a preparation, a chemical stripping of the body in preparation for transformation. Purgation before initiation is a pattern found in ritual systems across the world, from indigenous vision questing to Goop: you empty yourself before you can be filled with sacred knowledge (Crothers 2012, 530-531). **So the mirabilite, and getting the shits, was not a side effect of mining, but the reason they were mining gypsum in the first place.** And then there was the sweet flag. That’s not new Gen Alpha slang, that’s the plant’s name. [*Acorus americanus,*](https://www.fs.usda.gov/wildflowers/plant-of-the-week/acorus_americanus.shtml) a wetland plant that grows along river margins throughout eastern North America, produces a rhizome with potential stimulant and hallucinogenic properties at higher doses, widely used medicinally by historic Eastern Woodlands peoples. Crothers identifies it as a possible consciousness-altering agent in the cave context. There is no direct evidence they ate the rhizome down in the dark, but sweet flag pollen turns up in the paleofeces, which means they were eating or brewing the plant, and its effects, as Crothers puts it, “presumably were known” (Crothers 2012, 534-535). Combined with the sensory deprivation of total cave darkness, the physical exhaustion of hours of crawling, the cold, the smoke, the purgative effects of mirabilite, and the neurological effects of prolonged darkness itself, the conditions in the deep cave were a pharmaceutical toolkit for altered states of consciousness. If you’re curious about the neuroscience of what happens when you sit in total darkness for an extended period, I highly encourage you to *not* do that yourself. Your visual cortex, deprived of external input, starts generating its own inputs. They are geometric patterns called entoptic phenomena, produced by the structure of the nervous system itself rather than by any external stimulus. These patterns include grids, zigzags, dots, spirals, curved and parallel lines, and concentric arcs and circles. They are universal across human populations because they originate in the neural architecture of the visual system, not in cultural conditioning (Crothers 2012, 533). Anyone who has pressed their palms against their closed eyes and seen swirling colors has experienced a mild version. In total darkness, after hours of crawling, chemical purgation, possible hallucinogenic ingestion, extreme physical stress, and complete sensory isolation, bitch, you’ll be trippin’ balls. Oh, and if you need more evidence, [drawings on the walls of Mammoth Cave](https://uknowledge.uky.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?params=/context/kaleidoscope/article/1260/&path_info=13_Logan_Kisler_Prehistoric_Drawings_in_Mammoth_Cave.pdf) and other Eastern Woodlands cave sites reproduce these geometric forms, rendered as both petroglyphs and charcoal pictographs (Crothers 2012, 532-534). They come out as grids, zigzags, curved and parallel lines, dots, spirals, and concentric arcs. Check that link above for the paper that has good renditions of the most famous cave art from Mammoth Cave in higher contrast to see everything from shadowy figures to scratched hatchwork. **Their art literally matches the neuroscience of a hallucinogenic experience.** The cave walls were being decorated with images that the people in the caves were literally seeing, not images of the external world, but images generated by their own nervous systems in response to the cave’s darkness. They were painting their visions on the walls of the Lower World. This is one of the most sophisticated ritual-pharmacological-experiential systems documented anywhere in the pre-modern world, and it was happening in Kentucky centuries before Rome was even a village. All because of the shits. And if that’s not already cool enough (or you’re still unconvinced), on June 7, 1935, cave guides Lyman Cutliff and Grover Campbell, leading a crew that included Civilian Conservation Corps workers, were exploring a passage in Mammoth Cave when [they found a man who had been dead](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/7541ce_cbd09073f37a4075882bbd917497e8c4~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_740,h_630,al_c,q_90,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/7541ce_cbd09073f37a4075882bbd917497e8c4~mv2.png) for more than two thousand years. He was lying on a high ledge about twenty feet above the passage floor and roughly two miles from the Historic Entrance, in a section of cave that would require hours of travel from daylight. A six-ton boulder had collapsed on him while he was scraping gypsum from its underside (Meloy 1977; Watson 1974, 138-139; Crothers 2012, 529). [The rock that killed him weighed more than a pickup truck.](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/7541ce_55476ab57893411b89f40ae3ca90aa13~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_350,h_475,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/7541ce_55476ab57893411b89f40ae3ca90aa13~mv2.jpg) It pinned him in place, and the cave’s stable, dry environment, combined with naturally occurring mineral salts in the cave sediments, preserved his body in a state of natural mummification so complete that his gut contents outlasted him by two millennia. The diet recorded in the caves’ paleofeces ran to hickory nutshell plus the seed crops of the Eastern Agricultural Complex: sunflower, goosefoot, marshelder, a little squash (Crothers 2012, 528), and the Salts Cave plant-remains work shows the same seed-heavy pattern (Watson 1974, 113–122. [I’ve