The undiscoverable country

After Thursday's post about nonexistent islands, a loyal reader of Skeptophilia asked me if I'd ever heard of the country of Listenbourg.

I said, "Do you mean Luxembourg?" but he assured me he was spelling it right.

"Islands aren't the only thing that can be nonexistent," he said, which is true, but when you think about it too hard is a very peculiar statement.

So I looked into Listenbourg, and it's quite a story -- especially since the whole thing started as a way to ridicule Americans for their ignorance about anything outside the borders of the United States.

In October of 2022, a French guy named Gaspard Hoelscher posted a doctored map of Europe on Twitter that looked like this:

He captioned it, "Je suis sûr que les américains ne connaissent même pas le nom de ce pays!" ("I'm sure that Americans don't even known the name of this country!")  One of his followers responded, "Qui ne connaît pas le Listenbourg?" ("Who doesn't know Listenbourg?")

You'd think anyone who'd ever given more than a ten-second look at an actual map of Europe would immediately know this was a joke, but no.  Even a closer look at this map would have revealed the curious fact that "Listenbourg" is actually a resized and inverted copy of the outline of France itself, simply pasted onto (and partially covering) the northwest corners of Spain and Portugal.

Apparently, this was not the case, as the original post caused a number of irate Americans to jump up and defend our superior knowledge -- almost none of whom, however, came right out and said that they recognized it was a prank.  You could tell that some of them had actually come damn close to saying, "Of course I know where Listenbourg is," but held back at the last minute.

This prompted a flood of hilarity online that the prank's originator, Hoelscher, said "totally overwhelmed" him.  Amused Europeans invented a flag, capital city ("Lurenberg"), culture, history, language, and even a national anthem for Listenbourg.  It has five regions, they said: Flußerde, Kusterde, Mitteland, Adrias and Caséière.  A post saying that Hoelscher himself was the president was met by universal acclaim.  Then it escaped social media into the wider world:

• An announcement prior to the Paris Olympics of 2024 stated that "The number of Olympic delegations has risen from 206 to 207 with the arrival of Listenbourg."
• Amazon Prime in Europe announced that a documentary on the history of Listenbourg was in production -- only careful watchers noticed that the projected release date was "February 31, 2025."
• Ryanair said in a press release that they were "Proud to be announcing their new base in Listenbourg."
• The French television network TF1 aired a realistic-sounding weather report for the country.
• French politician Jean Lassalle said in a speech that he was "just returned from a visit to an agricultural seminar in Lurenberg."
• The city of Nice said that they were happy to announce their intention to become a sister city to Lurenberg, and that there would be new inexpensive flights between the two.

I have to admit that as an American, my laughter over all this is coupled with a distinct edge of cringe.  I mean, being global dumbasses is not exactly the reputation I'd like my country to have.  Sadly, though, I can't really argue with the assessment.  You don't have to dig very hard to find highly embarrassing videos of interviewers stopping people in crowds in the United States to ask them tough questions like "What is the capital of England?" and finding numerous Americans who can't come up with the answer.  And with the Republicans currently doing everything in their power to destroy our system of public education, the situation is only going to get worse.

Oh, but don't worry.  At least we'll have the Ten Commandments on the wall of every classroom, and students will get Bible lessons every day and won't be exposed to scary books like Heather Has Two Mommies.

Hey, I wonder what would happen if you asked Donald Trump to find Listenbourg on a map?  I bet he'd never realize he was being pranked, considering that he once gave a speech to African leaders and confidently talked about the proud country of "Nambia."

Look, I know we all have holes in our knowledge; all of us are ignorant about some subjects.  The important thing is not to make ignorance a permanent condition -- or to flaunt it.  Stubbornly persisting in your state of ignorance has a name.

It's called "stupidity."

What's worse is when people think they are experts on stuff when they're clearly not, and publicly trumpet their own idiocy.  (Donald Trump is absolutely the poster child for this phenomenon.)  As Stephen Hawking trenchantly put it, "The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge."  Because if you're convinced you already know everything you need to know -- and that, I'm afraid, is the state of many Americans, including the majority of our elected officials -- you have no incentive to learn more, or worse, to find out you're actually wrong about something.

