Month: April 2010

Pictish rock art may have been language

Ancient, Treasures

Pictish stone with engraved symbolsIron Age Scots left behind a copious quantity of intricately engraved rocks. Until recently they were considered rock art or heraldic symbols, but University of Exeter professor Rob Lee has just published a study that shows Pictish carvings share some of the properties of written language.

Lee and his fellow researchers Philip Jonathan and Pauline Ziman applied a mathematical process called Shannon entropy to hundreds of the Pictish stones. Shannon entropy examines the order, direction and randomness engraving, which can then be compared to other languages.

The resulting data was compared with that for numerous written languages, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese texts and written Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Ancient Irish, Old Irish and Old Welsh. While the Pictish Stone engravings did not match any of these, they displayed characteristics of writing based on a spoken language.

Lee explained that writing comes in two basic forms: lexigraphic writing that is based on speech and semasiography, which is not based on speech.

“Lexigraphic writing contains symbols that represent parts of speech, such as words, or sounds like syllables or letters, and tends to be written in a linear or directional manner mimicking the flow of speech,” he said. “In semasiography, the symbols do not represent speech — such as the cartoon symbols used to show you how to build a flat pack piece of furniture — and generally do not come in a linear manner.”

Lee and his team haven’t deciphered any of the carvings yet. According to University of Toronto professor Paul Bouissac, an expert in symbology, we’ll need to find a Pictish Rosetta Stone before any putative Pictish script can be translated.

We do know that the Picts had a distinct spoken language of their own because the Venerable Bede mentions it in his early 8th c. book Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, but that doesn’t prove anything, of course, in regards to a written language.

Nine-year-old finds new hominid species

Ancient

Nine-year-old Matthew Berger, son of paleoanthropologist Lee R. Berger, literally stumbled on the skeletal remains of a new hominid species at the Malapa site in South Africa while his father was a hill and a half away looking for hominid bones.

Matthew was chasing after his dog when he tripped on a log and saw something poking out from under a rock. He called out to his father who could tell from feet away that that something was a hominid clavicle. It turned out to belong to a young boy just a few years older than Matthew.

Skull of Australopithecus sediba boy found in Malapa, South AfricaDr. Berger and his team excavated the area and found more of the boy’s skeleton, including his excellently-preserved skull, and the remains of 3 other hominids, including a female that may have been the boy’s mother.

In a report being published Friday in the journal Science, Dr. Berger, 44, and a team of scientists said the fossils from the boy and a woman were a surprising and distinctive mixture of primitive and advanced anatomy and thus qualified as a new species of hominid, the ancestors and other close relatives of humans. It has been named Australopithecus sediba.

The species sediba, which means fountain or wellspring in Sotho, strode upright on long legs, with human-shaped hips and pelvis, but still climbed through trees on apelike arms. It had the small teeth and more modern face of Homo, the genus that includes modern humans, but the relatively primitive feet and “tiny brain” of Australopithecus, Dr. Berger said.

Geologists estimated that the individuals lived 1.78 million to 1.95 million years ago, probably closer to the older date, when australopithecines and early species of Homo were contemporaries.

The bones were all found in a pit within 3 feet of each other. The pit was once part of a cave complex but the roof eroded over the millennia, so the team suspects that the group of hominids either fell into the cave or sought shelter there and couldn’t get out. Their remains do not seem to have been scavenged, so they must have died and been entombed fairly quickly.

There is already a great deal of debate in the scientific community about the classification of these hominids. Dr. Berger’s team thinks they’re descendants of Australopithecus africanus, possibly ancestors of Homo erectus, or a related side branch of hominid not in the direct line of modern human ancestry.

Scientists not involved in the research are debating whether the bones belong to the Homo or Australopithecus genus, but most agree that the discovery of the skeletons at the Malapa site here in the Cradle of Humankind, a World Heritage site where dolomitic limestone caves contain fossils of ancient animals and hominids, is a major advance in the early fossil history of hominids.

“They are a fascinating mosaic of features,” said Rick Potts, director of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian. “It reminds us of the combining and recombining of characteristics, the tinkering and experimentation, that go on in evolution.”

Scientists plan to hold a competition among South Africa’s children to find a colloquial name for the boy so people will feel as connected to him as they do to Lucy, the 3.2 million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis found in Ethiopia.

How to make history appeal to the gaming generation

Ex Cathedra, Modern(ish), Multimedia

Today’s Heritage Key bloggers challenge asks how we can utilize gaming technology as a learning tool for children without indulging in the sex and violence that characterize some of the more popular videogames. Is it possible to craft online virtual education which appeals to kids raised in the era of Grand Theft Auto while at the same time teaching them about history?

