Are the planets growing?

Beyond the boundaries of established science an avalanche of exotic ideas compete for our attention. Experts tell us that these ideas should not be permitted to take up the time of working scientists, and for the most part they are surely correct. But what about the gems in the rubble pile? By what ground-rules might we bring extraordinary new possibilities to light?

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Open Mind
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Re: Are the planets growing?

Unread post by Open Mind » Sat Nov 09, 2019 7:38 am

sorry, (past) existence of giants. I wasn't saying I believe they exist today. lol

allynh
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Re: Are the planets growing?

Unread post by allynh » Sat Nov 09, 2019 1:28 pm

Open Mind,

Read through the whole thread. All the stuff you mentioned has been discussed.

The fossil evidence, large dinosaurs, flying pterosaurs, giant insects, are the fossil evidence that the Earth was once smaller, with lower gravity.

Maxlow takes the Earth back to where it was 1/12th its current size, which means 1/12th gravity.

The die off of the megafauna around 10k years ago was because the Earth grew about 10% to 15% making them too large for the current one gravity.

The thing people have to realize, is that as the Earth continues to Grow, and doubles in size over time, the gravity will double as well, limiting how big animals can grow, and make some birds that can fly today unable to fly.

BTW, the latest TPOD by Mel Acheson is flawed. Not up to his usual standards.

The animation of the Earth Growing that Neal Adams did shows Australia up between China and North America. The geology of both sides of Australia match with the geology of China and North America. Mel Acheson's comments about plate tectonics happening in minutes is physically impossible. The separation of the continents was caused by Growing, not simply cutting away material. The Earth was not carved into its present configuration. Yes, Electric Discharge Machining(EDM) has shaped the surface, but the fossil and geologic evidence shows Growth.

Conceptual Chromatography
https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2019/1 ... atography/
This is fun. Let’s play the game with plate tectonics: Instead of counting to a million years with every magnetic stripe on the Atlantic sea floor, let’s use smaller numbers. Just to up the ante, let’s use smaller units, too. How about a few minutes! We’d have to imagine SOMETHING ripping the Americas away from Europe and Africa all at once. It would have to be something so big that the continents and the energy to move them would be small potatoes in comparison. It would have to be something of astronomical proportions.

Velikovsky already proposed other planets sweeping by and causing somewhat similar commotions. Let’s take a clue instead from the Electric Universe: Instead of moving the Americas, we can leave them be. A “thunderbolt”–an interplanetary electrical discharge–just a bit more energetic than that alleged to have machined Valles Marineris out of Mars’ surface arcs along the Earth from pole to pole. It blasts out and lifts large chunks of lithosphere along each side of the more sinuous central channel. It melts the bottom and leaves stripes of reversed magnetism every time the oscillations in the discharge channel reverse polarity. The pinching of the discharge channel confines the excavation to a parallel-sided gouge in the Earth that afterward fills with water.

A few thousand years later, a geologist comes along with a strip of geologic record. . . .
Look at Venus, it is still hot from Growing during the Saturn Event. The Earth grew 10% to 15% at the same time, and did not turn the planet into an oven. The fact that Venus atmosphere is 900 degrees indicates that it probably almost doubled in size. The creation of that much "matter"(whatever "matter" is) turned Venus into an oven.

As time passes, and the temperature of Venus' atmosphere drops, it should be possible to compute how much Venus grew in that short time. By then we should have a better understanding of how the planets Grow.

Open Mind
Posts: 56
Joined: Tue Jul 25, 2017 7:47 am

Re: Are the planets growing?

Unread post by Open Mind » Sat Nov 09, 2019 2:00 pm

dude... Awsome! thanks.

Ya, I was going to ask about that 10-12 thousand years ago megafauna thing. Because all I've ever read or watched were talks about the dinosaurs, but I was wondering about the obvious mega fauna factor. So many larger sizes of present day animals, and ya the birds stuff I followed alot. That Ted Holden stuff was my introduction.

I struggle to get through these long threads and get distracted by the digressions, but I'll work through this one.

thanks again.

Open Mind
Posts: 56
Joined: Tue Jul 25, 2017 7:47 am

Re: Are the planets growing?

Unread post by Open Mind » Sun Nov 10, 2019 9:25 am

What's curious is why there aren't any ancient myths or stories, (at least that I have ever heard about), that address some new reality of 'feeling heavier'.

Also, shouldn't older strips of earth in the rift sections in the middle of oceans, have some unique density signature that distinguishes it having been formed in lower gravity. I'm imagining a lower gravity would at least show unique layer thicknesses differences or something.

allynh
Posts: 919
Joined: Fri Aug 22, 2008 5:51 pm

Re: Are the planets growing?

Unread post by allynh » Sun Nov 10, 2019 7:18 pm

I'm not sure about density differences, most of the rock would continue to compress as new layers are added above and below.

For people, I've mentioned many times in the thread about The Green Sahara. I first mentioned it in 2009. Many of the links are dead, but the post talks about what you are asking.

http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/forum/phpB ... =45#p16340

Basically, they found graveyards with two distinct populations. The ones at 10k years ago were 6 foot 5 inches on average, and the ones at 6k years ago were 5 foot 6 inches on average. That is mentioned clearly in the PBS Newshour transcript at the bottom of this post. That indicates to me that the Earth Grew 10% to 15% around that time.

BTW, as you read through the thread you will stumble across many attempts to discuss Green Sahara with the links going dead.

What's interesting when you google - green sahara national geographic

It no longer lists the National Geographic article. There is only a brief mention left on the site.

With Stone Age Graveyard Discovery in “Green Sahara,” the Age of Exploration Continues
August 14, 2008
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adve ... g-explore/

If you open the link, you will find the original link to the feature story. I suspect that since the article contradicted the dogma of Global Warming, that they removed it.

Green Sahara
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/ ... /gwin-text

I then checked the Wayback Machine archive and found the article with the pictures. Yay!

Green Sahara
https://web.archive.org/web/20080817040 ... /gwin-text

I tried the "print" icon and was able to get the entire article. Let's save a copy this time for future reference. One more layer added to the thread. HA!