My dad used to say "there's nothing as dangerous as confident stupidity."  I think that's spot-on.  And sad that the Listenbourg incident -- funny as it is -- pointed out that in the eyes of many people in the world, that's what the United States represents.

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Faith of our fathers

One of the things we noticed on our tour of southern Europe -- not that it was any kind of surprise -- was the omnipresence of churches.

They often are built on hills, and overlook the landscape; many are beautiful, and a few -- like the Duomo in Florence -- are architectural wonders.

It's an interesting experience for a non-religious person like myself to walk into some of these buildings.  One of the first places we visited was the fifteenth-century Basilica de Santa Maria degli Angeli et dei Martiri in Rome, which is unprepossessing from the outside, but the inside is nothing short of stunning.

The churches of Europe are renowned for housing works of art, and one in the Basilica that struck me as beautiful (if somber) is The Head of St. John the Baptist by the modern Polish sculptor Igor Mitoraj:

On the façade of the same church was another haunting sculpture:

This sort of painstaking artistry was evident in churches wherever we went.  There was the Church of St. Spiridion on the isle of Corfu:

And the Church of San Lorenzo in Florence:

But nowhere blew me away quite as much as the Church of La Sagrada Familia (the Holy Family) in Barcelona.  It was begun in 1882 by the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí, who is a fine example illustrating the quote from Aristotle, "There never was a genius without a tincture of madness."  Gaudí knew it was such an extravagant plan that he'd never live to see it completed; in fact, it's still under construction today, and the locals call it "The church that will never be finished."  Like many of Gaudí's creations, from a distance the exterior looks like something out of Dr. Seuss:

Only when you get closer to you begin to see the intricate details of the sculptures in every recess:

All of this is suitably amazing... but then you step inside, and it takes your breath away.

Gaudí was a master of using light as part of his vision for the place, and the stained glass of La Sagrada Familia is the most beautiful I've ever seen.

According to the guide, Gaudí was intent not only on creating a monument to his religion, but creating a place that celebrated the natural world -- somewhere that all people, of every religion (or no religion at all) could wonder at and be uplifted by.

But still, I couldn't help remembering that places like this are built because of beliefs I don't share any longer.  In a very real way, I feel like an outsider when I enter these sacred spaces.  When I was a kid, growing up in a staunchly Roman Catholic family, every Sunday we sang the hymn "Faith of Our Fathers:"

Faith of our fathers, living still, in spite of dungeon, fire and sword,
O how our hearts beat high with joy, whene'er we hear that glorious word!
Faith of our fathers, living still, we will be true to thee till death.

As a child I sang those words with tremendous gusto, but it didn't really work out that way, did it?  I left the church at age 21 and after a period of searching, I kind of gave it all up and for the most part, never looked back.

But there's a part of me that still resonates to the desire embodied in places like La Sagrada Familia.  I don't think I'll ever go back to the beliefs I tried like mad to hold onto in my youth, but there's a mystery and grandeur in these buildings that plucks my heart like a guitar string.  It goes beyond just desiring the sense of community you find in a church; there's a part of me, perhaps, that craves ritual as a sign of belonging, that needs beautiful symbols to help explain this strange and often chaotic universe.

There's no doubt that religion has much to answer for.  Not just big ticket items like the Inquisition, the Crusades, and the Islamic jihadist movement(s), but suppression of dissent, institutionalized bigotry, misogyny, cruelty, homophobia, abuse of power, and simple self-righteousness.

But religion has also been the impetus for the creation of great beauty.  It's doubtful Gaudí would have envisioned a masterwork like La Sagrada Familia had he not been religious, and the same can be said of works like Michelangelo's Pietà and Bach's Mass in B Minor, to name only two of hundreds.  It's obvious I'm of divided mind on this topic, and it's beyond me to figure out how to square that circle and resolve the seeming paradox.  I rejected religion's fundamental claims forty years ago, yet its draw for me has never really gone away.

