Month: May 2010

The Neanderthal in you

Ancient, Multimedia

A team of biologists decoding the Neanderthal genome have discovered that much to most everyone’s surprise that many people alive today have Neanderthals in their family tree. From one to four percent of Eurasian human genome seems to have come from Neanderthals.

Scientists, led by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have mapped about 60% of the Neanderthal genome using fragments of DNA found in fossil bones. They compared that genome to DNA from modern humans around the world and found that there is that smattering of Neanderthal ancestry in non-African populations.

A degree of interbreeding between modern humans and Neanderthals in Europe would not be greatly surprising given that the species overlapped there from 44,000 years ago when modern humans first entered Europe to 30,000 years ago when the last Neanderthals fell extinct. Archaeologists have been debating for years whether the fossil record shows evidence of individuals with mixed features.

But the new analysis, which is based solely on genetics and statistical calculations, is more difficult to match with the archaeological record. The Leipzig scientists assert that the interbreeding did not occur in Europe but in the Middle East and at a much earlier period, some 100,000 to 60,000 years ago, before the modern human populations of Europe and East Asia split. There is much less archaeological evidence for an overlap between modern humans and Neanderthals at this time and place.

Since the statistical model the team uses to interpret the genome data is complicated and hard for non-geneticists to follow, archaeologists are a bit out in the cold on this issue. Until there is some solid archaeological evidence to support the genome findings, skepticism will remain rampant. The genome mapping isn’t over, so new data is coming in all the time. This isn’t the last word on our Neanderthal roots from a biological standpoint either.

Meanwhile, the Smithsonian Institution has taken the news and run with it in a thoroughly entertaining fashion. They’ve created an app for iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and Android that takes a picture of you and Neanderthalizes it up. It’s called MEanderthal. You can also see yourself as a Homo floresiensis (living 95,000 – 17,000 years ago) or Homo heidelbergensis (living 700,000 – 200,000 years ago).

The Smithsonian got the idea from their very popular morphing station which does pretty much the same thing in person as the app does remotely. Paleo-artist John Gurche used fossils of early humans to design templates that are then customized with your info. Here’s a YouTube of the app in action:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/P-fyqQSKpGY&w=430]

Last WWI flamethrower may be found in France

Modern(ish), Social policy

The British produced only four top-secret Livens Large Gallery Flame Projectors to deploy at the Battle of the Somme. They were huge, complex flamethrowers that shot a 300-foot flame across the German lines. The aim wasn’t to kill so much as terrorize, to chase the enemy away from the front line and clear some space for the British troops to occupy German positions. It almost worked.

Two of the four were destroyed under German shelling before the battle began, but on July 1, 1916, the first day of the Somme, the two remaining flamethrowers were deployed and did what they were expected to do: scare the crap out of the German front line troops allowing the British to move in on the German trenches in the area with comparatively few losses.

Obviously that small initial advantage didn’t make much of a difference in the long term. The weapons were so absurdly oversized that they were hardly portable, and even if they could have been moved easily they could only be used for three 10-second blasts each.

To the men who operated them, the 56ft long, 2.5 tonne machines were called “Squirts”, and “Judgements”, by more senior officers. […]

They were operated by a crew of eight men from the Royal Engines Special Brigade – “Z” company – but took 300 men to assemble them underground, each component part being taken into the shallow tunnels, known as “Russian Saps”, in sequence. The devices then had to be filled with oil, taken underground in hundreds of cans.

The strange-looking, tubular weapons were only 14 inches wide and worked like a large syringe. A piston was pushed by compressed gas into a long chamber containing the fuel. This was then forced out through the nozzle on the surface, from where the jet of flame was projected.

Despite their limited but notable success on the battlefield and the incredible drama of their deployment, these weapons remained very little known. Now a team of archaeologists and historians believe they’ve located the remains of the last Livens Large Gallery Flame Projector under the mud of Montagne de Cappy in northern France.

The device was noted in a war diary as “lost beyond recall” on June 28th after the tunnel it was in collapsed under German shelling. The team studied the war diaries, private diaries, trench maps, other primary sources to narrow down its possible location, plus ground penetrating radar found evidence of metallic objects which could be the Livens projector. Of course, it could also be any number of other World War I ordnance, so when they dig in the area next week, they’re going to have to be extra careful.

If it does turn out to be the flamethrower, this would be the only one left in the world. The British only deployed one more in 1917 in Belgium. They did give a few to the Russians, but those are long gone in the chaos of revolution.

The Livens Large Gallery Flame Projector in action

Possible Raphael found in storage near Modena

Renaissance, Treasures

Possible Rafael in its gilded 17th century frameMario Scalini, state supervisor of fine arts for Modena and Reggio Emilia, was doing inventory of the tens of thousands of art pieces in storage in his area when he found a small portrait of a lady framed by a beautifully elaborate gilded 17th century frame in the vault of the ducal palace of the Este family in Sassuolo, outside of Modena.

He immediately noted the high quality of the painting. The piece was thought to be an 18th century copy of the head of the Madonna in Rafael’s famous Holy Family of the Pearl now in the Prado museum, so Scalini found its exceptional quality incongruous. Also, why would a mere 12 by 16-inch copy be put in such a large, sumptuous frame?