National Geographic Magazine - NGM.com
By Peter Gwin
https://web.archive.org/web/20080918000 ... /gwin-text

National Geographic Staff

On October 13, 2000, a small team of paleontologists led by Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago clambered out of three battered Land Rovers, filled their water bottles, and scattered on foot across the toffee-colored sands of the Ténéré desert in northern Niger. The Ténéré, on the southern flank of the Sahara, easily ranks among the most desolate landscapes on Earth. The Tuareg, turbaned nomads who for centuries have ruled this barren realm, refer to it as a "desert within a desert"—a California-size ocean of sand and rock, where a single massive dune might stretch a hundred miles, and the combination of 120-degree heat and inexorable winds can wick the water from a human body in less than a day. The harsh conditions, combined with intermittent conflict between the Tuareg and the Niger government, have kept the region largely unexplored.

Sereno, a National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence and one of the world's most prolific dinosaur hunters, had led his first expedition into the Ténéré five years earlier, after negotiating agreements with both the leader of a Tuareg rebel force and the Niger Ministry of Defense, allowing him safe passage to explore its fossil-rich deposits. That initial foray was followed by others, and each time his team emerged from the desert with the remains of exotic species, including Nigersaurus, a 500-toothed plant-eating dinosaur, and Sarcosuchus, an extinct crocodilian the size of a city bus. The 2000 expedition, however, was his most ambitious—three months scouring a 300-mile arc of the Ténéré, ending near Agadez, a medieval caravan town on the western lip of the desert. Already, his team members had excavated 20 tons of dinosaur bones and other prehistoric animals. But six weeks of hard labor in this brutal environment had worn them down. Most had mild cases of dysentery; several had lost so much weight they had to hitch up their trousers as they trudged over the soft sand; and everyone's nerves had been on edge since an encounter with armed bandits.

Mike Hettwer, a photographer accompanying the team, headed off by himself toward a trio of small dunes. He crested the first slope and stared in amazement. The dunes were spilling over with bones. He took a few shots with his digital camera and hurried back to the Land Rovers.

"I found some bones," Hettwer said, when the team had regrouped. "But they're not dinosaurs. They're human."

Heat, thirst, and, for the moment, dinosaurs were forgotten as the team members followed Hettwer back to the three dunes and began to gingerly survey their slopes. In just a few minutes they had counted dozens of human skeletons. Parts of skullcaps pushed up through the sand like upturned china bowls; jawbones clenched nearly full sets of teeth; a tiny hand, perhaps a child's, appeared to have floated up through the sand with all its finger bones intact. "It was as if the desert winds were pulling them from their final resting places," said Hettwer. Insinuated among the human bones was a profusion of clay potsherds, beads, and stone tools— finely worked arrowheads and axheads and well-worn grindstones. There were also hundreds of animal bones. In addition to antelope and giraffe, Sereno quickly recognized the remains of water-adapted creatures like crocodiles and hippos, then turtles, fish, and clams. "Everywhere you turned, there were bones belonging to animals that don't live in the desert," said Sereno. "I realized we were in the Green Sahara."

For much of the past 70,000 years, the Sahara has closely resembled the desert it is today. Some 12,000 years ago, however, a wobble in the Earth's axis and other factors caused Africa's seasonal monsoons to shift slightly north, bringing new rains to an area nearly the size of the contiguous United States. Lush watersheds stretched across the Sahara, from Egypt to Mauritania, drawing animal life and eventually people.

Archaeologists have inventoried the stone tools used by these early inhabitants and the patterns inscribed on their ceramics. They have also identified thousands of their rock engravings, which depict herds of ostriches, giraffes, and elephants. Some of the images suggest that along the way the people of the Green Sahara learned to domesticate cattle. But they remain veiled in mystery. Did they arrive here from the Mediterranean coast, central African jungles, or Nile Valley? Were they nomads, or did they stake out territories and build settlements? Did they trade with each other and intermarry, or did they wage war, or both? As the monsoons began to recede, how did they cope with a drying landscape? The only part of the story that then seems clear is that by some 3,500 years ago the desert had returned. The people vanished.

Seeking answers to such questions is normally the domain of anthropologists and archaeologists—not dinosaur hunters. But Sereno had become transfixed by the discovery. "There is something soul stirring about looking into the face of an ancient human skull and knowing this is my species," he said. Whenever he could steal a moment from his paleontological work, he pored through every scholarly publication he could find on the Green Saharans, tracked down the authors and badgered them with emails full of questions. Sometimes he would read all night before downing a cup of coffee and heading back to his lab. In 2003, during another dinosaur expedition in Niger, he took three days off to revisit the dunes and survey the site, counting at least 173 burials. To dig any deeper, however, would require more time, money, and expertise.

In the spring of 2005 Sereno contacted Elena Garcea, an archaeologist at the University of Cassino, in Italy, inviting her to accompany him on a return to the site. Garcea had spent three decades working digs along the Nile in Sudan and in the mountains of the Libyan Desert, and was well acquainted with the ancient peoples of the Sahara. But she had never heard of Paul Sereno. His claim to have found so many skeletons in one place seemed far-fetched, given that no other Neolithic cemetery contained more than a dozen or so. Some archaeologists would later be skeptical; one sniped that he was just a "moonlighting paleontologist." But Garcea was too intrigued to dismiss him as an interloper. She agreed to join him.

"I was impressed that he hadn't just ignored the burials and continued looking for dinosaurs," she told me.

They arrived at the site six months later. Clad in a salt-stained T-shirt and jeans, Sereno, vibrating with energy, powered up the first of the three dunes, identifying animal bones with nearly every stride—giraffe vertebra … hippo ulna … gazelle humerus. Garcea, a petite woman in unwrinkled chinos and a tennis hat, followed at a more measured pace, bending at the waist to scrutinize each item.

