Assessing a collapse

One of the coolest things about science is the cross-fertilization that happens between disciplines.

I'm always impressed when I see examples of this, and my reaction is usually, "How did you even think of doing that?"  It is, at its core, a highly creative process.  The best science involves looking at a problem from a different angle, drawing in data or methods from other disciplines, and putting the whole thing together in such a way that the answer is clear.  (Or at least, a piece of it is clearer than it was before.)  As Hungarian biochemist Albert von Szent-Györgyi put it, "Discovery consists of seeing what everyone has seen, and thinking what no one has thought."

The creative aspect of science struck me while I was reading an article yesterday in Ars Technica about a some new research into a historical puzzle: the sudden collapse of the Shang Dynasty in China, about three thousand years ago.  The Shang were in power for nearly six centuries -- a pretty long time for a single dynastic regime -- and had made some significant accomplishments, the most notable of which were the first recorded writing system for Chinese, and amazing advances in pottery making and bronze casting.  Then -- over a very short period, perhaps only a few years -- Shang rule imploded.  A rival group called the Zhou took advantage of the chaos to defeat the Shang in a bloody battle, then scattered the remaining Shang supporters throughout the land to assure they'd never be able to rise again.

Now, researchers at Nanjing University, led by meteorologist Ke Ding, have drawn on a variety of disparate fields -- meteorology, climatology, geology, archaeology, paleontology, and analysis of extant historical records -- to try to create a complete picture of the causes behind the Shang Dynasty's sudden demise.

Their conclusion: the collapse of the Shang was the consequence of a long line of dominoes that started with a series of prolonged and powerful El Niño events, thousands of kilometers away.

Paleontologists analyzing fossil remains in strata off the coast of Peru dating to around 1000 B.C.E. note a shift from cold-water species to those that favor warmer water.  The fact that there wasn't an oscillation back and forth, but a replacement by warm-water species that lasted perhaps a century, suggests that rather than the usual pendulum swing of El Niño/La Niña conditions -- the former causing a warmup of the surface waters off the west coast of South America, the latter a corresponding cooldown -- in the years before the Shang collapse, the climate seems to have switched over to a semi-permanent El Niño.  What would be the outcome of such a shift in the ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation)?  This is where the meteorologists and climatologists took over; they estimated the degree of warmup, and let their computer models predict what effects that would have.

One thing that popped out of the models was a drastic increase in the strength of Pacific typhoons, and a significant change in their paths.  The warmup shifted wind patterns, tracking large storms away from Australia (thus the droughts and wildfires in Australia and Indonesia that usually accompany El Niño years), and northward into China.  Typhoons, though, usually fizzle once they cross over from ocean to land; and the capital of the late Shang Dynasty was Zhaoge, in Henan Province, far away from the coast.  So how would typhoons have affected an inland city so drastically?

But the models showed that the altered wind direction didn't just shove storms toward China, it also fed warm, moist air inland -- atmospheric rivers.  These air currents flow until they meet a mountain range, and the humid air masses experience adiabatic cooling as they rise in elevation, causing them to dump their moisture as rain or snow on the windward sides of mountains.

In other words, the rain shadow effect.  The outcome; suddenly northern and central China were way wetter than they had been.

Now, enter the archaeologists.  One of the most common items in Shang-age archaeological sites are oracle bones -- usually the scapulae of ox, horses, or deer that are thrown into a fire, and the resulting cracks and scorch marks read by a shaman.  But fortunately for us, the shamans -- recall the Shang's development of the first Chinese writing system -- also recorded on the oracle bones what questions had been asked, and what the shaman's assessment of the results had been (i.e., the answer to the question).

And in the last fifty years of the Shang Dynasty, just about all of the oracle bones have to do with the weather.  A lot of them basically ask, "When the hell is it going to stop raining?"

A Shang Dynasty oracle bone [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Orakelknochen, CC BY-SA 3.0]

At the same time as this, the archaeologists also note the abandonment of village sites near riverbanks, an increase in burial of sites under riverine sediments, and the relocation of towns onto higher ground.

What Ke Ding and his colleagues concluded is that the Shang were weakened by years of floods, probably accompanied by poor harvests and resulting famine.  This set the stage for the Zhou rebellion, and the destruction of a dynasty that had ruled China for six centuries.

Now, here's the kicker.  The researchers caution that we're seeing a similar pattern today -- anthropogenic global warming is increasing oceanic surface temperatures, and the Pacific Ocean is seeing extended and more powerful El Niño events.  As Mark Twain observed, "History doesn't repeat, but it often rhymes."

Oh, except that noted climate scientist Donald Trump has evaluated the available data, and decided that global warming is a hoax, and the climatologists are big fat poopyheads.  So there's that.

Anyhow, it's a fascinating and elegant piece of research, and shows how creative the scientific enterprise can be.  Collaboration is the heart of discovery, and here we have an entire team of experts from disparate fields pitching in together to solve a historical puzzle.  One that, despite Trump's pronouncements, we had damn well better pay attention to today.

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The lake of bones

In Guy Gavriel Kay's brilliant, atmospheric novel Under Heaven, the character of Shen Tai has undertaken a strange vocation.