already gone in depth about the EAC](https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryAnecdotes/s/zl2M79J1Uz) if you want another hour lost reading about the evils of corn). He was roughly forty-five years old and about five feet three inches tall (Watson 1974, 139). He carried a polished mussel shell (his scraping tool), a woven bag (for the gypsum), and wore a twined loincloth, still wrapped around his body when they lifted the rock (Watson 1974, 31). A hotel clerk named Arthur Doyle gave him the name “Lost John,” because apparently the impulse to give dead strangers flippant nicknames is embedded in humanity. Lost John spent [the next four decades in a display case](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/7541ce_41d653fc612c47669d54be04f0937a64~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_740,h_443,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/7541ce_41d653fc612c47669d54be04f0937a64~mv2.jpg) on the tour route near the Giant’s Coffin, a short walk inside the Historic Entrance, with visitors filing past his two-thousand-year-old corpse (Watson 1974, 140). It wasn’t until 1976 that his remains were removed from public display and reburied in a secret location near the original discovery site. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) had not yet been passed when he was reinterred, but the ethical argument had already become impossible to ignore. This man died doing something sacred, in a place that was sacred, and displaying his body as a tourist attraction was, to put it mildly, *not fucking great.* If you don’t agree with me, I’ll remember that if you die at your computer. That way, I can display your corpse in its most sacred pose as a future tourist attraction: bent over, shitposting on the internet. # The Part Where the Dress Code for the Afterlife Is Surprisingly Specific And before we go, let’s talk about color, because in the Eastern Woodlands, color was more than decorative. **Color was theology.** At Adena burial sites across the Ohio River Valley, spanning from roughly 1000 to 200 BCE, the dead were covered in red ochre, which is [ground hematite](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Earthy_hematite_(Black_Hills,_South_Dakota,_USA)_1.jpg) (iron oxide) mixed into a paste or powder and applied to the body, the burial floor, or both. Dragoo’s inventory of Adena burial traits reads like a paint catalog: ocher sprinkled over the burial and the ground around it, ocher set in small piles in the grave, ocher coating the artifacts laid beside the body (Dragoo 1963, 209–210). The paint was prepared on stone tablets, and the dead were probably not the only ones wearing it; the participants likely painted themselves too (Dragoo 1963, 210). Red ochre in mortuary contexts is one of the oldest and most widespread human ritual practices on the planet; red ochre use dates back a hundred thousand years in Africa, and ochre-stained burials nearly as old appear in the Near East and tens of thousands of years deep in Europe and Asia. But in the Adena world, red ochre was one half of a two-color vocabulary. Red in mortuary contexts carried layered meanings: the red of ochre is the red of blood, of life-force, of the power needed for the passage from This World to the next. White meant initiation. White meant the passage from uninitiated to initiated, from ignorant to knowing, from outside the cosmological system to inside it. The white of gypsum is the white of cave walls, of the mineral deposits scraped from the body of the Lower World, of the material that young men carried back from the underworld as proof of their descent. White gypsum, ground into paint or a glittering powder, is Crothers’s candidate for the body decoration of the rites that happened back on the surface, the ceremonies where initiated men wore the proof of their descent (Crothers 2012, 535). So, red for the dead. White for the reborn, the “light.” Two pigments, two transformations, one cosmological system operating across hundreds of communities, thousands of square miles, and roughly a millennium. Either the pigment vocabulary was independently invented at every single site, which would be a coincidence of truly improbable precision, or it was taught. Anthropologists and archaeologists like Crothers have concluded it was part of a system. A curriculum. A theology. This symbolism runs into the present-day. Cherokee color symbolism, recorded ethnographically in the late nineteenth century by James Mooney, preserved the four-directional color system: east/red for success and triumph, south/white for peace and happiness, west/black for death, and north/blue for defeat and trouble (Mooney 1891, 342-343). The Adena system’s two-color mortuary vocabulary fits comfortably within this broader framework, with red and white marking the two transitions (death and initiation) that the cosmological system considered most important. If you don’t believe me, the most rigorous demonstration that indigenous peoples mapped their cosmological framework onto the physical landscape with color comes from Jan Simek of the University of Tennessee and Alan Cressler, working across the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee. Their 2013 study in *Antiquity,* titled “Sacred Landscapes of the South-Eastern USA,” analyzed ninety-four art sites: forty-four open-air sites and fifty cave art sites in dark zones where no natural illumination reached (Simek et al. 2013, 432). **“The cosmological divisions of the universe were mapped onto the physical landscape,” with the relief of the plateau itself as “a topographic canvas” (Simek et al. 2013, 443).