A battle between unknowns

I recently got into a discussion with a history-buff friend about the unfortunate fact that everything we know about history is incomplete -- and generally speaking, the further back in time you go, the more incomplete it is.  She referenced human remains like Tollund Man, the Lady of Caviglione, and the Egtved Girl, all European burials that have been extensively studied.  Tollund Man is the most recent (estimated at around 400 B.C.E.) and the Lady of Caviglione by far the oldest (at around 24,000 years ago), but all three share an aura of mystery regarding who they were, raising questions we almost certainly will never have answers to.  There's evidence Tollund Man was the victim of a sacrifice, but by whom, and toward what end, is unknown.  And about the circumstances of the other two, we know next to nothing.

Compound this with the fact that for every body that has survived, at least in skeletal form, literally millions more have crumbled into dust and are completely gone.  Most of our history is, and will always remain, lost.

The reason this comes up is the excavation in the Tollense Valley of Germany of the site of an ancient battlefield, dating to around 1250 B.C.E.  It was discovered in 1996 when an amateur archaeologist was walking along the edge of the Tollense River and saw something protruding from the bank.  It turned out to be a human bone -- and since that time, over 12,500 bones and 300 bronze arrowheads have been recovered from the area.  It appears to have been the site of one of the oldest known battles in Europe.  Some of the finds were downright gruesome:

The skull of one of the battle's casualties -- with the arrowhead that killed him still embedded in his cranium [Image credit: Volker Minkus]

What is most curious about the site is not that a bunch of people fought and killed each other -- after all, humans have been doing that pretty much forever -- but that an analysis of the arrowheads shows that the battle was between two groups, one of which had traveled there from hundreds of kilometers away.  The Tollense River Valley is in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, and about half the arrowheads are of a design known to occur in archaeological sites from that area; but the other half are clearly of a different make, matching designs from much farther south, in Bavaria and Moravia.

"This suggests that at least a part of the fighters or even a complete battle faction involved in Tollense Valley derive from a very distant region," said Leif Inselmann, of the Free University of Berlin, who co-authored the paper on the study, which appeared this week in the journal Archaeology.

Who they were, and what brought them northward and into conflict with the residents there, are unknown, although there are some speculative possibilities.

"A causeway that crossed the Tollense River, constructed about five hundred years before the battle, is thought to have been the starting point of the conflict," said study co-author Thomas Terberger, of the University of Göttingen.  "The causeway was probably part of an important trade route.  Control of this bottleneck situation could well have been an important reason for the conflict...  This new information has considerably changed the image of the Bronze Age, which was not as peaceful as believed before.  The thirteenth century B.C.E. saw changes of burial rites, symbols and material culture.  I consider the conflict as a sign that this major transformation process of Bronze Age society was accompanied by violent conflicts.  Tollense is probably only the tip of the iceberg."

The fact is, though, the rest of that iceberg is likely to remain forever underwater.  Who the people were that fought and died in the now peaceful river valley in northern Germany is very likely going to stay a mystery, as will the reason that drove some of them to make the long trip from the forests of Bavaria.  It behooves us amateur students of history to remember not only the old adage that "history is written by the victors," but that the vast majority of history is completely forgotten by both sides -- what we don't know about our own past far outweighs what we do know.

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Ancient UFOs

One argument against UFOs being alien visitors from other star systems is that the number of UFO sightings has risen in direct proportion to our knowledge and awareness that there are other star systems -- suggesting that they're largely a combination of overactive imagination and misinterpreting natural phenomenon (or such human-made creations as satellites and military aircraft).  The whole UFO craze, in fact, really took off during the 1940s and 1950s, when our scientific knowledge of space was accelerating rapidly.

And unsurprisingly, this was also when science fiction tropes in fiction really caught on in a big way.

Prior to the Enlightenment, the conventional wisdom in the Western World was that the skies were the domain of God and the angels, and as such were ceaseless and changeless.  (Which is why such transient phenomena as comets and novae got everyone's knickers in a twist.)  The planets weren't even considered to be places, as such; they were manifestations of powers or forces.  And if you think all that, there's no particular reason you'd look up and expect to see visitors from there, right?

So what we see, perhaps, turns out to be what we expected to see.

