Taken by the flood

Not long ago, I was listening to one of my favorite pieces by Claude Debussy, The Drowned Cathedral, and I started to wonder what legend had given rise to the piece.  After a little bit of digging, I found out that Debussy got his inspiration from the Breton legend of the mythical city of Ys, built on the coast of Brittany behind a seawall.  Princess Dahut the Wicked tempted fate by engaging in all sorts of depravity therein, despite the warnings of Saint Winwaloe that God was watching and would smite the ever-loving shit out of her if she didn't mend her ways.  (Okay, I'm paraphrasing a bit, here, but that's the gist.)  Anyhow, Dahut wouldn't listen, and one night a storm rose and broke through the seawall, and the ocean flowed in over the city.  Dahut's father, King Gradion, escaped on a magical horse with Dahut riding behind him, but Winwaloe shouted at him, "Push back the demon riding with you!"

So Gradion did what any good father would do, namely, he shoved his daughter into the sea, which "swallowed her up."  The sea also swallowed the rest of Ys, which kind of sucked for the inhabitants, given that it wasn't really their fault that the princess was a little morally challenged.  As for Princess Dahut herself, she became a mermaid, and is still hanging around to tempt sailors into jumping into the ocean to their deaths.  And according to legend, on windy days, you can still hear the bells of the drowned cathedral of Ys if you stand along the shore of Douarnenez Bay.

The Flight of King Gradion, by Évariste-Vital Luminais, 1884 (in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper, Brittany, France)  [Image is in the Public Domain]

Kind of a cool story, in a heartless, Grimm's Fairy Tales sort of way, even if Winwaloe and Gradion, not to mention God, do come across as pro-patriarchy assholes.  And whatever else you think, you have to admit that Debussy's piece is gorgeous (go back and give a listen to the recording of it I linked above, if you haven't already done so).

What I haven't told you, yet, though, is the other thing I found out while looking up the Legend of the Drowned City of Ys...

... is that French archaeologists diving only a few kilometers away from Douarnenez Bay just found the remnants of a seawall, now underwater, dating from seven thousand years ago.

The structure, found off the Ile de Sein at Brittany's westernmost tip, is a 120 meter long, twenty meter thick, two meter high wall with large granite monoliths sticking up from it at regular intervals.  When it was built, it would have been right at the shoreline -- at that point, we were just coming out of the last ice age, and the sea level was considerably lower than it is now -- but now it's under nine meters of water.  The archaeologists are unsure of its purpose, but given the legend the likeliest answer is that it was a seawall to prevent flooding.

"It was built by a very structured society of hunter-gatherers, of a kind that became sedentary when resources permitted.  That or it was made by one of the Neolithic populations that arrived here around 5,000 B.C.E.," said archaeologist and study co-author Yvan Pailler.  "It is likely that the abandonment of a territory developed by a highly structured society has become deeply rooted in people's memories...  The submersion caused by the rapid rise in sea level, followed by the abandonment of fishing structures, protective works, and habitation sites, must have left a lasting impression."

What strikes me about all this is that building this thing took an astonishing amount of work.  The mass of the stones is estimated at 3,300 tonnes.  Putting together a wall of this size, without any heavy equipment, was not an insignificant task.

But then, neither are Stonehenge, the Mayan and Egyptian and Aztec pyramids, Machu Picchu, Angkor Wat, the Easter Island moai, and the Great Wall of China.  To name a few.  I guess if you have sufficient motivation and building materials, not to mention large amounts of cheap and/or slave labor, there's not much you can't do.

But the whole thing in this case is rather sad, really.  The seawall ultimately failed; as the Tenth Doctor said, in the iconic (and tragic) episode of Doctor Who "The Waters of Mars," "Water is patient, Adelaide.  Water just waits.  Wears down the cliff tops, the mountains.  The whole of the world.  Water always wins."

It certainly did in this case.  The sea level rise between fourteen and five thousand years ago flooded the entirety of Doggerland, which used to connect Britain to mainland Europe but now lies at the bottom of the North Sea, and the Gulf of Carpentaria, which now separates Australia from New Guinea.  It's unsurprising that changes of this magnitude would stick around in the cultural consciousness -- and get worked into folk tales and legends.

So while the story of the wicked Princess Dahut and virtuous (if ruthless) Saint Winwaloe and the magical horse is certainly made up, the flooding of the city of Ys might have a basis in fact.  Further indication that when indigenous people tell us what happened in the past, maybe we should pay better attention.

