Phantoms & Monsters: Pulse of the Paranormal: Daily 2 Cents: Strange Skull Uncovered -- Birthmarks and Reincarnation -- Rare White Raven Body Found

Strange Deformed Skull Uncovered In France

The skeleton of an ancient aristocratic woman whose head was warped into a deformed, pointy shape has been unearthed in a necropolis in France.

The necropolis, found in the Alsace region of France, contains 38 tombs that span more than 4,000 years, from the Stone Age to the Dark Ages.

Archaeologists first found the tombs in 2011 while doing a preliminary excavation of the area prior to the start of a big industrial building project. This year, Lefranc and his colleagues went back to do a more in-depth excavation.

They found that the tombs were well preserved by the limestone rock in which they were buried. One of the burials contained 20 tombs of men, women and children.

"The corpses are lying on their backs, with outstretched legs and heads turned westwards," Lefranc said.

The tombs, which date to between 4900 B.C. and 4750 B.C., also contained a few stone vases and tools, along with ornaments such as mother-of-pearl elbow bracelets and collars. The small group may have been a family from a Neolithic farming and animal-herding culture that lived in long houses and buried their dead in cemeteries, Lefranc said. Read more at Deformed, Pointy Skull from Dark Ages Unearthed in France

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Are birthmarks connected to reincarnation?

An old woman died in Thailand with the wish to reincarnate as a boy. Her daughter dipped a finger in white paste and marked the back of the woman’s neck with the paste.

Not long after the woman’s death, the daughter gave birth to a son with a white mark on the back of his neck that mirrored the white paste left on the woman’s neck. When the boy became old enough to talk, he would claim possession of things that belonged to his grandmother as though they’d always been his.

This is one of many cases recounted by Dr. Jim Tucker at the University of Virginia in which birthmarks seem to relate to past lives.

The late Dr. Ian Stevenson, whose work Tucker continues, investigated 210 cases of children with birthmarks or defects that related to memories they retained from past lives.

Stevenson obtained a post-mortem report in 49 cases. The wound and birthmark were within 10 square centimeters of each other on the body in 43 percent of these cases, and many were much closer to the same location.

In some cultures, people mark the deceased with soot or paste to recognize them when they are reborn.

Here are a few examples of birthmarks related to past life memories studied by Stevenson.

A boy born in India without fingers on his right hand remembered another life in which he was a boy who had his fingers amputated after sticking them in a fodder chopping machine.

A boy in Turkey with a malformed right ear remembered having been shot and killed at close range on that side of his head.

A boy named Maha Ram in India could remember being killed in a previous life with a shotgun fired at close range. He remembered enough details of his past life for Stevenson to find the autopsy report of the man supposedly reincarnated as Ram. The birthmarks on Ram’s chest corresponded to the bullet wounds.

Some anecdotal accounts of birthmarks from past lives that have not been verified are shared on a past life discussion blog post.

Karen Kubicko posted photos of herself in high school with a birthmark on her neck and a photo of herself later in life without the birthmark. She said she remembered in 2011 that in a previous life she was a woman named Helen who was hit by a stray bullet in the neck and died in 1927.

The mark was where the bullet had hit in her vision.

After she remembered this, the mark gradually disappeared.

Another person on the blog said she had a birthmark on the back of her leg. She remembered a past life in which a snake bit her there. A few years later, she realized the mark had faded away. She said the area is not often exposed, so light exposure or other such external elements are not to blame. - The Epoch Times

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Discovery of rare white raven spurs calls to preserve its body

The discovery of a white raven in Greenland has attracted widespread attention, along with calls for the now-deceased animal’s remains to be preserved in a Danish museum.

Greenland’s leading newspaper Sermitsiaq reported Nov. 13 that a rare white raven was shot and killed in the village of Ikerasaarsuk in western Greenland.

“Tulukkat qaqortippata,” a Greenlandic expression which means “when ravens turn white” is similar to the English expression “when pigs fly,” a metaphoric figure of speech that describes a virtual impossibility.

Knud Flensted with the Danish Ornithological Society called the discovery of the white bird “very interesting,” asking for the bird’s body to be handed over to the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources or Denmark’s zoological museum in Copenhagen.

“It would be a huge loss if the raven is thrown out or eaten, because it is so rare,” Flensted told Sermitsiaq. “We want to see it preserved.”

Flensted told the newspaper that the white raven is not actually considered an albino; if it were, the bird would be pure white with pink eyes.

The raven killed in Ikerasaarsuk is a creamy white colour with brownish feathers under the wings with red eyes, which Flensted referred to instead as “ino,” adding that most “ino” birds are almost always female.

Hans Japhet Filippussen discovered the white raven in Ikerasaarsuk Nov. 13.

It’s not clear why the man shot the bird, but Filippussen told Sermitsiaq that the animal’s body was being frozen while the community decides what to do with it.

Photos of the white raven posted to Nunatsiaq News’ Facebook page have elicited strong reactions.

Many criticized the decision to shoot the animal; others called it “white spirit bird” and said its presence signaled a spiritual or religious event, like the second coming of Christ. - nunatsiaqonline

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'Little Red Riding Hood' traced back 2,000 years

Most people would have heard of the fairy tale of “Little Red Riding Hood”. It is the story of a young girl who wears a cloak and hood made of red velvet, who goes wondering through the forest alone to deliver wine and cake to her grandmother.

When she arrives, she is greeted by a ‘Big Bad Wolf’ disguised as her grandmother who ends up devouring her in one gulp. Luckily a huntsman arrives and cuts open the wolf’s stomach, saving both the young girl and her grandmother. However, we all know that stories and tales can be altered with each telling, transforming over time to become something quite different. In this way, folktales evolve in much the same way as species, taking on new features and dropping others as they spread to different parts of the world.

A group of researchers in Britain have used this feature to trace back the evolutionary tree for Little Red Riding Hood. It may seem like quite a strange choice of research topic, but it was chosen for good reason. By tracing back the origins of the fairytale and studying the ways in which it branched off over time, researchers are able to show how humans migrated throughout history.

"This is rather like a biologist showing that humans and other apes share a common ancestor but have evolved into distinct species," Durham University anthropologist Jamie Tehrani explained. Read more at 'Little Red Riding Hood' traced back 2,000 years

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