CT scans suggest the Iceman may have shattered his eye in a fall after he was wounded by an arrow.
A sharp incision in his right eye may have contributed to the rapid demise of Ötzi the Iceman, the famous mummy who died in the Italian Alps more than 5,000 years ago.
Twenty years after two hikers stumbled upon the Iceman in a melting glacier, new analyses have revealed that a deep cut likely led to heavy bleeding in the man's eye. In the cold, high-altitude conditions where he was found, that kind of injury would have been tough to recover from.
The official opinion remains that an arrow in his left shoulder was the cause of death for Ötzi. But the new study raises the possibility -- for some, at least -- that he fell over after being shot by an arrow. And, at higher than 10,000 feet in elevation, his alpine fall may have made the situation much worse.
"Maybe he fell down or maybe he had a fight up there, nobody knows," said Wolfgang Recheis, a physicist in the radiology department at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. "With this cut alone, at 3,250 meters, it would have been a deadly wound up there. Bleeding to death in the late afternoon when it was getting cold up there, this could be really dangerous."
Ever since his discovery in 1991, Ötzi has been measured, photographed, X-rayed, CT-scanned and endlessly speculated about. The Iceman Photoscan website allows anyone to scrutinize every inch of the body, which belonged to a 5'3", 110-pound, 45-year old man.
Ten years ago, researchers found a flint arrowhead buried in Ötzi's left shoulder blade inside a two-centimeter (0.8-inch) wide hole. They concluded that the arrow pierced a major artery and killed him within minutes. At a conference in September, experts reaffirmed that assessment.
But in one of the latest studies, Recheis used the most advanced CT-scanning technology available to take a closer look at Ötzi's right eye. Earlier examinations had shown a crack in the skull in that spot. The new work revealed a deep incision in the same place.
Scans also revealed iron crystals around the right eye and forehead, which produce a bluish hue. And since the region's rocks are naturally low in iron, Recheis and colleagues suspect the iron is a sign of a hematoma, or massive bleeding outside of the blood vessels. A biopsy is needed for confirmation.
Despite the officially stated opinion on Ötzi's cause of death, Recheis is not convinced that the arrow wound was deadly on its own.
"My South Tyrolean colleagues say the arrow most probably hit the sub-clavicular artery or other vital vessel and thus the Iceman died," Recheis said. "But there are doubts. It's justified that the arrow did not hit any vital vessels or nerves as far as we can say from the data we have."
"This could be the first thing," he added. "He was up there and shot by an arrow. And then he fell down, cut his eye and bled to death."
Albert Zink, head of the EURAC Institute for Mummies and the Iceman in Bolzano, Italy, was surprised and perplexed to hear of these new claims. At a conference this fall, he said, a whole table-full of experts discussed the evidence and unanimously agreed that the arrow killed the Iceman.
The shoulder wound, he said, was clearly fresh and bleeding heavily when Ötzi died.
"It is impossible that he walked around or that this was an old injury because this was a very severe injury," Zink said. "If you don't have the possibility to do surgery, you cannot survive from this for longer than 10 or 15 minutes."
The eye injury could have happened from a fall after Ötzi was shot or from a blow to the head by his attacker. But whatever the cause, Zink is sure that it was secondary to the arrow strike.
"It's true that there might be new evidence that there was a little crack in the skin, so maybe he was bleeding from skull trauma," he added. "But it doesn't change anything in the end."
According to some news reports, the new findings could support a theory that Ötzi was the victim of a mountaineering accident. Both Recheis and Zink agreed that this was unlikely. Based on his muscle strength and patterns of joint degeneration, the Iceman was a fit and experienced climber. And he was near an easy path when he died.
______________
References:
Sohn, Emily. 2011. "Ice Mummy May Have Smashed Eye in Fall". Discovery News. Posted: November 21, 2011. Available online: http://news.discovery.com/history/iceman-oetzi-eye-injury-111121.html
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
The cool twists of language
Guardian letter writers have been enjoying dissecting the word 'cool' – it may have had a surprising path to its modern meaning
The Oxford philosopher JL Austin once observed in a lecture that in English a double negative implied a positive meaning, whereas no language had been found in which a double positive implied a negative meaning. Another philosopher who was in the audience that day made a very simple counterclaim just by saying "yeah, yeah".
Over time words and expressions change in sound, in spelling and in use, sometimes at a snail's pace and sometimes almost overnight – as contributors to the Guardian's letters page have recently reminded us with reference to "cool". A change in meaning may follow a comprehensible if always tortuous path (from the coarse cloth, or bure, on the tables of medieval clerks to the modern bureaucrat, for example), or it may switch at a stroke into its opposite. Rien, the French word for "nothing", for example, is derived from the Latin rem, which means "something" (in the accusative case). By what path can a word get from meaning "something" to meaning "nothing"? It's like asking how anything can be "hot" and "cool" at the same time. Obviously, they can be – especially if you don't even know whether the jazz throbbing through the speakers is hot, cool, or just loud.
In Chekhov's short story Agafya, two rather disreputable fellows offer a girl a glass of vodka. She replies with a colloquial expression – Выдумал! – that means something like "Where did you get the idea [that I drink vodka]?" or "What put that idea into your head?" or "Don't insult me!" A thoughtful professional American translator of Chekhov expresses the force of the girl's response by "Oh! Please!" To my British ear, however, "Oh! Please!" is not a negative but an extremely positive expression. I can hear the young woman clapping her hands and springing to her feet to say in a squeaky treble, ooopleeeez! But for my American colleague, "oh please" is pronounced with an intercalated aspirated schwa between the first two consonants – p-h-er-leez – and for her it is a put-down, a wrist-slap, a no-no. The English word "please" means "yes" – and it means "no".
It's not enough to say that's just a difference between British and American English. Speakers of British English know that "Oh please" if said with the extra half-syllable between the p and l is a negative expression, just as Americans know that "Oh please" said with a rising intonation is a positive. When written down, the words oh please mean anything you want them to mean in the imaginary linguistic context your mind supplies. Same in French, as a matter of fact: merci means "thank you" and it also means "no thank you", depending on how you say it, in what circumstances, and to whom.