And to stay in the same mood, let's indulge in a little more Debussy, shall we?  How about his orchestral work, The Sea?  That seems a fitting way to end this discussion, doesn't it?

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The feral child

A point I've made before, but one I think is absolutely critical to skeptics, is that sometimes we simply don't have answers -- and are forced to admit that unless further information turns up, we might never have.

I get that it's intensely frustrating.  It seems to be hardwired into our brains that some conclusion, any conclusion, is better than remaining in doubt.  I recall once being asked by a student if I thought there was an afterlife.  My answer was, "I don't know."

"But what do you think?" the student said.

"I don't think anything.  The information we have from phenomena like near-death experiences is inconclusive.  And no one comes back to report from an actual death experience.  I'll find out for sure eventually, but at the moment, I don't have enough evidence to decide one way or the other.  So the answer is 'I don't know.'"

This obviously irritated the hell out of the student, and he said, "But you must have an opinion."

"Why?" I answered.  "If you want my opinion, it's that the world could do with a great many fewer opinions and a great many more facts."

The problem is, of course, that the intolerance for frustration stemming from a desperation to have the matter settled often drives us to unsupported speculation -- and these meanderings often end up passed along as fact.  (How many different The Jack the Ripper Mystery Solved! books have been written?  All equally confident, but all with different solutions?)  As a less-known but equally fascinating (and, reassuringly, less violent) example, let's consider the strange case of the Wild Boy of Aveyron.

In 1797, near the town of Saint-Sernin-sur-Rance in Aveyron département in southern France, three hunters came upon a boy of about nine.  He was completely naked, and ran from them, but they trapped him when he climbed a tree.  After capturing him -- and finding he couldn't (or wouldn't) speak, but didn't seem dangerous -- they brought him into the town, where he was taken in by an elderly widow who fed and clothed him.

Within a week, he disappeared -- leaving his clothes behind.

Over the next two years, he was spotted periodically in the woods, but always eluded capture.  Then -- in January of 1800 -- he came out of the forest on his own.  He eventually ended up in an orphanage in Rodez.  Upon examination, psychiatrist Philippe Pinel suggested he was mentally disabled, probably from birth; scars on his body suggested he'd spent most of his childhood in the wilderness.

Of course, the question arose of how a small child could survive in the forest, even in the relatively temperate south of France.  How he didn't die of exposure, from starvation, or from being attacked and eaten by wild animals, was a significant mystery.  Were his scars from the cuts and scrapes of living outdoors naked -- or were they from early abuse?  The physician Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, who worked extensively with the boy (whom he christened "Victor") believed that the evidence supported that Victor had "lived in an absolute solitude from his fourth or fifth almost to his twelfth year, which is the age he may have been when he was taken in the Caune woods."

Lithograph of Victor of Aveyron, ca. 1800 [Image is in the Public Domain]

At this period, France was just emerging from the chaos and horror of the Reign of Terror, and the question was raised of whether he was a child whose parents had been imprisoned or executed.  Several couples were located in the region who had sons of the right age that had gone missing while they (the parents) were in jail -- but none of them recognized Victor.

Another curious twist is that one prominent philosophy amongst the intelligentsia at the time was the idea of the "Noble Savage" -- that taken away from the noise and filth and crowds of the city, placed in the tranquility of the forests and glades, humans would revert to some sort of pre-Adam-and-Eve-eating-the-apple blissful state of oneness with nature.  People like the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau tended to have a rather optimistic -- some might say unwarrantedly optimistic -- view of the potential of humanity and the natural world.  (Alfred Lord Tennyson's observation that "Nature is red in tooth and claw" came later.)  So Victor was studied intensively to see if he showed any signs of Edenic grace and innocence.

Not so much, it turned out.  He still didn't like wearing clothes -- although consented to do so when it was cold -- and was fond of doing what just about all teenage boys do at least once a day.  Other than being mute, and having peculiar eating habits (raw vegetables were by far his favorite food), he didn't seem to exhibit any sort of before-the-Fall chastity and sinlessness.  He did show some signs of what we would now probably classify as autistic behavior -- rocking back and forth or hugging himself when stressed -- and there's been speculation that this, along with his lack of speech, may have been why he was abandoned in the first place.