Under Heaven is set in a world that is a thinly-disguised Tang Dynasty China, and Shen Tai has distanced himself from the backstabbing intrigue of court life to live in a small house beside a lake in the far west of the country.  The lake shore was the site of an ancient battle that left thousands dead.  All his life, Shen Tai has heard the voices of the slain warriors, so once he became an adult he made the decision to spend his days unearthing their skeletons and giving them proper burials, honoring their deaths with the appropriate rituals so their spirits can finally find rest.

I was immediately reminded of Shen Tai's long and arduous task when I stumbled upon an account of the strange (real) place called Roopkund, a glacial lake in Uttarakhand State, India.  It's high up in the Himalayas, at an altitude of a bit over five thousand meters:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Schwiki, Roopkund Lake, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Not, to my eye, the most scenic place in the world, but nevertheless Roopkund is a popular trekking destination for a very peculiar reason; like the lake near Shen Tai's little house, Roopkund's rocky soil contains hundreds -- possibly thousands -- of human skeletons.  Some are at the surface, but more erode out of the talus after every spring snow melt.  A few are visible beneath the water's surface, bringing to mind another creepy literary allusion -- Tolkien's Dead Marshes:

The legend is that the skeletons are the remains of people killed by a freak violent hailstorm in the ninth century C. E.  Some versions of the story are even more specific -- that the victims were a local king, Raja Jasdhaval, his wife Rani Balampa, and their retinue, who were on their way to visit the nearby Nanda Devi Shrine when they perished in a storm.  And indeed, many of the skeletons show unhealed injuries of the kind you'd expect from a blow to the top of the head by a rounded object like a large hailstone.

The story, though, gets even weirder.  Recent radiocarbon and DNA analysis of the remains found that they didn't all die in a single event.  Some of them died in around 800 C. E.; all of those showed typical South Asian genetic signatures.  But another group, that died in around 1800, had highly varied DNA signatures -- not only South Asian, but Vietnamese, Malay, and... Greek!

Nothing from local histories seems to account for how a large group of Greeks and Southeast Asians ended up high up in the Himalayas over two centuries ago.  But apparently, as odd as it seems, there were two separate hailstorms that wiped out not only a bunch of locals, but a large group of foreigners a thousand years later.

I'm not superstitious, but myself, I'm thinking visiting this lake might not be such a great idea.

Be that as it may, it's become a popular destination for aficionados of "dark tourism," the hobby of visiting places with grim or sinister histories.  In fact, the government of Uttarakhand is taking measures to protect the site as a national monument, spurred by how many tourists were going there -- and bringing pieces of the skeletons home with them.

Just a wee bit disrespectful, that.  I'm doubtful anyone is going to start hearing the disembodied voices of ghosts, like Shen Tai did, but fer cryin' in the sink, these are the remains of actual human beings who died painful and gruesome deaths.  Go take a look, if it floats your boat, but then -- just let them rest in peace, okay?  You really don't need a human skull collecting dust on your mantelpiece.

Maybe just read Kay's Under Heaven and learn a few lessons there.

Anyhow, that's our weird story for the day.  A lake full of bones up in the Himalayas, the full story of which is yet to be fleshed out.

So to speak.

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Cat tales

Our relationship with our pets has a very long history.

We know more about our connection to dogs; we've been keeping dogs (or vice versa) for at least ten thousand years, based on genetic analysis of bones found in proximity to human settlements -- and often, buried with honor.  How this relationship started is a matter of conjecture:

Wolf: I'm going to attack you, and viciously tear apart and eat your children!  You are no match for my ferocity!

Cave man: We have peanut butter, sofas, and squeaky toys.

Wolf:  ... I'm listening

Domestic cats, on the other hand, have more uncertain origins.  They were known to have been revered in ancient Egypt, and in fact the much-loved protector goddess Bastet is always depicted with a cat's head.  The ancestors of today's house cats are thought to be the Libyan wildcat (Felis lybica), a small felid which is still found in most of Africa, the Middle East, and central and southern Asia.  They were probably encouraged to live alongside humans for their use as mousers, and eventually became companion animals, just as dogs had earlier.

What's certain is that after that relationship formed, wherever humans went, their pets came along.  A very cool series of studies a while back used patterns of cat genetics -- in particular, the prevalence of the polydactyly gene and the gene that controls swirled tabby coat coloration -- to figure out the paths of migration taken by their human owners.  And just this week a fascinating paper appeared in the journal Science looking at how domestic cats first arrived in China, much more recently than you might think.

The first written reference to cats in China comes from the Tang Dynasty, and dates to the middle of the seventh century C.E.  It's a rather horrifying story.  An imperial concubine name Xiao ran afoul of a higher-ranked wife named Wu Zetian (Wu eventually was to become empress outright).  Wu had Xiao condemned to death -- by having her hands and feet chopped off, then to be drowned in a barrel of wine -- and before the sentence was carried out, Xiao said, "In my next life, may I be reborn as a cat, and Wu Zetian as a mouse.  I will then seize her by the throat to extract my revenge!"

Wu wasn't impressed, and had her rival executed anyhow.  History doesn't record any subsequent rebirths as cats and/or mice.

The earliest domestic cat bones found in China are from an archaeological site called Tongwancheng, and date to only around 1000 C.E.  There were earlier feline specimens, but they all seem to be the remains not of modern domestic cats but of the leopard cat (Prionailurus bengalensis), a small south Asian wildcat species (that recently was crossbred with the domestic cat to produce the Bengal breed), and which probably lived alongside humans but was never truly domesticated.