But it turns out that a handful of very peculiar UFO-ish incidents do come from the pre-technological world.  Now, I'm not saying any of these are actual extraterrestrial visitations, mind you; I still very much come down on the side of there being natural, no-aliens-required explanations for these phenomena.  But the fact remains that they're interesting accounts, even so.

Let's start with one observed in the days of the Roman Republic.  In 73 B.C.E., Rome was involved in the Third Mithridatic War against King Mithridates VI Eupator of Pontus and his allies.  The Roman senator Lucius Licinius Lucullus was charged with overseeing the war effort, and had decided to engage the Pontic army near Nicaea despite being outnumbered.  But then -- according to Plutarch -- the following happened:

But presently, as they were on the point of joining battle, with no apparent change of weather, but all on a sudden, the sky burst asunder, and a huge, flame-like body was seen to fall between the two armies.  In shape, it was most like a wine-jar (pithos), and in color, like molten silver.  Both sides were astonished at the sight, and separated. This marvel, as they say, occurred in Phrygia, at a place called Otryae.

Understandably, both sides decided this was an omen worth paying attention to, and called off the battle.  (I guess there was no indication of who the omen was against, so they both decided to play it safe.)  The delay didn't help Mithridates, ultimately; the Romans under Lucullus went on to fight on another day when there were fewer flaming wine-jars in the sky, and Pontus was resoundingly defeated.

So, what was this apparition?

Well, the likeliest answer is that it was a bolide -- a meteor that bursts in midair.  It's understandable how in those highly superstitious times, when omens were detected even in the entrails of slaughtered animals, such an occurrence would have sparked quite a reaction.

An even stranger one is the tale of the "Airship of Clonmacnoise," an account of a sighting that occurred in around 740 C.E. near Teltown, in County Meath, Ireland.  Here, the problem is sorting out what people actually saw from later embellishments.  The earliest versions of this story simply state that several "flying ships with their crews" were seen in the skies, but very quickly it grew by accretion.  In later iterations, the multiple ships coalesced into a single huge one, which was halted over the Abbey of Clonmacnoise when its anchor snagged on the roof of the abbey church.  A "sky sailor" climbed down a rope ladder to free it (shades of the Goblin Ship in the most recent episode of Doctor Who!), and told the astonished monks he was "in danger of drowning in the thicker air of this lower world."

Here's an account from thirteenth century monk and scholar Gervase of Tilbury:

The people were amazed, and while they discussed it among themselves, they saw the rope move as if [the crew] were struggling to free the anchor.  When it would not budge for all their tugging, a voice was heard in the thick air, like the clamor of sailors vying to recover the thrown anchor.  Nor was it long until, hope in the effectiveness of exertion having been exhausted, the sailors sent down one of themselves – who, as we have heard, dangling from the anchor rope, came down it hand over hand.  When he was about to disengage the anchor, he was seized by bystanders: he gasped in the hands of his captors like a man lost in a shipwreck, and died suffocated in the moisture of our thicker air.  But the sailors overhead, surmising that their comrade had drowned, cut the anchor rope after having waited for an hour, and sailed away leaving the anchor.

Of course, it's worth mentioning that by now the scene of the incident had shifted to London, because there's no way a good Englishman like Gervase could let such an exciting tale take place in a remote spot like central Ireland.

This one is probably just a tall tale -- although I do find the bit about the air down here being "thicker" curious, because that certainly wasn't widespread knowledge back then.

Then we have the events of the morning of April 14, 1561, when "many men and women of Nuremberg" witnessed something very peculiar.  The incident caught enough attention to be written up in a widely-circulated broadsheet the following week.  Here's how it was described by the witnesses:

In the morning of April 14, 1561, at daybreak, between 4 and 5 a.m., a dreadful apparition occurred on the Sun, and then this was seen in Nuremberg in the city, before the gates and in the country – by many men and women.  At first there appeared in the middle of the Sun two blood-red semi-circular arcs, just like the Moon in its last quarter.  And in the Sun, above and below and on both sides, the color was blood, there stood a round ball of partly dull, partly black ferrous color.  Likewise there stood on both sides and as a torus about the Sun such blood-red ones and other balls in large number, about three in a line and four in a square, also some alone.  In between these globes there were visible a few blood-red crosses, between which there were blood-red strips, becoming thicker to the rear and in the front malleable like the rods of reed-grass, which were intermingled, among them two big rods, one on the right, the other to the left, and within the small and big rods there were three, also four and more globes.  These all started to fight among themselves, so that the globes, which were first in the Sun, flew out to the ones standing on both sides, thereafter, the globes standing outside the Sun, in the small and large rods, flew into the Sun.  Besides the globes flew back and forth among themselves and fought vehemently with each other for over an hour.  And when the conflict in and again out of the Sun was most intense, they became fatigued to such an extent that they all, as said above, fell from the Sun down upon the Earth 'as if they all burned' and they then wasted away on the Earth with immense smoke.  After all this there was something like a black spear, very long and thick, sighted; the shaft pointed to the east, the point pointed west.

