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Fifth-Century Child's Skeleton Shows Evidence of "Vampire Burial" :
The "Vampire of Lugnano" had a rock in its mouth to keep it from rising from grave.
Archaeologists have discovered the skeleton of a 10-year-old child at an ancient Roman site in Italy with a rock carefully placed in its mouth. This suggests those who buried the child—who probably died of malaria during a deadly fifth century outbreak—feared it might rise from the dead and spread the disease to those who survived. Locals are calling it the "Vampire of Lugnano."
"This is a very unusual mortuary treatment that you see in various forms in different cultures, especially in the Roman world," says Jordan Wilson, a graduate student in bio-archaeology at the University of Arizona who studied the remains. He added that this could "indicate a fear that this person might come back from the dead and try to spread disease to the living."
Pretty much every culture on Earth has some version of a vampire (or proto-vampire) myth. Chinese folklore has the k'uei, which are reanimated corpses that rise from the grave to prey on the living; one type has sharp fangs, the better to bite into the neck of said prey. Russian, Albanian, Indian, and Greek folklore have similar undead monsters. Russian villagers in the Middle Ages often drove stakes into the bodies of suspected vampires upon burial to keep them from rising again.
The most-likely explanation is that the locals did this to ensure the dead child stayed that way. Prior excavations amidst the human remains in the Cemetery of the Babies unearthed various items commonly associated with magic at the time: raven talons, toad bones, and bronze cauldrons filled with ash. The oldest remains found previously were those of a three-year-old girl whose hands and feet were weighed down with stones.
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Sunday October 14 2018, @09:30PM (6 children)
Worldwide? Citation Required.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Runaway1956 on Sunday October 14 2018, @10:11PM (5 children)
At the end of the ice age, the sea level rose pretty drastically. Only the Jewish/Christian holy books make any real attempt to put a date on the floods, that I'm aware of. If we believe that the earth is only 5 or 6 thousand years old - then we should be able to date the flood.
https://iafi.org/about-the-ice-age-floods/introduction/ [iafi.org] That link seems to be specific to the North American continent.
https://www.mnn.com/family/protection-safety/photos/9-floods-of-biblical-proportion/water-water-everywhere#top-desktop [mnn.com] Slideshow format - the first couple slides address the rising sea after the ice age.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-thawed-the-last-ice-age/ [scientificamerican.com] This is more an attempt to explain global warming, with CO2 as the culprit - but it does make mention of rising sea levels.
http://nwcreation.net/iceage.html [nwcreation.net] I'll throw this one in, though it's kind of embarrasing. Christians trying to explain ice ages and floods while restricting themselves to a 6000 year old world. It's almost like they're pulling a fully grown chicken from an egg - or trying to stuff that chicken back into an egg.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2630738/How-world-looked-ice-age-The-incredible-map-reveals-just-planet-changed-14-000-years.html [dailymail.co.uk] That page is on track. I won't attempt to vouch for the accuracy of the maps, but they do tell the story of global flooding. The artist visualizes Australia joined to Asia, and Africa joined to Asia quite solidly. The Mediterranean looks like a little lake, failing to separate Africa from Europe. The Caribbean mostly above sea level. Take all of that with a grain of salt - I think the artist has exaggerated some of it. But, he does have the idea, we've got to give him credit for that.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Sunday October 14 2018, @10:48PM (4 children)
OK, well,
But we don't, do we?
The first link is very interesting, and I have bookmarked it to look at later, so thanks for that. It has no bearing on any Judeo-Christian writings though, because it happened thousands of years before the Jews existed on a continent they knew nothing about.
The second link seems like a list of floods. I am not arguing there have never been floods.
The third link is interesting, but not relevant to a global flood debate.
The fourth link is an embarrassment.
Did they provide evidence, or just quote a passage from the Bible? Because that's not evidence.
The fifth link is the Daily Mail, so not very credible, however the map looks pretty cool, and as you noted might be fairly accurate. It also has no bearing on a global flood either.
The thing is, the last ice age ended something like 7,000 years before the various Jewish tribes even existed. There is no evidence of a global flood at the end of the ice age anyway. There is evidence for various regional floods however, which might be why there are flood stories.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday October 15 2018, @05:38AM (3 children)
Wait - give that last one a couple more second's thought.
If the sea level rose by 10 meters - isn't that a "global flood"? As has been pointed out somewhere above, civilizations have always congregated along the coasts. Our own does. All of our largest cities sit on a coast - even Chicago sits on a fresh water coast.
If the seas rise a foot, some outliers are flooded out of their homes. Two feet, more of them. Three feet starts taking in major population centers. If the seas rise by multiple meters, entire cities are thoroughly flooded, and have to be abandoned.
That is a "global flood", I believe.
As for how it all ties into the Jews - well, the Jews have borrowed a lot of other things from the Sumerians - why not the flood?
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Monday October 15 2018, @02:13PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday October 15 2018, @02:27PM
LOL, this is prehistoric. If all the ice in the world suddenly melted, and flowed into the sea, there isn't enough to make it go up all that very far. Most of the lowlands were flooded before our oldest cultures started keeping records. That would be China, India, Egypt. Sumeria, which apparently predated all of those, is long gone, and no one knows how to read what little history might remain.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday October 15 2018, @06:55PM
That's fair, a 10 metre sea level rise is a global flood, I'm arguing it's not the Biblical flood, based on the fact it's way too distant in time.
I had a quick look at the Wikipedia article on Sumer, and it appears that they didn't invent writing until ~3000 BC and that is listed as proto-writing. That would still place the post ice age flood something like 6,000 years before and I don't believe the stories would have lasted that long in any pre-literate culture.
I suspect the Biblical flood story is based on "Hey, remember that time it rained a lot? Dave's farm got flooded and everything".