TRUE or FALSE: Mar 22, 2016

A Smoke Corpses of Aseki, Papua New Guinea

We tend to associate mummies with ancient Egypt, but a lot of culture around the world practiced mummification. The Anga tribe of the Aseki region of Papua New Guinea is one of them. Anga’s mummies, however, aren't wrapped in bandages and placed in tombs. They are left in the open, high above a cliff, often overlooking the village where they once lived.

One of the most important process of mummification is the removal of moisture from the dead bodies, because water promotes decomposition, and a decomposed body cannot be preserved by mummification. Ancient Egyptians achieved this by covering the dead bodies with salt and mixture of spices that had great drying properties. The Anga tribe employed a more direct approach they heated the dead bodies over a fire.

The elaborate process began by slicing open the knees, elbows, feet, and other joints. Hollow bamboo poles were then inserted in the slits, as well as the stomach of the body to evacuate its contents. The bodies were then smoked for over a month until all bodily

fluids had dripped out of the numerous cuts made in the body, as well as through the bamboo tubes. This fluid was collected and massaged by the villagers over their own bodies, as a mean to transfer the power of the deceased to the living. Some articles claim that the left over fluid was used as cooking oil, which is not only gross and revolting but is also a lie.

Most of what’s known about the mummies is based on the exaggerated tales of one British explorer named Charles Higginson, who was the first person to document a report on the smoked corpses in 1907. It was Charles Higginson who described the Anga as bloodthirsty savages who greedily lapped up the entrails of their own kin during the smoking

process. “But if that was the case,” reasonsIan Lloyd Neubauer, who travelled to this part of Papua New Guinea and spoke to the people there, “then why didn't the Anga make a meal of Higginson, a lone and defenceless foreigner living in their midst?”.

After the body was smoked and dried, it was covered with ocher, a claylike form of iron oxide, to protect the mummifying remains from scavengers and the elements. Even in the sweltering

conditions of Papua New Guinea, which normally accelerate the decomposition of corpses, the process worked remarkably well.

Mummification came to an end in 1949 when missionaries took firm root in Aseki. The remaining mummies are now carefully preserved by villagers who periodically perform restoration work whenever a limb of a mummy droops or looks like it would fall off. Supports to body parts would be added, and heated sap from local trees would

be used as glue. They would also touch up the ocher clay.

Anga mummies can be found in several villages of Papua New Guinea's Aseki District. Incidentally, the Anga tribes weren’t the only people who smoked their dead.

This type of mummification was also practiced by the Philippians in the town of Kabayan. They are known as Kabayan Mummies or Fire Mummies.

Linkage: amusingplanet.com
www.google.com.us.ph
harold-nesmith.blogspot.com
haroldnesmith.worldpress.com

New Found: Fairy Circles in AUSTRALIA

The mysterious phenomenon shows up on a new continent.

For many years, scientists have puzzled over a striking phenomenon in Namibia in a regular, hexagonal pattern, plants clear the ground and leave empty circles of earth. These blank spots are called "fairy circles," because they seem to have been put there almost by magic and because scientists can't agree on what, exactly, causes them.

Stephan Getzin, an ecological modeler at Germany's Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, once believed that the fairy

circles might be created by termites, one of the more popular theories for how the circles are formed. But as he researched them, he changed his mind: it seemed more likely, he wrote in a 2014 paper, that plants self-organize into these mysterious patterns.

That paper promoted an Australian scientist, Bronwyn Bell, to get in touch: fairy circles had been documented only in Africa, but, she wrote to Getzin, Australia had a similar phenomenon. Now, Getzin, Bell, and their colleagues have released a new paper, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that details the discovery of these Australian fairy circles and argues that, here too, the plants organize themselves into this arrangement.

The Australian fairy circles are found in western Australia, about 10 miles from the town of Newman. As in Namibia, the earth here is

dry and water scarce; it's water competition, argue the scientists who believe the plants self-organize, that drives vegetation here to leave patches of earth bare.

There is a notable distinction between the circles on the different continents. In the Namibian fairy circles, the exposed earth is loamy, and the open circles act as reservoirs of water. Here, the clay surface of the land is hard and dry, and it directs water towards the places where plants are actually growing.

Getzin and his colleagues did look for termite activity in the area where the Australian fairy circles were found, but they found no correlation between termite activity and the pattern of plants. One scientist who believes the Namibian circles are the work of

termites,Norbert Jürgens, told the New York Times that he might not actually call the Australia circles "fairy circles" because their clay characters makes them function differently.

The discovery of the Australian fairy circles hints that maybe there are more of these out there in the world: they're hard to identify from the ground, since they're spaced far enough apart that it's often impossible to see the next circle over while standing in one. Much easier is to find them in aerial photos, and in this age of satellite photography, there are plenty of those. Maybe all we need to do is look, and we'll find more fairy circles and, finally, a definitive answer to what causes them.

Linkage: atlasobscura.com

www.google.com.us/ph ; harold-nesmith.blogspot.com

The Gateway to Hell - Darvaza Turkmenistan

The Darvaza gas crater or “The Door to Hell” is a 60 meters wide and 20 meters deep hole in the heart of the hot, expansive Karakum

desert in Turkmenistan, that has been on on fire for the last 38
years. But the hole is not of a natural origin. The large crater is a result of a Soviet gas exploration accident that occurred in 1971.

The Darvaza (also known as Derweze) area is rich in natural gas. While drilling in 1971, the Soviets accidentally tapped into a massive underground natural gas cavern, causing the ground to collapse and the entire drilling rig to fall in. To prevent escape of poisonous gas into the atmosphere, the geologists decided to light it on fire. They had hoped the fire would use all the fuel in a matter of days, but as it turns out, the supply of natural gas below the crater is near infinite as the crater’s been burning since.

On a dark night, the glow of the burning hole can be seen from miles away and the smell of burning sulfur can be detected from a distance that becomes quite strong as you near the hot edge of the crater.