Victor never learned to speak, other than the words lait ("milk") and oh, Dieu ("oh, God").  But he was never violent, and in fact seemed predisposed to being gentle and caring.  When he was around eighteen, he went to stay with a Madame Guérin, with whom he lived for the rest of his life.  And when Madame Guérin's husband died, and she was sitting at her dinner table weeping, Victor startled her by going up and putting his arms around her and holding her while she cried.

Victor of Aveyron died in 1828 of pneumonia, at the age of somewhere around forty, and took to his grave whatever he knew about his origins.

The lack of information here is what facilitates wild speculation.  Much has been written about Victor -- some claiming that he was below average intelligence, others that he was of ordinary intelligence but autistic, others still that he was basically a normal young man and his early childhood trauma led him to hide the fact that he understood everything people were saying (and, perhaps, could speak as well, but simply refused to do so).

The truth, of course, is that we don't know who Victor was, what his mental capacity was, or where he came from.  There just isn't enough in the way of hard data, despite the extensive studies of the young man done by Itard and others.  So the correct conclusion is not to come to a conclusion at all.

It's frustrating, especially given such an intriguing story, but that's where we have to leave it.

Like I said, I get the human drive to understand, and how a mystery can nibble at your brain, keeping you puzzling over it.  And this can be a very good thing; two examples I can think of, from my own field of linguistics, that were finally solved due to someone's dogged tenacity and absolute refusal to give up are Jean-François Champollion's decoding of Egyptian hieroglyphics and the decipherment of the Linear B script of Crete by Alice Kober and Michael Ventris.

But sometimes -- there simply isn't enough information.  And at that point, we have to let it go, and hope that more turns up.

In the case of Victor of Aveyron, though, that's pretty unlikely.  So we're left with a mystery: a feral child showed up in late eighteenth-century France, eventually joined society (more or less), grew up, and finally died, and there is probably no way we'll ever know more.  Victor is, and shall almost certainly remain, a cipher.

However confounding that is to our natural intellectual curiosity.

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Lingua franca

Here's a question I wonder if you've ever pondered:

Why do the Spanish and French speak Romance languages and not Germanic ones?

It's not as weird a consideration as it might appear at first.  By the time the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the last part of the fifth century C.E., the entire western part of Europe had been completely overrun by Germanic tribes -- the Franks, the Burgundians, and especially the Visigoths.  This latter group ended up controlling pretty much all of southern France and nearly the entirety of Spain, and their king, Euric, ruled the whole territory from his capital at Toulouse.  It was Euric who deposed the last Western Roman emperor, poor little Romulus Augustulus, in 476 -- but showing unusual mercy, sent him off to a (very) early retirement at a villa in Campania, where he spent the rest of his life.  That he felt no need to execute the kid is a good indicator of how solidly Euric and the Visigoths were in control.

So the Germanic-speaking Goths more or less took over, and not long after that the (also Germanic) Franks and Burgundians came into northern France and established their own territories there.  The country of France is even named after the Franks; but their language, Franconian, never really took hold inside its borders.

Contrast this to what happened in England.  The Celtic natives, who spoke a variety of Brythonic dialects related to Welsh and Cornish, were invaded during the reign of the Emperor Claudius in the year 43 C.E., and eventually Rome controlled Britain north to Hadrian's Wall.  But when all hell broke loose in the fifth century, and the Roman legions said, "Sorry, y'all'll have to deal with these Saxons on your own" and hauled ass back home, the invaders' Germanic language became the lingua franca (pun intended) of the southern half of the island, with the exception of the aforementioned Welsh and Cornish holdouts.

All three places had been Roman colonies.  So why did France and Spain end up speaking Romance languages, and England a Germanic one?

The easier question is the last bit.  Britain never was as thoroughly Romanized as the rest of western Europe; it always was kind of a wild-west frontier outpost, and a great many of the Celtic tribes the Romans tried to pacify rebelled again and again.  When the Romans troops withdrew, there weren't a lot of speakers of Latin left -- exceptions were monasteries and churches.  Most of the locals had retained their original languages, and when the British Celts told the troops "Romani ite domum" (more or less), they just picked up where they'd left off.

The problem was, when the Angles and Saxons started arriving in huge numbers over the next two centuries, there wasn't a single dominant language there to stand up against them -- just a bunch of various dialects spoken by tribes that never were all that numerous, and didn't get along very well with each other anyhow.  So the West Germanic language the invaders spoke became the common language, eventually evolving into Old English.