Like the apparition that stopped the Roman/Pontic battle, this was interpreted as an omen -- in this case, that God was even more pissed off than usual, and everyone should immediately repent and promise not to be naughty hereafter.  So once again, everyone interpreted what they saw based on their cultural context -- which, honestly, is pretty universal.  But from a more scientific standpoint, what the hell was this?  

An illustrated news notice from April 1561, showing a drawing of the phenomenon [Image is in the Public Domain]

Unlike the Airship of Clonmacnoise (or Teltown or London or wherever they finally decided it happened), it's hard to dismiss this one as a tall tale.  The accounts are numerous, detailed, and -- most important, from a scientific standpoint -- all agree substantially with each other.  Skeptic Jason Colavito says that he believes the account is consistent with the atmospheric phenomenon called sun dogs, in which high-atmosphere ice crystals cause light refraction when the Sun is low in the sky, creating two bright spots (sometimes with a rainbow sheen, and often with a partial or complete halo) on either side of the Sun.

The problem is, I've seen many sun dogs, and nothing about them moves -- they can be kind of eerie, but they just hover near the horizon and eventually fade.  I've never seen a sun dog that "fell from the Sun down upon the Earth and then wasted away with immense smoke."  So for me, this one is in the "unknown" column.

Perhaps the strangest of all is the event that happened in February of 1803 in the Hitachi Province of the east coast of Japan.  Called Utsuro-bune (虚舟, hollow boat) the story was recorded in at least four separate written accounts.  The story goes that fishermen saw a strange object drifting in the ocean, and upon approaching it, found that it was a peculiar vessel "shaped like an incense burner," about 3.3 meters tall by 5.5 meters wide.  They said that the top half was "the color of lacquered rosewood," with windows made of glass or crystal, and the bottom half made of metal plates.  They towed it to land, and found that inside was a very small (but apparently adult) woman, only about 1.5 meters tall, with pale pink skin and red hair with white tips.  She spoke to them in some strange language, and could neither speak nor understand Japanese.  She clutched a rectangular metal box covered with strange inscriptions, and wouldn't let anyone touch it.

A drawing of the Utsuro-bune by Nagahashi Matajirou, ca. 1844 [Image is in the Public Domain]

Understandably, everyone in the area was pretty freaked out by this.  After numerous unsuccessful attempts to communicate with her, or at least see what was inside the box, they gave up and decided she was too creepy to keep around.  Ultimately, they put her back into her strange vessel, towed it back out to sea, and let it drift away.

UFO aficionados naturally are predisposed to interpret this as a Close Encounter with an alien.  Certainly her odd appearance and tiny size make that explanation jump to mind.  But can we infer anything more solid from it?

The story itself is strangely open-ended -- they never find out anything more about their weird visitor, and ultimately send her back to her dismal fate in the ocean.  It hasn't the tall-tale aspects of the Clonmacnoise Airship story, nor the obvious astronomical explanation of the flaming wine-jars over Nicaea.  Some have suggested that she was simply some poor soul -- possibly Russian or western European -- who had been cast adrift.  Unfortunately, no one thought to copy the odd symbols inscribed on the metal plates of her craft; at least that'd give us information about whether we're talking about an object of terrestrial manufacture, or something more exotic.

Like the Nuremberg incident, this one was widely-enough recorded that it's hard to dismiss it entirely as a myth.  But who the woman was, and where she'd come from, are still a mystery and probably always will be.