** The Cumberland Plateau, with its cliff-banded escarpments, sheltered overhangs, and deep cave systems, provided a natural three-dimensional architecture that indigenous peoples recognized and used. Open-air art sites sat up on the bluffs and cliff faces: Upper World. Cave art sites sat below them, in the dark: Lower World. The lived landscape between was This World, and the art stacked above and below it was matched to its tier in both content and color (Simek et al. 2013, 443). The findings were a slam dunk as evidence of this cosmological framework. Art at the highest elevations, on exposed cliff faces and bluff tops touched by the sun and stars, depicted Upper World imagery like celestial bodies and weather forces personified as mythic characters with influence on the human situation. These images were predominantly rendered in red pigment (Simek et al. 2013, 443). Art at the lowest elevations, in the deepest, darkest cave chambers, depicted Lower World imagery, such as supernatural serpents, dogs that accompanied dead humans on the path of souls, the beings associated with death, darkness, and transformation. These images were predominantly rendered in black pigment. The one crack in the model, which the authors flag themselves, is bird images showing up inside caves, where they have no business being (Simek et al. 2013, 443). The oldest dated cave art in the study, a charcoal pictograph, is nearly six thousand years old, though most of the art falls between roughly 900 and 1600 CE (Simek et al. 2013, 432). That is a tradition with roots older than the Abrahamic religions. That’s faith, baby. That’s thousand of years of the most coherent metaphysical framework in pre-Columbian North America. Like an onion, the Eastern North American indigenous universe has layers. You just have to shit your brains out first to figure it out. # Works Cited (for those who want to recreate that scene from Dumb and Dumber) Brown, James A., and John E. Kelly. “The Allure of Cahokia as a Sacred Place in the Eleventh Century.” In Stephen B. Carmody and Casey R. Barrier, eds., *Shaman, Priest, Practice, Belief: Materials of Ritual and Religion in Eastern North America.* Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2020. Carr, Christopher, and D. Troy Case, eds. *Gathering Hopewell: Society, Ritual, and Ritual Interaction.* New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum, 2005. Carr, Christopher, and Heather Smyth. “Soul Concepts of Scioto Hopewell Communities: The Ontological Foundation of Their Tripartite Ceremonial Alliance.” In Brian G. Redmond, Bret J. Ruby, and Jarrod Burks, eds., *Encountering Hopewell in the Twenty-first Century, Ohio and Beyond,* vol. 1, 154-194. Akron: University of Akron Press, 2019. Crothers, George. “Early Woodland Ritual Use of Caves in Eastern North America.” *American Antiquity* 77, no. 3 (2012): 524-541. Dragoo, Don. *Mounds for the Dead: An Analysis of the Adena Culture.* Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum, 1963. Hudson, Charles. *The Southeastern Indians.* Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976. Kentucky Archaeological Survey. “Mammoth Cave.” Discover Kentucky Archaeology. [https://archaeology.ky.gov/Find-a-Site/Pages/Mammoth-Cave.aspx](https://archaeology.ky.gov/Find-a-Site/Pages/Mammoth-Cave.aspx). Meloy, Harold. *Mummies of Mammoth Cave.* Shelbyville, IN: Micron Publishing, 1977 \[originally copyrighted 1968\]. Mooney, James. “The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees.” *Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1885-86.* Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1891. Mooney, James. *Myths of the Cherokee.* Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1897-98, Part 1. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1900. Penney, David. “The Adena Engraved Tablets: A Study of Art Prehistory.” *Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology* 5, no. 1 (1980): 3-38. Romain, William F. *Shamans of the Lost World: A Cognitive Approach to the Prehistoric Religion of the Ohio Hopewell.* Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2009. Simek, Jan F., Alan Cressler, Nicholas P. Herrmann, and Sarah C. Sherwood. “Sacred Landscapes of the South-Eastern USA: Prehistoric Rock and Cave Art in Tennessee.” *Antiquity* 87, no. 336 (2013): 430-446. Smith, Bruce D. *Rivers of Change: Essays on Early Agriculture in Eastern North America.* Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992. Spurlock, John, Olaf Prufer, and Stuart Pigott. *Caves and Culture: 10,000 Years of Ohio History.* Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006. Taxman, Hershel. “Nonmetric Trait Variation in the Adena Peoples.” *Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology* 19, no. 1 (1994): 74-96. Waldron, John, and Elliot Abrams. “Adena Burial Mounds and Inter-Hamlet Visibility: A GIS Approach.” *Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology* 24, no. 1 (1999): 97-111. Watson, Patty Jo. *The Prehistory of Salts Cave, Kentucky.* Reports of Investigations No. 16. Springfield: Illinois State Museum, 1969. Watson, Patty Jo, ed. *Archeology of the Mammoth Cave Area.* New York: Academic Press, 1974. Watson, Patty Jo, Mary Kennedy, Patrick Willey, Louise Robbins, and Ronald Wilson. “Prehistoric Footprints in Jaguar Cave, Tennessee.” *Journal of Field Archaeology* 30 (2005): 25-43. Webb, William S., and Charles E. Snow. *The Adena People.* Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1974.