The situation was different in France and Spain.  By the fifth century, those had both been solidly Roman for three hundred years.  The Celtic/Gaulish natives were by this time thoroughly subjugated, and many had even thrown their lot in with the conquerors, rising to become important figures.  (One example is first century B.C.E. writer and polymath Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus, who despite his Roman name was from the Celtic Vocontii tribe in the western foothills of the Alps.)  Business, record-keeping, and administration were all conducted in Latin; most of the cities were predominantly Latin-speaking.  

The Germanic tribes who swept through western Europe in the fourth and fifth centuries had an interesting attitude.  They didn't want to destroy everything the Romans had built; they just wanted to control it, and have access to all the wealth and land.  They didn't even care if the Roman town-dwellers stayed put, as long as they acknowledged the Goths' overlordship.  (Which almost all of them did, given that there were no other options.  Practical folks, the Romans.)

The invading Visigoths, Franks, and Burgundians had no written language we know of, so when they settled in to rule the place -- and most importantly, to do business with the local landowners -- their only real option was to learn Latin.  Latin became the prestige language, the language you learned if you wanted to go places, much the way English is now in many parts of the world.

The result was that Latin-derived Old French and Old Spanish were eventually adopted by the Germanic-descended ruling class, ultimately being spoken throughout the region, while the opposite pattern had happened across the Channel in England.  Interesting that the Franks gave their name to the country of France and its language, but the only modern language descended from Franconian is one spoken two countries northeast of there -- Dutch.

It's always fascinating to me to see how chance events alter the course of history.  You can easily see how it could have gone the other way -- the Visigoths might have been more determined to eradicate every trace of Romanness, the way so many conquerors have done.  Instead, they saw the value in leaving it substantially intact.  Not because they had such deep respect for other cultures -- they weren't so forward thinking as all that -- but because they recognized that they could use the Roman knowledge, language, and infrastructure for their own gain.  The result is that my Celto-Germanic ancestors spoke a language derived from Latin, even though by that time it was about the only Roman thing about them.

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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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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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Lights out

Regular readers of Skeptophilia may recall a post I did about a year ago about the Miyake Events, seven wild solar storms that occurred over the past ten thousand years that were powerful enough to alter the atmosphere's carbon-14 balance, leaving distinct traces in the composition of tree rings.  The last, and the only one that occurred during modern times, was the 1859 Carrington Event, which (even though it was one of the weakest of the recorded Miyake Events) was bad enough to short out telegraph lines, causing sparking and numerous fires, and triggered auroras as far south as the Caribbean.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Arctic light - Frank Olsen, Aurora Borealis I, CC BY-SA 3.0]

If anything like this happened today, it would be nothing short of catastrophic for the entire technological world, and I can say with little fear of contradiction that we are completely unprepared for any such eventuality.  A Miyake Event would very likely cause a near-total collapse of electrical grids, massive failure (or complete destruction) of satellites, and power surges in electrical wires that would almost certainly trigger widespread fires in businesses and residences.  Computers -- from home computers to massive mainframes -- would be fried.  Airline navigation systems and air traffic control would shut down pretty much immediately.  The disruption, and the cost, would be astronomical.

Well, a paper last week in The Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences describes evidence of a solar storm 14,300 years ago that makes the known Miyake Events look like gentle spring zephyrs.

The study focused on a site containing partially-fossilized tree trunks along the banks of the Drouzet River in Hautes-Alpes département, France, up in the Alps near the city of Gap, the location of which is coincidentally only ten miles from the tiny village (St. Jean-St. Nicolas) where my great-grandfather was born.  The carbon-14 levels in one ring in the tree trunks indicate the most powerful solar storm on record, consistent with a coronal mass ejection hundreds of times more powerful than the Carrington Event.

The worst part is that no one knows what causes solar storms.  They show no apparent periodicity -- the spacing between the known Miyake Events varies from a little over two hundred years to well over four thousand.  Even more alarming is that solar astronomers don't know if there's any warning prior to the storm occurring, or if we'll just be sitting here on our computers looking at funny pictures of cats, and suddenly be engulfed in a shower of sparks.

The damage from even a weak Miyake Event -- not to mention the one 14,300 years ago that was the subject of last week's paper -- is hard even to guess at.  "Extreme solar storms could have huge impacts on Earth," said Tim Heaton of the University of Leeds, who co-authored the study.  "Such super storms could permanently damage the transformers in our electricity grids, resulting in huge and widespread blackouts...  They could also result in permanent damage to the satellites that we all rely on for navigation and telecommunication, leaving them unusable.  They would also create severe radiation risks to astronauts."