A long-ago friend once said about me that I was a failed mystic -- if I'd had the balls, I'd have been a monk.  The comment stuck with me all these years because it hits so close to the mark.  To paraphrase the poster on Fox Mulder's wall, I Wish I Could Believe.

But until that unlikely event occurs, I can still appreciate the profundity and depth of what the religious impulse has created.  And nowhere has that been realized more beautifully than in Gaudí's Church That Will Never Be Finished, in the city of Barcelona.

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Southern European retrospective

Greetings, loyal readers, I'm back a couple of days earlier than anticipated from a two-and-a-half week's trip to Europe, still a bit jet-lagged but otherwise unscathed.  We visited Italy, Croatia, Greece, France, and Spain, so only got a touch of each place (Italy is the place we got to explore the most thoroughly), but it was still, overall, a wonderful trip.

Flying, not so much.  Unlike certain other trips I can recall, it was mishap-free -- no missed connections or lost luggage, and not so much as a delay -- but flying in general has become a fairly miserable experience.  Witness our flight from Paris back to New York, wherein a passenger in the seat in front of my wife reclined her seat so far that Carol had about six cubic centimeters of space left in front of her.  She couldn't even bend over to get anything from underneath the seat.  It was tempting for her to recline her own seat, but she resisted, not only out of consideration and compassion for the passenger behind her, but for fear of triggering the dreaded Reclining Seat Chain Reaction, which continues like a row of human dominoes until you get to the row in the very back where the seats don't recline, and the last person ends up getting compressed into a vaguely human-shaped splat mark against the rear bulkhead.

But, honestly, these are clearly First World Problems, and we were privileged to get to travel and see some amazing places.  Here are a few high points, and some photos I took of cool spots, in the order we visited them.

First off, Rome.  Oh, my goodness, Rome.  The sense of antiquity there is palpable, almost everywhere you go.  So is the sense that you're taking your life into your own hands when you step into the street.  Roman drivers are flat-out insane.  They use their horns to communicate three things: (1) buongiorno!; (2) get out of the damn way, you idiot tourist; and (3) my car has a horn.  Lane markings are considered merely suggestions.  If you're on a motorcycle, lane markings are considered imaginary.  But we escaped without being run down, and got to see places like Palatine Hill:

Palatine Hill is where Augustus and Livia had their home.  Yes, that Augustus and Livia.  The foundation of their house still exists, in fact, which I find astonishing given that Augustus died in the year 14 C.E.  Then there's the Forum:

And the abso-freakin-lutely huge second-century temple of the emperor Antoninus Pius:

And the Fontana degli Dioscuri:

The last-mentioned is one of many giant statues we saw featuring extremely attractive naked people, which was a popular subject of sculpture back in ancient Rome and a tradition I definitely think we should bring back.

From Rome, our next stop was the lovely city of Dubrovnik, Croatia.  Here I parted ways with the rest of our group (Carol and I were traveling with four friends) and went on a boat ride through a wetland nature preserve north of the city.  The coastline of Croatia is stunningly beautiful -- one of the prettiest places I saw on the entire trip.

After Croatia, we had a day on the lovely island of Corfu.  Coastal Greece has the clearest water I've ever seen -- unfortunately, it was still a little cool to go for a swim.  The following photo is unretouched -- no filters, nothing.  That's actually the color of the water.

We got to do some tasting of local food and drink -- something that became a bit of a theme on the trip -- and were treated to Greek limoncello (much better than the Italian variety, we were told by the proprietor), various olives and olive oils (with freshly-baked bread), honeys, jams, and marmalades.

After Corfu we were supposed to go to Malta, long a fascination of mine for its role in the Crusades, but the weather turned very windy and the ship was unable to dock.  So, unfortunately, we had a day at sea instead -- Malta will have to wait for another time, I suppose.

