As a zeroth observation, it’s a bit eyebrow-raising that a binding could cause an increase to the volume of a skull.

That’s very interesting. Have they written any books? Do they have any blogs?

In the really tall bottle.

Maybe it was these guys.

Look at this site. It covers a bunch of stuff that I can’t vouch for nor am I saying it’s all real. Look at the bottom of the page for,

“…An elongated skull was unearthed in a Copper Island burial mound. No other data available…”

https://earthepochs.blogspot.com/2014/09/2014-ancient-canal-builders-john-m.html

I will say that some of this is real. I also believe that the melonheads are real and supposedly their DNA has been tested and the mtDNA does not match any known DNA we have. They have cranial stitching that is different from all other skulls. I have also seen videos and pictures of baby melonhead mummies that have the same cranial shape so it doesn’t come from binding.

That being said someone could have made up a bunch of dummies and made videos of them. To counter that these have been found WAY back in history. An archeological dig in Malta found quite a few of these with thousands and thousands of normal skulls.

https://redice.tv/news/the-mystery-of-maltas-long-headed-skulls

https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_craneos.htm#Additional_Information

_relaxes_

Nigerians and other West Africans who come to the USA their one main peeve is that their kids begin to adopt bad habits of American black kids.

Among other things, it explains why North American in particular and New World wines in general are marketed and spoken of with primary emphasis on the type of grape, not the region/terroir of origin. I have a colleague who really hates that.

Apparently in more recent times, accessible to scholars, new world peoples did not make grape wine. They certainly fermented other plants, so no lack of desire for alcohol.

Maybe they tried and new world grapes weren’t good, or somehow that plant never drew their attention when they were looking for fermentables. One can get pretty slammed with maize derivatives.

Wine seems to start with the Spanish bringing in their version of winemaking. Plenty of places in the Americas whose climate would support it.

When it comes to settler wine production, my suspicion is that marginal climates like Canada started with other fruit wines and moved on to grape vine cultivation much, much later. Quebec still produces a lot of fruit wine. Had a particular label of strawberry wine once and have hoped to stumble on it again ever since. Come to think, England, another marginal grapevine climate, has managed to make many other fruit wines.

A lot of the grapes used in the Americas are hybrids with European grapes, too. So there’s that.

Interestingly, there was some huge plant disease crisis in Europe in the 19th century, so now most vineyards in the main producer countries use vines that had to be grafted with North American vines. There are few vineyards left with ungrafted vitis vinifera of old stock, and the disease is still out there. That might be the fault of 19th century hybrid experimentation, actually. The French must have been beside themselves with panic. The Franco-Prussian war would have been a trifle by comparison.

To be fair, Canadian wine until probably the 90s [I'm relying on my father and an associate of his from memory here] was plonk comparable to the stuff the Germans used to export exclusively- like Blue Nun or Black Tower, which for a time were a huge factor on the Canadian and US markets in their own right. I have actually been meaning to try them. There’s always the chance the wine people are just being snobs and those things actually taste good. I like things like German riesling, gewurztraminer, and almost any rose, and I would not have a hope of detecting all the tastes and aromas one is supposed to taste or smell in finer reds. They might taste better or worse to me, but they taste like wine. Not blackberries with hints of oak and cinnamon.

I think my number one question is who the hell was mining all the copper in Michigan? Some estimates have the amount of copper extracted pegged at about a half-billion (with a “B”…) pounds, starting somewhere around 2450 BC, and ending circa 1200 BC.

First time I heard of this, I was like “Yeah, pull the other one…”, but I’ve done some reading and talked to people who know about the sites, and it all appears to be genuine. Which is mind-boggling. That’s a lot of copper–Where the hell did it all go?

There’s no sign of it here in North America that I’m aware of, archaeologically speaking, sooooo… WTF?

My other big question is, why the hell would anyone give enough of a damn to cover this stuff up, or conceal it from general knowledge? A lot of it is pretty open, like the prevalence of stone structures in New England that pre-date the Colonies, and which seem to share some characteristics with stuff found around the Mediterranean.

You’ve also got those tantalizing references to the “giants” of yore, whose remains are reported all through the literature of the 19th Century, and then whose existence seemingly evaporates. There are documented hand-overs of the remains found in New Mexico and Nevada that supposedly went to the Smithsonian, but there’s not a damn thing in the museum records supporting that. But, news stories in the local papers all describe that happening. So, what was it? A social phenomenon of amusing lies that everyone was telling, or what? If there was a “vast conspiracy” to cover all this crap up, then… Why? What’s the damn point? It’s all (literally…) ancient history, so why must we defend the “conventional account” so desperately?

If that’s what’s going on, that is. Whole thing may be a bunch of fabulists, but it’s damned hard to tell without replicating the research yourself.

I have met first-person sources who describe seeing what the apocrypha describe, though. Most memorably, a guy who spent a lot of his spare time documenting stuff he found in the New England area, and his growing conviction that a lot of it which everyone just assumed was Colonial in origin actually pre-dated the conventional historical account. He had a bunch of stuff backing that idea up, like the rate of weathering on the stones, the construction styles, and accounts from remnant Indian oral histories of the sites being there before they got there…

Whole thing is fascinating. I have to ask why anyone would have that much investment in the “conventional history” to automatically discount all this stuff, because to me, an open mind needs to be kept open. What’s recorded in the books ain’t necessarily so; I have personal experience with that, in my own lifetime.

Which again raises the question: Why? What’s the point of obfuscating what really happened, or covering up the anomalies?