Also unknown is how long it would take to repair the damage.  A conservative estimate is months.  Can you imagine?  Months with no computers, no email, no cellphones, no texting.  No online banking or business transactions.  No travel by airplane except for short hops.  No GPS.  No satellite contacts for television or radio... or national defense.  Restoring electrical grids would undoubtedly be first priority, and they'd likely be easier to repair, but still -- probably weeks with no electricity.

The result would be chaos on an unprecedented scale.

We've become so dependent on our high-tech world that it's hard to imagine what it would be like if suddenly it all just... went away.  I'm reminded of the last scenes of the brilliantly funny (if dark) Simon Pegg movie The World's End, where it turns out that the whole technological shebang is being run by a moderately malign intelligence (played to weary, long-suffering perfection by Bill Nighy) called The Network, who argues that humans need someone smart in control because we're just too idiotic to manage on our own:

The Network:  We are trying...

Gary:  Nobody's listening!

The Network:  If you'd only...

Gary:  Face it!  We are the human race, and we don't like being told what to do!
The Network:  Just what is it you want to do?

Gary:  We wanna be free!

Andrew: Yeah!

Gary:  We wanna be free to do what we wanna do!

Andrew:  Yeah!

Gary: We wanna get drunk!

Steven: Yeah!

Gary:  And we wanna have a good time!  And that's what we're gonna do!

The Network:  It's pointless arguing with you.  You will be left to your own devices.

Gary (incredulous that he's actually won the argument):  Really?

The Network:  Yeah.  Fuck it.

At which point The Network shuts down -- taking all of the world's technology with it.

Well, it looks like we might not need to fight The Network to destroy the whole superstructure of electronics we depend upon -- all it'd take is one good solar storm, and it'll be lights out for the foreseeable future.

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The ghosts of the Petit Trianon

I sometimes get grief from readers because of my tendency to reject claims of the paranormal out of hand.

In my own defense, I am convincible.  It just takes more than personal anecdote and eyewitness accounts to do it.  Our memories and sensory-perceptive apparatus are simply not accurate enough recording devices to be relied on for anything requiring scientific rigor.  I find myself agreeing with the hard-nosed skeptic MacPhee in C. S. Lewis's novel That Hideous Strength: 

"My uncle, Dr. Duncanson," said MacPhee, "whose name may be familiar to you — he was Moderator of the General Assembly over the water, in Scotland — used to say, 'Show it to me in the word of God.'  And then he’d slap the big Bible on the table.  It was a way he had of shutting up people that came to him blathering about religious experiences.  And granting his premises, he was quite right.  I don’t hold his views, Mrs. Studdock, you understand, but I work on the same principles.  If anything wants Andrew MacPhee to believe in its existence, I’ll be obliged if it will present itself in full daylight, with a sufficient number of witnesses present, and not get shy if you hold up a camera or a thermometer."

And the difficulty is that so often, when you take a close look at the eyewitness testimony itself, even it doesn't hold water.  The minimum standard for scientific acceptance is one in which the paranormal explanation accounts for the claim better than any of various competing natural explanations, and I've yet to see a single example where that applies.

As an example of this, let's take a look at one of the most famous claims of witnesses to a haunting -- the Moberly-Jourdain Incident.

The event in question took place in August of 1901.  Two friends (some have claimed, with some justification, that they were lovers), Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, were on holiday from their teaching jobs at St. Hugh's College, Oxford University.  They traveled together in France, and on the day in question were touring Paris.  They'd visited Versailles, and after seeing the palace decided to walk from there to the Petit Trianon, a château built on the palace grounds during the reign of Louis XV.

They were using a Baedeker guidebook to find their way, but missed the path they were looking for and became lost.  This is when, according to their account, things started seeming odd.  A feeling of dread and weariness came over them; the whole scene started looking like a tableau rather than reality, as if somehow they were inside an animated work of art.  "Everything suddenly looked unnatural, therefore unpleasant," Moberly later wrote.  "Even the trees seemed to become flat and lifeless, like wood worked in tapestry.  There were no effects of light and shade, and no wind stirred the trees."