Last time, Obama won for winning the election. Today, we're focusing on Abraham Lincoln's appearance in Obama vs Romney. Current standings: [https://tiermaker.com/list/random/erb-rappers-15891919/6364614](https://tiermaker.com/list/random/erb-rappers-15891919/6364614) Remember, if it's immediately obvious that a criterion applies to all appearances of a rapper, you're supposed to try and come up with something new for their future appearances. This also applies to criteria which applies against an opponent for every time that opponent appears. Also, your criteria needs to be measurable. If you need a refresher on the other rules, refer to Day 1: [https://www.reddit.com/r/ERB/comments/1tadege/scientifically\_prove\_this\_rapper\_won\_day\_1\_john/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ERB/comments/1tadege/scientifically_prove_this_rapper_won_day_1_john/)

(ALREADY CLOSED, DO NOT POST FURTHER COMMENTS) Welcome back. Last time, the winning comment (from u/[vegankidollie](https://www.reddit.com/user/vegankidollie/)) said that Vader won the actual battle by freezing Hitler in carbonite. Today, your goal is to prove that Lincoln did indeed squash Chuck Norris just like he did to the South. (This is your reminder to make sure that your criteria can be put in measurable terms. If you need a refresher on the other rules, see the Day 1 post: [https://www.reddit.com/r/ERB/comments/1tadege/scientifically\_prove\_this\_rapper\_won\_day\_1\_john/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ERB/comments/1tadege/scientifically_prove_this_rapper_won_day_1_john/))