At the top, they surveyed a macabre scene. Around them lay dozens of human skeletons in various degrees of completeness, far more than Garcea had seen at all her other digs combined. Nonetheless, she seemed more interested in what looked to me like tiny gray chunks of gravel. "They're potsherds," she said, and held up one inscribed with a pointillistic pattern. She identified the markings as belonging to a people known to scholars as the Tenerian, a nomadic herding culture that lived during the latter part of the Green Sahara era, 6,500 to 4,500 years ago. Then she picked up another piece. She studied it for a moment, looking perplexed. Instead of little dots, this sherd was decorated with wavy lines. She picked up another like it, then another. "These are Kiffian," she said, her voice rising with excitement.

Garcea explained that the Kiffian were a fishing-based culture and lived during the earliest wet period, between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago. She held a Kiffian sherd next to a Tenerian one. "What is so amazing is that the people who made these two pots lived more than a thousand years apart."

Over the next three weeks, Sereno and Garcea—along with five American excavators, five Tuareg guides, and five soldiers from Niger's army, sent to protect the camp from bandits—made a detailed map of the site, which they dubbed Gobero, after the Tuareg name for the area. They exhumed eight burials and collected scores of artifacts from both cultures. In a dry lake bed adjacent to the dunes, they found dozens of fishhooks and harpoons carved from animal bone. Apparently the Kiffian fishermen weren't just going after small fry: Scattered near the dunes were the remains of Nile perch, a beast of a fish that can weigh nearly 300 pounds, as well as crocodile and hippo bones.

Garcea suspected that the Tenerian had made most of the stone tools. Nearly three-fourths of them were hewed from a strange green volcanic rock that bore a glasslike sheen and yielded razor-sharp edges when fractured. The abundance of green flakes on the dunes indicated that the Tenerian spent long periods of time at Gobero making and sharpening their tools. "But it's possible they lived part of the time at the place where they quarried the green rock," said Garcea. One of the Tuareg said he had seen big boulders of it in the Aïr mountains, some hundred miles to the northwest.

At dusk the heat gave way to the cool evening air, and the camp divided into three groups. The soldiers, dressed in threadbare fatigues and combat boots with no socks, gathered around their fire, speaking Hausa, Niger's dominant language. At the Tuareg fire, the guides removed their linen chèches, which they kept neatly wound around their faces during the day. They reclined on foam mattresses, served each other strong, sugary tea, and quietly discussed Niger's restive politics in their native Tamashek. Meanwhile, the dig team cooked couscous and freeze-dried vegetables on a propane stove, eating by the light of their headlamps. Their conversations focused on the stark differences in the burials. Some appeared to be little more than a tight bundle of bones, as if the body had been bound or squeezed into a basket or a leather bag, which had long since decomposed. These compact burials belied the fact that some of these individuals were surprisingly large—as much as six feet eight inches tall, with thick bones suggesting they had been well muscled.

By contrast, other skeletons belonged to much smaller people, about five-and-a-half feet tall. They were buried on their sides in relaxed positions, as if they had fallen asleep and drifted into death. Some of their graves contained beads, arrowheads, or animal bones. But since no potsherds were found in the burials, it wasn't clear which were Kiffian and which were Tenerian. Until the age of the bones could be determined, no one could say for sure. And what had led the Tenerian to bury their dead in the exact same spot as the Kiffian had laid theirs to rest, thousands of years earlier?

"Perhaps the Tenerian found the Kiffian burials and recognized this place as sacred," Garcea offered. "It's possible they thought these bones belonged to their own ancestors."

The search for answers could not wait long. Gobero held at least 200 burials, which would take several field seasons to excavate. But the constant desert wind was eroding the site year by year, scattering the bones down the sides of the dunes. An even more dire concern was looters. Officials in Niger have identified close to a hundred Stone Age sites in the Ténéré and report that nearly all were looted before they could be excavated. Often Tuareg traveling in camel caravans find the sites and scavenge artifacts to sell to dealers in Agadez, who in turn sell them illicitly to tourists. Though the Niger government has outlawed the sale of antiquities, only Gobero and one other site remained unlooted.

Members of the dig team suspected that a few of the soldiers were picking up artifacts as they patrolled the site's perimeter. When confronted by Sereno, they denied it. One night by the Tuareg fire, I asked one of the guides whether he thought anyone might pilfer artifacts. He shrugged. "When you are hungry and your children are hungry, what can you do?" Another confided to me that over the years he had collected a small number of artifacts during his travels in the desert. He produced a leather pouch that held an array of gemlike arrowheads and a beautiful knife chipped from the strange green stone. "These are not for sale," he said. "They are for my children. It is their history. I want them to see it before it is all gone."

SERENO FLEW HOME with the most important skeletons and artifacts and immediately began planning for the next field season. In the meantime, he carefully removed one tooth from each of four skulls and sent them to a lab for radiocarbon dating. The results pegged the age of the tightly bundled burials at roughly 9,000 years old, the heart of the Kiffian era. The smaller "sleeping" skeletons turned out to be about 6,000 years old, well within the Tenerian period. At least now the scientists knew who was who.

In the fall of 2006 they returned to Gobero, accompanied by a larger dig crew and six additional scientists. Garcea hoped to excavate some 80 burials, and the team began digging. As the skeletons began to emerge from the dunes, each presented a fresh riddle, especially the Tenerian. A male skeleton had been buried with a finger in his mouth. Another had been interred inside a frame of disarticulated human bones. Among the strangest was an adult male buried with a boar tusk and a crocodile ankle bone and his head resting on a clay pot. Parts of the skeleton appeared to have been burned, hinting that an elaborate ritual had accompanied his burial.

Garcea paid close attention to these details. In lieu of a written language, such clues are critical to understanding what she described as a culture's "software"—its traditions, value system, and beliefs about the supernatural. The very act of burial contains a message, Garcea told me as she delicately brushed dirt from another Tenerian skeleton. "By infusing the land with the remains of your people, you claim it."

Unlike the Tenerian burials, the bundles of Kiffian bones came with few artifacts to shed light on their culture. But bones and teeth alone can say a lot about the daily lives of a vanished people. Their appearance can reveal an individual's sex, age, and general health, and they hold chemical signatures that, analyzed in a lab, can reveal the kinds of food a person ate and the location of the water sources he drank from.