Bengal cat [Image licensed under the Creative Commons User:Lightburst, Paintedcats Red Star standing, CC BY-SA 4.0]

As far as domestic cats, they seem to have arrived in China via the Silk Road.  Bones found in Kazakhstan, dating to the ninth century C.E., have a mitochondrial DNA signature that links both to later Chinese cats and to cats in the Middle East -- suggesting that merchant travel between the two is how cats arrived in east Asia.

Once there, they established a place in Chinese culture as the favorite pet of the wealthy.  Like the earlier study of cat genes and human migration, this one has an odd filigree having to do with how human selection influences evolution.  In Chinese culture, white is a symbol of purity, and white animals are especially revered.  This gave Silk Road merchants an incentive to find and transport white cats -- a practice over a thousand years ago which has left its mark all these centuries later.  This selectivity of importation is probably why today a disproportionate number of modern Chinese cats are white (or have white patches).

So we move, and we take our pets with us, and that changes both them and us.  It's a very old connection, and one many of us cherish deeply.  Think of that next time you cuddle with your kitty or puppy -- you're taking part in a relationship that goes back thousands of years, and was important enough even in those rough times that it drove commerce.  So even before the existence of mail-order places like Chewy, where we can spend inordinate amounts of money pampering our furry friends, our bonds with our pets were still a deeply important part of our lives.

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Traveler's tale

Yesterday's post focused on the unfortunate fact that gullible people will always be with us, as will the charlatans and fakers who make it their life's work to take advantage of credulity wherever they find it.  It's a theme regular readers of Skeptophilia will be all too familiar with.  However, today I'd like to look at something else -- something hopeful -- that, fortunately, will also always be with us.

My example of this is someone I wonder if you've heard of.  His name was Lābīn Sǎowùmǎ (拉賓掃務瑪), but he is more commonly known by his name rendered in the Syriac language, Rabban Bar Ṣawma ("Rabban," and the Chinese version "Lābīn," are honorifics, translating as "leader" or "master").  Bar Ṣawma was born into a wealthy family, probably of either Uyghur or Ongud descent, in Zhongdu (near modern Beijing, China) in around the year 1220 C.E.  

Bar Ṣawma was a Christian, a member of a small enclave of Nestorian Christians which had been founded during the Tang Dynasty in the seventh century.  In an open-mindedness unusual for the time, the Tang emperors allowed the Church of the East to coexist with the majority Confucian religion of the Han Chinese.  Although they had some ups and downs -- there was a bout of persecution in the tenth century -- there was still a small group practicing their religion by the thirteenth, officially overseen by a Patriarch who lived in what is now Iraq.

Bar Ṣawma became a monk at about age twenty, and quietly taught in Zhongdu for the next two decades.  It wasn't until the mid-1260s that he and a student of his, Rabban Markos, decided to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.  And that was when their lives changed irrevocably.

It's a sad fact that a lot of religious people approach going to other cultures as "let's see how many people I can convert, voluntarily or otherwise."  Bar Ṣawma and Markos seemed to look at it more as "let's see how much I can learn from this amazing world."  Perhaps it came from their upbringing in a minority religion that had been treated with gracious tolerance; but however they came by the attitude, it allowed them to view other cultures with curiosity and not with fear, superiority, condescension, or condemnation.

They made their way through western China and Mongolia, into what are now Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Afghanistan, along the way making friends with the Mongol ruler Abaqa Khan.  The ended up in Baghdad, where they were welcomed -- amazingly, given the fact that the Crusades were kind of in full swing at that point -- and Markos decided to stay in a monastery in Mosul, where he was elected as Patriarch of the Church of the East, taking the name Yahballaha III.  (Markos/Yahballaha didn't always meet with such positive reactions; he was imprisoned by the Muslims twice, and each time had to be ransomed.  Despite this, he stayed in his role as Patriarch until his death in 1317.)

Bar Ṣawma, though, had a lot farther yet to go.

Chosen as the ambassador of the Church of the East to the Pope (then Honorius IV, although Honorius was to die before Bar Ṣawma arrived), as well as the Byzantine Emperor Andronikos II Palaiologos and the various monarchs of Europe, he took off again in 1287 -- at which point he was 67 years old, so hardly a young man even by modern standards.  (I'm 63 and know whereof I speak, on that count at least.)  As hard as it is to imagine, Bar Ṣawma made his way through Armenia, across the Caucasus Mountains and through the Byzantine Empire, then on into the Greek Islands, Sicily (where he saw Mount Etna erupt), Naples, Rome, Genoa, Paris, and finally reached the Atlantic Ocean at Bordeaux, along the way having audiences with the various rulers of the lands he passed through, including King Philip IV "the Fair" of France and King Edward I of England (who was in Bordeaux at the time; in 1287 Gascony was ruled by the English).