The next stop was the island of Sicily, where we got to take a cooking class in the town of Taormina.  Here's a picture from near the restaurant.  That's Mount Etna in the background.

We learned how to make traditional hand-made pasta and pizza and then got to lunch on the results -- accompanied, of course, with large quantities of amazingly good wine.

At the end of the meal, we had a digestif of limoncello, which the proprietors assured us was much better than the Greek variety.

At this point we were in volcano-and-earthquake territory, which long-time readers of Skeptophilia will know is a major fascination of mine.  The 1908 earthquake in Messina, our guide told us, killed eighty thousand people and flattened nearly the entire city; most of the casualties, she said, died within a span of thirty-seven seconds as the ground lurched and buildings collapsed.  The Messina-Taormina fault, which lies just offshore of the east coast of the island, is still very much active, and as you saw, Mount Etna looms over the town of Taormina.  As we were sailing away that evening, we got a light show from the pretty well constantly-erupting island of Stromboli, which has been nicknamed "The Lighthouse of the Mediterranean."

Speaking of volcanoes, we next went to Naples, which sits in the shadow of Vesuvius -- in fact, a magmatic system underlies the entire region, leading to its nickname of the "Campi Flegrei" ("burning fields") about which I've written before.  We visited the ruins of Pompeii, which was an overwhelming enough experience that I'm planning an entire post devoted just to that, so you'll have to wait for photos and commentary.  But here's a photo of the city of Naples taken from the slopes of Vesuvius, just to give you an idea of how many people live in the bullseye.

After Naples we docked in the rather unattractive industrial port town of Livorno, and took a bus into Florence.  Florence, as you undoubtedly know, is famous for its art and architecture, including the Duomo -- the city cathedral -- which is truly incredible.

We also got to see David -- not the David, but a replica that is out in the square near the Accademia Gallery, home of the original.  Even the replica was suitably amazing.

As an amateur sculptor, I was gobsmacked by the beauty of the human figure, and the incredible detail Michelangelo was able to work into the musculature.  That man was a true genius.

It rained just about the entire time we were in Florence, so we went to the Galileo Museum, which is very much worth a visit if you're a science nerd.  The museum has a fine collection of early scientific devices, including this amazing armillary sphere that stands about eight feet tall:

And a hand-cranked glass lathe used for making lenses for telescopes and microscopes:

After Florence, we had a quick stop in coastal France.  This was the place I most felt shortchanged about, time-wise; we only had time to take a quick run in from our port (Cannes) to the charming little village of St. Paul de Vence.  It was still raining, but it's a lovely place, and one I wish I'd been able to spend more time exploring.  I also would have loved to go farther north; my father's family comes from only about two hundred kilometers north of there, up in the high Alps.  Once again -- like Malta -- that'll have to wait for another trip.

After Cannes, we went to the island of Ibiza.  Ibiza is one of two islands in the Balearic Archipelago, east of Spain, that we got to visit.  When a friend found out we were going to Ibiza, he said he'd been there, and that it was famous for sun, swimming, sex, and alcohol, and because of the last-mentioned he didn't remember much about the other three.  But true to form, we did something extremely nerdy instead and went to visit an organic farm, where we got to make our own herbal liqueur (which, amazingly enough, we were able to successfully transport home without the bottles breaking).

I didn't get any good photos of the farm, but here's an evening shot of the Ibiza lighthouse:

After Ibiza we went to another island in the Balearics, Mallorca, and while there we took a taxi up to Bellver Castle (which overlooks the city of Palma) and hiked our way back down, stopping along the way for some truly amazing cappuccino.

We finished up the trip in the city of Barcelona, where we got to visit the Sagrada Familia (again, which will be the subject of another post), and the wild, Dr.-Seussian Park Güell, conceived by the astonishingly creative mind of the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí:

From there, it was a quick flight to Paris, a long flight to New York City, a quick flight to Rochester, and a drive back home, where we got in at two AM.  Then had to get up at seven to go pick up the dogs from the kennel.  So I think I'll be fighting the dregs of jet lag for a couple more days.