Even at the site, Arizona State University bioarchaeologist Chris Stojanowski could begin to piece together some clues. Judging by the bones, the Kiffian appeared to be a peaceful, hardworking people. "The lack of head and forearm injuries suggests they weren't doing much fighting," he told me. "And these guys were strong." He pointed to a long, narrow ridge running along a femur. "That's the muscle attachment," he said. "This individual had huge leg muscles, which means he was eating a lot of protein and had a strenuous lifestyle—both consistent with a fishing way of life." For contrast, he showed me the femur of a Tenerian male. The ridge was barely perceptible. "This guy had a much less strenuous lifestyle," he said, "which you might expect of a herder."

Stojanowski's assessment that the Tenerian were herders fits the prevailing view among scholars of life in the Sahara 6,000 years ago, when drier conditions favored herding over hunting. But if the Tenerian were herders, Sereno pointed out, where were the herds? Among the hundreds of animal bones that had turned up at the site, none belonged to goats or sheep, and only three came from a cow species. "It's not unusual for a herding culture not to slaughter their cattle, particularly in a cemetery," Garcea responded, noting that even modern pastoralists, such as Niger's Wodaabe, are loath to butcher even one animal in their herd. Perhaps, Sereno reasoned, the Tenerian at Gobero were a transitional group that had not fully adopted herding and still relied heavily on hunting and fishing.

The twilight of the Green Sahara around 4,500 years ago might have been the perfect time to be hunting at Gobero, said Carlo Giraudi, the team's geologist. As water sources dried up throughout the region, animals would have been drawn to pocket wetlands, making them easier to kill. Four middens found on the dunes and dated to around that time included hundreds of animal remains, as well as fish bones and clamshells—not usually part of a herder's diet. "The Green Sahara's climate was rapidly changing," said Giraudi, "but just before the lake dried up, the people at Gobero would have thought they were living in a golden period."

Then they were gone, leaving only bones and a few artifacts to bear witness. On my last day at Gobero, Sereno and his colleagues began excavating a particularly poignant burial containing three skeletons. Several members of the dig team interrupted their own work to watch. Soon a few of the Tuareg abandoned their late afternoon tea and wandered over, and a couple of soldiers joined the group. Evening breezes began to sweep away the desert's intense heat. As the sand was carefully brushed away, a petite Tenerian woman came into clear relief, lying on her side. Facing her were the skeletons of two children. Their molars suggested they were five and eight years old when they died. Each child reached tiny arms toward the woman. Her fragile arm bones reached back to them. Between the skeletons lay a cluster of disarticulated finger bones, implying the deceased had been laid to rest holding hands.

Was this a mother and her children? Had a grieving father posed his family in this gesture of love before covering them with sand? The questions rippled around the graveside in English, French, Tamashek, and Hausa. The skeletons exhibited no clear signs of trauma, though four arrowheads turned up near the bones, perhaps part of a burial ritual. But if their deaths weren't violent, how did they all die at the same time? If it was a disease or a plague, who would have been left to bury the bodies in such an elaborate fashion? Maybe, someone suggested, they drowned in the lake.

Back in Arizona, Stojanowski continues to analyze the Gobero bones for clues to the Green Saharans' health and diet. Other scientists are trying to derive DNA from the teeth, which could reveal the genetic origins of the Kiffian and Tenerian—and possibly link them to descendants living today. Sereno and Garcea estimate a hundred burials remain to be excavated. But as the harsh Ténéré winds continue to erode the dunes, time is running out. "Every archaeological site has a life cycle," Garcea said. "It begins when people begin to use the place, followed by disuse, then nature takes over, and finally it is gone. Gobero is at the end of its life."

In February of 2007, as the team was making plans to return to Niger, hostilities broke out again between some of Niger's Tuareg groups and the government. By December, Human Rights Watch had reported scores of soldiers and civilians had been killed or injured in clashes and by land mines. The government declared emergency rule in the region, prohibiting foreigners from traveling to the Ténéré. Sereno and Garcea were forced to cancel the 2007 and 2008 dig seasons. Meanwhile, the wind blows across Gobero, and the desert continues to consume the last remnants of the Green Sahara.
The PBS Newshour had an episode covering the find in 2008. This is the Transcript from the Wayback Machine.

Scientists Find Stone Age Burial Ground From Once-green Sahara
https://web.archive.org/web/20080821080 ... 08-14.html
Scientists Find Stone Age Burial Ground From Once-green Sahara

A team of paleontologists inadvertently discovered the remains of a Stone Age cemetery in the Sahara desert, revealing clues about the lives of the hunter-gatherers who lived in the once-temperate region. A lead researcher details the finds.

JEFFREY BROWN: The original search was for dinosaur bones, but at a site in Niger in the Southern Sahara, scientists came across the bones of an entirely different species: humans.

The site called Gobero contains a cemetery with some 200 graves with skeletons from two distinct populations, dating as far back as 10,000 years, some buried in ritual poses.

Artifacts such as jewelry and ceramics were found, as were harpoon tips and other fishing tools, evidence of a time when the Sahara was green and filled with lakes.

And joining us now is Paul Sereno, a University of Chicago professor and paleontologist who led the team. It was funded in part by National Geographic.

So you go looking for dinosaurs. Sometimes you go looking for something and you find something else?

PAUL SERENO, University of Chicago: You know, that's really part of discovery, maybe the best part, finding something unexpected.

JEFFREY BROWN: So this is an area, I gather, where it was known that long ago was lush. There was green; there was water. What's the surprise that you found here?

PAUL SERENO: Well, the surprise is that we get much more of the picture when you find hundreds of burials. You get entire bodies. You get stature. You get health. You really get a look at the lifestyle of these people. You get to understand what they were eating, what they're hunting.

And we actually found a cemetery. We found people that were buried at right about the same time. This was very unexpected in the middle of the Sahara. This is something we usually reserve for sedentary or stable people building pyramids and things like that.

But here, in the middle of the Sahara, we got a cemetery, a very interesting lifestyle. So that's really what we're getting out of this.

Two different groups of people

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, now, you brought two skulls. I don't usually get to say this sitting here at the NewsHour, but you brought two skulls to the table.