Even more astonishing is that after this long voyage, he still had enough energy left to make the return trip.  He crossed Europe a second time, from west to east, and decided to settle down in Baghdad, where he spent the rest of his life, dying in 1294 at the age of 74.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons PHGCOM, VoyagesOfRabbanBarSauma, CC BY-SA 3.0]

In the final years of his life, he wrote his memoirs, which were first published in English in 1928 under the rather cumbersome title The Monks of Kublai Khan, Emperor of China: or The History of the Life and Travels of Rabban Sawma, Envoy and Plenipotentiary of the Mongol Khans to the Kings of Europe, and Markos Who as Mar Yahbh-Allaha III Became Patriarch of the Church of the East in Asia.  I've read excerpts of it -- I'd like to find a complete copy -- and what strikes me in every bit I've read is his deep curiosity and respect for the lands, people, and cultures he was visiting.  Here's a bit about his stay in Italy:

And from that place they travelled inland on horses, and they passed through towns and villages and marveled because they found no land which was destitute of buildings.  On the road they heard that Mar Papa [Pope Honorius IV] was dead...  Three days later the Cardinals sent and summoned Rabban Ṣawma to their presence.  And when he went to them they began to ask him questions, saying, "What is thy quarter of the world, and why hast thou come?"  And Rabban Ṣawma said unto him, "The Mongols and the Catholicus [i.e. the Patriarch] of the East have sent me to Mar Papa concerning the matter of Jerusalem; and they have sent letters with me."  The Cardinals said unto him, "Where is the Throne of the Catholicus?"  He said to them, "In Baghdad...  Know ye, O our Fathers, that many of our Fathers have gone into the countries of the Mongols, and Turks, and Chinese and have taught them the Gospel, and at the present time there are many Mongols who are Christians... "  Then Rabban Ṣawma said unto them, "I have come from remote countries neither to discuss, nor to instruct [men] in matter of the Faith, but I came that I might receive a blessing from Mar Papa, and to visit the shrines of the saints and to make known the words of King [Arghon] and the Catholicus.  If it be pleasing in your eyes, let us set aside discussion, and do ye give attention and direct someone to show us the churches here and the shrines of the saints; [if ye will do this] ye will confer a very great favor on your servant and disciple."

It's interesting how much you can gain in understanding when you go to a place with the attitude, "I'm not here to do anything to you, I just want to learn.  Show me whatever's cool."  I've tried to adopt that approach when I've traveled -- I've been lucky enough to visit a great many lovely places, and have met with nearly one-hundred percent positive responses from the people I've spoken with.

On the other hand, I have to admit that Rabban Bar Ṣawma rather puts me to shame.  After all, I had the convenience of an airplane to get where I was going.  He did the whole thing -- a one-way distance of over eight thousand kilometers -- in the thirteenth century, using a combination of horses, boats, and his own two feet.

It's easy to look back at the people of those times as being narrow-minded bigots whose only thought was forcing others to conform, at the point of a sword if necessary.  And certainly some of them were.  Don't get smug about how much more enlightened we are, though -- it's clear that we still have people of that mindset around today.  The Middle Ages didn't have the market cornered on bigotry, more's the pity.  

But more importantly, Rabban Bar Ṣawma is a reminder that then, as now, there were people who were kind, accepting, and broad-minded, who gazed around with wonder, saying "Look at this, isn't it all so beautiful?"

When you read the news every day, and it seems populated by the worst representatives of the human species, remember Rabban Bar Ṣawma and his long odyssey, driven only by his intellectual curiosity and his deep love for his fellow human beings.  Then set aside the doomscrolling, and reassure yourself that there are still those sorts of people around today, too.  Plenty of them.

Like Bar Ṣawma knew 750 years ago, to find them, all you have to be willing to do is to look around you.

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The echoes of Carrhae

Back on the ninth of June, 53 B.C.E., seven legions of Roman heavy infantry were lured into the desert near the town of Carrhae (now Harran, Turkey) by what appeared to be a small retreating force of Parthian soldiers.  It was a trap, and the leader of the Roman forces, Marcus Licinius Crassus (who was one-third of the First Triumvirate, along with Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great) fell for it.  Well-armed and highly mobile Parthian horsemen swept down and kicked some legionnaire ass.  Just about all of the Roman soldiers were either captured or killed, and Crassus himself was executed -- in some accounts, by having molten gold poured down his throat.

Not the way I would choose to make my exit.  Yeowch.

A bust thought to be of the unfortunate Marcus Licinius Crassus [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Sergey Sosnovskiy, Bust of a Roman, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, CC BY-SA 4.0]

In any case, very few soldiers from Crassus's seven legions made it back to Italy.  They didn't all die, though, so what happened to the survivors?

This is where it gets interesting -- not only because historical mysteries are intrinsically intriguing, but as another example of "please don't believe whatever you see on the internet, and more importantly don't repost it without checking it for accuracy."

The Battle of Carrhae comes up because a couple of days ago I got one of those "sponsored" posts on Facebook that are largely clickbait based on what stuff you've shared or liked in the past.  With my interest in archaeology and history, I get a lot of links of the type, "Archaeologists don't want you to find out about this ONE WEIRD HISTORICAL FACT," as if actual researchers just hate it when people hear about what they're researching and love nothing better than keeping all of their findings secret from everyone.

In any case, the claim of this particular post was that the survivors of the Battle of Carrhae were absorbed into the Parthian Empire (plausible), but never were accepted there so decided after a while to up stakes and move east (possible), where they eventually made their way to northwestern China (hmmm...) and there's a place called Liqian where their descendants settled.  These guys were recruited by the Chinese as mercenaries to fight against the Xiongnu in 36 B.C.E., and when the Xiongnu were roundly defeated the grateful Chinese Emperor allowed the Romans to stay there permanently.