Most philosophers do not like expressions that mean one thing and its opposite. Aristotle came up with the law of excluded middle to get rid of them: "For any proposition, either that proposition is true, or its negation is." Yet ordinary language users are addicted to using and inventing expressions that mean one thing or its opposite depending on who's listening. Taboo words are almost always capable of reversing their meaning – they can be used for purposes that are diametrically opposed. Shit! may express strong disapproval in many circumstances, but among the right crowd it may equally well be used by the same speaker to express delight and surprise.
"Cool" probably didn't come to mean stylish, swish, glamorous or desirable by the same kind of forking path that makes please and shit into bipolar expressions. As an antonym of "hot" it probably had the power to mean "not angry", "not hurried" and all sorts of more desirable attributes than those that are normally associated with heat. It may well be that the first "cool" was nonchaloir, an Old French expression meaning "non-heat" (from the obsolete verb chaloir, "to be hot"). Given the muddled history of words moving from French to English and back again, "cool" – as in a "cool customer", "as cool as a cucumber" – might have started out as a translation of nonchalant into the local lingo. As we British do admire restraint in outward behaviour, it's no surprise that a nonchalant gentilhomme – a real cool gent – was one to be imitated and admired, and that coolness became associated with stylish and fashionable things.
Of course this is all speculation, as are most forms of word history. But just as languages constantly change and switch things around, so too are they surprisingly conservative, and what often seems most modern and trendy turns out to be a reminiscence or a revival of some forgotten form in the language of yore. It's possible that the present vast spread of "cool" in our own language (and far beyond, not just back into French baba-cool, but into Chinese 酷 kù as well) wouldn't have arisen without cool jazz; but it's just as likely that had jazz never been invented the idea that there's something stylish about not being hot (bothered, angry, puce…) would have given "cool" many of the meanings it now has.
In Tallinn and Tartu, however, what's really kool is school. No wonder Estonians are so high up the league tables.
____________
References:
Bellos, David. 2011. "The cool twists of language". The Guardian. Posted: November 21, 2011. Available online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/21/cool-language-guardian-letter-writers
The Oxford philosopher JL Austin once observed in a lecture that in English a double negative implied a positive meaning, whereas no language had been found in which a double positive implied a negative meaning. Another philosopher who was in the audience that day made a very simple counterclaim just by saying "yeah, yeah".
Over time words and expressions change in sound, in spelling and in use, sometimes at a snail's pace and sometimes almost overnight – as contributors to the Guardian's letters page have recently reminded us with reference to "cool". A change in meaning may follow a comprehensible if always tortuous path (from the coarse cloth, or bure, on the tables of medieval clerks to the modern bureaucrat, for example), or it may switch at a stroke into its opposite. Rien, the French word for "nothing", for example, is derived from the Latin rem, which means "something" (in the accusative case). By what path can a word get from meaning "something" to meaning "nothing"? It's like asking how anything can be "hot" and "cool" at the same time. Obviously, they can be – especially if you don't even know whether the jazz throbbing through the speakers is hot, cool, or just loud.
In Chekhov's short story Agafya, two rather disreputable fellows offer a girl a glass of vodka. She replies with a colloquial expression – Выдумал! – that means something like "Where did you get the idea [that I drink vodka]?" or "What put that idea into your head?" or "Don't insult me!" A thoughtful professional American translator of Chekhov expresses the force of the girl's response by "Oh! Please!" To my British ear, however, "Oh! Please!" is not a negative but an extremely positive expression. I can hear the young woman clapping her hands and springing to her feet to say in a squeaky treble, ooopleeeez! But for my American colleague, "oh please" is pronounced with an intercalated aspirated schwa between the first two consonants – p-h-er-leez – and for her it is a put-down, a wrist-slap, a no-no. The English word "please" means "yes" – and it means "no".
It's not enough to say that's just a difference between British and American English. Speakers of British English know that "Oh please" if said with the extra half-syllable between the p and l is a negative expression, just as Americans know that "Oh please" said with a rising intonation is a positive. When written down, the words oh please mean anything you want them to mean in the imaginary linguistic context your mind supplies. Same in French, as a matter of fact: merci means "thank you" and it also means "no thank you", depending on how you say it, in what circumstances, and to whom.
Most philosophers do not like expressions that mean one thing and its opposite. Aristotle came up with the law of excluded middle to get rid of them: "For any proposition, either that proposition is true, or its negation is." Yet ordinary language users are addicted to using and inventing expressions that mean one thing or its opposite depending on who's listening. Taboo words are almost always capable of reversing their meaning – they can be used for purposes that are diametrically opposed. Shit! may express strong disapproval in many circumstances, but among the right crowd it may equally well be used by the same speaker to express delight and surprise.
"Cool" probably didn't come to mean stylish, swish, glamorous or desirable by the same kind of forking path that makes please and shit into bipolar expressions. As an antonym of "hot" it probably had the power to mean "not angry", "not hurried" and all sorts of more desirable attributes than those that are normally associated with heat. It may well be that the first "cool" was nonchaloir, an Old French expression meaning "non-heat" (from the obsolete verb chaloir, "to be hot"). Given the muddled history of words moving from French to English and back again, "cool" – as in a "cool customer", "as cool as a cucumber" – might have started out as a translation of nonchalant into the local lingo. As we British do admire restraint in outward behaviour, it's no surprise that a nonchalant gentilhomme – a real cool gent – was one to be imitated and admired, and that coolness became associated with stylish and fashionable things.
Of course this is all speculation, as are most forms of word history. But just as languages constantly change and switch things around, so too are they surprisingly conservative, and what often seems most modern and trendy turns out to be a reminiscence or a revival of some forgotten form in the language of yore. It's possible that the present vast spread of "cool" in our own language (and far beyond, not just back into French baba-cool, but into Chinese 酷 kù as well) wouldn't have arisen without cool jazz; but it's just as likely that had jazz never been invented the idea that there's something stylish about not being hot (bothered, angry, puce…) would have given "cool" many of the meanings it now has.
In Tallinn and Tartu, however, what's really kool is school. No wonder Estonians are so high up the league tables.
