I confess that my favorite among Gunnar Heinsohn's books has always been Die Vernichtung der Weisen Frauen, on the witch-hunts of the Renaissance, which he wrote together with Otto Steiger. It remains one of my regrets that the book has never been translated. I had Gunnar's book in mind last fall, when I translated from Alsatian into English and standard German the play by the Jewish-Alsatian poet Nathan Katz (1892-1981) S'Annele Balthasar, on the 1589 trial of a young peasant girl accused of witchcraft . I was in the middle of translating when Gunnar informed me of his illness. I sent him the finished translation in German and he appreciated it. He deemed it "liebevoll." We talked about it at some length when I last visited him in Gdansk in January, one month before his death. He was much interested in the original Alsatian language, and in its translation. There was a bold literary streak to Gunnar, not well known. As a young man, when Al de Grazia and I first knew him, he was, together with Chris Marx, an ardent fan of Arno Schmidt. 

I am bringing here Nathan Katz and my translation of his 1924 masterpiece, Annele Balthazar, to the English speaking public, wishing them godspeed!

Anne-Marie de Grazia

Read: Nathan Katz: Annele Balthasar (in English) 

also available in German (Deutsch).

^{Nathan Katz by Henry Solveen}

On 21 July AD 365 a quake of magnitude ∼ 8 struck near Crete.  It destroyed every
city on the island, with widespread devastation in a large region from the Balkans to N
Africa, from the Nile to NE Libya.  The extreme W Coast of Crete was lifted up by 10 m
& the quake generated a tsunami, that carried ships 3 km inland at Alexandria, Egypt.

Here, in this note we announce that a large cosmic object, a meteorite or asteroid,
impacted planet Earth on that day, most likely a comet. 

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Go to Gunnar's article and link to the new reseach

Researchers found that the Eurasian populations could trace some genetic material back to two different Neanderthal lineages: one represented by a Neanderthal whose remains were discovered in the Vindija cave in Croatia, and another represented by a Neanderthal whose remains were discovered in the Altai mountains. They also discovered that the modern-day populations they studied also share genetic deletions — areas of DNA that are missing — with both the Vindija and Altai Neanderthal lineages.

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"The origin of AD dating is not verifiable before the 11th century AD (with the exception of some manuscripts that have never been analyzed scientifically). Thus, there is no place in the 1st millennium AD where historians or chronologists would have kept a complete record of the years AD 1-1000..."

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One day in 2011, undergraduate student Naomi Martisius was sorting through tiny bone remnants in the UC Davis paleoanthropology lab when she stumbled across a peculiar piece. The bone fragment, from a French archaeological site, turned out to be a part of an early specialized bone tool used by a Neandertal before the first modern humans appeared in Europe. Used to smooth tough animal hides, the tools were made about 50,000 years ago by Neandertals. The specialized tools are still used today, in similar form, to smooth and refine leather made into high-end purses and jackets.

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A hormone called progesterone is important for preparing the uterine lining for egg implantation and in maintaining the early stages of pregnancy. Almost one in three women with European descent inherited a genetic variant of the progesterone receptor called V660L from Neanderthals. According to a new study, its carriers have higher fertility, more siblings, fewer miscarriages, and less bleeding during early pregnancy.

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Scientists have claimed that a strand of DNA that triples the risk of developing severe Covid-19 was passed on from Neanderthals to modern humans. The genetic endowment, a legacy from more than 50,000 years ago, has left about 16% of Europeans and half of south Asians today carrying these genes. They also had heightened sensitivity to pain, could tolerate smoke emanations better than was thought, and would have found it easier to use a hammer than pick up a coin.

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We know much better now what de Denisovans, an extinct sister group of the Neanderthals, looked like, their mitochondrial DNA (inherited from their mothers) and their Y chromosomes (inherited from the fathers) have been sequenced and evaluated...

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In a little bit over a year, our knowledge of Neanderthals and of their ancestors, the Superarchaics and the Denisovans, has greatly expanded. 

"Genes from fossils have shown that the ancestors of many living people mated with Neanderthals and with Denisovans, a mysterious group of extinct humans who lived in Asia. Now, a flurry of papers suggests the ancestors of all three groups mixed at least twice with even older “ghost” lineages of unknown extinct hominins..."

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By French Annales historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie

I. The voyage of the Plague by flea-hop along the Silk Road...

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II. The cataclysmic integration of the Americas and Oceania into the Eurasian disease-world. 