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This happened with my old biology teacher when I was in high school. Overall the science curriculums where I live are pretty good, but there is one minor part (~1 lesson) in the evolution syllabus where students have to learn about and discuss alternate explanations for the origin of life (which lets be honest is primarily referring to abrahamic creationism). If I had to guess, the writers of the course probably didn't particularly want to include this part but were pressured into including it, most likely by a Catholic group (the education system here has very strong roots historical in Catholicism and their influence can still be felt, one of the most popular subjects was created entirely so that catholic schools could freely teach religion at school). Anyway, this particular part of the course was pretty neutral on exactly what alternate, non-scientific theory you could teach, but intelligent design is clearly the expected lesson. Its what is included in the textbooks and what almost every teacher teachers in that lesson, except for mine. My teacher, a former geneticist, had no intent of teaching us about creationism. Instead, we had a fascinating lesson on Aboriginal dreamtime stories, and discussing the varying beliefs of different indigenous groups throughout Australia. He taught us exactly what the syllabus required, although not what it had intended. tl;dr our high school biology course requires a lesson on an alternate creation "theory", implying christian creationism, so my teacher decides to teach us about Aboriginal dreamtime stories Edit: Many of you have mentioned that Catholicism officially accepts evolution, so they are unlikely to be responsible for this syllabus point. This was pure speculation by me. It seems that the intent was most likely to force a discussion about evolution and religion into the classroom so that we reach the conclusion that they aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. Regardless, its how my teacher and many others interpret it, and really isn't a discussion that should be forced into every biology classroom.