____________
References:
Bellos, David. 2011. "The cool twists of language". The Guardian. Posted: November 21, 2011. Available online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/21/cool-language-guardian-letter-writers
Monday, December 5, 2011
Human, artificial intelligence join forces to pinpoint fossil locations
WUSTL paleoanthropologist, colleagues develop artificial neural network model to predict location of fossil sites
In 1991, a team led by Washington University in St. Louis paleoanthropologist Glenn Conroy, PhD, discovered the fossils of the first — and still the only — known pre-human ape ever found south of the equator in Africa after only 30 minutes of searching a limestone cave in Namibia.
Traditionally, fossil-hunters often could only make educated guesses as to where fossils lie. The rest lay with chance — finding the proverbial needle in a haystack.
"I don't want to say it's total luck," says Conroy, professor of physical anthropology in Arts & Sciences, "but it's a combination of hard work, meticulous planning and, well, a good dose of luck."
But thanks to a software model used by Conroy and researchers at Western Michigan University, fossil-hunters' reliance on luck when finding fossils may be diminishing.
Using artificial neural networks (ANNs) — computer networks that imitate the workings of the human brain — Conroy and colleagues Robert Anemone, PhD, and Charles Emerson, PhD, developed a computer model that can pinpoint productive fossil sites in the Great Divide Basin, a 4,000-square-mile stretch of rocky desert in Wyoming.
The basin has proved to be a productive area for fossil hunters, yielding 50 million- to 70 million-year-old early mammal fossils.
The software builds on satellite imagery and maps fossil-hunters have used for years to locate the best fossil sites. It just takes the process a step further, Conroy says.
With information gathered from maps and satellite imagery — such as elevation, slope, terrain and many other landscape features — the ANN was "trained" to use details of existing fossiliferous areas to accurately predict the locations of other fossil sites elsewhere in the Great Divide Basin.
Because few sites are 100 percent identical, researchers had to "teach" the ANNs to recognize sites that shared key features in common. With the help of guidance from the scientists, the ANNs use pattern recognition to identify sites that share similar features.
"The beauty and power of neural networks lie in the fact that they are capable of learning," says Conroy, also a professor of anatomy and neurobiology at the School of Medicine. "You just need to give them a rule to deal with things they don't know."
Conroy and colleagues tested the software at the Great Divide Basin last summer. The ANNs correctly identified 79 percent of the area's known fossil sites, and 99 percent of the sites it tagged contained fossils.
Next up, the scientists tested the software on the nearby Bison Basin, also in Wyoming. Despite having been taught to recognize fossil sites at a neighboring location (the Great Divide Basin), the ANNs correctly identified four fossil sites in the Bison Basin.
"That gave us encouragement that a blind test based on a neural network for a different basin still gave us pretty good predictive results," Conroy says.
Next, Conroy is planning to continue to use the software to search for early hominid fossil sites in South Africa.
The scientists hope this new application of existing technology will help increase the efficiency of paleontological fieldwork.
"In the old days, we'd all bring different maps, and start walking," Conroy says. "Now, we're talking about ways to improve one's chances."
__________
References:
EurekAlert. 2011. "Human, artificial intelligence join forces to pinpoint fossil locations". EurekAlert. Posted: November 21, 2011. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-11/wuis-hai112111.php
In 1991, a team led by Washington University in St. Louis paleoanthropologist Glenn Conroy, PhD, discovered the fossils of the first — and still the only — known pre-human ape ever found south of the equator in Africa after only 30 minutes of searching a limestone cave in Namibia.
Traditionally, fossil-hunters often could only make educated guesses as to where fossils lie. The rest lay with chance — finding the proverbial needle in a haystack.
"I don't want to say it's total luck," says Conroy, professor of physical anthropology in Arts & Sciences, "but it's a combination of hard work, meticulous planning and, well, a good dose of luck."
But thanks to a software model used by Conroy and researchers at Western Michigan University, fossil-hunters' reliance on luck when finding fossils may be diminishing.
Using artificial neural networks (ANNs) — computer networks that imitate the workings of the human brain — Conroy and colleagues Robert Anemone, PhD, and Charles Emerson, PhD, developed a computer model that can pinpoint productive fossil sites in the Great Divide Basin, a 4,000-square-mile stretch of rocky desert in Wyoming.
The basin has proved to be a productive area for fossil hunters, yielding 50 million- to 70 million-year-old early mammal fossils.
The software builds on satellite imagery and maps fossil-hunters have used for years to locate the best fossil sites. It just takes the process a step further, Conroy says.
With information gathered from maps and satellite imagery — such as elevation, slope, terrain and many other landscape features — the ANN was "trained" to use details of existing fossiliferous areas to accurately predict the locations of other fossil sites elsewhere in the Great Divide Basin.
Because few sites are 100 percent identical, researchers had to "teach" the ANNs to recognize sites that shared key features in common. With the help of guidance from the scientists, the ANNs use pattern recognition to identify sites that share similar features.
"The beauty and power of neural networks lie in the fact that they are capable of learning," says Conroy, also a professor of anatomy and neurobiology at the School of Medicine. "You just need to give them a rule to deal with things they don't know."
Conroy and colleagues tested the software at the Great Divide Basin last summer. The ANNs correctly identified 79 percent of the area's known fossil sites, and 99 percent of the sites it tagged contained fossils.
Next up, the scientists tested the software on the nearby Bison Basin, also in Wyoming. Despite having been taught to recognize fossil sites at a neighboring location (the Great Divide Basin), the ANNs correctly identified four fossil sites in the Bison Basin.
"That gave us encouragement that a blind test based on a neural network for a different basin still gave us pretty good predictive results," Conroy says.
Next, Conroy is planning to continue to use the software to search for early hominid fossil sites in South Africa.
The scientists hope this new application of existing technology will help increase the efficiency of paleontological fieldwork.
"In the old days, we'd all bring different maps, and start walking," Conroy says. "Now, we're talking about ways to improve one's chances."