This idea was championed by historian Homer Dubs, professor of Chinese history at Oxford University, who as part of his argument claimed that the "fish-scale formation" used by the Chinese army against the Xiongnu had been copied from the Roman "testudo formation" -- a move where legions go forward with their shields overlapping to prevent spears and arrows from their opponents from striking home.  The Romans had taught the Chinese a new tactic, Dubs said, and that's how they won the battle.

So far, I have no problem with any of this.  There's nothing wrong with researchers making claims, even far-fetched ones; that's largely how scientific inquiry progresses, with someone saying, essentially, "Hey, here's how I think this works," and all his/her colleagues trying their best to punch holes in the claim.  If the claim stands up to the tests of evidence and logic, then we have a working model of the phenomenon in question.

But the link I got on social media pretty much stopped with, "Hey, some Romans ended up in China, isn't that cool?"  There was no mention of the fact that (1) Dubs made his claim in 1941; (2) because there has never been a single Roman artifact -- not one -- found near Liqian, just about all archaeologists and historians think Dubs was wrong; and (3) a genetic test of a large sample of people around Liqian found not the slightest trace of European ancestry.  Everyone there, apparently, is mostly of Han Chinese descent, just as you'd expect.

And the genetic tests that conclusively put Dubs's claim to rest were conducted seventeen years ago.

Look, it's not that I don't get clickbait.  These sites like "Amazing Facts From History" exist to get people to click on them, boosting their numbers and therefore their ad revenue, irrespective of whether anything they're claiming is true.  In other words, if they can get you to click on it, they win.

But what I don't understand is the number of people who shared the link -- over five thousand, at the point I saw it -- and appended comments like, "This is so interesting!" and "History is so fascinating!", apparently uncritically accepting what the site claimed without doing what I did, a (literally) two-minute read of Wikipedia that brought me to the paper from The Journal of Human Genetics I linked above.  Not a single one of the hundreds of commenters said, "But this isn't true, and we've known it's not true for almost two decades."

I can almost hear the objections.  What's the harm of believing an odd claim about ancient history, even if the (very strong) evidence is that it's false?  To me, there is actual harm in it; it establishes a habit of credulity, of accepting what sounds cool or fun or weird or interesting without any apparent consideration of whether or not it's true.  Sure, there's no immediate problem with believing Roman soldiers settled in China.

But when you start applying that same lack of critical thinking to matters of your health, the environment, or politics, the damage accrues awfully fast.

So please do some fact-checking before you share.  Apply skepticism to what you see online -- even if (or maybe, especially if) what you're considering sharing conforms to your preconceived notions about how things work.  We can all fall prey to confirmation bias, and these days, with the prevalence of clickbait sites run by folks who don't give a rat's ass if what they post is real or not, it's an increasing problem.

Check before you share.  It's that simple.

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Lords of the air

Ever since I was a kid, my favorite group of dinosaurs has been the pterosaurs.

These are one of the six groups of animals that independently evolved flight, or at least significant capacity for gliding (the others are insects, birds, bats, flying squirrels, sugar gliders, and colugos).  They had incredible diversity at their height, during the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods, from the pint-sized Sordes pilosus (with a sixty-centimeter wingspan) to the almost unimaginably huge Quetzalcoatlus northropi (with a ten-meter wingspan, as big as a light plane).

Most of them were probably clumsy on the ground -- it's hard to imagine how Quetzalcoatlus got off the ground -- but in the air, they were nimble, maneuverable, and fast.  The smaller ones were probably insect-eaters; the larger ones likely fed on fish, although a terrestrial diet of small reptiles and mammals is also possible. 

What brings all this up is the discovery of a new species of pterosaur, one of dozens that have been identified from the Jehol Biota, a stupendous fossil deposit in northeastern China near Huludao.  This fossil bed has produced not only pterosaurs but incredibly well-preserved species of prehistoric birds and other vertebrates -- it's like a tapestry of late Cretaceous animal life.

"Pterosaurs comprise an important and enigmatic group of Mesozoic flying reptiles that first evolved active flight among vertebrates, and have filled all aerial environmental niches for almost 160 million years," said Xiaolin Wang, of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who co-authored the paper describing the discovery.  "Despite being a totally extinct group, they have achieved a wide diversity of forms in a window of time spanning from the Late Triassic to the end of the Cretaceous period.  Notwithstanding being found on every continent, China stands out by furnishing several new specimens that revealed not only different species, but also entire new clades."

This includes the newly-discovered Meilifeilong youhao, belonging to the family Chaoyangopteridae, which is represented at the site by two other species that have been found nowhere else.

Meilifeilong looked like something out of a nightmare, if the artist's reconstruction is accurate (and probably even if it isn't):

[Image courtesy of artist Maurilio Oliveira]

The name means "beautiful flying dragon," which I doubt is what I'd say if I saw one, but what I'd say is borderline unprintable so we'll leave it at that.

It's astonishing to think of how long these creatures ruled the skies -- from the late Triassic until the very end of the Cretaceous, a time span of around 160 million years.  Had change not come in the form of the Chicxulub Meteorite collision, they might well still be here, soaring on thermals above our forests and lakes and oceans, the undisputed lords of the air.  And even if we now know them only from fossils, they still can't help but impress.