Big picture of the possible Rafael MadonnaHe followed up on his hunch that this might be an actual Raphael by digging through the ducal archives for any reference to the portrait. He found nothing about a copy, but he did find an inventory reference from 1663 to a “portrait of a woman” by Raphael. There is no record of the Raphael portrait currently in the collection, nor was there any trace of it having been ceded to the Elector of Saxony in 1746 when Francesco III d’Este had to sell many of the most valuable pictures after he was bankrupted by the Wars of the Spanish, Polish, and Austrian Successions. There was no record of it being loaned or dispersed at any other time either, so it seems the Rafael was squirreled away somewhere and forgotten, maybe to be mistaken for a copy decades later.

The art official sent the 12 by 16 inch (30 centimeter by 40 centimeter) work to a laboratory in Florence, where one of the experts who ran scientific tests on the painting, Anna Pelagotti, said infrared testing revealed three layers underneath, including a preparatory design.

“It was a beautiful sensation, our mouths dropped open,” said Pelagotti, describing the reaction she and her fellow experts had when the saw the sketch. “It looked more Raphael” than one could imagine, Pelagotti marveled, adding, “you could see his hand” in the finely detailed sketch.

The testing also indicated two restorations done in the 17th and 19th centuries. Obviously that means it can’t be an 18th century copy, and it also means the original was highly esteemed, enough to make it worth restoring over the centuries.

'Holy Family la Perla' by Raphael and his pupil, Giulio RomanoScalini doesn’t want any paint samples taken for testing because he doesn’t want the small piece damaged in any way, so the next step is to ask the Prado if they’ll loan him the Holy Family for comparison purposes.

The Holy Family is known as “La Perla” because King Philip IV of Spain considered it the pearl of his art collection. Raphael did a sketch of the painting before he died, but left it to his pupil Giulio Romano to finish. If the Modena portrait is authenticated as done by the master himself, then the sketch and the portrait is all we’ll have in his hand of the Holy Family.

The final word will have to come from art historians examining both pieces with expert eyes, but for now, all signs to point to this portrait being one of Raphael’s last paintings, the original Madonna of one of his greatest masterpieces.

Maya had plumbing long before Spanish invaded

Ancient

Penn State researchers Kirk French and Christopher Duffy have located an engineered water pressure system in the ancient Maya city of Palenque that dates back far before the Spanish invasion.

Similar systems were used in ancient European civilizations — Minoan Crete had one in the palace in 1400 B.C. — but before now, no pre-Spanish versions had been found in Latin America, so the conventional wisdom was that there were none until the Spaniards brought them to the continent. The Palenque system, however, was constructed and operating during the peak Classic Maya period, some time between 250-600 A.D. The Spanish conquest of Yucatán took place more than a thousand years after that, between 1527 and 1546. Palenque was abandoned in 800 A.D.

Kirk French first came across the aqueduct and tunnel structure in 1998 when he was but a wee graduate student helping map the city’s ruins, but the significance wasn’t apparent to him or his team at the time. They already knew that the Maya expanded the habitable area in Palenque by using aqueducts to divert the many streams in the area and contain rainy season flooding. It wasn’t until French joined the faculty at Penn State University, put his head together with hydrologist Christopher Duffy and they returned together to the Palenque tunnels that they realized what a revolutionary find he had made.

Piedras Bolas Aqueduct, Palenque, MexicoThe pressurized water feature is called Piedras Bolas Aqueduct, a spring-fed channel on steep terrain.

From the tunnel’s entrance to its outlet 200 feet downhill, the elevation drops about 20 feet and its diameter decreases from 10 feet near the spring to about a half a foot where the water emerges. [See the red arrow in the picture right.]

This combination of a downhill flow and sudden channel restriction pressurized the water, shooting it from the opening to an estimated height of 20 feet.

The effect is like putting your finger over the end of a hose: the smaller the opening, the further the stream of water will spray.

Another system like it was found in Palenque palace. There are no remains left at the business end of the aqueduct, however, so archaeologists aren’t quite sure how it was used. It might have just fed a fountain, or it might have raised water to residential neighborhoods for waste disposal.

French thinks a fountain is the most likely use, a display of wealth and power for the ruling elite, basically.

Ancient rock paintings found on ‘stone goat’ in China

Ancient, Treasures

An archaeologist and a team of students have found 1,000 ancient rock carvings and paintings in Yangce Town, in east-central China’s Henan province. The team spent a week exploring a 5 kilometer area between villages and encountered a variety of different pictographs.

[Archaeologist Ma Baoguang] told reporters that he was deeply impressed by a large cambered stone which is 8 meters long and 3.7 meters wide. There are more than 500 small craters of different sizes on the surface of the stone and several relatively larger craters that are 13 to 20 centimeters in diameter and three to seven centimeters in depth. These craters are connected by various lines, forming a very large ancient diagram….

Ma thinks the craters and lines are maps of the Yellow and Luo rivers. What makes them particularly notable is that they are drawn and carved on a stone goat, an ancient animal sculpture. They’re very rare on their own, so to find one with intricate ancient designs on its neck and back is unique. No other similar rock paintings have been found on a stone goat.

The find has not been dated, so far as I can tell.

Ma Baoguang with rock paintings on stone goat

P.S. – Stone Goat should be a band name. Stoned Goat if it’s reggae.