__________
References:
EurekAlert. 2011. "Human, artificial intelligence join forces to pinpoint fossil locations". EurekAlert. Posted: November 21, 2011. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-11/wuis-hai112111.php
Sunday, December 4, 2011
UCSB scholar's reading of hieroglyphic verb alters understanding of Mayan ritual texts
By presenting a new interpretation of a Maya hieroglyphic verb, Gerardo Aldana, associate professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at UC Santa Barbara, has revised the understanding of one of the longest-studied texts in Maya archaeology. Aldana's research appears in his new book, "Tying Headbands or Venus Appearing: New Translations of k'al, the Dresden Codex Venus Pages and Classic Period Royal 'Binding' Rituals" (Archaeopress, 2011).
According to Aldana, at the end of the 19th century, the German philologist Ernst Förstemann discovered the basis of the modern interpretation of a Venus table in the 13th-century Maya manuscript known as the Dresden Codex. The six-page Venus table is an almanac dedicated to tracking the observable phases of the planet Venus. Förstemann's interpretation laid the groundwork for academic and popular 20th-century characterizations of the Maya as "obsessed" with astronomy and time. While scholars have added to his interpretation over the next 100 years, all have followed the basic model resulting from his work.
In his new book, Aldana shows that "k'al," the main verb referring to Venus events in the Dresden Codex, has been misread. He argues that the verb refers to an "enclosing" of time and space, such as that found throughout the Postclassic Mesoamerican ritual activity. "The key to my argument is that previously recognized records are pictorial, graphically representing the 'cosmogram' that ties space and time together," Aldana said. "But I show that the Dresden Codex Venus Table records the same concept in hieroglyphic text –– the idea is the same in both cases, but represented by an image in the Aztec convention, and by hieroglyphic text according to Mayan sensibilities."
The new hieroglyphic reading is accompanied by a revision of the mathematics of the Venus Table, also departing from the 70-year-old tradition in the field, Aldana said. "Overall, the result shows a much greater coherence to Postclassic religion throughout Mesoamerica," he explained. "And while contact between the regions has never been in question –– the Venus pages in the Dresden Codex, for example, include the names of Aztec deities, modified so they could be written with Mayan hieroglyphs –– the new interpretation goes beyond the mere appropriation of 'gods' to the sharing of deeper religious concepts."
The revision is also tied to Aldana's recent work on the calendar correlation, the means of correlating dates on the ancient Maya calendar with those on the Gregorian –– or modern –– calendar. In his chapter, titled "The Maya Calendar Correlation Problem," which appeared in the book, "Calendar and Years II: Astronomy and Time in the Ancient and Medieval World" (Oxbow Books, 2010), he showed that the currently accepted correlation constant –– the GMT –– is incorrect. Based in part on astronomical events, the GMT is named for early Mayanists Joseph Goodman, Juan Martinez-Hernandez, and J. Eric S. Thompson. Each contributed to the calculation.
In "Tying Headbands or Venus Appearing," Aldana demonstrates the scholarly value of letting go of the GMT. Without the GMT, he argues, a new coherence is revealed between the architecture and hieroglyphic texts of Late Classic Copan and the material in the Postclassic Dresden Codex. "This interpretation shows that the same religious ideas of astronomy, calendrics, space, and time were held in the Classic period, through the Postclassic period, and into early Colonial times," he said.
____________
References:
EurekAlert. 2011. "UCSB scholar's reading of hieroglyphic verb alters understanding of Mayan ritual texts". EurekAlert. Posted: November 21, 2011. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-11/uoc--usr112111.php
According to Aldana, at the end of the 19th century, the German philologist Ernst Förstemann discovered the basis of the modern interpretation of a Venus table in the 13th-century Maya manuscript known as the Dresden Codex. The six-page Venus table is an almanac dedicated to tracking the observable phases of the planet Venus. Förstemann's interpretation laid the groundwork for academic and popular 20th-century characterizations of the Maya as "obsessed" with astronomy and time. While scholars have added to his interpretation over the next 100 years, all have followed the basic model resulting from his work.
In his new book, Aldana shows that "k'al," the main verb referring to Venus events in the Dresden Codex, has been misread. He argues that the verb refers to an "enclosing" of time and space, such as that found throughout the Postclassic Mesoamerican ritual activity. "The key to my argument is that previously recognized records are pictorial, graphically representing the 'cosmogram' that ties space and time together," Aldana said. "But I show that the Dresden Codex Venus Table records the same concept in hieroglyphic text –– the idea is the same in both cases, but represented by an image in the Aztec convention, and by hieroglyphic text according to Mayan sensibilities."
The new hieroglyphic reading is accompanied by a revision of the mathematics of the Venus Table, also departing from the 70-year-old tradition in the field, Aldana said. "Overall, the result shows a much greater coherence to Postclassic religion throughout Mesoamerica," he explained. "And while contact between the regions has never been in question –– the Venus pages in the Dresden Codex, for example, include the names of Aztec deities, modified so they could be written with Mayan hieroglyphs –– the new interpretation goes beyond the mere appropriation of 'gods' to the sharing of deeper religious concepts."
The revision is also tied to Aldana's recent work on the calendar correlation, the means of correlating dates on the ancient Maya calendar with those on the Gregorian –– or modern –– calendar. In his chapter, titled "The Maya Calendar Correlation Problem," which appeared in the book, "Calendar and Years II: Astronomy and Time in the Ancient and Medieval World" (Oxbow Books, 2010), he showed that the currently accepted correlation constant –– the GMT –– is incorrect. Based in part on astronomical events, the GMT is named for early Mayanists Joseph Goodman, Juan Martinez-Hernandez, and J. Eric S. Thompson. Each contributed to the calculation.
In "Tying Headbands or Venus Appearing," Aldana demonstrates the scholarly value of letting go of the GMT. Without the GMT, he argues, a new coherence is revealed between the architecture and hieroglyphic texts of Late Classic Copan and the material in the Postclassic Dresden Codex. "This interpretation shows that the same religious ideas of astronomy, calendrics, space, and time were held in the Classic period, through the Postclassic period, and into early Colonial times," he said.