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Life finds a way

I've written here before about the Permian-Triassic Extinction, sometimes nicknamed "the Great Dying."  It occurred 251.9 million years ago, and like the Cretaceous Extinction 186 million years later -- the one that knocked out the non-avian dinosaurs -- it happened suddenly, destroying ecosystems worldwide that had been thriving prior to the event.

The cause of this cataclysm is still a matter of some debate.  Hypotheses include:

• The formation of the Siberian Traps, an unimaginably huge lava flow covering most of eastern Siberia. (Its volume is estimated at four million cubic kilometers.)  The eruption would have burned everything in its wake, ripping through the vast Carboniferous coal and limestone beds, pumping tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  It would also have released huge amounts of sulfur dioxide -- not only a poison, but one of the most powerful greenhouse gases.  The result; massive global warming, oceanic acidifiction, and a catastrophic change in ecosystems worldwide.
• The lockup of Pangaea.  The collision of smaller continents to form a supercontinent has a number of effects -- the eradication of coastline along the colliding margin, ecological changes from shifting ocean currents, and collapse of mid-ocean ridges (resulting in a huge drop in sea level) among them.
• A "methane burp."  This sounds innocuous, but really, really isn't.  There's a tremendous amount of methane locked up in the form of clathrates -- a network of water ice with methane trapped inside.  These "frozen methane hydrates" coat the entire deep ocean floor.  The stuff is stable under cold temperatures and high pressures, but if something disturbs them, they begin to come apart, releasing bubbles of methane gas.  The bubbles expand as they rise, displacing more and more water, and when they hit the surface it causes a tsunami, not to mention releasing tons of methane into the atmosphere, which is not only toxic, it's also a greenhouse gas.
• Bombardment by swarms of comets and/or meteorites.  The problem with confirming this hypothesis is that any geological evidence of meteorite collisions would be long since eroded away.  If the object(s) that impacted the Earth were metallic meteorites, it's possible that you could use the same technique Luis Alvarez pioneered to explain the Cretaceous Extinction, which wiped out most of the dinosaurs -- enrichment of a layer of sediment by dust that's high in metallic elements not found in large quantities elsewhere.  But if it was a comet (mostly ice) or a rocky meteorite, we might not see much in the way of evidence of the event.

Current expert opinion is that the first one is strongly implicated as the prime cause, but the others may have played a role as well.

In any case, the end result was the extinction of an estimated 95% of marine life and 85% of terrestrial life.  Several groups that had been dominant for millions of years -- trilobites, eurypterids, blastoids, and the orthid and productid brachiopods, for example -- were wiped out completely.

It's hard to fathom what this would be like (although we'd damn well better try; there are estimates of the current, largely anthropogenic, extinction rate that place it in the same range as the Permian-Triassic).  Overall, it seems like ninety percent of the world's species died.  At the same rates today, we'd be left with a grand total of two hundred species of birds in all of North America -- and only forty different kinds of mammals.  

The reason this rather dismal topic comes up is some new research that actually provides a glimmer of hope; a find by paleontologists in China suggesting that after this cataclysm, life rebounded amazingly fast -- resulting in thriving and diverse ecosystems in as little as a million years.

Artists' reconstruction of the Guiyang biota [Image courtesy of artists Dinghua Yang and Haijun Song]

The most amazing thing about this is that at that point, the situation was still, in a word, lousy.  The average sea surface temperature at the equator is estimated at around 35 C (95 F).  The pH was still way down -- how far down isn't known, but certainly enough to inhibit calcium carbonate production by mollusks and corals.  The carbon dioxide levels were still sky-high.  But astonishingly, the organisms that made it through the bottleneck managed to adapt even to these hostile conditions.  Even in the (very) early Triassic Period, life found a way to adapt.

I hesitate to draw too much cheer from all this, however.  The fact that the species who survived the Great Dying eventually did okay is little consolation to the tens of thousands of species that went extinct.  Even if what we're now doing -- rampant fossil fuel use, pollution, and deforestation -- won't wipe out every last living thing on Earth, the results could still be beyond catastrophic.  And while it's "geologically rapid," "recovery in a million or so years" won't help our children and grandchildren.

It's time we extend "learn from the past rather than ignoring it" to prehistoric events, not just historical ones.

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Jurassic rainbow

Regular readers of Skeptophilia might recall that about a year ago, paleontologists announced the discovery of a bird fossil from northeastern China that had a long, pennant-like tail -- and that from the extraordinary state of preservation, they were able to determine that the outer tail feathers had been gray, and the inner ones jet black.

Determining feather, hair, and skin color of prehistoric animals is remarkably tricky; the pigments in those structures break down rapidly when the animal's body decomposes, and the structures themselves are fragile and rarely fossilize.  The result is that when artists do reconstructions of what these animals may have looked like, they base those features on analogies to modern animals.  This is why in old books on dinosaurs, they were always pictured as having greenish or brownish scaly skin, like the lizards they were thought to resemble, even though dinosaurs are way more closely related to modern birds than they are to modern lizards.  (To be fair, even the paleontologists didn't know that until fairly recently, so the artists were doing their best with what was known at the time.)

