Echoes of the ancestors

I recently finished geneticist Bryan Sykes's book, Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: A Genetic History of Britain and Ireland, which describes the first exhaustive study of the DNA of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland.  From there, I jumped right into The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic, by Robert L. O'Connell, which looks at one of the bloodiest battles on record -- the nearly complete massacre of the Roman army by the Carthaginians at the Battle of Cannae in 216 B.C.E.  That book, like Sykes's, considers the large-scale movements of populations.  The Carthaginians, for example, were mostly displaced Phoenicians who had intermarried with Indigenous North African people, and then occupied what is now Spain, adding in a Celtic strain (the "Celtiberians").

One thing that made my ears perk up in O'Connell's book is that Hannibal, in his march toward Rome, crossed through Transalpine Gaul, picking up large numbers of Gaulish mercenaries along the way, who of course had their own grudge with Rome to settle.  And his path took him right near -- perhaps through -- the valley up in the Alps containing the capital of the Celto-Ligurian tribe called the Tricorii, a town then known as Vapincum.

The name Vapincum eventually was shortened, and morphed into its current name, Gap, a modern town of forty thousand people.

It also happens to be about ten kilometers from the little village where my great-great-grandfather was born.

My last name was, like the name of Gap, altered and shortened over time.  It was originally Ariey, and then picked up a hyphenated modifier indicating the branch of the family we belonged to, and we became Ariey-Bonnet.  When my great-great-grandfather, Jacques Esprit Ariey-Bonnet, came over to the United States, the immigration folks didn't know how to handle a hyphenated name, and told him he'd have to use Ariey as his middle name and Bonnet as his surname, so all four of his children were baptized with the last name Bonnet, despite the fact that it wasn't his actual surname.

Just one of a million stories of how immigrants were forced to alter who they were upon arrival.

In any case, about three years ago, I had my DNA analyzed, and one of the things I found out was about my Y-DNA signature.  This is passed down from father to son, so I have the same Y DNA (barring any mutations) as my paternal ancestors as far back as you can trace.  And it turns out my haplogroup -- the genetic clan my Y-DNA belongs to -- is R1b1b2a1a2d3, which for brevity's sake is sometimes called R1b-L2.  And what I learned is that this DNA signature is "characteristically Italo-Gaulish," according to Eupedia, which is a great source of information for the histories of different DNA groups.

Distribution of the larger R1b Y DNA haplogroup [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Maulucioni, Haplogrupo R1b (ADN-Y), CC BY-SA 4.0]

What's most interesting is that as far back as I've traced my paternal lineage, they hardly moved at all.  My earliest known paternal ancestor, Georges Ariey, was born in about 1560 in Ranguis, France, only about a kilometer from the village of St. Jean-St. Nicolas where my great-great-grandfather Jacques Esprit Ariey-Bonnet was born three hundred years later.  And the DNA I carry indicates they'd been there a lot longer than that.

I have to wonder if my paternal ancestors were some of the Gauls who were there to see Hannibal's army headed for their fateful meeting with the Romans -- or even if they may have joined them.  The Tricorii were apparently noted for going into battle wearing nothing but body paint, so maybe this accounts for my own tendency to run around with as little clothing as is legally permissible when the weather's warm.  What's bred in the bone comes out in the flesh, as John Heywood famously said.

So then I had to look at my mtDNA haplogroup.  The mt (mitochondrial) DNA descends only from the maternal line, so we all have mtDNA from our mother's mother's mother (etc.).  Each person's mtDNA differs from another's only by mutations that have accrued since their last common matrilineal ancestor, and this can provide an idea of how long ago that was (in other words, when the two lineages diverged from each other).  Simply put, more differences = a longer time span since the two shared a common ancestor, making both mtDNA and Y DNA something geneticists call a molecular clock.  The mtDNA from my earliest known maternal ancestor, Marie-Renée Brault, who was born in 1616 in the Loire Valley of western France, belongs to haplogroup H13a1a.  Once again according to Eupedia, this lineage goes back a very long way -- it's been traced to populations living in eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus, and from there spread through the mountains of Greece, across the Alps, and all the way to western France where my maternal great-great (etc.) grandmother lived.

So that genetic signature was carried in the bodies of mothers and daughters along those travels, then crossed the Atlantic to Nova Scotia, then went back across to France when the British expelled the Acadians in the Grand Dérangement, and crossed a third time to southern Louisiana in the late eighteenth century, finally landing in the little town of Raceland where my mother was born.  My dad's Y DNA took a different path -- staying put in the Celto-Ligurian populations of the high Alps for millennia, and only in the nineteenth century jumping across the Atlantic to Louisiana, eventually to meet up with my mother's DNA and produce me.

It's astonishing to me how much we now can figure out about the movement of people whose names and faces are forever lost to history, echoes of our ancestors left behind in our very genes.  However much I'd like to know more about them -- a forlorn hope at best -- at least I've gotten to find out about the shared heritage of our genetic clans, and can content myself with daydreams about what those long-ago people saw, heard, and felt.

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After the Pax Romana

My fellow author and twin-brudda-from-anudda-mudda Andrew Butters is one of several people who are always the lookout for cool developments in science and history to throw my way, and this time he's found one that is right square in my wheelhouse.