____________
References:
EurekAlert. 2011. "UCSB scholar's reading of hieroglyphic verb alters understanding of Mayan ritual texts". EurekAlert. Posted: November 21, 2011. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-11/uoc--usr112111.php
Saturday, December 3, 2011
Mystery of Dead Sea Scroll Authors Possibly Solved
The Dead Sea Scrolls may have been written, at least in part, by a sectarian group called the Essenes, according to nearly 200 textiles discovered in caves at Qumran, in the West Bank, where the religious texts had been stored.
Scholars are divided about who authored the Dead Sea Scrolls and how the texts got to Qumran, and so the new finding could help clear up this long-standing mystery.
The research reveals that all the textiles were made of linen, rather than wool, which was the preferred textile used in ancient Israel. Also they lack decoration, some actually being bleached white, even though fabrics from the period often have vivid colours. Altogether, researchers say these finds suggest that the Essenes, an ancient Jewish sect, "penned" some of the scrolls.
Not everyone agrees with this interpretation. An archaeologist who has excavated at Qumran told LiveScience that the linen could have come from people fleeing the Roman army after the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, and that they are in fact responsible for putting the scrolls into caves.
Iconic scrolls
The Dead Sea Scrolls consist of nearly 900 texts, the first batch of which were discovered by a Bedouin shepherd in 1947. They date from before A.D. 70, and some may go back to as early as the third century B.C. The scrolls contain a wide variety of writings including early copies of the Hebrew Bible, along with hymns, calendars and psalms, among other works. [Gallery of Dead Sea Scrolls]
Nearly 200 textiles were found in the same caves, along with a few examples from Qumran, the archaeological site close to the caves where the scrolls were hidden.
Orit Shamir, curator of organic materials at the Israel Antiquities Authority, and Naama Sukenik, a graduate student at Bar-Ilan University, compared the white-linen textiles found in the11 caves to examples found elsewhere in ancient Israel, publishing their results in the most recent issue of the journal Dead Sea Discoveries.
A breakthrough in studying these remains was made in 2007 when a team of archaeologists was able to ascertain that colorful wool textiles found at a site to the south of Qumran, known as the Christmas Cave, were not related to the inhabitants of the site. This meant that Shamir and Sukenik were able to focus on the 200 textiles found in the Dead Sea Scroll caves and at Qumran itself, knowing that these are the only surviving textiles related to the scrolls.
They discovered that every single one of these textiles was made of linen, even though wool was the most popular fabric at the time in Israel. They also found that most of the textiles would have originally been used as clothing, later being cut apart and re-used for other purposes such as bandages and for packing the scrolls into jars. [Photos of Dead Sea textiles]
Some of the textiles were bleached white and most of them lacked decoration, even though decoration is commonly seen in textiles from other sites in ancient Israel.
According to the researchers the finds suggest that the residents of Qumran dressed simply.
"They wanted to be different than the Roman world," Shamir told LiveScience in a telephone interview. "They were very humble, they didn't want to wear colorful textiles, they wanted to use very simple textiles."
The owners of the clothing likely were not poor, as only one of the textiles had a patch on it."This is very, very, important," Shamir said. "Patching is connected with [the] economic situation of the site."
Shamir pointed out that textiles found at sites where people were under stress, such as at the Cave of Letters, which was used in a revolt against the Romans, were often patched. On the other hand "if the site is in a very good economic situation, if it is a very rich site, the textiles will not be patched," she said. With Qumran, "I think [economically] they were in the middle, but I'm sure they were not poor."
Robert Cargill, a professor at the University of Iowa, has written extensively about Qumran and has developed a virtual model of it. He said that archaeological evidence from the site, including coins and glassware, also suggests the inhabitants were not poor.
"Far from being poor monastics, I think there was wealth at Qumran, at least some form of wealth," Cargill said, arguing that trade was important at the site. "I think they made their own pottery and sold some of it, I think they bred animals and sold them, I think they made honey and sold it."
Who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?
Scholars are divided about who authored the Dead Sea Scrolls and how the texts got to Qumran. Some argue that the scrolls were written at the site itself while others say they were written in Jerusalem or elsewhere in Israel.
Qumran itself was first excavated by Roland de Vaux in the 1950s. He came to the conclusion that the site was inhabited by a religious sect called the Essenes who wrote the scrolls and stored them in caves. Among the finds he made were water pools, which he believed were used for ritual bathing, and multiple inkwells found in a room that became known as the "scriptorium." Based on his excavations, scholars have estimated the population of the site at as high as 200.
More recent archaeological work, conducted by Yitzhak Magen and Yuval Peleg of the Israel Antiquities Authority, suggests that the site could not have supported more than a few dozen people and had nothing to do with the scrolls themselves. They believe that the scrolls were deposited in the caves by refugees fleeing the Roman army after Jerusalem was conquered in A.D. 70.
Magen and Peleg found that the site came into existence around 100 B.C. as a military outpost used by the Hasmoneans, a Jewish kingdom that flourished in the area. After the Romans took over Judaea in 63 B.C. the site was abandoned and eventually was taken over by civilians who used it for pottery production. They found that the pools de Vaux discovered include a fine layer of potters' clay.
There are other ideas as well. Cargill argues that while Qumran started out as a fort it was later occupied by a sectarian group whose members were deeply concerned with ritual purity. "Whether or not they are the Essenes, that's a different question," he said. This group, much smaller than earlier estimates of 200 people, would have written some of the scrolls, while collecting others, he argues.
Other groups, not part of the Qumran community, may also have been putting scrolls into the caves, Cargill said.
Can clothing solve the mystery?
The new clothing research may help to identify the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Shamir told LiveScience that it is unlikely the scrolls were deposited in the caves by Roman refugees. If that were the case, the more-popular textile in ancient Israel, wool, would have been found in the caves along with other garments.
"If people run away from Jerusalem they would take all sorts of textiles with them, not only linen textiles," she said. "The people who ran away to the Cave of Letters, they took wool textiles with them."
Peleg, the archaeologist who co-led the recent archaeological work at Qumran, told LiveScience he disagrees with that assessment. He said he stands by the idea that there is no connection between Qumran and the scrolls stored in the caves.
"We must remember that almost all the textiles were found in the caves and not at the site. The main question is the connection between the site and the scrolls," Peleg wrote in an email. "I can find alternative explanations for the fact that scrolls were found with linen."
