Wanderlust

Maybe it's because I'm fundamentally a home body, but I find it really hard to understand what could have driven our distant ancestors to head out into uncharted territory -- no GPS to guide them, no guarantee of safety, no knowledge of what they might meet along the way.

A couple of years ago I wrote a piece about the extraordinary island-hopping accomplished by the ancient Polynesians -- going from one tiny speck of land to another, crossing thousands of kilometers of trackless ocean in dugout canoes.  We don't know what motivated them, whether it was lack of resources on their home islands, being driven away by warfare, or simple curiosity.  But whatever it was, it took no small amount of skill, courage, and willingness to accept risk.

The wanderings of the ancestral Polynesians, though, are hardly the only example of ancient humans' capacity for launching out into the unknown.  Two papers this week look at other examples of our forebears' wanderlust -- still, of course, leaving unanswered the questions about why they felt impelled to leave home and safety for an uncertain destination.

The first, which appeared in PLOS-One, looks at the similarity of culture between Bronze-Age Denmark and southwestern Norway, and considers whether the inhabitants of Denmark took a longer (but, presumably, safer) seven-hundred-kilometer route, crossing the Strait of Kattegat into southern Sweden and then hugging the coast until they reached Norway, or the much shorter (but riskier) hundred-kilometer crossing over open ocean to go there directly.

While the direct route was more dangerous, it seems likely that's what they did.  If they'd skirted along the coastline, you'd expect there to be more similarity in archaeological sites along the way, in the seaside areas of southern Sweden.  There's not.  It appears that they really did launch off in paddle-driven boats across the stormy seas between Denmark and Norway, four thousand years ago.

"These new agent-based simulations, applied with boat performance data of a Scandinavian Bronze Age type boat," the authors write, "demonstrate regular open sea crossings of the Skagerrak, including some fifty kilometers of no visible land, likely commenced by 2300 B.C.E., as indicated by archaeological evidence."

Considering people twice as far back in time, a paper this week in Nature describes evidence that seafarers from what is now Italy crossed a hundred kilometers of ocean to reach the island of Malta.  A cave in Latnija, in the northern Mellieħa region of Malta, has bones of animals that show distinct signs of butchering and cooking -- and have been dated to 8,500 years ago.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Frank Vincentz, Malta - Mellieħa - Triq il-Latnija - Paradise Bay 05 ies, CC BY-SA 3.0]

"We found abundant evidence for a range of wild animals, including Red Deer, long thought to have gone extinct by this point in time," said Eleanor Scerri, of the University of Malta, who was the paper's lead author.  "They were hunting and cooking these deer alongside tortoises and birds, including some that were extremely large and extinct today...  The results add a thousand years to Maltese prehistory and force a re-evaluation of the seafaring abilities of Europe's last hunter-gatherers, as well as their connections and ecosystem impacts."

What always strikes me about this sort of thing is wondering not only what fueled their wanderlust, but how they even knew there was an island out there to head to.  I know that patterns of clouds can tell seafarers they're nearing land, but still -- to launch off into the open ocean, hoping for the best, and trusting that there's safe landing out there somewhere still seems to me to be somewhere between brave and utterly foolhardy.

I guess my ancestors were made of sterner stuff than me.  I'm okay with that.  Being a bit of a coward has its advantages.  As Steven Wright put it, "Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines."

So if y'all want to, you can take off in your dugout canoes for parts unknown, but I'm gonna stay right here where it's (relatively) safe.  I suppose it's a good thing our forebears had the courage they did, because it's how we got here.  And I hope they wouldn't be too embarrassed by my preference for sitting on my ass drinking coffee with cream and sugar rather than spending weeks at sea nibbling on dried meat and hardtack and hoping like hell those clouds over there mean there's dry land ahead.

Chacun à son goût, y'know?

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A lens on the past

We have an unfortunate tendency to idealize the past.

Well, unfortunate is probably the wrong word.  I don't guess it does any real harm, and in fiction it can be quite entertaining.  Unrealistic is probably a better choice.  Except for the (very) select privileged few, our ancestors' lives were -- to quote Thomas Hobbes -- "solitary, nasty, poor, brutish, and short."