Short answer: yes. Long answer as follows. First I think it’s important that we unpack the assumption that sex and violence don’t belong in history teaching tools. History is replete with violence, sex and all manner of depraved intrigue, after all, so when we take it as a given that virtual education should be free of these elements, I think we do students a disservice. When we sanitize history, not only do we engage in willful deception, but we also drain it of much of its relatable humanity.

Granted, schools are notoriously twitchy about getting into the muck of things not least because parents can raise five kinds of hell about it, and no website that aspires to be educational wants to be blocked by content filters, so I wouldn’t suggest a child’s history game feature explicit sex or huge torrents of gore.

However, even Grand Theft Auto, which has become the unwitting poster child for over-the-top violence and sexually suggestive videogames, is fundamentally a mapping game with recent historical backdrops. It’s a sandbox game, so unlike linear formats that force you follow a trajectory pre-determined by the game designer, you can wander around without engaging any of the violent elements. Just pick a non-assassin, non-prostitute role and explore to your heart’s content.

I think GTA makes a better positive role model than cautionary tale for anyone seeking to create virtual historical worlds that appeal to people raised in the gamer era. Dig, if you will, the picture of an open world game set in Victorian London where you can be anyone from a chimney sweep to Jack the Ripper. Children would have every city landmark, every alley of coal-besmogged Whitechapel committed to memory within a week. How about the Tudor court? Or late Republican Rome? Or the Spanish Inquisition? Actual history is way, way juicier than Grand Theft Auto.

Rote memorization of dates and geography bores students to tears, but set up an historically accurate virtual world and give players a mission to fulfill and they’ll quaff the most arcane detail like sweetest ambrosia. That almost preternatural ability to absorb the properties of a gameworld has the potential to be an invaluable teaching tool.

Game designer Jane McGonical in this excellent TED speech about using MMORPGs to change the world points out that the average young person in game playing culture will have spent 10,000 hours gaming by age 21. With perfect attendance, a student will spend 10,080 hours from 5th grade to graduation.

That means what we’re talking about when we refer to the GTA generation is a group of people who voluntarily dedicate as much time to games as they are forced by law and/or parents to spend in school, and all those hours they are fully immersed in the game environment learning and retaining every possible nuance. So setting aside any value judgments about the quality of the learned material, which set of 10,000 hours is more productive? It’s not even a close call.

The question then becomes how do would-be educators tap into this parallel world of learning. Virtual online environments are a great way to explore cultural and historical landmarks that you can’t see in person, or which you couldn’t possibly explore in the kind of detail the virtual replica provides. They are not, however, gameworlds. There’s no complex puzzle to solve, no epic mission, no social fabric knit via collaboration, none of the elements that most engender what McGonical calls “blissful productivity,” the willingness to work hard at something deeply satisfying.

I R WINNARThis is where many of the games you encounter on history-themed sites fail. They tend to be afterthoughts, gadgets tacked on to content rather than fully realized gameplay environments. For example, the BBC website offers a companion game to their excellent A History of the World in 100 Objects radio series. It’s called Relic: Guardians of the Museum and the aim is to answer a multiple choice question about one of the objects in the series. If you get it right, you “unlock” the relic and return it the museum. Once you’ve unlocked them all you get (dramatic drumroll) a certificate. Please turn to your right to see my hard-won Guardian of the Museum certification.

This is not really a game so much as an open-book quiz you don’t even get graded on. I’m in no way knocking the BBC here. The series is great and the companion website marshals its readers to submit historical artifacts of their own to create a huge complex timeline of objects mundane and fantastical from all over the world. The object database is a fresh, interactive approach custom-coded to the BBC’s particular needs, but to me that only underscores the failure of game imagination that has given us Relic.

Starting with content and tacking on the shadow of something that can be mistaken for a game in the right light is backwards. To get the full advantage of the gamerbrain’s capacity to absorb knowledge, you have to do the opposite: craft a complex environment that is fleshed out with content.

Games like Making History, a World War II strategy game, are already used in classrooms. It’s not a first-person shooter like the hugely popular Call of Duty series (shooting at people in school, even fake people = not a good idea), but rather a kind of realistic CGI World War II version of Risk. Students play a country and cope with real life diplomatic and economic issues as well as military strategy.

It doesn’t sell as much as the first-person shooters — it’s a tad on the dry side — but they’ve created a legitimate gameworld that can be and is used as a teaching tool. Not that games which prominently feature historical backdrops don’t sell. Just to name a few, there’s the City Building Series, where you micromanage yourself an empire based on ancient Rome, Greece, Egypt and China, Sid Meier’s Pirates!, which embedded the map of the Caribbean in young men’s brains for 20 years, the Total War series, the Rome title of which even has a modification pack called Rome: Total Realism which corrects historical inaccuracies in the retail game, and Sid Meier’s apotheosis, the Civilization series.