For instance, linen could have been chosen as scroll wrapping for religious reasons or perhaps priests were responsible for storing the scrolls and they wore linen clothing. "The clothes of the priests were made from linen," Peleg wrote.
In their paper, Shamir and Sukenik say that the clothing found in the Dead Sea Scroll caves is similar to historical descriptions of the clothing of the Essenes, suggesting that they in fact lived at Qumran. They point to an ancient Jewish writer, Flavius Josephus, who wrote that the Essenes "make a point of keeping a dry skin and always being dressed in white." (However, Josephus never said anything about the clothing being made of linen, Peleg points out.)
Josephusalso wrote that the Essenes were very frugal when it came to clothing and shared goods with each other.
"In their dress and deportment they resemble children under rigorous discipline. They do not change their garments or shoes until they are torn to shreds or worn threadbare with age. There is no buying or selling among themselves, but each gives what he has to any in need and receives from him in exchange something useful to himself ..."
(Translation from "Jewish Life and Thought Among Greeks and Romans: Primary Readings," Louis Feldman and Meyer Reinhold, 1996.)
In their paper, Shamir and Sukenik also point to another ancient writer, Philo of Alexandria, who wrote that the Essenes wore a common style of simple dress.
"And not only is their table in common but their clothes also. For in winter they have a stock of stout coats ready and in summer cheap vests, so that he who wishes may easily take any garment he likes, since what one has is held to belong to all and conversely what all have one has."
(Translation from the "Selected Writing of Philo of Alexandria," edited by Hans Lewy, 1965.)
Cargill said that the clothing is further evidence that there was a Jewish sectarian group living at Qumran.
"You do have evidence of a group that raised its own animals, pressed its own date honey, that appears to have worn distinctive clothes and made its own pottery, and followed its own calendar, at least a calendar different from the temple priesthood," he said. "Those are all signs of a sectarian group."
He also noted the presence of mikveh (ritual baths) at the site and the fact that the residents could make pottery that was ritually pure.
This group appears to have wanted to separate itself from the priests based at the temple in Jerusalem. "There is a congruency within many of the sectarian documents that appears to be consistent with a sectarian group that has separated itself from the temple priesthood in Jerusalem," Cargill said.
According to Cargill's theory, the people of Qumran would have written some of the scrolls, while collecting others. "Obviously they didn't write all of the scrolls," Cargill said. Dating indicates some of the scrolls were written before Qumran even existed. One unusual scroll, made of copper, may have been deposited after Qumran was abandoned in A.D. 70.
Cargill says it's possible that some of the scrolls may have been put in caves from people outside the community. If that's true, some of the textiles could also be from people outside of Qumran.
"[If] not all of the Dead Sea Scrolls are the responsibility of sectarians at Qumran then it would follow that not all of the textiles that are discovered in the caves are [the] product of a sect at Qumran," Cargill said.
Were there women at Qumran?
The new research may also shed light on who created the textiles.
The textiles are of high quality and, based on the archaeological finds at Qumran itself, where there is little evidence of spindle whorls or loom weights, the team thinks it's unlikely they would have been made at the site.
"This is very, very important, because this is connected to gender," Shamir said, "spinning is connected with women."
She explained that the textiles were likely created at another site in Israel, with women playing a key role in their production. This suggests that there were few women living at Qumran itself. "Weaving is connected with men and women, but spinning was only a production of women, [and] we don't find this item at Qumran."
______________
References:
Jarus, Owen. 2011. "Mystery of Dead Sea Scroll Authors Possibly Solved". Live Science. Posted: November 21,2011. Available online: http://www.livescience.com/17123-dead-sea-scrolls-writers-textiles.html
Scholars are divided about who authored the Dead Sea Scrolls and how the texts got to Qumran, and so the new finding could help clear up this long-standing mystery.
The research reveals that all the textiles were made of linen, rather than wool, which was the preferred textile used in ancient Israel. Also they lack decoration, some actually being bleached white, even though fabrics from the period often have vivid colours. Altogether, researchers say these finds suggest that the Essenes, an ancient Jewish sect, "penned" some of the scrolls.
Not everyone agrees with this interpretation. An archaeologist who has excavated at Qumran told LiveScience that the linen could have come from people fleeing the Roman army after the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, and that they are in fact responsible for putting the scrolls into caves.
Iconic scrolls
The Dead Sea Scrolls consist of nearly 900 texts, the first batch of which were discovered by a Bedouin shepherd in 1947. They date from before A.D. 70, and some may go back to as early as the third century B.C. The scrolls contain a wide variety of writings including early copies of the Hebrew Bible, along with hymns, calendars and psalms, among other works. [Gallery of Dead Sea Scrolls]
Nearly 200 textiles were found in the same caves, along with a few examples from Qumran, the archaeological site close to the caves where the scrolls were hidden.
Orit Shamir, curator of organic materials at the Israel Antiquities Authority, and Naama Sukenik, a graduate student at Bar-Ilan University, compared the white-linen textiles found in the11 caves to examples found elsewhere in ancient Israel, publishing their results in the most recent issue of the journal Dead Sea Discoveries.
A breakthrough in studying these remains was made in 2007 when a team of archaeologists was able to ascertain that colorful wool textiles found at a site to the south of Qumran, known as the Christmas Cave, were not related to the inhabitants of the site. This meant that Shamir and Sukenik were able to focus on the 200 textiles found in the Dead Sea Scroll caves and at Qumran itself, knowing that these are the only surviving textiles related to the scrolls.
They discovered that every single one of these textiles was made of linen, even though wool was the most popular fabric at the time in Israel. They also found that most of the textiles would have originally been used as clothing, later being cut apart and re-used for other purposes such as bandages and for packing the scrolls into jars. [Photos of Dead Sea textiles]
Some of the textiles were bleached white and most of them lacked decoration, even though decoration is commonly seen in textiles from other sites in ancient Israel.
According to the researchers the finds suggest that the residents of Qumran dressed simply.
"They wanted to be different than the Roman world," Shamir told LiveScience in a telephone interview. "They were very humble, they didn't want to wear colorful textiles, they wanted to use very simple textiles."