It was a whirlwind tour but an opportunity to visit some amazing places, have some awesome food and wine (and limoncello, about which I will not be pinned down to rank by any Greek or Italian partisans in the audience).  But it's nice to be home as well, where spring has finally set in and the garden is ready to plant.

So goodbye for now, southern Europe.  With luck, I'll be back someday.

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The drowned wall

Humans have been modifying their own environment for a very long time.

Our capacity for building stuff is pretty extraordinary.  Birds build nests, some mammals and reptiles burrow, spiders spin webs -- but compared to what we do, it's all pretty rudimentary stuff.  No other species on Earth looks around, takes materials from nature, and says, "Hey, if I cut this to pieces and move it around, I could do something new and useful with it" to the extent that we do.

I was thinking about all this when I read a paper this week about an archaeological discovery in the Baltic Sea off the coast of Germany.  As I discussed in more depth in a post a couple of days ago, ten thousand odd years ago the Earth (especially the Northern Hemisphere) was coming out of a catastrophic and sudden cooling episode called the Younger Dryas event, during which the sea levels were considerably lower (because so much seawater was locked up as polar and glacial ice).  In fact, much of what are now the Baltic and North Seas were dry(ish) land; you could walk from England to France across a broad, grassy valley that is now at the bottom of the English Channel.

The result is that a great many of the artifacts produced during that time are now underwater, and finding them can be a matter of luck.  That was certainly the case in this instance, where scientists demonstrating a multibeam sonar system for some students in a research vessel ten kilometers offshore in the Bay of Mecklenburg saw something extraordinary -- the remains of a 971-meter-long rock wall archaeologists say "may be the oldest known human-made megastructure in Europe."

Nicknamed the "Blinkerwall," it is made of rows of a total of fourteen hundred smaller stones connecting three hundred boulders that were pretty clearly too large to move.  What the wall's builders apparently did was built a barrier out of the smaller stones connecting the large ones into a zigzagged line.

Part of the Blinkerwall [Image credit: Philipp Hoy]

The purpose of the wall, of course, can only be guessed at, but the researchers suspect it was used for hunting.  "When you chase animals [such as reindeer], they follow these structures, they don’t attempt to jump over them," said Jacob Geersen, of the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research in Warnemünde, a German port town on the Baltic coast.  "The idea would be to create an artificial bottleneck with a second wall or with the lake shore."

Once the animals were funneled into the narrow strip of land between the two barriers, they would be more vulnerable to spear-wielding hunters lying in wait.

The next step in the research, Geersen said, is to send divers down to the base of the wall, now submerged under twenty-one meters of water, to try and bolster this explanation by finding spearheads or other hunting implements.

You have to wonder what else might be down there.  Our intrepid ancestors have been finding new ways to make stuff for tens of thousands of years.  Wherever that impulse came from, there's no denying that it's served us well.  It always makes me wonder what traces will be left of our culture in ten thousand, or a hundred thousand, or a million years -- and what deductions our descendants will make about our habits, practices, and lifestyles.

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The mystery of the Etruscans

One of the unresolved mysteries of European anthropology is where the Etruscans fit into the big picture.

The Etruscans lived in northwestern Italy, in the region now called Tuscany -- in fact, the name Tuscany comes from the Latin Tusci, one of several names they had for the people who lived there.  The Greeks called them the Τυρσηνοί -- the Tyrrhenians -- etymologically related both to Etruria (the region where they lived) and, obviously, the Tyrrhenian Sea that still bears their name.  They called themselves the Rasenna, a word which, like most of their language, is of uncertain origin.

The big question is whether the Etruscans were autochthonous (academia-speak for "they'd always been there") or allochthonous (migrants from somewhere else -- and if so, from where?).  Of course, the truth is that all Europeans are ultimately allochthonous, because we all started out in east Africa -- it's just that some of us have been in place for a lot longer than others.  We know the Etruscans were already in that region when the Romans got there, who encountered them in something like 500 B.C.E. and ultimately absorbed them completely.  (An occupation the Romans excelled at.)