This idealization creates a picture in our minds that is almost certainly false.  Consider, for example, Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear series, which focuses on the meeting between some civilized, beautiful Cro-Magnon folks and some violent, nasty Neanderthals.  Reminiscent of Tolkien's Orcs and Elves, the Neanderthals all have names like Thok and Ugg and Glop, and the Cro-Magnons mellifluous names like Sondamar and Alidor.  (Before you start yelling at me, yes, I made those up because I don't own the book any more and I don't feel like looking it up.  But my point stands.)

But it's not just the prehistorics.  Contrast two different tales of medieval monastic life -- Ellis Peters's Brother Cadfael series and Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.  Don't get me wrong, I love Brother Cadfael; his logic, compassion, and love for botany are all endearing, and Peters was a great mystery writer.  But the reality of life in western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was undoubtedly closer to Eco's harsh, unwashed, rough-shod reality, with its starving peasants and superstitions and religious fanaticism, than it was to Peters's genteel knights and tradesmen and monks.

Like I said, I don't really object to fictional portrayals, even with their inevitable inaccuracies.  I've written a few stories set in the past myself -- the English Midlands in the nineteenth century (Adam's Fall), pre-Civil-War Louisiana (The Communion of Shadows), eleventh century Iceland (Kári the Lucky), and Britain during the fourteenth century Black Death (We All Fall Down).  I hope I've skirted the line between realism and romanticism deftly enough to make it believable without being too dark and depressing.

But the fact remains that our ancestors didn't have it easy.  That we're here is a tribute to their tenacity, strength, and determination.  Whenever I consider archaeological finds, I'm always struck by how cushy a lot of us have it now, with our indoor plumbing and heat in the winter and electric appliances and modern medicine, all of which our forebears somehow survived -- at least for a while -- without.

The reason this comes up is a study out of the University of Oxford that was published last week in the journal Antiquity, describing a rather horrific archaeological discovery in Merrie Old England.  The remains of at least 37 people were found near Charterhouse Warren, Somerset, dating to the Early Bronze Age (preliminary dating puts them at around 2000 B.C.E.) that show signs not only of violent death -- but the bodies were butchered and eaten afterwards, and the remains thrown down a fifteen-meter-deep shaft.

"We actually find more evidence for injuries to skeletons dating to the Neolithic period in Britain than the Early Bronze Age, so Charterhouse Warren stands out as something very unusual," said Rick Schulting, who was the study's lead author.  "It paints a considerably darker picture of the period than many would have expected."

[Image credit: Schulting et al., Antiquity]

And it doesn't appear to be a case of desperation, where starving people resorted to cannibalism because they had no other options.  The same site yielded up plentiful cattle bones, so it's apparent the Bronze Age residents of Charterhouse Warren weren't hurting for chow.

Any explanation of this behavior is, of course, pure speculation, but one thought is that the victors ate their defeated enemies as a way either of dehumanizing them, or perhaps from some sort of belief that doing so would allow any courage or spirit the enemies had to pass into them.

"Charterhouse Warren is one of those rare archaeological sites that challenges the way we think about the past," Schulting said.  "It is a stark reminder that people in prehistory could match more recent atrocities and shines a light on a dark side of human behavior.  That it is unlikely to have been a one-off event makes it even more important that its story is told."

It certainly puts a clearer and harsher light on what life in the past was actually like.  "If people think of the past as something peaceful and idealized," said archaeologist Ludvig Papmehl-Dufay, of Kalmar University, who was not involved in the current study, "that needs to be revised."

In any case, it's probably for the best that we do see our history through softer lenses.  The rigors that 95% of humanity endured back then, that (fortunately) far fewer have to endure now, were seriously depressing stuff.  And I suppose it's encouraging, really; for all the horrific stories in the news, we have come a long way as a species.  Not that we don't still have a long way to go.  But when asked when I would choose to live if I had a time machine that could take me into the past, my answer is always "right here and right now."