PAUL SERENO: They're three for the interview.

JEFFREY BROWN: What did they tell us about the kind of people? As I said, they were two different peoples at two different times, right? And these represent the two types?

PAUL SERENO: Yes, and this is really a fairly stunning part of the discovery that two very different kinds of people -- they're our species. They're 6,000 and about 9,500 years old.

But if you look at these faces a little bit more closely, these are two men, adult men, but very different faces. So we have squared orbits here that are separated, different shape to the nose, different shape to the chin, a lot of different shape to the back end of the skull. These are clues that they're really very different people.

We may get some genetics out of the teeth eventually to go along with the differences in skull shape, but this is what we use to really determine different human populations, populations that are separated in time.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, so this is the older one, and they were tall?

PAUL SERENO: Very tall. This man here, we have his complete skeleton. He's sort of bundled up in a tube. You wouldn't know it from looking at him how he was buried how tall he is, but he's six-foot-five, and that's...

JEFFREY BROWN: Six-five?

PAUL SERENO: That's an average for the adult males.

JEFFREY BROWN: Wow.

PAUL SERENO: So they were very tall, the early population.

JEFFREY BROWN: And then the later ones, what year are we talking about here?

PAUL SERENO: About 6,000 years ago, this population -- we call them Tenerians. We call this Kiffian, and we call these Tenerians. Their average was below six feet. This man here stood a little bit below my height, about five-foot-six.

'A remarkable grave'

JEFFREY BROWN: Is it unusual to find two very different populations on the same site?

PAUL SERENO: Well, what we did in analyzing the skull shape of this individual and that individual is, first, show how different they are. And then, second, we linked across the Sahara populations from North Africa, the coast of the Mediterranean, all the way over to the Atlantic coast, an ancient population with this kind of skull.

So we see a migration into the Sahara, when it turned green, from those parts. And then they were driven out by a dry period. And when it turned wet again, another kind of person moved in.

Where these people came from, ultimately, and where they became the Tenerians, that's for future research. We're really interested, because the Sahara is inhabited today by some very interesting nomads. And we're wondering, ultimately, are we looking at the roots of that population?

JEFFREY BROWN: There's another photo that I want to show our audience. This is a finding from the cemetery of a -- well, you can describe it -- a mother and children?

PAUL SERENO: Yes, this is a remarkable, remarkable grave. There's really nothing been found in the fossil record, pre-historic record, anything like this.

It's a woman about 30 to 40 years of age reaching out towards two young individuals we presume to be her children. By the way, they're posed, very intimate pose, an 8-year-old and a 5-year-old. The 5-year-old is literally hugging the 8-year-old, reaching for the woman.

We found pollen clusters, evidence of flowers that were laid down underneath these burials, and arrowheads that were tossed into the grave before they were ceremoniously buried.

But emotion, a sincere intimacy that -- the human feelings that you get from this grave -- we brought it back exactly as we found it, 5,300 years old.

Climate change connections

JEFFREY BROWN: Now, one of the themes then -- climate change -- is very topical now. So what connections do you make?

PAUL SERENO: It's really stunning. Elephants, hippos, crocodiles, six-foot fish in the middle of the Sahara.

JEFFREY BROWN: In a place that now is all desert.

PAUL SERENO: It is not just desert; it's a desert within a desert. That's how they describe the Tenera. I mean, bone dry, hyper arid. And this is -- 5,000 years ago, things became drier and drier. We're talking just 5,000 years.

Humans didn't do that. Little wobbles in our Earth's orbit are the driving factor, ultimately, for these kinds of climate change, but climate change it is. And it really affected the populations that lived there. It really drove some out and allowed some others to colonize the place. It drove human history.

JEFFREY BROWN: And just briefly, you said what is coming next, in terms of some of the research. You're going to be involved? What happens?

PAUL SERENO: Oh, we're interested in fine-tuning our understanding.

I mean, basically, we want to know how the recent populations -- everybody wants to know how the recent populations relate to these ancient populations. Are we looking at the roots of the people who are living there today, the Egyptians, the Berbers, the Tuaregs?

And where do they come from? And, ultimately, we're interested in human history. And we have a much better view of the humans today that lived in the center of the Sahara than we did before we ran into that site.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, Paul Sereno, thanks very much.

PAUL SERENO: You're welcome.
Notice the comment about "Climate Change". Since he is clearly saying that "Humans didn't do that." I suspect that is why the article disappeared from the National Geographic web site.

Thank god for the Wayback Machine. I have the original articles in pdf but it feels better for people to see the original articles themselves.

Open Mind
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Re: Are the planets growing?

Unread post by Open Mind » Sun Nov 10, 2019 8:16 pm

I haven't done an extensive search yet, but I'm assuming there are many human remains that date older than 10,000 years, that are normal height. I'm assuming I'm right about that. How does that work?

Is this where it becomes a conspiracy theory of concealment of findings? I was working in one of the Smithsonian museums last year and I cracked a joke to one of the girls assigned to help us, something about where they keep the giant bones. And she excitedly and proudly said, "Oh, they're not real. They're whale bones. I know. I've moved them". I felt like congratulating her for being important enough to the Smithsonian, that they felt it was necessary to give her the 'busy work' job of moving whale bones and giving her that back story of the mystery surrounding the so called "Giant's Bones", so she could have plausible deniability and also promote the debunking story. lol

allynh
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Re: Are the planets growing?

Unread post by allynh » Mon Nov 11, 2019 12:19 pm

"Giant's Bones at the Smithsonian"

That makes a great title for a novel. HA!

Google - giant human skeletons at the smithsonian

The articles are great. They go right into my Story folders. That is so fun.

Thanks...

When I talk about the article disappearing from the National Geographic site, it's not about "conspiracy theories"*, it's about funding. They depend on donations and patrons. If they print something that goes against the beliefs of the patrons, they get complaints and a threat to funding.

- I suspect that it was the statements of the lead researcher about climate change that triggered the disappearance.

The same thing happens in many institutes that depends on patrons for funding, like the way PBS limits what it funds to avoid upsetting donors. Concepts such as Dinosaurs having feathers, any human find in the Americas that violate the "Clovis point" limit, etc...