I've always had a near-obsession with the western European "Dark Ages" -- between the collapse of Roman rule at the end of the fourth century C. E. and the consolidation of Frankish rule under Charlemagne in the middle of the eighth.  Part of the reason for my fascination is that so little is known for certain about it.  When people are fighting like hell just to stay alive, not too many of them are going to prioritize writing books about the experience, or (honestly) even bothering to learn how to read and write.  Add to that the fact that during the turmoil, a great many of the books that had been written beforehand were destroyed, and it all adds up to a great big question mark.

The people who lived on the fringes of the once-great Roman Empire -- the Celts in the west, the Germanic tribes and Scandinavians in the north, the Slavs in the east -- took advantage of the chaos to reestablish some degree of autonomy, although they left little in the way of written records either, so what we know of their customs, politics, and beliefs is only from what's left of their buildings, monuments, and other durable artifacts.

But that doesn't mean there isn't more out there to find.  The link Andrew sent me, from the site LiveScience, describes a site from the province of Galicia in northern Spain, an area that even today owes much of its culture and music to its Celtic heritage.  Castro Valente, originally thought to be from the Iron Age and therefore pre-Roman, has turned out to be from that awkward blank spot in history I'm so fascinated with -- the fifth century C.E., shortly after the Romans wrote finis on the Pax Romana and hightailed it back to Italy to defend the home country against the Visigoths and Vandals.

Using lidar (light detection and ranging -- a relatively new technique using lasers to map out underground archaeological sites), researchers from University College London and the University of Santiago de Compostela found that the site is the remains of a fortress that had been built on the remains of an Iron Age settlement, but the main structure is of early fifth century construction.  It's huge, covering an area of twenty-five acres, comprised of thirty towers and a defensive wall a little over a kilometer long.

Part of the wall at Castro Valente

The people of the region had never been "pacified" (using that term from the Roman perspective) for long.  The northwestern part of the Iberian peninsula was inhabited by three Celtic groups, the Callaeci in the far northwest, the Lusitani in what is now northern Portugal, and the Astures a little to the east (you might surmise, correctly, that the last-mentioned gave their name to Asturia, the modern name for the north-central province of Spain).  All three were perpetual thorns in the side to the would-be rulers of the region.  The northwestern part of the Iberian Peninsula was only under nominal Roman control even at the height of the Empire, and when a long spate of unfortunately-timed inept rulers kept the central government of Rome in continuous upheaval, followed by repeated invasions from the east by Germanic and Slavic armies, the subjugated people in the west thought that'd be a fine time for them to assert their own independence.  (In fact, right around the same time that Castro Valente was being built, Rome itself was sacked by the Visigoths under Alaric -- a blow from which the Roman Empire never really recovered.)

The hilltop fort could only do so much, though.  Most of that region eventually fell to the Suebi, a Germanic people originally from the Elbe River valley.  The Kingdom of the Suebi lasted for 170 years, at which point they, too, were conquered by the Visigoths, which lasted until 720 C.E. when the Muslim Umayyad Caliphate pretty much overran the entire Iberian Peninsula.

When you think of the history of Spain, chances are you don't think of the Celts and the Germans -- but they had a major role in shaping the language and culture of the region.  This influence is strongest in the northern and western parts of the region; in fact, in modern Galicia there's a significant link still to the Celtic nations.  They even share a musical tradition -- I own a set of Galician bagpipes (a beautiful instrument called a gaita).  Check out this incredible performance by Susana Seivane -- whose father designed my pipes!

It's fascinating to see ancient history still present around us -- not only in the artifacts and archaeological sites, but in the culture we enjoy in the modern world.  These traditions have their roots in the distant past -- in this case, stretching back to a tumultuous period when it looked like the entire established order was collapsing permanently.  That it didn't is a tribute to human resilience and perseverance through a time where day-to-day life was fraught with danger, something we can read in the remnants of stone walls and foundations still standing in the now-peaceful Spanish woodlands.

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Bred in the bone

A while back I had my DNA tested.  I know a good bit about my family tree, and I did it not only to find out about my genetic heritage, but to see if the DNA tests were as accurate as they claim -- a bit like a teacher being able to tell if a student is doing a problem correctly because (s)he already knows what the answer should be.

The answer is: it's pretty damn good.  The most interesting was from a company called My True Ancestry, which supposedly was working off an enormous data bank and could do some seriously fine-grained analysis.  I uploaded my DNA file, and within a few hours I had a map of the closest matches, and they turned out to be spot-on.  It picked up my great-great grandfather Solomon Meyer-Lévy, who was an Ashkenazi Jew from Alsace, and also my father's paternal ancestry, which came from the French Alps.  The rest of my family was scattered through western and northwestern France, England (a cluster in southern England and one in Yorkshire), and two spots in Scotland (one near Glasgow, one near Edinburgh).

This aligns pretty much perfectly with what I know about the origins of my family.  The "pretty much" comes from one puzzling finding; it showed no matches in Germany.  Another great-great grandfather, one William Brandt, came to America in the mid-1800s and married a woman of French and Dutch ancestry named Isabella Rulong.  I know William was German; on the census his birthplace is given as Bremen, so I even know the city.  But my DNA shows zero ancestry in Germany.

However, the answer to this mystery could be simple.  I know a bit about William Brandt because the house he built in the 1870s is on the Louisiana Register of Historic Homes.  William was the court recorder for Lafayette Parish for almost twenty years, and served as mayor for a year.  But the woman who now lives in what was Brandt's house gave us a tour and told us a little about what she knows about my ancestor, and apparently he wasn't exactly a pinnacle of exemplary behavior.  He was, she said, a notorious drunkard, frequently having to be rescued from some ditch or another he'd fallen into after his latest night on the town.  