The historian Thucydides said they were related to the Pelasgians, a bit of a catch-all term ancient Greeks used to describe the inhabitants of Greece prior to the arrival of the classical Greek-speaking Dorians, Ionians, Achaeans, and Aeolians.  The word Pelasgian was almost synonymous with barbarian -- the ancient Greeks and ancient Romans shared a rather off-putting self-congratulatory bent, summed up as "if you're not us, sucks to be you."  

Of course, they're hardly the only civilization to feel that way.  I could name a modern one or two that still haven't gotten over that attitude.

In any case, there's good evidence that the Etruscans had already been there a while when the Romans encountered them, and that they were not closely related to the people in the neighborhood.  Their language, for example, is still a mystery, and has only been partly deciphered by linguists.  The general consensus is that, like Euskara (the language of the Basque people), it is non-Indo European.  There are two other languages it seems to be related to -- the Rhaetic language, an extinct language once spoken by people in what is now eastern Switzerland and western Austria, and Lemnian, spoken on the distant island of Lemnos in the Aegean Sea prior to their being conquered by speakers of Attic Greek in the sixth century B.C.E. 

The latter suggests that Thucydides may have been right on the money in connecting the Etruscans to the Pelasgians.  Together, Etruscan, Rhaetic, and Lemnian seem to be related to no other known languages, and are tentatively classified as a linguistic isolate family (Tyrsenian).

None other than the Roman Emperor Claudius wrote a twenty-volume set on the history and language of the Etruscans -- apparently he himself was a fluent speaker, and was fascinated by their culture -- but tragically, no trace of that extensive manuscript remains.  It's one of a long list of works we only know by their titles, and through references in other books.

The Monteleone Chariot, bronze inlaid with ivory, from sixth century B.C.E. Etruria [Image is in the Public Domain]

A genetic study of Etruscan remains found that they seemed to be related to the central European Urnfield Culture -- so named because of their practice of cremation and burial in ceramic urns -- which probably originated on the steppes of eastern Europe.  But as this path was a pretty common one -- the ancestors of the Celts, Slavs, Hungarians, and Germanic peoples all came that way -- it might not tell us all that much about how or when the Etruscans arrived.

At least their later history was happier than that of many people who bumped into the Romans.  There was some warring and jockeying for power, which the Etruscans ultimately lost, but they were eventually subsumed into the Roman Republic, becoming full Roman citizens.  Many Etruscan towns went on to make large amounts of money as middlemen between the Romans and the conquered Celtic tribes to the north and west.  Several prominent families who were to rise to position of power in the Republic (and later Empire) had Etruscan roots, including the Caecinia, Urgulania, Tarquinia, and Volumnia families, all names that will be familiar to aficionados of Roman history.  Most of the people from modern Tuscany have Etruscan roots, indicating their ancestors have been living in the same place for over three thousand years.

In the end, though, we're left with a mystery.  A people who left behind buildings and works of art and an only partly-understood language, whose connections to other ancient peoples are lost to the shadows of time.  And a mystery is always fascinating -- even if we might never fully discover the answers to all the questions.

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A light into shadow

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

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

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

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

Or... maybe not entirely lost.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Back to Africa

I was kind of tickled, when I got my "23 & Me" results back a couple of years ago, to find out that I had 284 identified Neanderthal markers, identifying me as having more Neanderthal ancestry than 60% of the samples tested.