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We have mapped the human genome, landed rovers on Mars, and can peer back to the beginning of the universe. Yet, millions still believe a 7th-century merchant flew to heaven on a winged pony with the face of a woman. When you trace the history of Al-Buraq, you don't find a miracle; you find a recycled collection of pagan, Jewish, Christian, and Persian folklore that evolved over millennia. # 5,026 Years Ago (c. 3000 BCE) | The "Guardians" of Mesopotamia In ancient Mesopotamia, to "protect" palaces, kings carved the Lamassu—massive stone monstrosities with the body of a bull, the wings of an eagle, and a human head. * The Iranian Connection: The Achaemenid Persians adopted this imagery at Persepolis (The Gate of All Nations). The Persian Gopaitioshah (a winged bull with a human face) served as the direct cultural bridge to later Islamic depictions of hybrid celestial beasts. # 2,826 Years Ago (c. 800 BCE) | Rebranding the Pegasus The Greeks gave us the Pegasus, the horse that carried Zeus's lightning. * The Etymological Link: While the name Buraq comes from the Arabic barq (lightning), it shares a linguistic root with the Middle Persian word barag (a riding beast). This reflects a shared tradition of associating "lightning-speed" with divine steeds. # 2,300 – 1,800 Years Ago | The Judeo-Christian "Heavenly Ascent" Long before Muhammad, Jewish and Christian "Apocalyptic" literature established the genre of the "Heavenly Tour." * The Book of Enoch (c. 300 BCE): This Jewish text describes Enoch being taken to heaven, where he is guided through different celestial levels by angels to see the dwelling of God and the fate of sinners. * The Ascension of Isaiah (c. 150 CE): This Christian text describes the prophet Isaiah traveling through seven distinct heavens, each one more glorious than the last. Muhammad’s "Seven Heavens" is a direct lift from this existing Christian cosmological map. * The Apocalypse of Peter (c. 135 CE): This early Christian work provided the graphic descriptions of Hell (punishments fitting the crimes) that were later mirrored in the Mi'raj accounts. The famous climax of the Mi'raj—where Muhammad negotiates with God to reduce daily prayers from 50 to 5—is a Jewish literary theme. * The Precedent: In Genesis 18, Abraham bargains with God to save Sodom, repeatedly asking to lower the number of "righteous people" required to spare the city. * The Moses Connection: Jewish Midrash (legends) describe Moses ascending to heaven to receive the Torah and having to outsmart or bargain with the angels. Muhammad’s "negotiation" isn't a new revelation; it is a retelling of the Jewish "Prophet as a Bargainer" motif. # 2,526 Years Ago (c. 500 BCE) | The Persian "Arda Viraf" Night Journey The Persians had a fully developed tradition of celestial travel that predates the Islamic version by a thousand years. * Zoroastrian tradition describes the journey of Arda Viraf, who drinks a sanctified hallucinogen to travel through Heaven and Hell to report back to the living. >And then those *Dasturs* of the religion filled three golden cups with wine and narcotic of Vishtasp; and they gave one cup over to Viraf with the word 'well-thought,' and the second cup with the word 'well-said,' and the third cup with the word 'well-done'; and he swallowed the wine and narcotic, and said grace whilst conscious, and slept upon the carpet. >[https://www.avesta.org/pahlavi/viraf.html](https://www.avesta.org/pahlavi/viraf.html) * The Blueprint: Viraf’s journey through the "seven layers," his meeting with a deity, and his return to the physical world provide the exact structural blueprint for the 7th-century Islamic narrative. It was a Sassanid Persian literary theme used to grant authority to religious leaders. # 1,405 Years Ago (621 CE) | The "Night Journey" Manifests in Mecca This era marks the formal entry of a "Night Journey" into the Islamic canon, fueled by the partnership between Muhammad and Salman Farsi, a Persian. Working together they bridged the gap between Arabian revelation and Persian tradition. Salman, a former Zoroastrian priest and "Guardian of the Fire," shared the cosmological lore of his ancestors, specifically the Arda Viraf and the concept of a celestial ascent through the Seven Heavens. They wove these ancient Persian spiritual themes into the emerging Islamic identity, transforming 1,000 years of Zoroastrian tradition into a cornerstone of their new religion. While the myth was codified during this time, the creature being imagined (Al-Buraq) was initially described simply as a white animal "smaller than a mule." original 7th-century descriptions contained no mention of a woman’s face or a peacock tail. # ~700 Years Ago (c. 1300s CE) | The Persian "Glow-Up" & Iconography The modern version of Al-Buraq, the horse with a beautiful woman's face and a peacock tail, is almost entirely a product of Indian/Hindu inspired Persian artistic genius, after the Persian-Islamic cultural merger became the dominant artistic force in the East. From a book illustration made for Persian Shah Tahmasp 1, mid 1500's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buraq#/media/File:Miraj\_by\_Sultan\_Muhammad.jpg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buraq#/media/File:Miraj_by_Sultan_Muhammad.jpg) During the Ilkhanid and Timurid periods in Iran, Persian painters created the Mirajnama (The Book of Ascension). Influenced by the Senmurv (a mythical Persian bird-dog), they added the "human face" to Buraq to symbolize its intelligence. \-------------------- # Why These Connections Matter to Critical Thinking 1. The "Seven Heavens" are Not Scientific: The "Seven Heavens" model is not a divine truth; it is a 2,000-year-old Christian and Jewish literary convention based on an ancient, incorrect understanding of the solar system (the seven "wandering" celestial bodies: Sun, Moon, and 5 visible planets). 2. The Plagiarism of the "Bargain": If the deity were truly all-knowing (as claimed in the Quran), he would not need to "change his mind" because a man on a horse asked him to. This narrative arc exists only because it was a popular trope in Jewish Midrashic literature that the early authors of Islam were exposed to. 3. The Evolution of a Hybrid: The Al-Buraq is a "Frankenstein" creation: a Greek Pegasus, carrying a Jewish "Enochian" traveler, through a Christian "Seven-Heaven" map, wearing a Mesopotamian Lamassu’s face, and decorated in Persian Sassanid jewelry. Conclusion The "Night Journey" is a fascinating piece of syncretic folklore. It is the result of seven centuries of cultural "borrowing" from the Jews, Christians, and Persians. When we strip away the layers of borrowed mythology, we are left with a story that has no place in a world governed by logic, evidence, and reason. To teach this as "sacred history" is to ignore the actual, human history of how myths are manufactured.