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The collapse

I've mentioned before that I have an absolute fascination with historical mysteries, which is why if I had the opportunity to visit one place and period, it would be somewhere in western Europe during the "Dark Ages" -- the time between the collapse of the Western Roman Empire (usually placed at 476 C.E., when the puppet emperor Romulus Augustulus was deposed by the Scirian leader Odoacer) and the founding of the Carolingian dynasty and re-consolidation of power by Charlemagne 325 years later.  During that interval, damn little is known for sure -- we have some names, like Clovis and Charles Martel and Arthur Pendragon -- but how many of the accounts from that period are true and how many later inventions and add-ons, we'll probably never be certain.

There's another time period, though, that is (if anything) more mysterious still -- partly because it's much further in the past.  This is the Late Bronze Age Collapse, that happened in the twelfth century B.C.E., in which two of the most powerful civilizations in ancient Eurasia, the Mycenaean Greeks and the Hittites, suddenly disintegrated, and others in the region, including the Egyptian New Kingdom and the Assyrian Empire, were seriously weakened (although ultimately survived and rebuilt).

Whatever happened, it happened fast.  Two of the main cities of the Hittite Empire, Hattusa and Karaoğlan, both burned right around the same time, and from the archaeological evidence, so many people died their bodies were never buried.  Greece was equally hard-hit, with just about every Mycenaean palace and citadel burned or demolished; the period afterward has been nicknamed the "Greek Dark Ages," a period of about four hundred years from which we have almost no records.  Whatever caused it, the Greek peninsula seems to have been left largely depopulated.  One estimate is that ninety percent of pre-collapse settlements in the Peloponnese, the southernmost region of Greece, were abandoned during that one event.

The Mycenaean "Mask of Agamemnon," ca. 1550 B.C.E. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Xuan Che, MaskOfAgamemnon, CC BY 2.0]

So what caused the collapse?

The simple answer is that we don't know.  It may well have been a confluence of bad stuff; earthquakes, plagues, and famines are all possibilities, although it's hard to imagine why any of the three would then lead people across an entire region to destroy just about every last city.  Another possibility is severe and prolonged drought caused by a climatic shift, followed by open rebellion by people desperate for food and water.  (Recall that back then, the kings were considered to be intercessors to the gods on the behalf of the people; when the rain stopped falling and the crops all died, it's entirely possible the people overthrew their own rulers for not intercessing hard enough.)

It's also possible that both the Mycenaeans and the Hittites were overcome and destroyed by a mysterious group called the "Sea Peoples," who are mentioned in records of the Egyptian New Kingdom (the Egyptians were also attacked, but successfully repelled them and managed to survive).  Who these Sea Peoples were isn't known for sure, but they may have been an alliance between the Lukka of coastal southwestern Anatolia, the Peleset of what are now Israel and Lebanon (the name is probably a cognate to the biblical name "Philistine"),  and the Weshesh, who may have been from Sicily or southern Italy.  But the truth is, we're not sure of that, either.  The Sea Peoples left no records of their own and seem to have moved around a lot, so any artifacts they left behind haven't told us much.

And of course, it could be a combination of all of these.  Changes in climate and natural disasters are known to have been responsible for famines and epidemics, and when those happen, people often up stakes and try to move to a more congenial venue -- which is inconvenient for the people who already live there.  The attacks by the Sea Peoples may have been a result, not the root cause, of the collapse.

But there's no doubt that the effects were devastating.  The eastern Mediterranean would take four centuries to recover completely, leaving behind a historical whodunnit that still puzzles us today.  But it does highlight how tenuous survival was back then.  The people of the ancient world were one bad harvest between relative comfort and famine.  Epidemics were regular visitors, sometimes wiping out settlements entirely.  When things get desperate, the veneer of civility disintegrates pretty rapidly.

It's to be hoped our modern civilization would be resilient enough to weather such calamities, should they strike, but the reality is, we're not really that different from our distant ancestors.  It's nice to think that in severe trials, we'd help each other -- that we might remember Benjamin Franklin's words, "We must hang together, or we shall most assuredly all hang separately."  Like us, the Bronze Age empires probably thought they'd be around forever, but when catastrophe struck, they seem to have promptly self-destructed.

Let's hope we can learn some lessons from their failure.