Humans have come in a range of sizes. The limits are on how big you can grow in the gravity field of the time. We have plenty of people now who are tall and strong, they often become basketball players, but when they found two populations, with different average heights that is suggestive to me that gravity increased.

The human skeletons found adds to the observation of the megafauna dying off at the same time.

* Conspiracy theories are great fun for novels, but a disaster in the real world. I have a large story folder full of source material.

Basically, it is a recursive loop that is similar to an epileptic seizure. You get trapped in a thought that burns a bunch of chemicals, but gets nowhere. There is the "want" the "desire" to understand something that can never be satisfied. It can only be forgotten, or abandoned.

"Everyone believes very easily whatever they fear or desire."

-- Jean de la Fontaine

"You simply cannot invent any conspiracy theory so ridiculous and obviously satirical that some people somewhere don’t already believe it."

-- Robert Anton Wilson

Open Mind
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Re: Are the planets growing?

Unread post by Open Mind » Mon Nov 11, 2019 5:24 pm

I get that 'funding' drives circumstances that might fuel the idea there's a conspiracy. I go as far as agreeing I might be guilty of making the same decisions if I were directly involved.

But back to my main question, which is, again, in my best estimate, the very first question the mainstream might want to visit before giving these alternative theories a chance. That is the question about modern humans, Neanderthal, Cro Magnon, etc. I suspect remains of all these species that go back a couple hundred thousand years have no significant size differences to speak of, or we'd be hearing about it.

If gravity allows for various species to grow to their optimal size as a sort of soap bubble equilibrium as the largest they can get before they're performance and longevity suffers, then it should be an odd rarity to find 100,000 year old humanoid species that are similar in height to modern day. Possible yes, but with the predominance of those findings being within normal modern size, it devistates the argument.

So is it the conspiracy theory? Because as literally almost all animals, plants, insects, and fish were bigger the farther back you go, including Gigantopithecus, a human cousin ffs, then its a frustrating thing to have to deal logically if most if not all acknowledged archeological findings are of homo sapiens under 6'.

Help me past this stumbling block. To me, its literally the most important question.

allynh
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Re: Are the planets growing?

Unread post by allynh » Mon Nov 11, 2019 11:04 pm

Sure, try this.

Ask the same question a different way:

- Why aren't all humans the same size, today. Why is there such variability among humans right now.

That's the thing, gravity is a "limiter", not a "driver" of height/size. For the past, we can only go by what fossils we find.

For example, Lucy was 1.1 m (3 ft 7 in) tall.

Lucy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_(Australopithecus)

An interesting question, is how tall would children grow on the Moon, or Mars, if we were to settle there. Another would be, if children were born in the space station, and grew up without gravity, how big would they get. That asks the question of, what role does gravity play in a developing child.

ISS Mouse Experiment Tests How the Body Adapts to Living on the Moon
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-bri ... cpIVC2ZNTY
Japan’s experiment module on ISS, called Kibo. (Credit: NASA)

Astronauts living on the International Space Station spend hours working out every day just to avoid losing serious muscle mass and bone density in microgravity. But will such precautions be needed to live on worlds that are simply lower in gravity than Earth, like the moon and Mars? And what effect would such gravity have on growing children? These questions are almost entirely unanswered by science, but they’re vital for humanity’s aims to build permanent settlements off-world.

Now Japan has taken a first step toward answering some of these questions thanks to a new instrument in their KIBO module on the International Space Station. Called MARS – Multiple Artificial-gravity Research System – it can spin to produce gravity at a variety of levels. Scientists have used it to raise mice in microgravity, artificial Earth gravity and artificial lunar gravity. Then, they compared the mice to those raised in a similar habitat on the ground in true Earth gravity.

Mice in Space!

The experimental mice were reared in space for a month before returning to Earth for study. All the mice survived their time on station and the trip back to the ground. And, upon returning to Earth, the mice were dissected to check on their growth rates and internal organs.

The first round of experiments, back in 2017, compared the mice raised in artificial Earth gravity and microgravity to those raised on Earth. Scientists found that the ones raised with gravity – real or artificial – seemed to do fine. But the mice raised in microgravity suffered from loss of bone density and muscle mass compared to the other mice.

That’s pretty normal. Experiments on both mice and humans have proven this over more than half a century of spaceflight. But it was still helpful to prove that mice raised in artificial gravity could do as well as those raised with the real deal on the ground.

The second round of the experiment saw mice raised in simulated lunar gravity. That experiment just ended, and the mice returned to Earth in June on one of SpaceX’s Dragon capsules. After collecting the mice from the capsule, researchers shipped them to Japan for study.

Throughout all the experiments, researchers could watch their mice on video to see how they behaved in space. Aside from the physical changes already measured in the microgravity mice, both these rodents and the lunar-gravity mice adapted their behaviors to their strange environments. They learned to maneuver, feed, and groom themselves with light or no gravity, just as humans have. The mice in artificial Earth gravity stood and ate normally, while those in microgravity learned to eat while floating, and those in artificial lunar gravity learned to wait until they had drifted to the ground before eating.

The truly valuable results will come once scientists have had time to analyze the samples from the mice raised in artificial lunar gravity. Until now, most tests have been essentially all-or-nothing when it comes to gravity, and that’s not what humans will deal with on the moon or Mars. But the fact that all the mice survived their month in space, regardless of the gravity of their situations, is already a good sign.
Notice, the mice did not grow larger in lower gravity, but of course we are not running the experiment over millions? of years.

Now, if you want to really burn your brain:

- Why did dinosaurs have such small brains compared to the size of their body.

Walnut the True Measure of a Dinosaur’s Brain
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/scie ... urs-brain/
January 28, 2013

Ampelosaurus had a surprisingly small brain. All fifty feet of the dinosaur – from its pencil-toothed muzzle to the tip of its long tail – was regulated by a mass of tissues about the size of a walnut and a half. That comparison isn’t sloppy shorthand. Ohio University paleontologist Lawrence Witmer actually went to the trouble of comparing the hulking sauropod’s brain to an English walnut to test an old axiom and correct a journalistic mistake.