The reason I was happy about this is not because it gave me an explanation for why I like my steaks rare and have a general aversion to wearing clothes.  It was more because I find the Neanderthals a fascinating bunch.  Far from the low-intelligence cave trolls a lot of us picture them as -- witness the use of their name as an insult -- by the end they actually had larger brains than your average modern Homo sapiens.  They had culture; they anointed and buried their dead, seem to have had music (if the archaeologists are correct about the origin of the Divje Babe flute), and might even have had language -- they had the same variant of the FOX-P2 gene that we do, which is instrumental to our ability to understand and produce spoken language.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Clemens Vasters, Neanderthal in a business suit, CC BY 2.0]

It also wasn't terribly surprising in my own case, as Europeans generally have more Neanderthal ancestry than any other group, and my test results showed me to be -- also unsurprising, given what I know of my family tree -- nearly 100% of European origin, mainly French, Scottish, Dutch, German, and English.  The Neanderthals themselves are named after the Neander Valley of Germany, where archaeologists found the first fossils of the species (or subspecies, depending on who you believe).  So once it was determined that they had interbred with early modern Homo sapiens, their geographical distribution led to a (correct) surmise that Europeans would have more Neanderthal ancestry than other ethnic groups, for the same reason that southeast Asians and Native Australians have more Denisovan ancestry than the rest of us.

That's why a paper in Cell two weeks ago came as such a shock.  In it, a team led by Lu Chen of Princeton University found that a number of African ethnic groups, especially those in northern and western Africa, have a lot more Neanderthal ancestry than anyone realized.

Because it's still not as much as the Europeans have, and the African Neanderthal genes identified are variants usually found in Europe, the guess is that some of the European Homo sapiens/Neanderthal hybrids made their way across (or around) the Mediterranean in a "back-to-Africa" migration, injecting Neanderthal genes into groups that previously had little to no Neanderthal ancestry.

It also means that geneticists may be underestimating the number of Neanderthal markers in the rest of us.  Because those estimates were made using comparison between sample DNA and that of people thought to have no Neanderthal ancestry at all -- such as the Yoruba of Nigeria -- if those African groups did have ancestry that was the result of a back-to-Africa migration by European hybrids, then that revises the baseline upward.  The former estimates of 1.7-1.8% Neanderthal DNA for your average person of European descent might be on the low side.

"Our work highlights how humans and Neanderthals interacted for hundreds of thousands of years, with populations dispersing out of and back into Africa," said study co-author Joshua Akey in an interview with Science News.  "Remnants of Neanderthal DNA survive in every modern human population studied to date."

I find it fascinating how DNA is now being used to track relationships and migratory patterns not only of other animal species, but of humans.  And it's gotten pretty accurate.  It picked up my Ashkenazic ancestry, identifying it at 6% -- just about right based on my one great-great-grandfather, Solomon Meyer-Lévy of Dauendorf, Alsace, who emigrated from his birthplace and joined a small community of French-speaking Jews in Donaldsonville, Louisiana in around 1850.  The other interesting result in my own DNA that made sense was a smattering of Italian ancestry, undoubtedly because my father's paternal line ancestor, Jacques-Esprit Ariey-Bonnet, was born in a little town in the French Alps, quite close to the border of Italy.

So the amount we can learn about our own past from our genes is staggering, and I'm sure there are other surprises in store for us.  It informs us not only of our physical makeup but our history, a millions-of-years-long trail leading back to our most distant hominid ancestors on the savannas of Kenya and Tanzania.

Although it still doesn't explain the rare steaks and nudity thing.

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This week's book recommendation is a fascinating journey into a topic we've visited often here at Skeptophilia -- the question of how science advances.

In The Second Kind of Impossible, Princeton University physicist Paul Steinhardt describes his thirty-year-long quest to prove the existence of a radically new form of matter, something he terms quasicrystals, materials that are ordered but non-periodic.  Faced for years with scoffing from other scientists, who pronounced the whole concept impossible, Steinhardt persisted, ultimately demonstrating that an aluminum-manganese alloy he and fellow physicists Luca Bindi created had all the characteristics of a quasicrystal -- a discovery that earned them the 2018 Aspen Institute Prize for Collaboration and Scientific Research.

Steinhardt's book, however, doesn't bog down in technical details.  It reads like a detective story -- a scientist's search for evidence to support his explanation for a piece of how the world works.  It's a fascinating tale of persistence, creativity, and ingenuity -- one that ultimately led to a reshaping of our understanding of matter itself.

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