Any educators seeking to entice the vast audience playing these games must realize that they are dealing with highly sophisticated gaming palates. There are no shortcuts to designing a quality game packed with challenge as well as content. This is a major challenge for any regular folk trying to create an appealing and instructive virtual history, I know. I certainly couldn’t do it, but there are people who can, and not necessarily people who cost huge gobs of cash either.

The companies that produce games with strong historical backdrops could convert them into teaching tools with a relatively small investment. All the hard and expensive development work — the creation of photorealistic historical environments like the Renaissance Florence of Assassin’s Creed II, for instance — has already been done, so add a few enthusiastic history and computer science graduate student interns to the research and development team and you could pack the existing game with historically accurate content and diverse missions at comparatively little cost. The smaller audience for educational games wouldn’t be an issue then, because the company is already making its money back from the retail game.

From a non-profit perspective, if Villanova’s Computer Science department can spend two years scanning the entire Sistine Chapel so we can explore every inch of it in extreme close-up on the Vatican website, then perhaps similar institutions and research organizations could be enlisted to design real games that enlist the full immersion capabilities of a richly detailed gameworld to educate as well as they stimulate.

WWI vet gets military honors 56 years after lynching

Modern(ish), Social policy

Isadore Banks was a World War I veteran and prosperous landowner from Marion, Arkansas. He was also black, so in June of 1954, a year before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in Montgomery, Alabama, somebody chained him to a tree, doused him in gasoline and set him on fire.

A pillar in the African-American community, Banks helped bring electricity to the town of Marion in the 1920s and became one of the wealthiest black landowners in a region with a long history of racial violence.

His killing had a profound effect. Many blacks left and never came back. For those who remained, the message was clear: If you were black and acquired wealth, you knew your place.

Blacks from all around would come to the killing site — to look at the oak sapling, to pray and to never forget. It seems most everyone in Crittenden County’s black community had a hunch who was responsible.

Nobody knows exactly why Banks was lynched. There are various theories: that people resented his wealth or his refusal to sell some of his property, that he was having an affair with a white woman, that he beat a white man who was dating his daughter.

Whatever the reason, Banks knew people were after him. He hid in a friend’s attic at one time, where a mob of white people came after him but couldn’t find him.

Reward posterHe disappeared on June 4th, 1954. The local black community offered a $1,000 reward for information leading to a conviction but nobody claimed it. Isadore Banks’ body was found on June 26th, burned beyond recognition, next to a canister of gasoline 50 yards from his truck. They identified him by his shoes.

Although there are still people alive who remember the murder and rumored suspects, Banks’ brutal lynching is one of the the oldest unsolved Civil Rights cases in the country. The FBI is still pursuing the investigation as part of its Civil Rights Cold Case Initiative, but unfortunately, the case file itself was destroyed in 1992 as required by the Records Retention and Disposition policy of the National Archives and Records Administration.

Now, 90 years after he served his country in World War I and 56 years after he was lynched, the U.S. Army has given Banks his long-delayed military honors. Banks’ granddaughter Marcelina Williams found his military records and worked with the Army to make it happen.

Military honors for Isadore Banks

Oldest known man-made structure found in Greece

Ancient

Theopetra paleolithic wallIt’s a stone wall built at the entrance to Theopetra cave near Kalambaka, Greece, and it’s a whopping 23,000 years old.

The wall — which is basically an intentional pile of stones — blocks 2/3rds of the cave mouth. It was built during the coldest period of the most recent ice age, so its builders were probably trying to keep the cold winds out of their cave dwelling.

“An optical dating test, known as Optically Stimulated Luminescence, was applied on quartz grains nested within the stones. We dated four different samples from the sediment and soil materials, and all provided identical dates,” Nikolaos Zacharias, director of the laboratory of archaeometry at the University of Peloponnese, told Discovery News.

Archaeologists have been excavating Theopetra cave for 25 years now, and have found a large number of material remains ranging in age from 50,000 to 5,000 years old. The remains suggest that the cave was continually inhabited for 45,000 years.

They’ve found the remains of multiple fires, flint and quartz tools, pottery, jewelry made from the teeth of early elk, animal bones and barley, wheat and lentils both wild and cultivated, suggesting that the people who lived in that cave went from foraging to farming over the millennia.

Theopetra is the only site in Greece that show continuous use through the upper and middle Paleolithic Age, the Mesolithic and Neolithic eras.

Human footprints have been found, one barefoot, three covered, in the deeper layers of the cave. Carbon-14 dating of fire remains at that cave level indicate those footprints were made around 45,000 B.C. In mainland Europe Neanderthal remains date to that time, so it’s possible that this cave has not only seen Homo Sapiens Sapiens shift from hunter-gathering to agriculture, but also humanity itself shift from one species to another.