Most everyone is familiar with the idea that huge dinosaurs had brains the size of a walnut. But where did this unflattering comparison come from? Witmer, who has tried to get at the origins of the idea, says the earliest example anyone has turned up so far is in Jennie Irene Mix’s 1912 book Mighty Animals, which says that the famous Jurassic sauropod Diplodocus “had a brain that was not much bigger than a walnut.” The meme didn’t really catch on until 1945, though, when paleontologist Edwin Colbert said that the armor-plated Stegosaurus also had a brain the size of the edible seed.

Witmer was reminded of the old saying when news source LiveScience covered a PLoS One study on the brain of Ampelosaurus that he had just published with Fabien Knoll, Ryan Ridgely, and coauthors. The 70 million year old sauropod, the report said, had a brain “which was not much bigger than a tennis ball.” That comparison is a bit too generous. (And Witmer nor his colleagues recall giving the news source such a comparison.) As Witmer explained in a Facebook post, “A tennis ball has a volume of about 140 cc, whereas the brain endocast of Ampelosaurus is just 39.5 cc.” A better measure of the dinosaur’s endocast, Witmer proposed, is a walnut. The side-by-side comparison of the pantry staple and the paleoneurological reconstruction shows just how startlingly small the dinosaur’s brain was.

In the post, Witmer wrote that he and his colleagues were “proposing the walnut as the new official unit of measure of dinosaur brain size, based on our microCT-scanned 26.2 cc walnut as the standard.” Of course, this was just some playful paleontology. “It’s just a joke, because it’s historically been such a player in dinosaur brain-size comparisons,” Witmer says. Still, the Cretaceous crack underscores the perplexing truth that some of the biggest animals of all time had ludicrously small brains.

“After studying maybe a couple dozen species of sauropods (which is a crap-ton of species for a CT-based study, “crap-ton” being another favorite unit of measure),” Witmer explains, “we have yet to find a clade that shows marked expansion of brain size.” In fact, Witmer points out, sauropod brains may have been even smaller than expected, since dinosaur brains didn’t fully fill the braincase endocasts that have been reconstructed from fossil remains. “Suffice it to say that if you thought a walnut or two was pretty small for an endocast volume, just imagine how much smaller the actual brain was,” Witmer says. Determining how much brain was in the braincase is the subject of further study by Witmer’s student Ashley Morhardt.

So what does all this mean for the biology and behavior of the animals? Are small brains really indicators of dullard dinosaurs? That’s difficult to say, Witmer says, since he and other paleo-brain specialists “can only talk in general and comparative terms.” Still, Witmer expects that sauropods “were pretty simple beasts” whose behavior was “largely governed by instinct and generally stereotyped responses.”

That doesn’t mean that sauropods were biological automatons, as some early 20th century paleontologists presumed. In addition to footprint evidence of sauropods walking together, Witmer points out, “we find sauropods with display structures” that belie some sort of social interaction and behavior. Ampelosaurus itself had such adornments – ornamental structures called osteoderms that gave the dinosaur’s flanks and back some imposing decoration. And “Somehow all those sympatric Morrison [Formation] sauropods species were able to sort out whom to mate with,” Witmer says. Just because sauropods were probably dim-witted doesn’t mean that they weren’t capable of socializing or other relatively complex behaviors related to interacting with their own kind.

Of course, there was so much Mesozoic diversity and disparity that it would be wrong to assume that all dinosaurs were only capable of reflexive, knee-jerk responses to the world around them. Sauropods are just one part of an emerging picture of dinosaur neuroanatomy and behavior. “The exciting thing about recent comparative cognitive studies is how surprisingly ‘smart’ are a wide range of birds and reptiles, not just corvids” such as ravens, Witmer says. A sauropod’s intellect might not have been very impressive, but “we might indeed have been inspired by some dinosaur species to utter ‘Clever girl.'”

Knoll, F., Ridgely, R., Ortega, F., Sanz, J., Witmer, L. 2013. Neurocranial Osteology and Neuroanatomy of a Late Cretaceous Titanosaurian Sauropod from Spain (Ampelosaurus sp.)Neurocranial Osteology and Neuroanatomy of a Late Cretaceous Titanosaurian Sauropod from Spain (Ampelosaurus sp.)Neurocranial Osteology and Neuroanatomy of a Late Cretaceous Titanosaurian Sauropod from Spain (Ampelosaurus sp.). PLoS ONE. 8, 1: e54991. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0054991
- The larger the animal, the more food it must eat, the more heat it must radiate.

So the question to ask is, why did some dinosaurs got really big and some didn't. There were probably more small dinosaurs than big ones.

What was the advantage for getting really big, and why didn't it take a large brain to run a large body, or do we simply have no clue what a brain does. HA!

Aardwolf
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Re: Are the planets growing?

Unread post by Aardwolf » Tue Nov 12, 2019 6:51 am

Open Mind wrote:What you're addressing here is I believe two separate issues. You're right about looking at each theory based on its merit to determine whether you believe it or not. But not caring about the mainstream attach points is not constructive. Its like a lawyer knowing his clients innocence so confidently, that he doesn't look at the prosecuting attorney's line of argument. He likely loses that case and his client goes to jail as a result so everyone loses. Which is why my line of questioning is all about the mainstream attack points, (not that I happen to know what I was asking is in fact one of those, but with my limited knowledge, if I put myself in the mainstream shoes, those questions are what would give me hesitation).
Then choose not to put yourself in mainstream shoes and keep your mind open, just like all true scientists.
Open Mind wrote:However, overturning the current geological paradigm is the least of my interests. What grips me the most about this theory is the implications of a smaller earth and the implied lower gravity, and the many mysteries that could solve among which are:
Giant dinosaurs, plants insects, fish, etc
Some megalithic construction
The existence of Giants, (relatively speaking)

If you don't think I've taken this all too far, then I have a burning question for you.
Fire away.

Aardwolf
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Re: Are the planets growing?

Unread post by Aardwolf » Tue Nov 12, 2019 6:53 am

Duplicate

Open Mind
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Re: Are the planets growing?