William Brandt's house, Lafayette, Louisiana [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Paigecbroadbent, Brandt, CC BY-SA 3.0]

This may explain why he held the office of mayor for only a year, something that has always intrigued me.  And it may well also account for my lack of German ancestry.  It's entirely possible that my great-great grandmother Isabella found a friend, as it were, to provide solace and comfort in the absence of her ne'er-do-well husband, and this unknown is actually my biological great-great grandfather.  A study two years ago found that about one percent of births worldwide are due to what they euphemistically call "extra-pair paternity," which is why you have to sign a waiver when you get your DNA tested that you won't hold the company responsible if your results aren't quite what you expected.

So I think there's a pretty good chance that my great grandmother, Mary Emily (Brandt) Bonnet, was not actually William's daughter.  Just as well.  I have enough rogues and scoundrels in my family as it is.

It's amazing what we can now figure out by DNA analysis.  A study just published this week in Nature, written by a team of researchers way too long to list here, used DNA samples from bones and teeth found at burial sites in England to see if they could figure out who came from where and when, and found that in the Late Bronze Age (1,200 to 800 B.C.E.) there was a huge influx of people from what is now northwestern France.  These people, who were probably formed of different tribes but are what we usually collectively call "Celtic," eventually replaced fifty percent of the indigenous pre-invasion population.

"By using genetic data to document times when there were large-scale movements of people into a region, we can identify plausible times for a language shift," said study co-author David Reich of Harvard University, in an interview with Science Daily. "Known Celtic languages are too similar in their vocabularies to plausibly descend from a common ancestor 4,500 years ago, which is the time of the earlier pulse of large-scale migration, and very little migration occurred in the Iron Age.  If you're a serious scholar, the genetic data should make you adjust your beliefs: downweighting the scenario of early Celtic language coming in the Iron Age [and early Bronze Age] and upweighting the Late Bronze Age."

England, of course, has been invaded and settled several times since then; by the Romans in the first century C.E., by the Germanic Anglo-Saxons starting in the sixth century, then by the Norman French in the eleventh.  Each new pulse of invaders brought along their own languages and culture -- and their DNA.  That we can look at bones today and see the genetic history of the people they came from is pretty stupendous.

One of the coolest pieces of this research has to do with lactose tolerance.  You probably know that lactose is a sugar that is easily digested by most mammals only in infancy, and adults lose their tolerance for it.  (This is why it's not a good idea to feed milk to an adult cat.)  But some people retain the ability to digest lactose -- it's most common in Europe, and is caused by a single gene.  Lactose tolerance seems to have spread along with the practice of keeping dairy cattle, for obvious reasons.  And in the period studied by the research, the incidence of the lactose-tolerance gene skyrocketed, so the new influx of settlers seem to have been milk drinkers -- and brought along their cattle.

It's amazing what we can learn from a bunch of three-thousand-year-old bones, and that the DNA fragments still contained within them give us a window into the movements of people during a time we know little about otherwise.  In my case, we're talking about people who are likely to be my ancestors (all "extra-pair paternity events" aside).  One more example of the wisdom in the saying carved into the wall of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: γνῶθι σεαυτόν ("know yourself").

Or, as John Heywood put in in 1546: "What's bred in the bone comes out in the flesh."

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I remember when I first learned about the tragedy of how much classical literature has been lost.  Take, for example, Sophocles, which anyone who's taken a college lit class probably knows because of his plays Oedipus Rex, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus.  He was the author of at least 120 plays, of which only seven have survived.  While we consider him to be one of the most brilliant ancient Greek playwrights, we don't even have ten percent of the literature he wrote.  As Carl Sagan put it, it's as if all we had of Shakespeare was Timon of Athens, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Cymbeline, and were judging his talent based upon that.

The same is true of just about every classical Greek and Roman writer.  Little to nothing of their work survives; some are only known because of references to their writing in other authors.  Some of what we do have was saved by fortunate chance; this is the subject of Stephen Greenblatt's wonderful book The Swerve, which is about how a fifteenth-century book collector, Poggio Bracciolini, discovered in a monastic library what might well have been the sole remaining copy of Lucretius's masterwork De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), which was one of the first pieces of writing to take seriously Democritus's idea that all matter is made of atoms.

The Swerve looks at the history of Lucretius's work (and its origin in the philosophy of Epicurus) and the monastic tradition that allowed it to survive, as well as Poggio's own life and times and how his discovery altered the course of our pursuit of natural history.  (This is the "swerve" referenced in the title.)  It's a fascinating read for anyone who enjoys history or science (or the history of science).  His writing is clear, lucid, and quick-paced, about as far from the stereotype of historical writing being dry and boring as you could get.  You definitely need to put this one on your to-read list.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Genetic walkabouts

Today's topic comes to us from the One Thing Leads To Another department.  

I got launched into this particular rabbit hole by a notice from 23 & Me that they'd refined their analysis of their test subjects' DNA, and now had a bigger database to extract from, allowing them to make a better guess at "percent composition" not only by general region, but by specific sub-region.

So I took a look at my results.  My DNA came out 63.5% French, 25.3% Scottish and English, 6.4% Ashkenazi, and the remaining 4.8% a miscellany.  This works out to be pretty much what I'd expect from what I know of my family tree.  My mom was close to 100% French, but a great-grandfather of hers, one Solomon Meyer-Lévy, was a French Jew from Alsace and is the origin of the Ashkenazic DNA.  My dad was a bit of a hodgepodge in which French, Scottish, and English predominate.