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Ali, ASM, Mowbray, C, Lanz, M, ... J, Aldridge, PD, Tyson-Capper, A, Abraham, S, Pickard, RS, and Hall, J. "Targeting Deficiencies in the TLR5 Mediated Vaginal Response to Treat Female Recurrent Urinary Tract Infection." Scientific Reports 7, no....

But this in turn means that Jude was reading some book that told this true story we don’t have access to today! There are many other examples, but suffice it to say that Josephus had sources for facts about Abraham we simply don’t have.

His astronomical discoveries shook ... and Mesopotamian scientific thought. He led armies that altered the course of world history. And all this took place before he became the forefather of the Arab, Turk and Israelite peoples! This man’s name was Abraham....

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Global expert's appointment further strengthens Engine's scientific and R&D leadership as the company advances its precision oncology pipeline toward the clinic · SINGAPORE and REDWOOD CITY, Calif., April 30, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Engine Biosciences (Engine), a company pioneering cancer medicines informed by its proprietary machine learning and functional genomics platform, today announced the appointment of Robert (Bob) Abraham...

While critics of a robust relationship between Abrahamic religion and modern science, especially the recent New Atheists, claim that theism and science are in tension if not outright conflict, a vast body of research in the history of science and contemporary treatments of science and religion support the possibility of faith-science complementarity. Dimensions of this research include the Christian roots of modern science and the coherence of Christian doctrine with recent scientific ...

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Read this astounding, yet brief, PROOF from history. You'll be shocked to find WHY facts of history have been suppressed WHY the Bible has been falsely labeled "unscientific." Did you know that the Abraham of your Bible was a skilled scientist, astronomer, and mathematician?

This page lists works of an author who doesn't have a ResearchGate profile or hasn't added the works to their profile yet. It is automatically generated from public (personal) data to further our legitimate goal of comprehensive and accurate scientific recordkeeping.

Jude as an Assistant Member in ... Dr. Abraham is a co-investigator in the St. Jude Collaborative Research Consortium on 3D Genomics of Pediatric Cancer alongside other St. Jude faculty, and collaborators from Dana Farber and the Whitehead Institute. In addition to his scientific training, ...

The Abraham lab leverages computational pipelines to decipher transcriptional processes in development and disease.

View the profile of Jonathan Abraham, MD, PhD, Investigator at HHMI from Harvard University specializing in Structural Biology.

The psychologist pointed out that not everything is 'one size fits all.'

Biblical archaeology provides scientific proof of Scripture's historical accuracy, strengthening the roots of Israel and the West.

This year's Ig Nobel Prizes will be held in Zurich, Switzerland, Sept. 3.

For the first time since they began, the Ig Nobel Prizes, a satirical version of the Nobel prizes, is being held overseas.

Dud was heading home in his pickup truck when he saw the strange goings-on at the Bahdziewicz place. Abraham Lincoln Bahdziewicz was out in the family’s large garden with a

Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:REGN) RBC Capital Markets Global Healthcare Conference May 20, 2025 11:00 AM ETCompany ParticipantsMark Hudson -...

Only a century after the nation’s founding, scientists began using Morrow Plots to test best practices for a variety of local crops. They still do.

In his latest history column, Ken Bridges explores the life and legacy of Dr. Benjamin Rush - a founding father of the U.S. and advocate for psychiatry.

Immunologist Liz Marnik, who grew up unvaccinated, says shaming people who distrust science will do nothing to improve vaccine acceptance.

The United States' leading scientific body is set Thursday to launch a major report on the link between climate change and extreme weather, a growing research field now underpinning lawsuits seeking b...

Neurocrine Biosciences, Inc. (NBIX) Discusses Progress and Strategy in Neurology and Obesity R&D Programs December 16, 2025 12:00 PM ESTCompany...

Industry update and market analysis regarding Abraham Scientific.

Charles Darwin said that if it could be shown that evolution did not occur by small, incremental, and cumulative changes, then his theory would come completely unraveled. Just over one

Let us choose one another. Protect your children, protect your neighbors, and protect the republic.

As always, this list was created after doing zero research and without consulting previous lists. This ranking is not scientific, but it is correct.

The annual Ig Nobels, a satirical scientific award ceremony, is moving from the US to Europe due to visa-related concerns for attendees.

Dr. K.V. Rao Scientific Society has been involved in promoting science by spotting and recognising talent at the school and university levels for the past 24 years.

The Republican senator said he believed Kennedy, a known vaccine skeptic, would not touch science-backed vaccine guidance.

Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (REGN) Discusses Factor XI Development Program and Clinical Data in Hematology Pipeline November 10, 2025 8:30 AM ESTCompany...

With science increasingly coming under attack, using humour as a way to get people interested in scientific research is more important than ever, the founder of the satirical Ig Nobel prizes said.- Science 'threatened and destroyed' - At a time when scientific research is being "threatened and actively destroyed", particularly under the administration of US President Donald Trump, many people "have been telling us that now what we're doing has become much more important", Abrahams said.

evidence that the biblical patriarch influenced ancient scientific genius by christopher eames istock . com / marques photography astronomy , mathematics and abraham evidence that the biblical...

chapter 2 the heavens declare god ’s glory from the booklet our awesome universe potential by joel hilliker copyright © 2009 , 2010 , 2013 , 2023 , 2024 philadelphia church of god s cienti...

watch out , world , it ’s not good news ! abraham prepares to speak the old testament shadow of this christ , who is called the rock of offense , is a rock that sits atop mount moriah , on the jerus...