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"It might come as a surprise, but outside our New Testament records we have very little additional historical information about Paul other than the valuable [although 300 years later; GH] tradition that Jerome [347-420 AD] preserves for us that he was born in the Galilee..."

Read the article in pdf

The moon may have kept our planet’s atmosphere safe from a more active sun 4 billion years ago, with a magnetic field that has long since disappeared, says a new NASA-led study

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Prof. Akira Kouchi and University of Hokkaido are looking into the matter...

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In a conference given at the Polish Naval Museum on July 7, 2020, Gunnar Heinsohn gives an overview of his First Millennium revised chronology from the standpoint of Poland...

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Gunnar Heinsohn’s RAVENNA AND CHRONOLOGY is a 100 page, abridged English version of his 550-page German manuscript WIE LANGE WÄHRTE DAS ERSTE JAHRTAUSEND? (How long did the First Millennium last?) Q-MAG.org will present RAVENNA AND CHRONOLOGY in three parts, abundantly illustrated.

I asked Gunnar Heinsohn if we may end up having to go back behind Michael Psellos (ca. 1018-1078 AD) and start A.D. history all over again? His answer was: YES! (...)

Go to RAVENNA AND CHRONOLOGY

• The new (final) Tunguska theory?
• The handsome dead with ram-bones
• The (almost) cuddly 18,000y old puppy: wolf or dog?

At the Neanderthal excavation site Abri-du-Maras,near the river Ardèche, in France, the discovery of a piece of string definitely establishes the cognitive abilities of the Neanderthals.

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A single Northern Hemisphere calibration curve has formed the basis of radiocarbon dating in Europe and the Mediterranean for five decades, setting the time frame for prehistory. However, as measurement precision increases, there is mounting evidence for some small but substantive regional (partly growing season) offsets in the same-year radiocarbon levels.

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• Intense cosmic radiation burst in 775 AD
  
• A highly abnormal Sun in the mid-Holocene, 5480 BC
  

Decades ago, the discovery of flower-pollen around the skelettal remains of Neanderthals in the Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan gave rise to an enduring controversy around the question of whether the Neanderthals might have grieved for their dead.

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The evidence for early presence of Neanderthals and earlier hominins on the Greek Aegean island of Naxos, as discovered on the land of Alfred de Grazia, shortly after his death... (See here)

>>>Here, we detail evidence from excavations at the chert source of Stelida on what today is the island of Naxos in the middle of the Aegean Basin, where paleodosimetric dates suggest that hominins were present in the region by 200 ka ago, accessing the chert quarry during a glacial lowstand when exposed land connected Anatolia to continental Southeast Europe, by seafaring, or through some combination of the two. Throughout the remainder of the Pleistocene, this region was occupied and/or traversed at least sporadically, including by early H. sapiens ~40 to 30 ka ago (who may have arrived by boat), and later by indisputably seafaring Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of the Early Holocene...<<<

Go to the article in AAAS Science Advance

It was one of Alfred de Grazia's long-cherished projects, first evoked with the publishers of McMillan in the 1980s. (See article "Encyclopaedia of Quantavolution" in the Q-Ency Encyclopaedia). 

Go to Q-Ency

^{"Neanderthals on Naxos" exhibition at the Municipal Center, Naxos, 2018 (poster)}

Enter the exhibition

From Science to the American School of Classical Studies, to Archaeology News, to the SIS Review, the archaeological world is abuzz with the implications of the Palaeolithic discoveries at Stelida, on the island of Naxos, Greece. The presently held conceptions about the patterns of settlement of Europe by early Man and proto-humans may well have to be drastically revised. In Alfred de Grazia's garden was discovered the earliest evidence of a human presence in any island in the Mediterranean.

Go to the article by Anne-Marie de Grazia with links to numerous articles in various languages.

What is a god?
How did the priesthood, and cults of bloody sacrifices come into existence?
How did our forebears arrive at fashioning images of gods in animal- human- or mixed shapes?
Were the gods sacrificed to, or did the sacrificed become gods?
How, in short, did humanity reach this first step of higher culture?

Gunnar Heinsohn's groundbreaking work in the history of religion, based on clues from anthropology, archaeology, mythology and ancient history, is made available for the first time in English, in a serialized form, in a translation by Anne-Marie de Grazia.

serialized in Q-mag.org

Go to: The Creation of the Gods

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