The owners of the clothing likely were not poor, as only one of the textiles had a patch on it."This is very, very, important," Shamir said. "Patching is connected with [the] economic situation of the site."
Shamir pointed out that textiles found at sites where people were under stress, such as at the Cave of Letters, which was used in a revolt against the Romans, were often patched. On the other hand "if the site is in a very good economic situation, if it is a very rich site, the textiles will not be patched," she said. With Qumran, "I think [economically] they were in the middle, but I'm sure they were not poor."
Robert Cargill, a professor at the University of Iowa, has written extensively about Qumran and has developed a virtual model of it. He said that archaeological evidence from the site, including coins and glassware, also suggests the inhabitants were not poor.
"Far from being poor monastics, I think there was wealth at Qumran, at least some form of wealth," Cargill said, arguing that trade was important at the site. "I think they made their own pottery and sold some of it, I think they bred animals and sold them, I think they made honey and sold it."
Who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?
Scholars are divided about who authored the Dead Sea Scrolls and how the texts got to Qumran. Some argue that the scrolls were written at the site itself while others say they were written in Jerusalem or elsewhere in Israel.
Qumran itself was first excavated by Roland de Vaux in the 1950s. He came to the conclusion that the site was inhabited by a religious sect called the Essenes who wrote the scrolls and stored them in caves. Among the finds he made were water pools, which he believed were used for ritual bathing, and multiple inkwells found in a room that became known as the "scriptorium." Based on his excavations, scholars have estimated the population of the site at as high as 200.
More recent archaeological work, conducted by Yitzhak Magen and Yuval Peleg of the Israel Antiquities Authority, suggests that the site could not have supported more than a few dozen people and had nothing to do with the scrolls themselves. They believe that the scrolls were deposited in the caves by refugees fleeing the Roman army after Jerusalem was conquered in A.D. 70.
Magen and Peleg found that the site came into existence around 100 B.C. as a military outpost used by the Hasmoneans, a Jewish kingdom that flourished in the area. After the Romans took over Judaea in 63 B.C. the site was abandoned and eventually was taken over by civilians who used it for pottery production. They found that the pools de Vaux discovered include a fine layer of potters' clay.
There are other ideas as well. Cargill argues that while Qumran started out as a fort it was later occupied by a sectarian group whose members were deeply concerned with ritual purity. "Whether or not they are the Essenes, that's a different question," he said. This group, much smaller than earlier estimates of 200 people, would have written some of the scrolls, while collecting others, he argues.
Other groups, not part of the Qumran community, may also have been putting scrolls into the caves, Cargill said.
Can clothing solve the mystery?
The new clothing research may help to identify the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Shamir told LiveScience that it is unlikely the scrolls were deposited in the caves by Roman refugees. If that were the case, the more-popular textile in ancient Israel, wool, would have been found in the caves along with other garments.
"If people run away from Jerusalem they would take all sorts of textiles with them, not only linen textiles," she said. "The people who ran away to the Cave of Letters, they took wool textiles with them."
Peleg, the archaeologist who co-led the recent archaeological work at Qumran, told LiveScience he disagrees with that assessment. He said he stands by the idea that there is no connection between Qumran and the scrolls stored in the caves.
"We must remember that almost all the textiles were found in the caves and not at the site. The main question is the connection between the site and the scrolls," Peleg wrote in an email. "I can find alternative explanations for the fact that scrolls were found with linen."
For instance, linen could have been chosen as scroll wrapping for religious reasons or perhaps priests were responsible for storing the scrolls and they wore linen clothing. "The clothes of the priests were made from linen," Peleg wrote.
In their paper, Shamir and Sukenik say that the clothing found in the Dead Sea Scroll caves is similar to historical descriptions of the clothing of the Essenes, suggesting that they in fact lived at Qumran. They point to an ancient Jewish writer, Flavius Josephus, who wrote that the Essenes "make a point of keeping a dry skin and always being dressed in white." (However, Josephus never said anything about the clothing being made of linen, Peleg points out.)
Josephusalso wrote that the Essenes were very frugal when it came to clothing and shared goods with each other.
"In their dress and deportment they resemble children under rigorous discipline. They do not change their garments or shoes until they are torn to shreds or worn threadbare with age. There is no buying or selling among themselves, but each gives what he has to any in need and receives from him in exchange something useful to himself ..."
(Translation from "Jewish Life and Thought Among Greeks and Romans: Primary Readings," Louis Feldman and Meyer Reinhold, 1996.)
In their paper, Shamir and Sukenik also point to another ancient writer, Philo of Alexandria, who wrote that the Essenes wore a common style of simple dress.
"And not only is their table in common but their clothes also. For in winter they have a stock of stout coats ready and in summer cheap vests, so that he who wishes may easily take any garment he likes, since what one has is held to belong to all and conversely what all have one has."
(Translation from the "Selected Writing of Philo of Alexandria," edited by Hans Lewy, 1965.)
Cargill said that the clothing is further evidence that there was a Jewish sectarian group living at Qumran.
"You do have evidence of a group that raised its own animals, pressed its own date honey, that appears to have worn distinctive clothes and made its own pottery, and followed its own calendar, at least a calendar different from the temple priesthood," he said. "Those are all signs of a sectarian group."
He also noted the presence of mikveh (ritual baths) at the site and the fact that the residents could make pottery that was ritually pure.
This group appears to have wanted to separate itself from the priests based at the temple in Jerusalem. "There is a congruency within many of the sectarian documents that appears to be consistent with a sectarian group that has separated itself from the temple priesthood in Jerusalem," Cargill said.
According to Cargill's theory, the people of Qumran would have written some of the scrolls, while collecting others. "Obviously they didn't write all of the scrolls," Cargill said. Dating indicates some of the scrolls were written before Qumran even existed. One unusual scroll, made of copper, may have been deposited after Qumran was abandoned in A.D. 70.
Cargill says it's possible that some of the scrolls may have been put in caves from people outside the community. If that's true, some of the textiles could also be from people outside of Qumran.