So there are four old tales that are widely touted in UFOlogical circles as evidence of visitation.  Predictably, I'm not convinced, although I have to admit they're curious stories.  But my reaction is tempered by the fact that "it's a peculiar tale" isn't enough to append, "... so it must be aliens."  Before we jump to a supernatural or paranormal explanation, it's critical to rule out the natural and normal explanations first -- and, critically, to determine if there's even enough hard evidence to draw a conclusion.

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The enduring mystery of Kaspar Hauser

On the 26th of May, 1828, a strange teenage boy showed up on the streets of Nuremberg, Germany.  He was dirty and wore tattered clothing, and appeared terrified, refusing to speak to anyone when approached.  After a time he was coaxed into revealing that he carried a letter addressed to a Captain von Wessenig of the Fourth Squadron of the Sixth Bavarian Cavalry.

The heading of the letter read:

Von der Bäierischen Gränz
daß Orte ist unbenant
1828

[From the Bavarian border
The place is unnamed
1828]

The letter, which was unsigned, said that the boy was named Kaspar Hauser, and had been given to the letter's author as an infant on 7 October 1812.  It went on to state that Kaspar was born on 30 April 1812, and that Kaspar's father was a member of the Sixth Cavalry, but had died, so the anonymous author of the letter said he had instructed the boy in reading, writing, and the Christian religion, but had "never allowed him to take a step outside the house."  Now -- for no apparent reason -- Kaspar had been set free.

"Either make him a cavalryman, as his father was," the letter read, "or else hang him."

At first, all Kaspar would say was "I want to be a cavalryman, as my father was" and "Horse, horse!"  Pressure to say more, or to give an account of himself, resulted in tears.  After several months of being shuttled from one place to another -- including a stint locked up in Luginsland Tower in Nuremberg Castle for being a vagabond -- he went to live with Friedrich Daumer, a schoolteacher, who helped him to learn to speak.  At this point, a strange story emerged.

Kaspar told Daumer he'd spent his entire life in solitary confinement in a tiny darkened cell, two meters by one meter, and one-and-a-half meters tall.  All he had was a straw mattress to sleep on and a couple of toys including a dog carved out of wood.  His food and water were provided by a man who wore a mask, never revealing his face.  Sometimes the water tasted bitter; afterward he slept soundly -- and woke up to find the straw had been changed, and his hair and nails trimmed.

This, of course, initiated a firestorm of inquiry into who could have imprisoned a child in this fashion, but none of the leads turned up anything solid.  Kaspar himself couldn't give directions for retracing his steps back to where he'd lived.  Once every avenue had been investigated, the authorities more or less gave up, and the controversy seemed to settle down.

Then, on 17 October 1829, Kaspar was attacked by a man who uttered the words, "You will have to die before you leave Nuremberg," and gashed him on the forehead with a knife.  The man's voice, he said, was identical to that of his former captor.  Oddly, though, the blood trail led first to Kaspar's bedroom -- then, instead of toward the quarters where Daumer slept, it led downstairs and through a trap door into the cellar.

When asked why he'd done that, Kaspar said he didn't know.

Concerns for his safety after the incident led the police to transfer him to the home of Johann Biberbach, a municipal authority.  But that didn't last long; on 3 April 1830, there was a gunshot in Kaspar's bedroom, and Biberbach rushed in to find him bleeding from a superficial head wound.  Kaspar explained that he'd been standing on a chair to reach for some books, lost his balance, and struck a pistol that was mounted to the wall, causing it to go off.

A painting of Kaspar Hauser by Carl Kreul, from late 1830.  Note the scar on his forehead from the knife wound the previous year.  [Image is in the Public Domain]

This far-fetched story got him transferred first to the house of a Baron von Tucher, then to another schoolteacher named Johann Georg Meyer, and finally to a printmaker named Anselm von Feuerbach.  All three men quickly found Kaspar to be a sneaky, unreliable habitual liar.  Von Feuerbach was especially blunt, writing in a letter, "Caspar [sic] Hauser is a smart scheming codger, a rogue, a good-for-nothing that ought to be killed."

It seems like someone agreed with that assessment.  On 14 December 1833, Kaspar came home after a walk with a deep stab wound in the left side of his chest.  He'd been lured to the Ansbach Court Garden, he said, and then assaulted by a man with a knife who had handed him a small cloth bag and then stabbed him.  Kaspar said he'd dropped the bag, but a policeman searching the garden the following day found it.  It contained the following note: "Hauser will be able to tell you quite precisely how I look and from where I am. To save Hauser the effort, I want to tell you myself from where I come [unreadable].  I come from from [unreadable] the Bavarian border [unreadable].  On the river [unreadable].  I will even tell you the name: M. L. Ö."