So like I said, no surprises.  I'm a white guy of western European descent, which if you look at my profile photo, is probably not going to come as any sort of shock.

What I thought was more interesting was the regional breakdown.  The Scottish and English bits were especially interesting because I don't have good records of where exactly my British Isles forebears were from.  Apparently I have a cluster of genetic relatives around Glasgow, the London area, and Yorkshire.  Other than my dad's paternal family (which was from the French Alps, near Mont Blanc and the border of Italy) and my Alsatian great-great-grandfather, my French ancestry is all in western France; this lines up with what I know of my mom's family, which came from Bordeaux, Poitou, the Loire Valley, and Brittany.

So all of this shores up their claims to accuracy, because this was ascertained purely by my DNA -- I didn't send them my family tree, or anything.  But then this got combined with another random thing, which is that I've been reading a book called The Ancient Celts by anthropologist Barry Cunliffe, and I was kind of surprised at how much of Europe the Celts once ruled -- not only the British Isles and all of France (then called Gaul), but what is now Switzerland, southern Germany, Austria, the northern half of Italy, the eastern half of Spain, and down into a big chunk of the Balkans.  They seem to have been nothing if not inveterate wanderers, and their walkabouts took them just about everywhere in Europe but Scandinavia.  They were there for a long while, too; it was only when the Romans got their act together and started to push back that the Celts retreated; they were shoved farther west when first the Germanic tribes, and then the Slavs, moved in from the east and kind of kept moving.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

This all got me thinking, "Okay, when I say my ancestry is on the order of 2/3 French, what exactly am I saying?"  So I started doing some research into "the ethnic origin of the French," and I found out that it's not simple.  The western parts of France (whence my mom's family originated) are mostly of Celtic (Gaulish) ancestry.  People in the southeast, especially the lowlands near Marseilles, have a lot of Roman and Etruscan forebears.  When you get over into Languedoc -- the southwestern part of France, near the border of Spain -- there's an admixture not only from the Moors of North Africa, but from the Basques, who seem to be the remnants of the earliest settlers of Europe, and are the only ones in western Europe who don't speak an Indo-European language.  In Normandy there's a good admixture of Scandinavian blood, from Vikings who settled there a thousand years ago -- in fact, "Normandy" means "North-man-land."  Despite the fact that the name of the country and its people comes from a Germanic tribe (the Franks), the only place there's a significant amount of Germanic ancestry in France is in the east -- from Burgundy north into Alsace, Lorraine, and Picardy.

Apparently the only reason the French are Frankish is because the Franks ruled the place for a few hundred years, a bit the way the Normans did in England.  The common people, your average seventeenth-century peasants in Bordeaux, probably were nearly 100% Gaulish Celt.

So when I say my mom's family is French, and a guy from Lille and a woman from Marseilles say the same thing, what exactly do we mean?

And there's nothing unusual about the French in that regard; I just use them as an example because I happen to know more about them.  The same is true pretty much anywhere you look except for truly insular cultures like Japan, which have had very little migration in or out for millennia.  We're almost all composites, and ultimately, all cousins.  I remember when I first ran into this idea; that the further back you go, the more our family trees all coalesce, and at some point in the past every human on Earth could be sorted into one of two categories -- people who were the ancestors of every one of us, and people who left no living descendants.

That point, most anthropologists believe, is way more recent than most of us would suspect.  I've heard -- to be fair, I've never seen it rigorously proven, but it sounds about right -- that the two-category split for those of us with western European ancestry happened in around 1,200 C.E.  So pick out anyone from thirteenth century western Europe, and he's either my ancestor, or he has no descendants at all.

This brings up a couple of things.  First, "royal blood" is an idiotic concept from just about whichever angle you choose.  Not only does royal ancestry not confer fitness for leading a country -- let's face it, a lot of those kings were absolute loonies -- I can pretty much guarantee that I descend from Charlemagne, and if you have European ancestry, so do you.  My wife actually descends from an illegitimate child of King Edward IV of England (something she likes to remind me about whenever I get uppity), but the truth is, all of us have royal blood and peasant blood pretty well mixed indiscriminately.

Second, racism, ethnicism, and xenophobia are all equally ridiculous, since (1) we're virtually all genetic mixtures, (2) regardless of our ethnicity, our genetic similarities far outweigh our differences, and (3) we're all cousins anyhow.  I find that rather cool, honestly -- that a Zulu woman living in Botswana and I have common ancestry if you go back far enough.  Race is a cultural construct, not a genetic one, which you can see with extraordinary vividness if you take a DNA test, or if you read anything about the migration patterns humanity has taken since first leaving the East African savanna something like 250,000 years ago.

Anyhow, those are my musings about ethnicity, DNA, ancestry, and so on.  It all goes to show that we're wonderfully complex creatures, and the determination of some of us to see the world as if it was straightforward black-and-white is not only inaccurate, it misses a great deal of the most interesting parts of it.  As the brilliant science fiction writer Ursula LeGuin put it, "I never knew anybody who found life simple.  I think a life or a time looks simple only if you leave out the details."