¡ cuidado , mundo , no son buenas noticias ! abraham se prepara para hablar la sombra del antiguo testamento de este cristo , que se llama la roca de escándalo o de caída , es una roca que se sienta...

gab es abraham wirklich ? der forschungsstand 7. juli 2026 — von robert in bibel , christentum , heilige schriften , islam , judentum , religion gab es abraham wirklich ? die moderne geschic...

scientist , astronomer , mathematician — and father of nations the fact that ancient records speak of a scientist among the chaldeans who had a special relationship with ‘ the mighty god ’ isn’t coi...

volume number 38 1 comment times of reckoning and set times in abraham 3 interpreter : a journal of latter - day saint faith and scholarship 38 ( 2020 ) : 1-14 authors j. ward moody j. war...

gospel topics essay on the boa . date jul 2014 type website source the church of jesus christ of latter - day saints lds hearsay direct reference " translation and historicity of t...

was abraham a genius in mathematics and astronomy ? candace jones apr 11 , 2025 5 min read updated : apr 22 , 2025 did abraham possess talents in mathematics and astronomy , and what histori...

order of the stars abraham 3 the glory of god is intelligence , or , in other words , light and truth . d&c 93 : 36 abraham recorded an experience that can help us understand more about the pr...

In this presentation from the UroCancer Interdisciplinary Forum (UCIF) 2026, Abraham Morgentaler, MD, FACS, Professor of ...

In this interview, we explore what patient-centred care truly means in practice, what inspired Dr Abraham Zavala, Scientific ...

The USS Abraham Lincoln isn't just a massive warship — it's a floating physics machine. ⚓ In this video, we break down the ...

Lincoln's Infinite Player Piano generated music with punched paper, steam, lightning, and a suspicious talent for predicting what ...

Historians have spent over two hundred years trying to figure out the woman who gave life to the most famous president in ...

Have you ever wondered why Abraham Lake in Canada looks like it is filled with thousands of suspended white orbs?

Reivew of T Theory Framework.

Watch the Full Video Here: https://www.ifa.com/videos/pioneers-of-probability-abraham-de-moivre Disclosure: This video is for ...

Dive into this eye-opening clip where Bollywood star John Abraham breaks down the vital connection between your diet and heart ...

In 2015, geneticists ran mitochondrial DNA tests on living descendants connected to Abraham Lincoln's mother — and what they ...

ഈ ഗണിതശാസ്ത്രജ്ഞൻ തന്റെ മരണം എങ്ങനെ മുൻകൂട്ടി അറിഞ്ഞു? | Abraham de ...

AbrahamLincolnAbraham Lincoln once looked into the night sky and saw what appeared to be thousands of stars raining down ...

AIR 6'S REVIEW ON GO CLASSES ✨ What does it take to secure AIR 6 in ...

क्या आप जानते हैं कि Abraham Lincoln की माँ की मृत्यु एक जहरीले पौधे से ...

This workshop explores the connection between **quantum physics, science, spirituality, the vortex, and the Law of Attraction**, ...

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Does the Book of Genesis hold up when evaluated under modern science, historical facts, and secular ethics? In this deep-dive ...

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keşfet #keşfetteyiz #keşfetedüş #reels #viral #viralshort #viralvideo #viralshorts #viralvideos #viralreels #video #shorts ...

New DNA analysis reveals a disturbing truth about Abraham Lincoln's mother — and it is the kind of truth that explains why the ...

DNA from Abraham Lincoln's family line was tested and what researchers found actually defies explanation. Everyone knows the ...

Abraham de Moivre was exiled in London, making a living by calculating odds for gamblers in coffeehouses. When asked about ...

NOTE FROM TED: While some viewers may find this talk helpful as a complementary approach, please do not look to this talk as a ...

DNA #AbrahamLincoln #DarkHistory “In the 19th century, one of the most iconic leaders in history may have been hiding a deadly ...

K-DISC വെറുമൊരു 'administrative hub' മാത്രമോ ? കേരളത്തിന്‍റെ Knowledge Economy ...