But it does mean that if we were to get in the TARDIS and go back to the Mesozoic Era, we'd be in for a lot of surprises about what the wildlife looked like back then.  Take, for example, the late Jurassic Period fossil found by a farmer in China that contained the nearly-complete skeleton of a birdlike dinosaur.  Here's the fossil itself:

What's remarkable about this fossil is that the feathers were so well-preserved that paleontologists were able to get a close look at the melanocytes -- the pigment-containing cells -- and from the arrangement and layering of those cells, they determined that the dinosaur's head feathers were arrayed like a rainbow, similar to modern hummingbirds, sunbirds, and trogons.

So here's the current reconstruction of what this species looked like:

[Reconstruction by artist Velizar Simeonovski, of The Field Museum]

Kind of different from the drab-colored overgrown iguanas from Land of the Lost, isn't it?

The species, christened Caihong juji from the Mandarin words meaning "big rainbow crest," adds another ornate member to the late Jurassic and early Cretaceous fauna of what is now northern China.  And keep in mind that we only know about the ones that left behind good fossils -- probably less than one percent of the total species around at the time.  As wonderful as it is, our knowledge of the biodiversity of prehistory is analogous to a future zoologist trying to reconstruct our modern ecosystems from the remains of a sparrow, a cat, a raccoon, a deer, a grass snake, and a handful of leaves from random plants.

I think my comment about being "in for a lot of surprises" if we went back then is a significant understatement.

Even so, this is a pretty amazing achievement.  Astonishing that we can figure out what Caihong juji looked like from some impressions in a rock.  And it gives us a fresh look at a long-lost world -- but one that was undoubtedly as rainbow-hued and iridescent as our own.

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Grave matters

Today we take a trip into the past with three new discoveries from the world of archaeology, sent my way by my eagle-eyed friend and fellow writer, Gil Miller.

The first one has to do with ancient fashion.  Have you ever wondered how our distant ancestors dressed?  Whether it was crudely stitched-together rags, as the peasantry are often depicted?  Leopard-skin affairs, like the Flintstones?  Or nothing but a brass jockstrap, like this guy?

Turns out it wasn't so different from what you and I are wearing.  (I'm assuming you're not naked except for a brass jockstrap.  If you are, I won't judge, but I also don't want to know about it.)  An analysis of the clothing worn by a 3,200 year old mummy recovered from China's Tarim Basin was wearing tightly-woven, intricately-made trousers, built to be durable and allow maneuverability -- a little like today's blue jeans.

The pants worn by "Turfan Man" [Image from M. Wagner et al./Archaeological Research in Asia, 2022]

The cloth is a tight twill weave -- something that was assumed to be invented much later -- and had a triangular crotch piece that seems to be designed to avoid unfortunate compression of the male naughty bits while riding horseback.  The decoration, including an interlocking "T" pattern on the bands around the knees, is very similar to patterns found used on pottery in the area, and as far away as Kazakhstan and Siberia.

From ancient Chinese fashion items, we travel halfway around the world for something a little more gruesome -- a burial in the Lambayeque region of Peru that seems to contain the skeleton of a surgeon, along with his surgical tools.

The burial has been dated to the Middle Period of the Sican Culture, which would have been somewhere between 900 and 1050 C. E., and was recovered from a mausoleum temple at the rich archaeological site of Las Ventanas.  The man was obviously of high standing; he was wearing a golden mask pigmented with cinnabar, a bronze pectoral, and a garment containing copper plates.  But most interesting was the bundle of tools he was buried with -- awls, needles, and several sizes and shapes of knives.  This, the researchers say, identifies him as a surgeon.

It's hard for me to fathom, but surgery was done fairly regularly back then -- up to and including brain surgery (called trepanning).  There was no such thing as general anesthesia, so it was done under local anesthesia at best, probably supplemented with any kind of sedative or painkilling drugs they had available.  Still, it was a horrible prospect.  But what is most astonishing is that a great many of the patients, even the ones who had holes drilled into their skulls, survived.  There have been many cases of skeletons found that show signs of surgery where the surgical cuts healed completely.

But still, the ordeal these poor folks went through is horrifying to think about, so let's move on to the third and final article, that comes to us from England.  An archaeologist named Ken Dark has led a team of researchers in studying 65 grave sites in the counties of Somerset and Cornwall that date back to a time of history I've always had a particular fascination for -- the Western European "Dark Ages," between the collapse of the Roman Empire as a centralized power in the fourth and fifth centuries C. E. and the reconsolidation of Europe under such leaders as Charlemagne and Alfred the Great, four hundred years later.

The "darkness" of the so-called Dark Ages isn't so much that it was lawless and anarchic (although some parts of it in some places probably were), but simply because we know next to nothing about it for sure.  There are virtually no contemporaneous records; about all we have, the best-known being Gildas's sixth-century De Excidio et Conquesto Britanniae, are accounts that contain legend mixed up with history so thoroughly it's impossible to tell which is which.  I bring up Gildas deliberately, because his is the only record of King Arthur written anywhere close to the time he (allegedly) lived, and the graves that Dark and his team are studying date from right around that pivotal time when Christianized Romano-Celtic Britain was being attacked and overrun by the pagan Angles, Saxons, and Jutes.