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Not long ago I was discussing with a friend of mine the unfortunate tendency of North Americans and Western Europeans to judge everything based upon their own culture -- and to assume everyone else in the world sees things the same way.  (An attitude that, in my opinion, is far worse here in the United States than anywhere else, but since the majority of us here are the descendants of white Europeans, that attitude didn't come out of nowhere.)  

What that means is that people like me, who live somewhere WEIRD -- white, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic -- automatically have blinders on.  And these blinders affect everything, up to and including things like supposedly variable-controlled psychological studies, which are usually conducted by WEIRDs on WEIRDs, and so interpret results as universal when they might well be culturally-dependent.

This is the topic of a wonderful new book by anthropologist Joseph Henrich called The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.  It's a fascinating lens into a culture that has become so dominant on the world stage that many people within it staunchly believe it's quantifiably the best one -- and some act as if it's the only one.  It's an eye-opener, and will make you reconsider a lot of your baseline assumptions about what humans are and the ways we see the world -- of which science historian James Burke rightly said, "there are as many different versions of that as there are people."

[Note:  If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Sanitizing history

An online acquaintance of mine made an interesting statement a couple of days ago.

"The Europeans didn't just bring exploitation and disease to North America, they brought war.  The Native Americans didn't even fight wars until after the Europeans arrived."

I asked him how he knew this, and he said he'd read it in a book, and then posted a link from (of all things) a Reddit page.   I gave a verbal shrug, and sort of said, "Okay, then," and didn't push the topic any further.  But I've been thinking about it ever since.

Why do we need to have certain ethnic groups be characterized by a nearly mythical goodness?

How often have we heard that before the Europeans arrived, the Natives were "in touch with the land," that they respected the Great Spirit, asked animals' permission before hunting, never took more than their fair share of what nature had to offer?  And now, this gentleman claims that they also never made war on each other until the Europeans arrived and taught them to do so.  I've heard similar claims made for other groups -- most commonly the Celts, who have also been mythologized to a fare-thee-well, to the point that since the mid-1800s there have been quasi-religious groups of "druids" who have tried to emulate what they think the Celts were doing back then.  More recently, the Afrocentrist movement has claimed that all good things came from Africa, and the extreme wing of that school of thought calls dark-skinned people "Sun People" and light-skinned people "Ice People" -- with all of the value judgments that those terms imply.

There are a couple of problems with all of this -- one of them academic, one of them common-sense.

The academic problem is that because all three of those groups left next to no tangible records, we really don't have all that clear a picture of what they were doing before they were contacted by societies who did write things down.  And when that contact occurred, the records left weren't exactly unbiased -- it's hard to know how much to believe of (for example) what the Romans wrote about the Celts.  Trying to piece together what was going on in the years prior to such contact is decidedly non-trivial, and has to be inferred from archaeological evidence and such indirect evidence as patterns of linguistic distribution.

Queen Boudicca of the Celts by Joseph Martin Kronheim (1855) [Image is in the Public Domain]

In preparation for writing this, I tried to find out what was actually known to anthropologists about the nature of society in pre-Columbian North America, and the answer is: surprisingly little.  I'm no anthropologist myself, so am unqualified to make a firm judgment, but what did strike me about the papers I read is that they don't even necessarily agree with each other.  The tangible artifacts left behind by some groups (e.g. the Pueblo cultures of the US Southwest) seem to suggest a peaceful agricultural existence, but that, too, is a guess.  It seems fairly certain that the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) tribes of the Northeastern US did a good bit of fighting with the Algonquian tribes of Eastern Canada; those groups were "traditional enemies" and apparently were happily beating each other up long before the French and English arrived and made things worse.  Certainly the Aztecs, Maya, and Incas of Central and South America were not exactly what you might call peaceful by nature -- stone carvings show Aztec priests ripping the hearts from living sacrificial victims, and at least some of those victims appear from the carvings to have been prisoners of war.

My second objection is purely common sense; while some cultural values seem to me to be better than others, I just don't believe that whole groups of people were somehow "nicer" overall.  Consider what a future anthropologist might make of our current "warlike" American culture -- in the last hundred years we have certainly fought a great many times in places around the globe, for a variety of purposes, and during that time have diverted a large percentage of our resources into weaponry and the military.  What does that mean about us as a people?  My general feeling is "not much."  If you look around you, you'll find mean people, nice people, aggressive people, gentle people, and pretty much the gamut of whatever set of traits you choose.  Sure, our militarism is connected to our citizenry -- the military decisions are made by our leaders, who are elected by us -- but a future mythologizer who came up with a concept of American People As Evil Bloodthirsty Imperialists would be missing the truth by a mile.  (As would a concept of Americans As Courageous, World-Saving Warriors.)

Please note that I am in no way trying to excuse what our, or any other culture's, militarism actually accomplished.  What the Europeans did to the Native Americans and the Africans, what the British did to the Australian Natives and the people of India and Pakistan, what the Romans (and later the English) did to the Celts, are inexcusable tragedies.  My point is that the cultures who were the victims of these atrocities were not themselves perfect, and we do no favors either to them nor to the study of history in general by pretending that's true. 

 It is easy, out of our pity for the losers, to make them into creatures of myth, as having lived in an Eden until the nasty aggressors came in and fucked it up.  As always, reality is complex and messy, and doesn't fit neatly into pigeonholes.  It might be appealing to believe that the Celts were the Mystical, Nature-Worshiping People of the Sacred Forest prior to their being beaten to a pulp by a whole succession of cultures.  But this is a myth, just like the Native American as Noble Protector of the Environment and the African cultures as warm-hearted, creative Sun People.  No culture is perfect, no ethnic group without flaws, and it is only our desire to have an ideal to espouse that makes us ascribe such characteristics to the inhabitants of the past.

