Mysterious giant humanoids discovered on the ceiling of an Alabama cave (videos and pictures)

May 23, 2022

A new scientific study uncovered GIANT human-like figures etched in the ceiling of an Alabama cave by Native Americans more than a 1000 years ago.

The figures, three of which were humanoid in shape, are among the biggest ever uncovered in the Northern Americas. Some are more than 6ft long per a study presenting the findings published in the peer-reviewed journal Antiquity on Tuesday.

Known as glyphs, the unique carvings sculpted in the soft mud on the cave’s ceiling could provide clues into the traditions of Native American peoples of this southeastern US, say the study’s authors.

“We know that Native Americans over a very wide area have certain ideas in their religious concepts that they share. They believe in a tiered universe,” said archeologist Jan Simek.

“They believed that there were these spirit worlds all around them that permeate the natural world, even though you couldn’t see them,” he said.

-Invisible figures revealed by months of tenuous work-

The project was decades in the making for the paper’s authors — archeologist Jan Simek and photographers Alvarez and Alan Cressler.

Despite this, they could not document the artwork because of a simple, technically challenging barrier: The cave ceiling is so close to the floor that it was impossible to take good pictures of the carvings.

Alvarez first tried to document the glyphs as a photographer on a National Geographic assignment in 1999. “The images were so faint!” he told Insider.

“I feel like there are stories that get entrusted to me,” said Alvarez. “That was the motivation behind doing all the work.”

Finally, hi-tech 3D photogrammetry would be the key to capturing the glyphs. It can read the minute variation in light between two images taken a few inches apart to draw precise 3D models of objects.

It was still a grueling, month-long task to capture more than 16,000 pictures that very slightly overlap to map out the entire cave ceiling.

“It took like years for my knees to recover. It’s just kneeling and stooping for hours and hours and hours in days and days and days on end,” Alvarez said.

Finally able to digitally lower the cave floor they first glimpsed the enormous humanoid glyphs.

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>>16328919

-Deciphering an ancient story for the first time in centuries-

The glyphs portray what archeologists call anthropomorphs, figures that could either represent humans in costumes and masks or humanoid spirits, Simek said.

These characters were probably deeply ingrained in the culture of the people living near the cave so that they could understand who they were from seeing only a part of them, Simek said.

The style of the drawings in the Alabama cave is reminiscent of figures seen in the midwest and the western US. They are very large with square shoulders, ghost-like, with headgear and elaborate clothing, and directly face the viewer. That suggests that these figures represented inhabitants of the supernatural world, per the study.

One example of similar anthropomorphs can be seen in the Barrier Canyon in Utah.

However, the study authors have not been able to link the Alabama figures to recognizable characters recorded in southeast Native American stories.

“They clearly represent a character or a set of characters that we’ve never seen before,” said Simek.

Philip Carr, a professor of Native American Studies and Anthropology at the University of South Alabama who was not involved in the study, was complimentary of the work.

“It is the work of archaeological teams such as this one that provide those rare glimpses into past ideologies that leave us wanting to know even more,” he told Insider.

“Are these figures related to the underworld? If so, what was the relationship of the people who drew them to those beings of the underworld?”

-Rediscovering the old to inform the new-

We know little about the people that would have lived around that cave 1,000 and 1,500 years ago, what is called the Middle Woodland phase.

“We don’t have the kind of documentation about artwork that we have for later time periods,” said Simek. “We know the archeological context, but even that is relatively hard to find that at this date,” he said.

These findings are relevant to present-day Native American communities, which see these traditions as part of their heritage, Simek said.

“Their descendants are the native people of the southeast that were in the region when Europeans arrived: The Cherokees, the Creeks, Muscogee people, Choctaw, Chickasaw,” he said.

“These people and their culture are vibrant and alive. Europeans moved them out of the Southeast forcibly, to Oklahoma, to reservations that were not their homeland. But they still maintain their connectivity,” he said.

“Archeology is not always about the dead,” Simek said. [Cambridge, BI]

https://strangesounds.org/2022/05/mysterious-giant-humanoids-discovered-on-the-ceiling-of-an-alabama-cave-videos-and-pictures.html

https://youtu.be/b32ONX5O_AI

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>>16328920

There was a cave dick in there

kek

Bitcoin City In El Salvador Takes The Metaverse In The Opposite Direction

05/16/2022

We've all heard about bringing cities into the Metaverse, but this city will bring a part of the Metaverse to the real world instead.

AR, VR, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and the lot are the usual culprits cited when talking about the Metaverse. Built on already existing and slightly unrelated technologies, this concept and buzzword is supposed to meld physical and virtual worlds together in an almost seamless fashion. In most cases, it involves recreating many physical things in a digital form, from avatars of ourselves to real-world cities and locations. There's also a part that will bring digital artifacts into our world, mostly as overlays that can only be seen through screens or headsets. The Metaverse and its friends are already influencing changes in the real world, but perhaps none more daring and a teeny bit bewildering than an entire city founded upon the concept and the "image" of bitcoin.

It's not hard to imagine walking into a virtual city whose layout happens to be inspired by the design of a coin. After all, it's pretty trivial to mold 3D spaces to one's liking, whether or not they actually conform to the laws of physics. But doing it the other way around and building a real-world city patterned after a digital currency sounds a tad "out of this world," to put it mildly. And yet that is what El Salvador is embarking on if the construction of this vision actually begins.

Announced late last year by El Salvadorian president Nayib Bukele, the "bitcoin city" will be built on the side of the Conchagua volcano, which has thankfully never erupted in a very long time. The general layout of the city will be in the shape of a coin, as much as the terrain would allow it to be round, with a central plaza that bears the bitcoin logo. At least based on the model that was recently unveiled, even the pattern of buildings and roads will give the city a remote semblance to the digital bits that make up all of the digital world as we know it.

Of course, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies don't exactly have a defined form, despite the "coin" in their names, so this is pretty much an artist's interpretation of what a city built on it should look like. The designer also opted to paint the model in gold, almost giving it a Game of Thrones opening sequence vibe, but President Bukele assures that the actual city won't look so pretentious. It will be a mix of greens from trees and blues from the nearby sea, so its associations with bitcoin can really only be seen from high above. Fortunately, there are also plans to have a viewing deck over the volcano for that very purpose.

bitcoin city, which might be its actual name, isn't just a tribute to the first cryptocurrency that made it big. The whole city will be built on bitcoin, or rather its construction will be funded by the sale of bitcoin bonds. The city will also be powered by geothermal energy from its neighboring volcano. Of course, that energy will also be used to mine bitcoins, which became El Salvador's official currency last year, the first and so far only country to adopt a cryptocurrency in this manner.

The city's design is admittedly enthralling, but its concept and execution will most likely leave many scratching their heads. Basing an economy and an entire city on cryptocurrency is a huge leap of faith, and there have already been signs of trouble even before sales of those bonds have started. bitcoin city wouldn't be the first bold enterprise to capitalize on new technological trends, but it is definitely one of the more ambitious ones. One could almost say it is bitcoin-crazy, and it wouldn't be an exaggeration, especially considering how the city is designed around a bitcoin.

https://www.yankodesign.com/2022/05/16/bitcoin-city-in-el-salvador-takes-the-metaverse-in-the-opposite-direction/

>>16328997

>riding the Q train