The people they saw -- a woman shaking a piece of cloth out of a window, what seemed to be palace gardeners, and some men who looked like "very dignified officials, dressed in long greyish-green coats with small three-cornered hats" -- had a vaguely unreal appearance.  Weirdest of all was the man they came across seated by a garden kiosk.  According to Moberly, his appearance was "most repulsive ... [his] expression odious.  His complexion was dark and rough...  The man slowly turned his face, which was marked by smallpox; his complexion was very dark.  The expression was evil and yet unseeing, and though I did not feel that he was looking particularly at us, I felt a repugnance to going past him."

Another person they saw was a fair-haired lady in an old-fashioned white dress, sitting on the grass working on a sketch.  She, too, paid Moberly and Jourdain no attention, and seemed to look right through them.

At this point, they saw the building of the Petit Trianon in the distance, and walked toward it.  Upon reaching the front entrance, they were met by another group of tourists and a guide, joined them for a tour, and nothing else odd happened.

Neither woman mentioned their peculiar experiences to the other for almost three months.

Aerial view of the Petit Trianon [Image licensed under the Creative Commons ToucanWings, Vue aérienne du domaine de Versailles par ToucanWings - Creative Commons By Sa 3.0 - 052, CC BY-SA 3.0]

It was Moberly who triggered a reconsideration of what they'd seen by asking, out of the blue, if Jourdain thought the Petit Trianon was haunted.  Jourdain said she thought it was.  After briefly describing what they remembered, they decided each to write down their memories of that day, then compare notes.  There were some differences (Jourdain, for example, didn't recall seeing the lady in the white dress), but there was decent agreement between their accounts.  After some discussion, they concluded they'd seen ghosts -- that they'd witnessed a re-enactment of events from August 1792, immediately before the beginning of the French Revolution.  The evil-looking man, they said, was Joseph Hyacinthe François de Paule de Rigaud, Comte de Vaudreuil (who was smart enough to flee France before things became too dangerous), and the woman in white was none other than Queen Marie Antoinette (who would lose her head on the guillotine only a year later).

So, what really happened here?

Ten years afterward, Moberly and Jourdain published a book about the incident, called An Adventure.  It was an overnight sensation.  However, objections began to mount just as quickly.  Among them:

• Both Moberly and Jourdain were known for oddball claims besides their most famous one.  For example, Moberly once said she'd seen the ghost of the Roman Emperor Constantine in the Louvre in 1914.  (What he was doing in the Louvre is anyone's guess; maybe ghostly Roman emperors take vacations just like the rest of us.)  Jourdain had a definite paranoid streak -- during World War I she became convinced that a German spy was hiding in St. Hugh's (of which at that point she was principal), and at the time of her death in 1924 she had become so notorious for erratic and autocratic behavior that she had provoked mass resignations amongst the staff.  So it's not like the two women are what I'd call reliable witnesses.
• An analysis of the original manuscript of An Adventure (dating from 1903), the first published edition (in 1911), and subsequent editions shows increasing embellishment, and the addition of new details each time the story was republished.  This is certainly a bit suspicious.
• Both women told their stories separately on numerous occasions, and as time passed, their versions converged -- suggestive that as they compared their memories, each of their own recollections became tainted with the other's.
• At the time of their visit, the French writer Robert de Montesquiou lived near Versailles, and was known to host themed parties on the palace grounds in which he and his friends wore period dress and staged tableaux vivants.  French artist and historian Philippe Jullian has suggested that Moberly and Jourdain stumbled upon one of these parties, and were understandably freaked out by what they saw -- and, furthermore, that the evil-visaged, pockmarked man was de Montesquiou himself, whose appearance by all accounts was creepy enough to explain their revulsion.

The upshot of all this is that despite this story showing up in countless books with titles like Twenty True Tales of the Supernatural, and being cited as one of the best-documented accounts of a haunting, it doesn't meet that minimum standard -- that the paranormal explanation accounts for the claim better than the purely natural ones.

So, in conclusion: I'm not saying ghosts and an afterlife aren't possible.  I'm not, honestly, a disbeliever.  I simply don't have enough convincing evidence to come down one way or the other, and at least regarding an afterlife, I figure I'll find out sooner or later anyhow.  Until then, I'm with MacPhee.  I need more than just "you saw it."

Although I can't go with MacPhee's suggestion of a camera providing good evidence.  Those were the Good Old Days, when making a faked photograph took at least some skill.  These days, Photoshop probably has a one-click "Add Ghost" feature.

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