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One of the most compellingly weird objects in the universe is the black hole -- a stellar remnant so dense that it warps space into a closed surface.  Once the edge of that sphere -- the event horizon -- is passed, there's no getting out.  Even light can't escape, which is where they get their name.

Black holes have been a staple of science fiction for years, not only for their potential to destroy whatever comes near them, but because their effects on space-time result in a relativistic slowdown of time (depicted brilliantly in the movie Interstellar).  In this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, The Black Hole Survival Guide, astrophysicist Janna Levin describes for us what it would be like to have a close encounter with one of these things -- using the latest knowledge from science to explain in layperson's terms the experience of an unfortunate astronaut who strayed too close.

It's a fascinating, and often mind-blowing, topic, handled deftly by Levin, where the science itself is so strange that it seems as if it must be fiction.  But no, these things are real, and common; there's a huge one at the center of our own galaxy, and an unknown number of them elsewhere in the Milky Way.  Levin's book will give you a good picture of one of the scariest naturally-occurring objects -- all from the safety of your own home.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Stonehenge revisited

If you're into paranormal research, the word "Stonehenge" is enough to make you shudder.

It's not that it's not an impressive monument, historically important, and culturally unique.  It's definitely all of those things.  It's just that the strangeness of the structure, out there on the bleak Salisbury Plains, invites woo-woo speculation and just plain blather like no other.

With the possible exception of the Pyramids, of course.  Google "secrets of the Pyramids" if you don't believe me, but only click on the links if you have a high tolerance for nonsense.  You have been warned.

Anyhow, whenever I see sites that say "mysteries of Stonehenge decoded!" I always roll my eyes a bit.  But as I've commented more than once, rejecting claims out of hand is just as lazy as accepting them out of hand; cynicism is no better than gullibility, and both are excuses not to think.  So I got my comeuppance at the hands of the Brussels Times with an article called "Belgian Archaeologist Discloses Mysteries of Stonehenge," which turns out not only to be completely legitimate, but truly fascinating.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Wigulf~commonswiki, Stonehenge, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The article is about archaeologist Christophe Snoeck, of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, who has been working on the archaeology of Stonehenge since he was a graduate student at Oxford.  He's studying the remains of individuals who were cremated at the site, and his analysis of the bone fragments (and the genetic makeup thereof) has shown that they were not part of the native population of Wessex, but seem to have come along with the stones themselves -- which have been known for years to have come from quite a distance, the Preseli Mountains of western Wales.

"By working directly on the human remains found at the site we hoped to gain insight, not on the origin of the stones, but on the origin of those using the site and being buried there," Snoeck said.  "Most research on Stonehenge focused on the stones.  Little was known about the humans buried at the site.  This is mostly due to the fact that they were cremated and only small cremated bone fragments remained.  It is only very recently that new methods have been developed to study cremated human remains."

Snoeck's research gives us a lens into a pre-literate people (or at least one for whom we have no written records), who have therefore been essentially silent for millennia.  Despite what you hear from aficionados of pagan religions, there is almost nothing known about the culture of the early Celts.  Most of the druidic trappings are the results of the 19th-century "Celtic revival" that mysticized -- invented, really -- a religion for these mysterious people.  The little real data we have comes from contemporary accounts; but those writings (such as descriptions by the invading Romans) are not only unflattering, but are almost certain to be largely incorrect, if you judge by other examples of conquerors describing the conquerees.

"By gathering more information about [the early Celts]," Snoeck says, "we can start to understand the place of such sites in the wider landscape and how they shaped societies and beliefs through time and space.  We were very excited to see that not all individuals lived near the site and that many actually moved over quite large distances to come to Stonehenge...  [U]nderstanding how people and societies changed trough time and space helps us understand current societies and how they might change and interact."

So it's nice that we have someone researching the site with a serious eye toward gathering scientifically-relevant data.  Heaven knows there's enough silliness out there on the topic.  It'll be fascinating to see what Snoeck and other archaeologists uncover about Stonehenge's builders, and other related sites such as the dolmens in Brittany.  All of it will give us a window into a long-dead people, whose knowledge, language, and culture vanished beneath the sands of time over two thousand years ago.

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In August of 1883, one of the largest volcanic eruptions in human history (literally) obliterated an island in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra.

The island was Krakatoa (now known by its more correct spelling of "Krakatau").  The magnitude of the explosion is nearly incomprehensible.  It generated a sound estimated at 310 decibels, loud enough to be heard five thousand kilometers away (sailors forty kilometers away suffered ruptured eardrums).  Rafts of volcanic pumice, some of which contained human skeletons, washed up in East Africa after making their way across the entire Indian Ocean.  Thirty-six thousand people died, many of whom were not killed by the eruption itself but by the horrifying tsunamis that resulted, in some places measuring over forty meters above sea level.

Simon Winchester, a British journalist and author, wrote a book about the lead-up to that fateful day in summer of 1883.  It is as lucid and fascinating as his other books, which include A Crack at the Edge of the World (about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake), The Map that Changed the World (a brilliant look at the man who created the first accurate geological map of England), and The Surgeon of Crowthorne (the biographies of the two men who created the Oxford English Dictionary -- one of whom was in a prison for the criminally insane).