"[If] not all of the Dead Sea Scrolls are the responsibility of sectarians at Qumran then it would follow that not all of the textiles that are discovered in the caves are [the] product of a sect at Qumran," Cargill said.
Were there women at Qumran?
The new research may also shed light on who created the textiles.
The textiles are of high quality and, based on the archaeological finds at Qumran itself, where there is little evidence of spindle whorls or loom weights, the team thinks it's unlikely they would have been made at the site.
"This is very, very important, because this is connected to gender," Shamir said, "spinning is connected with women."
She explained that the textiles were likely created at another site in Israel, with women playing a key role in their production. This suggests that there were few women living at Qumran itself. "Weaving is connected with men and women, but spinning was only a production of women, [and] we don't find this item at Qumran."
______________
References:
Jarus, Owen. 2011. "Mystery of Dead Sea Scroll Authors Possibly Solved". Live Science. Posted: November 21,2011. Available online: http://www.livescience.com/17123-dead-sea-scrolls-writers-textiles.html
Friday, December 2, 2011
Peru archaeologists find pre-Inca sacrificed babies
Researchers at the Sillustani archaeological site in Peru say they have found the bodies of 44 children thought to have been sacrificed between 600 and 700 years ago.
They were buried in pairs in baskets placed around stone funerary towers.
Researchers said their ages ranged from newborns to three years old.
The archaeologists believe they belonged to the Kolla culture, which ruled parts of the Puno region of southern Peru between 1200 and 1450.
All the bodies had a volcanic stone placed on their chest, and were surrounded by a variety of offerings, including animals, food, dishes and pitchers, archaeologist Eduardo Arisaca said.
Researchers at the site say ceramics with paintings of scenes of war found with the bodies suggest the children were sacrificed during a period of conflict between the Kolla and a rival culture.
They said the bodies were found near a 10m-tall (32ft) circular stone tower known as Chullpa Lagarto.
The bodies of some 200 people have been unearthed near the tower at the Sillustani site some 1,300km (800 miles) south-east of the capital, Lima.
______________
References:
BBC News. 2011. "Peru archaeologists find pre-Inca sacrificed babies". BBC News. Posted: November 20, 2011. Available online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-15813793
They were buried in pairs in baskets placed around stone funerary towers.
Researchers said their ages ranged from newborns to three years old.
The archaeologists believe they belonged to the Kolla culture, which ruled parts of the Puno region of southern Peru between 1200 and 1450.
All the bodies had a volcanic stone placed on their chest, and were surrounded by a variety of offerings, including animals, food, dishes and pitchers, archaeologist Eduardo Arisaca said.
Researchers at the site say ceramics with paintings of scenes of war found with the bodies suggest the children were sacrificed during a period of conflict between the Kolla and a rival culture.
They said the bodies were found near a 10m-tall (32ft) circular stone tower known as Chullpa Lagarto.
The bodies of some 200 people have been unearthed near the tower at the Sillustani site some 1,300km (800 miles) south-east of the capital, Lima.
______________
References:
BBC News. 2011. "Peru archaeologists find pre-Inca sacrificed babies". BBC News. Posted: November 20, 2011. Available online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-15813793
Thursday, December 1, 2011
We Are Hardwired to Walk
Watching a toddler take his first steps, it's obvious he's learned through observation and encouragement. But are our brains specially wired to learn this important behavior so early on?
Scientists are beginning to think so, according to one article published in the journal Science.
By looking at the body's neural circuitry in rats, humans and other animals, researchers pieced together that the process of learning to move around looks similar across species, despite most mammals moving on four legs and Homo sapiens stepping with two. The finding indicates that humans' innate ability to walk has a lengthy evolutionary history.
Previously, neuroscience experts thought pathways in the nervous system changed dramatically during human development, allowing new pathways to replace the deeply -rooted connections shared with other mammals. Not so, says lead researcher Francesco Lacquaniti, according to one article in The Atlantic. He provided an analogy comparing learning to walk with learning to drive a stick shift car. New drivers first learn the basic gears, but then add more with time. Yet even the most advanced drivers still need the first gear to drive. The same principle applies to learning to walk, with humans and animals sharing a common circuitry and gradually building on it in different ways.
Instead, toddlers continue to use these primitive connections in muscles, adding to them as they become more skilled at walking. In the study, Lacquaniti and colleagues looked at the electrical activity in muscles in newborns, toddlers, preschoolers and adults. They found the same connections were at play among cats, guineafowl, non-human primates and rats as well.
Scientists estimate that this circuitry became more diversified in animals at least 100 million years ago, say the article's authors.
____________________
References:
English, Marianne. 2011. "We Are Hardwired to Walk". Discovery News. Posted: November 18, 2011. Available online: http://news.discovery.com/human/humans-walking-evolution-111121.html
Scientists are beginning to think so, according to one article published in the journal Science.
By looking at the body's neural circuitry in rats, humans and other animals, researchers pieced together that the process of learning to move around looks similar across species, despite most mammals moving on four legs and Homo sapiens stepping with two. The finding indicates that humans' innate ability to walk has a lengthy evolutionary history.
Previously, neuroscience experts thought pathways in the nervous system changed dramatically during human development, allowing new pathways to replace the deeply -rooted connections shared with other mammals. Not so, says lead researcher Francesco Lacquaniti, according to one article in The Atlantic. He provided an analogy comparing learning to walk with learning to drive a stick shift car. New drivers first learn the basic gears, but then add more with time. Yet even the most advanced drivers still need the first gear to drive. The same principle applies to learning to walk, with humans and animals sharing a common circuitry and gradually building on it in different ways.
Instead, toddlers continue to use these primitive connections in muscles, adding to them as they become more skilled at walking. In the study, Lacquaniti and colleagues looked at the electrical activity in muscles in newborns, toddlers, preschoolers and adults. They found the same connections were at play among cats, guineafowl, non-human primates and rats as well.
Scientists estimate that this circuitry became more diversified in animals at least 100 million years ago, say the article's authors.
____________________
References:
English, Marianne. 2011. "We Are Hardwired to Walk". Discovery News. Posted: November 18, 2011. Available online: http://news.discovery.com/human/humans-walking-evolution-111121.html
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