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A light into shadow

I think my love of science comes from the joy of unlocking one at a time the pieces of the universe that were mysteries.  It's why I'm such a dilettante -- someone who, as an acquaintance once described me, has knowledge a light year across and an inch deep.  I find it all fascinating.  I was never able to focus on one thing long enough to really become an expert.  I'd start in one direction, but in short order I'd say, "Oh, look, something shiny!" and take off on some unrelated tangent.

I may not have much in the way of academic credentials, but it makes me a force to be reckoned with when playing Trivial Pursuit.

It's okay, really.  I enjoy the fact that my brain makes up for in breadth what it lacks in depth.  Which is why last week we had posts about astronomy, geology, glaciology, paleontology, and cosmology, and today we're on to archaeology.

Because of my love of mysteries, I've always been drawn to trying to understand civilizations whose relics are scanty or poorly-understood.  The Incas, Aztecs, and Mayas.  The ancestors of the First Nations of North America.  The Songhai Empire and the kingdoms of Benin, Congo, and Aksum in Africa.  The ancient history of Southeast Asia and Australia.  And while European history is generally considered to be well-studied and accessible, that's because most of the focus is on the Romans, Greeks, and Norse, who left extensive written records.  The Celts, Slavs, and the southern Germanic tribes, for whom we have far fewer extant records (and many of those were penned by conquering cultures which took few pains to represent them fairly or accurately), have an ancient history that is largely lost to the shadows of time.

Or... maybe not entirely lost.

Archaeologists are now using sophisticated technological tools to discern traces of long-gone settlements, recovering traces of civilizations that have been up till now complete ciphers.  The reason this comes up is a study by a team from University College Dublin, working with colleagues in Serbia and Slovenia, which used aerial photography to piece together the remnants of 3,500 year old settlements in the southern Carpathian Basin -- and found that the area was as thickly-settled as many of the far better known cultures who were at their height around the same time.

"Some of the largest sites, we call these mega-forts, have been known for a few years now, such as Gradište Iđoš, Csanádpalota, Sântana or the mind-blowing Corneşti Iarcuri enclosed by thirty-three kilometers of ditches and eclipsing in size the contemporary citadels and fortifications of the Hittites, Mycenaeans or Egyptians,” said UCD archaeologist Barry Molloy, who led the study.  "What is new, however, is finding that these massive sites did not stand alone, they were part of a dense network of closely related and codependent communities.  At their peak, the people living within this lower Pannonian network of sites must have numbered into the tens of thousands...  Uniquely for prehistoric Europe, we are able to do more than identify the location of a few sites using satellite imagery but have been able to define an entire settled landscape, complete with maps of the size and layout of sites, even down to the locations of people’s homes within them. This really gives an unprecedented view of how these Bronze Age people lived with each other and their many neighbors."

One of the circular hill-forts discovered through analysis of aerial photographs

Of course, this sets the imagination running.  Like the Australian fossilized bird footprints we looked at yesterday, these remnants only tell you so much, in this case tantalizing clues about how their cities were laid out, coupled with hypothesizing the purposes of buildings for which we only have traces of foundations.  But deeper information about the societies who lived there, their political and social structure, religious beliefs, and languages -- the relics we have are silent on all of that.  Who these people were, we can only speculate.

Still, it's a remarkable achievement.  "1200 BC was a striking turning point in Old World prehistory, with kingdoms, empires, cities, and whole societies collapsing within a few decades throughout a vast area of southwest Asia, north Africa, and southern Europe," Molloy said.  "It is fascinating to discover these new polities and to see how they were related to well-known influential societies yet sobering to see how they ultimately suffered a similar fate in wave of crises that struck this wider region."

And for me, looking at it from the outside, it's wonderful to cast some light into the shadows of a culture that heretofore was completely mysterious.  Knowing them, even if only a little, is thrilling.  I'll end with a quote from the inimitable Richard Feynman, from his book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out:

Fall in love with some activity, and do it!  Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter.  Explore the world.  Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.  Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best.  Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do.

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The unanswerable

Humans are boundlessly curious, and that's a good thing.  Our drive to understand, to cure our ignorance about the world around us, is the engine that powers science.  In my 32-year career as a science teacher, one of the things I strove the hardest to accomplish was to urge my students never to be content to shrug their shoulders and stop trying to understand.