Unread post by Open Mind » Tue Nov 12, 2019 7:26 am

The main inquiry was about how someone who is a proponent of the expanding earth theory deals with the question of the size of homo sapiens' remains across hundreds of thousands of years. Its a kind of a trap question.

You have two choices. You can support the claim that vast numbers of 'giants' remains have been hidden, destroyed, or ignored and lost, suggesting a conspiracy theory, which opens you up to easy straw man points of ridicule and inevitably complete disregard. Or you can attempt to rationalize the situation as it is, thereby accepting the mainstream presumption that there are in fact no conspiracies to conceal giant remains because there never was any.

Rock and a hard place.

Remember, I'm just devil's advocate here.

Since you didn't address the 'missing giants remains' question, then I have to consider your argument based on a presumption that you don't believe there are missing giants remains because there never were any, (or at least not enough to consider more than the chance finding of a person who had a rare pituitary gland disorder).

Ok.

I'm aware of the bone mass loss in space, and I am not surprised that mice experience the same kind of thing, and can adapt to the conditions of that experiment. I'm also not surprised that mice didn't grow larger. Based on how I imagine gravity has influence over the scale of life, you would need to conduct an experiment that allowed for many generations of mice to live in that simulated gravity. How many, I couldn't be sure, but the process of adaptation to the new gravity I assume would take significant time, (more than 10 generations, less than 100, as a guess). So those experimental results have no bearing on the question of gravity influence on scale.

Its reasonable to comprehend the idea that simple Darwinian natural selection will bias the survival of larger creatures. As for how they grow larger, I have to assume in the growth stages of a creature, lower gravity will allow for randomly generated reductions of tensile elasticity of tendon and muscle as past generations muscles atrophy and have reduced demand. Maybe the limits of those stretching components during growth may not communicate the nerve conducted information to limit the length of bone growth. I believe its accepted that environmental circumstances can have an indelible affect on genetics over time. Obviously, I can't begin to break down the process accurately, but I certainly can image it possible.

As for the brain size, your talking about completely different species that we have no comparison for. Its not like the smaller brontosaurus these days have a different relative size brain. If that were the case, we'd have some data on it. But in the absence of a control or a base line, we can only conclude that dinosaurs simply didn't require larger brains, perhaps because they didn't have to survive the challenge of being hunted by humans.

I can accept that different species can grow into a variety of different sizes, but using the logic of the pattern of recognition with respect to scale differences of animals that we do have a comparison for:

Elephant
Armadillo
Bear
Camel
Rabbit
etc. etc. etc.

It stretches credulity to presume it's just a result of fluke probabilities, that only smaller homo sapiens wound up dying in a way that preserved their bodies for discovery, while so many other species freely revealed their giant past.
We need something better than the leap required to accept that fluke.

We need to know why there are no giant bones. I would suggest its a linchpin for acceptance of the expanding earth theory.

Open Mind
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Re: Are the planets growing?

Unread post by Open Mind » Tue Nov 12, 2019 7:49 am

In fact, this line of thinking about gravity and its affect on scale, and more precisely the time it takes for life to adapt, brings up another interesting line of inquiry.

We are actually never really talking about life adapting to gravity in a way that would increase their growth. Its actually always how gravity can shrink a life forms size. So I don't really need to invoke some nervous system feedback triggering start and stop points of bone growth. If we're talking about how gravity is always increasing, then I believe its becomes much more simple. As a tall person, I've experienced back problems all my life. Its clear that if gravity increases, then large animals become more prone to injury and ailments like arthritis, and also more vulnerable to predators. It seems the mechanism of adaptation to increased gravity has already been discovered by Darwin.

Considering that simplification, (and I'm going to help your argument now), maybe homo sapien intelligence is directly responsible for the survival of smaller humans in area's where there was lots of huge predators. Smaller humans can hide easier. Since they'd have to be incredibly huge to actually qualify for a competitive advantage in fighting and killing the enormous predators, their survival might be based on the advantage of being smaller and easier to escape predation, up a tree or in a cave, etc. Could this account for a wide variety of scales of homo sapiens? Occam's Razor would suggest its likely not going to make a marked difference in that range of scale than we see today, but I suppose its possible. But then considering the enormous amount of mega mammals that dies off in North America, it might suggest there should be far less giant remains findings there, which isn't the case, if we're to believe the old news clippings that Jim Vieira includes in his presentations.

tough one.

Open Mind
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Re: Are the planets growing?

Unread post by Open Mind » Tue Nov 12, 2019 8:00 am

Aardwolf wrote: If you don't think I've taken this all too far, then I have a burning question for you.

Fire away.
I already did in my response to Allynh. Its was about the implications of the die off of mega mammals in North America during the Younger Dryas event. And what that implied about how recently the gravity might have changed. He said he believed the younger dryas event was either caused by, or accompanied with a 10% increase in gravity.


I don't think my point about putting myself in the typical "Mainstream'ers Shoes" is bad idea. Consider it a step towards necessary evils to eventually lead to more people actually rolling the dice and funding the study of some of these ideas. I don't think my questions are unreasonable. Know thine enemy.

Aardwolf
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Re: Are the planets growing?

Unread post by Aardwolf » Tue Nov 12, 2019 10:35 am

Open Mind wrote:The main inquiry was about how someone who is a proponent of the expanding earth theory deals with the question of the size of homo sapiens' remains across hundreds of thousands of years. Its a kind of a trap question.
I'll address all your arguments here as they flow from the same misconception.

The Expanding Earth process is incredibly slow. Any measurable discrepancy takes 10's of millions of years. You're looking for changes in an era that cannot possibly have any measurable detection. Also how do we know height was an advantage for vegetable eating tree-dwellers? Maybe taller humans were easily spotted by the meat eating big cats at the top of the food chain.

However, we do have giants. Go back 150+ million years. These animals could not survive standing in this gravity yet they thrived for millions of years. Meganeura would not be able to get off the ground yet dragonfly are the fastest and deadliest hunters on the planet. That's the trap of the mainstream, but they have to keep their minds closed to maintain this facade they have built their careers on.

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