Fruitful weekend

Well, the title might be slightly misleading. Neither did I have a weekend break (here in Asturies our few low cost flying options mainly mean losing a full day each way), nor an intense social life, nor a "sex, fruit juices and punk" weekend... I just happened to watch some great documentaries!

• Ice Age Columbus, who were the first Americans touches the topic of when and from where did the first Homo Sapines reach America. The most commonly accepted theory says that Sapiens got to America from Asia, crossing the Bering Strait (that at that time was not a strait, but a mass land called Beringia) about 20000 years ago, this is the Clovis First theory. This Docudrama (not sure if this classification is correct, it's one of those documentaries that uses actors and uses a fictitious story to help represent a feasible reality) tells us a different story that has been gaining supporters in the last years, the Solutrean Hypothesis. In short, this theory says that it were people from Southern France or the Cantabrian Coast (hey, those could be my ancestors!) who first reached North America, using the Ice bridge that at that time joined Southern France with North America. In this Ice Age period the sea level was rather lower than now, so good part of the places where these people could settle are covered by the sea at the present time and we can't search for traces of their presence there. Anyway, some traces have been found, like the fluted stone tool found in Cactus Hill.
  Rather interesting to whet your appetite and do some more investigation.



• Quest for Noah's flood by National Geographic is another interesting one. It tells us how the ancient flood story that is common to many world cultures (Noah's flood for Christians) could be based on real facts that happened 7000 years ago in what we now call Black Sea. Another interesting thing I learned from the documentary is that most of its water volume is anoxic and lifeless (over 90% of the deeper Black Sea volume is anoxic water). The Black Sea happens to be the world’s largest meromictic basin. Well, they don't mention this word in the documentary and I hadn't read it before until I read the wikipedia article, but it's the name for a phenomenon that I already knew, but I mainly related to lakes, when the upper and lower water layers do never intermix. In Volcanic lakes this can make the lower layer to accumulate CO2 and in the end it could lead to a catastrophe (like the one in Lake Nyos). There are some documentaries dealing with this topic, like "Naked Science: Killer Lakes" and "MegaDisasters: Methane Explosion".



• The third documentary of the weekend was this one about current Israeli society (unfortunately it's only in Spanish). This is not one of those constant reminders of how good the Palestinians are and how evil the Israelis are... you know, that proislamic retoric so popular among many westerns (from neonazi scum to extreme left)... frankly I'm more interested in how the normal people in Israel (secular, moderate Jewish, moderate Muslims...) live, trying to survive between crazy fundamentalist Jewish and crazy fundamentalist Muslims. This documentary deals a bit with that, the good things of Israel:
  the ideas underlying the first Kibbutzs, the incredible scientific development, the normal status of the gay population...
  and the bad ones: the discrimination that those Palestinians living in Israel and contributing to the normal work of the society still have to suffer, the disgusting orthodox Jews, the Jewish settlements beyond the acceptable borders...