Like most things, though, this curiosity has a downside, and that is when it turns into a desperation to have an answer, any answer, whether it's supported by the evidence or not.  Saying "I don't know, and may never know" is sometimes so profoundly uncomfortable that we settle into whatever explanation sounds superficially appealing -- and forthwith stop thinking about it.

Taking a scientific, skeptical view of things requires not only that you have the drive to understand, but that you can tolerate -- and know the scope of -- the limits of your own knowledge.  As theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler put it, "We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance.  As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance."

What got me thinking about this is a story I ran into on the site Coast to Coast, which specializes in oddball speculation about unexplained phenomena.  The headline was "Mysterious Stone Carving Stumps Archaeologists in England," just the latest in umpteen popular media stories about some new discovery that "has scientists baffled."

To read this stuff, you come away with the impression that scientists do nothing all day but sit around scratching their heads in puzzlement.

In any case, the contents of the story are interesting enough.  A curious stone carving was discovered by some archaeologists investigating a Late Bronze Age site on Nesscliffe Hill, near Shrewsbury.  Without further ado, here's the carving:

Paul Reilly, one of the archaeologists studying the site, said that the carving is "indicative of two different types of technology, grinding and carving...  It appears to depict some kind of figure with the indentation being its head and the various scratches representing two long horns and two small horns, a central body line and two arms, one held up and the other down, the upward one showing a possible hand holding a pipe or a weapon...  Placing it in historical context, however, is another challenge altogether...  The carving has similarities with Late Bronze Age carvings of figures in horned helmets.  The region was once the domain of a Roman tribe known as the Cornovii, a name that has been suggested to reference to the ‘horned ones’.  The figure also could represent a horned deity cult in the Roman army as depicted at several military sites across Britain."

Note how many times Reilly uses words like "appears" and "could be" and "possible" and "suggested."  The fact is -- as he admits up front -- he doesn't know who carved the figure and why.  Dating such finds is a challenge at best, and this one is especially problematic; it was found in loose soil that had been used to backfill a trench from an earlier dig, so it was not in what archaeologists call "a secure context" (i.e., pretty much where it had been placed when its maker set it down millennia ago).

None of this is all that unusual; this kind of thing happens all the time in archaeology, and is in fact way more common than finding an artifact and being able to ascertain exactly when it had been created, by whom, and why.  But what got me thinking about our need to find an answer, any answer, was how Tim Binnall -- who wrote the article about the discovery -- wound up his piece by asking if any of his readers could "solve the mystery of the stone carving," and asked them to submit their answers to him at Coast to Coast.

Now, I know part of this is just an attempt to engage his readers, and there's nothing wrong with that.  I always love it when readers post comments and questions here at Skeptophilia (well, almost always -- I could do without the hate mail).  But immediately I read that, my reaction was, "Why on earth would some random layperson's opinion on the carving have any relevance whatsoever?"  He is, in essence, asking people to form opinions about an artifact for which even the experts have nothing more than speculation.

This is where we cross over into the territory of preferring any answer at all over admitting that we simply don't know, and may never know.

I'm deliberately leaving this in the realm of an obscure archaeological find, because (notwithstanding Binnall's request) few of us are going to get passionately emotional about a carved piece of rock from Bronze Age England.  But I'm sure you can come up with lots of other, more highly charged, examples of this -- questions for which our desire to have answers overrides the fact that we simply don't have enough evidence to conclude anything.  And some of these answers to unanswerable questions are believed with enough fervor that people will die for them -- and there are those who will unhesitatingly kill you if your answer is different from theirs, or worse, if you state outright that you don't know, and in reality, neither do they.

These are not easy issues.  As I said earlier, a lot of it comes from a source that is, at its heart, a positive thing; the drive to know.  But honesty is as important as curiosity, and that includes an honest assessment of what we understand and what we do not.  I'll conclude with a quote from another brilliant physicist, Richard Feynman: "I would far rather have questions that cannot be answered than answers that cannot be questioned."

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