So if you're a fan of excellent historical and science writing, or (like me) fascinated with volcanoes, earthquakes, and plate tectonics, you definitely need to read Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded.  It will give you a healthy respect for the powerful forces that create the topography of our planet -- some of which wield destructive power greater than anything we can imagine.

Sanitizing history

An online acquaintance of mine made an interesting statement a couple of days ago.

"The Europeans didn't just bring exploitation and disease to North America, they brought war.  The Native Americans didn't even fight wars until after the Europeans arrived."

I asked him how he knew this, and he said he'd read it in a book, and then posted a link from a Yahoo! Answers page.  I gave a verbal shrug, and sort of said, "Okay, then," and didn't push the topic any further.  But I've been thinking about it ever since.

Why do we need to have certain ethnic groups be characterized by a nearly mythical goodness?

How often have we heard that before the Europeans arrived, the Natives were "in touch with the land," that they respected the Great Spirit, asked animals' permission before hunting, never took more than their fair share of what nature had to offer?  And now, this gentleman claims that they also never made war on each other until the Europeans arrived and taught them to do so.  I've heard similar claims made for other groups -- most commonly the Celts, who have also been mythologized to a fare-thee-well, to the point that since the mid-1800s there have been quasi-religious groups of "druids" who have tried to emulate what they think the Celts were doing back then.  More recently, the Afrocentrist movement has claimed that all good things came from Africa, and the extreme wing of that school of thought calls dark-skinned people "Sun People" and light-skinned people "Ice People" -- with all of the value judgments that those terms imply.

There are a couple of problems with all of this -- one of them academic, one of them common-sense.

The academic problem is that because all three of those groups left next to no tangible records, we really don't have all that clear a picture of what they were doing before they were contacted by societies who did write things down.  And when that contact occurred, the records left weren't exactly unbiased -- it's hard to know how much to believe of (for example) what the Romans wrote about the Celts.  Trying to piece together what was going on in the years prior to such contact is decidedly non-trivial, and has to be inferred from archaeological evidence and such indirect evidence as patterns of linguistic distribution.

Queen Boudicca of the Celts by Joseph Martin Kronheim (1855) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

In preparation for writing this, I tried to find out what was actually known to anthropologists about the nature of society in pre-Columbian North America, and the answer is: surprisingly little.  I'm no anthropologist myself, so am unqualified to make a firm judgment, but what did strike me about the papers I read is that they don't even necessarily agree with each other.  The tangible artifacts left behind by some groups (e.g. the Pueblo cultures of the US Southwest) seem to suggest a peaceful agricultural existence, but that, too, is a guess.  It seems fairly certain that the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) tribes of the Northeastern US did a good bit of fighting with the Algonquian tribes of Eastern Canada -- those groups were "traditional enemies" and apparently were happily beating each other up long before the French and English arrived and made things worse.  Certainly the Aztecs, Maya, and Incas of Central and South America were not exactly what you might call peaceful by nature -- stone carvings show Aztec priests ripping the hearts from living sacrificial victims, and at least some of those victims appear from the carvings to have been prisoners of war.

My second objection is purely common sense; while some cultural values seem to me to be better than others, I just don't believe that whole groups of people were somehow "nicer" than others.  Consider what a future anthropologist might make of our current "warlike" American culture -- in the last hundred years we have certainly fought a great many times in places around the globe, for a variety of purposes, and during that time have diverted a large percentage of our resources into weaponry and the military.  What does that mean about us as a people?  My general feeling is "not much."  If you look around you, you'll find mean people, nice people, aggressive people, gentle people, and pretty much the gamut of whatever set of opposite traits you choose.  Sure, our militarism is connected to our citizenry -- the military decisions are made by our leaders, who are elected by us -- but a future mythologizer who came up with a concept of American People As Evil Bloodthirsty Imperialists would be missing the truth by a mile.  (As would a concept of Americans As Courageous, World-Saving Warriors.)

Please note that I am in no way trying to excuse what our, or any other culture's, militarism actually accomplished.  What the Europeans did to the Native Americans and the Africans, what the British did to the Australian Natives, what the Romans (and later the English) did to the Celts, are inexcusable tragedies.  But the cultures who were the victims of these atrocities were not themselves perfect.  It is easy, out of our pity for the losers, to make them into creatures of myth, as having lived in an Eden until the nasty aggressors came in and fucked it up.

As always, reality is complex and messy, and doesn't fit neatly into pigeonholes.  It might be appealing to believe that the Celts were the Mystical, Nature-Worshiping People of the Sacred Forest prior to their being beaten to a pulp by a whole succession of cultures.  But this is a myth, just like the Native American as Noble Protector of the Environment and the African cultures as warm-hearted, creative Sun People.  No culture is perfect, no ethnic group without flaws, and it is only our desire to have an ideal to espouse that makes us ascribe such characteristics to the inhabitants of the past.

Alien round-up

Yesterday's post, which involved fact-free speculation about UFOs being a "macro-scale quantum effect," made me realize that it's been a while since we looked at what was happening in the world of UFOlogists and alien aficionados.  So I did some research, and I'm glad that I did, because there are three stories that certainly merit a closer look.

First, we have an article over at the wonderfully loony website Phantoms and Monsters: Pulse of the Paranormal called "Chatting With the Axthadans," in which we learn about an extraterrestrial species that I, at least, had never heard of.