The burial practices of noble sixth-century Britons stands in stark contrast from Anglo-Saxon burials from the same period; the Britons, it's believed, scorned the ostentation and ornate decorations of pagan funerals, and by comparison even high-status individuals were buried without much pomp.  What sets these graves apart from those of commoners is that they were set apart from other graves, had a fenced enclosure, and were covered with a tumulus of stones that the early Celts called a ferta, which was a sign of high standing.

"The enclosed grave tradition comes straight out of late Roman burial practices," Dark said.  "And that's a good reason why we have them in Britain, but not in Ireland -- because Britain was part of the Roman empire, and Ireland wasn't...  We've got a load of burials that are all the same, and a tiny minority of those burials are marked out as being of higher status than the others.  When there are no other possible candidates, that seems to me to be a pretty good argument for these being the ‘lost' royal burials."

So that's today's news from the past -- ancient blue jeans, primitive surgery, and Dark Age noble burials.  Sorry for starting your day on a grave note.  But it's always fascinating to see not only how things have changed, but how similar our distant ancestors were to ourselves.  If we were to time travel back there, I'm sure there'd be a lot of surprises, but we might be more shocked at how much like us they were back then.  To borrow a line from Robert Burns, a person's a person for a' that and a' that.

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Shake your tail feathers

My wife and I reset some pavers in our front sidewalk a couple of days ago.  In our area, most of the stone used for paving and wall-building is native slate and limestone, which make up the majority of the bedrock in this part of upstate New York; and given slate's tendency to fracture naturally along parallel planes, it makes an obvious good choice for paving stones.

We used a pry-bar to pull up one big stone -- maybe a meter across and two meters long -- and a piece of it sheared off.  Unfortunate but unavoidable.  When I stopped and picked up the chunk, a flat, triangular piece a little larger than the palm of my hand, I noticed something interesting about it.  It had ripple marks, the clear signature of the muddy environment where it formed.

Seeing this sort of thing always makes me imagine what things were like back then.  The rocks in this area are Devonian in age, on the order of four hundred million years old, at which time this whole area was at the bottom of a shallow sea.  So those ripple marks in my sidewalk paving stone were created by water movements that occurred so long ago it's hard to imagine.  At that point, there was virtually no terrestrial life -- a few plants and insect species had colonized the land, but everything else was still aquatic.  The first dinosaurs were still a good 150 million years in the future.

It's kind of cool the way these sorts of moments thrill me from two different perspectives.  Being a biology teacher (retired now), I find it absolutely fascinating to ponder the grand panorama that is the history of life on Earth, and to consider evolution's role in creating what Darwin famously called "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful."  As a novelist, it never fails to fire my imagination -- to picture what it would be like to stand there on the beach with the bare, treeless Devonian landscape stretching out behind me, looking out over oceans where swam trilobites and bizarre armored fish (ostracoderms) and ammonites, all of which went extinct long, long ago.

The reason this comes up -- besides finding signs of four-hundred-million-year-old ocean waves in my slate sidewalk paver -- is a link sent to me (once again) by the indefatigable Gil Miller, about a fossil discovery found in northeastern China recently.  It's the fantastically well-preserved remains of a little feathered dinosaur from 120 million years ago called Yuanchuavis kompsosoura, which was about the size of a blue jay -- but had a thirty-centimeter-long tail, which is longer than its entire body.

Yuanchuavis kompsosoura

Extravagant tails like this are an interesting case of an evolutionary trade-off.  Modern birds like peacocks have tails so long they're actually a hindrance to flying, but apparently the disadvantages of having such a clumsy appendage are outweighed by the advantage in terms of attractiveness to potential mates (sexual selection).  It's theorized that having elaborate plumage is a way of advertising your overall genetic health.  "Look at me," they say.  "I am so genetically superior I can throw away all sorts of energy and resources on something completely frivolous.  I am totally who you want to have sex with."

Kind of the bird version of driving a Jaguar.

That sort of teleological reasoning, however, is always thin ice when you're talking about evolutionary drivers.  None of that selection is being done because of any kind of conscious weighing of options.  But whatever its basis, we see similar kinds of wild tails in a great many bird species today -- swallowtailed kites, African widowbirds, paradise flycatchers, quetzals, drongos, and a lot of hummingbirds, as just a few examples.  The fact that so many relatively unrelated species have gone down the same path supports the conjecture that whatever is propelling this selection, it's pretty powerful.

Reading the article about this fascinating little dinosaur immediately switched on the other mode, which led me to imagining what it actually looked like when alive, and wondering about its behavior and environment.  Of course, even most well-preserved fossils give you only a hint about what the living creature looked like; all the spots and patterns and colors in movies like Jurassic Park are guesses, as are the behaviors (like the dinosaur with the toxic spit that killed Dennis Nedry).  But here, the preservation is on such a fine scale that the paleontologists do have an idea of what color it was -- traces of pigment-producing cells suggest that the fan part of its tail was gray, and the two long banner feathers in the middle were jet black.

Here, we actually can visualize what it looked like when he was shaking his tail feathers in the early Cretaceous forests.

So that's our imagined trip into deep time for today.  I know I've quoted it here before, but the lines from Tennyson's "In Memoriam" are so poignant and so apposite that I will end with them anyhow:

There rolls the deep where grew the tree.
O Earth, what changes hast thou seen?
There where the long road roars hath been
The stillness of the central sea.

The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands;
They melt like mist, the solid lands,
Like clouds, they shape themselves and go.

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