The Axthadans are sometimes confused with the "Greys," we read, although there are some significant differences.  The "Greys" are much shorter, the author tells us, and come from a planet only thirty light years distant.  The Axthadans, on the other hand, are benevolent aliens from the Andromeda Galaxy.

Upon reading this, I immediately thought, "How can you be from a whole galaxy?"  I mean, it's bad enough that some woo-woos think that there are life forms that come from a constellation, given that this is just a loose assemblage of a few stars that are all at varying distances from the Earth, and only seem to be near each other when viewed from our vantage point.  But an entire galaxy?  Made up, according to recent studies, of one trillion stars?

How could that possibly work?

Also, there's the little problem that the distance from the Earth to the center of the Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million light years.  In other words, so distant that even at the speed of light, it would take 2.5 million years to get there.  I seem to remember that even the writers of the original Star Trek recognized that the Andromeda Galaxy was kind of far away -- in one episode, evil aliens try to hijack the Enterprise and take it there, for some reason that escapes my memory at the moment, and they convert almost the entire crew into little geometrical solids for the duration of the voyage, which saved not only on upkeep but also on salary for hiring actors to portray Red Shirts who were just gonna die anyhow.  But fortunately, the un-converted members of the crew save the day, and prevent the ship from being taken on a voyage Boldly Going Where No One In His Right Mind Would Ever Attempt To Go.

So, however unlikely it is that we've been visited by beings from another star system, it's orders of magnitude less likely that we've been visited by beings from another galaxy.  The distances are simply prohibitive, even presupposing some kind of super-advanced technology.


(Much) closer to home, we have a woman in Wales who thinks that the aliens are abducting Welsh people because of their superior DNA.

Hilary Porter, "UFOlogist and public speaker," says she herself has been abducted so many times that she's lost count.  The first time was when she and her husband were on their way to visit a friend in Llanelli, and had a time-slip after which they found themselves near Cardiff with no memory of what had happened for some hours previous.

"It was damned frightening," Porter said.  "We just blacked out and had no idea how we got there.  I didn’t feel well at all.  My husband thought we must have gone to sleep, but that didn’t explain how we got there...  When we got home I got changed and found triangular suction marks on my stomach, blood suction marks. I thought 'flipping hell, look at that.'"

Which is a fair enough response, I suppose.  As far as why they abducted her, and why that area of road is an "abduction hotspot," Porter speculates that it's because the aliens want DNA from "the Celtic tribes" because their "DNA is of more interest" and is "compatible for creating human/alien hybrids."

I suppose I should be concerned, given that I'm a quarter Scottish by ancestry.  I'm not sure if the other 3/4 (which is mainly French) outweighs the Celtic-ness, though.  I can understand it if the aliens aren't interested in French DNA, given that a human-alien hybrid that was only interested in sitting around in the intergalactic café drinking red wine and looking smug probably wouldn't be much use.  But if a quarter Scottish is sufficient, I want to invite the aliens to abduct me.  I would love to see the interior of a spacecraft.  Also, meeting an extraterrestrial intelligence is high on the list of things I want to do.  I'd be happy to roll up my sleeve and give them a vial of blood, if that's what they're after, although I'd appreciate it if they'd give me a pass on the whole body-cavity probe thing.

Last, we have word from none other than Pope Francis himself that if aliens exist, he'd not only welcome them, he'd baptize them.

I'm not making this up.  The Vatican has taken a great interest in astronomy in recent years, probably out of guilt feelings over what they did to Galileo and Giordano Bruno.  And the pope himself is deeply intrigued by the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

In his weekly homily, given on Monday, Pope Francis said, "If – for example - tomorrow an expedition of Martians came, and some of them came to us, here... Martians, right?  Green, with that long nose and big ears, just like children paint them...  And one says, 'But I want to be baptized!' What would happen?...  When the Lord shows us the way, who are we to say, 'No, Lord, it is not prudent!  No, let's do it this way'... Who are we to close doors?  In the early Church, even today, there is the ministry of the ostiary [usher].  And what did the ostiary do?  He opened the door, received the people, allowed them to pass.  But it was never the ministry of the closed door, never."

So that sounds pretty open-minded, although I do have to wonder why exactly the aliens would want to be baptized.  I mean, if the pope is right about god and salvation and the whole shebang, presumably the aliens already know about it.  There's no particular reason why they'd have to go to the trouble of coming all the way to Rome (Italy, Earth, Solar System) to get access.

And then, there'd be the inconvenience of the aliens having to fly their spaceships to Mass every Sunday, and sending their kids to catechism classes and all.  Nah, I'm pretty sure they'd just prefer to stay home and keep whatever religious beliefs (or lack thereof) they already had.

But that's the whole problem, isn't it?  According to the UFOlogists, we have all of these aliens, coming here all the time.  To listen to people like Hilary Porter, Earth is a regular Stellar Grand Central Station.  And the people who believe in the Axthadans think that they came all the way to this tiny, insignificant little speck of rock, 2.5 million light years away, to "guide our development" and "prepare humans for possible integration into the universal culture."  And they've been coming for a while, too; apparently the biblical book of Ezekiel, which reads like almost as much of a Bronze-Age bad acid trip as the book of Revelation, was a chronicle of a visit from the Axthadans.

It all seems pretty unlikely to me -- given the distances involved, and the how generally unremarkable our planet and Solar System seem to be.  So sad to say, but I think we probably haven't been visited.  Meaning my DNA and yours (if you have Celtic ancestry) is reasonably certain to be safe from extraction.