Kaspar Hauser died three days later without ever explaining further.

So we're left with a perplexing question: who was Kaspar Hauser?

Explanations, as you might imagine, are kind of all over the map.  The first, and simplest, is that he was lying about his entire backstory.  It's possible he'd been raised in an abusive family and had run away, but the story of solitary confinement by a masked man wasn't true.  The letters were written by Kaspar himself and the wounds, including the one that ultimately killed him, were self-inflicted.  In this case, Kaspar Hauser suffered from Munchausen syndrome -- a psychological condition in which an individual claims illness or injury, sometimes even injuring him/herself deliberately, in order to garner attention and sympathy.  This is certainly consistent with the opinion of people who knew him personally, such as von Feuerbach.

Another possibility is that the confinement story was substantially true, and he was driven mad by the neglect and abuse he'd suffered.  Proponents of this explanation differ as to how much of his later story was true.  Some believe the wounds were self-inflicted; others that his captor feared being caught, and so hunted Kaspar down and killed him.  "M. L. Ö," as you might guess, has never been identified.

The last, and wildest, possibility is that Kaspar Hauser had been hidden away because he was the hereditary prince of Baden.  His parents, Charles, Grand Duke of Baden and Stéphanie de Beauharnais, had feared for the boy's life -- the birth of a male heir would have bumped Charles's successor, his uncle Louis -- so they switched him with the dying infant of a servant, claiming their own baby had died, then spirited the boy away to be raised in safety.

Mitochondrial DNA samples from Kaspar Hauser's hair and clothing were compared to that of a female-line descendant of Stéphanie de Beauharnais, and they weren't identical -- but were close enough that the theory "could not be ruled out."

It's profoundly frustrating, but the fact is we'll probably never know the truth.  This is summed up by the inscription on his tombstone, in the city of Ansbach: "Here lies Kaspar Hauser, riddle of his time.  His birth was unknown, his death mysterious."

It's an evocative story, though, and has made its way into many works of fiction (in fact, the tale of Kaspar Hauser inspired my novella Adam's Fall, which also starts out with someone finding a strange, mute, ragged teenage boy -- but the two stories diverge completely thereafter).  

But as far as the mysterious German boy goes, as good skeptics we have to leave it there.  It's unlikely that any other evidence will surface -- so we have to be content to let the enduring mystery of Kaspar Hauser remain that way, probably forever.

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Bishop Hatto and the mice

To round out our week of looking at odd and creepy tales, today we're going to consider one of the most famous: the story of the evil Bishop Hatto.

Hatto was a real person, and was Archbishop of Mainz in the late tenth century C. E.  He had a reputation for being a dreadful human being, grasping, greedy, and cruel, and in fact had a tower built on a small island in the Rhine (near present day Bingen am Rhein) to control shipping traffic.  The top of the tower had a platform for crossbowmen, and ships were forced to pay tolls to pass the island -- or risk having his bowmen pick off the sailors from their high vantage point.

So Bishop Hatto got richer and the poor got poorer (as they are wont to do).  Things reached a peak in the mid-970s, when a famine struck central Europe.  Rather than use his considerable wealth to ease the suffering of the peasants, he took this as another opportunity to fatten his own coffers, storing up what grain there was and jacking up the prices to wring as much cash as he could from the desperate.  Finally, the peasants had had enough, and according to the best-known version of the legend, plotted to rebel against and depose Bishop Hatto.  But they didn't take into account the bishop's cunning, nor the fact that he had paid informants to keep him apprised of what was going on.  Well aware of what was being planned, he put forth a proclamation that he'd relented and would give away the grain to anyone who needed it.

Relieved, the peasants showed up at Hatto's massive grain storage barn -- only to find that it was empty.

And the doors were barred behind them.

Hatto then had his soldiers set fire to the barn, and as the peasants died screaming, the bishop laughed and said, "Listen to the mice squeak."

Hearing his words, one of the poor unfortunates in the burning barn came to a gap in the wood and shouted, "Mice?  You'll rue your words, Hatto... before this night is over, the mice will come to take their vengeance on you!"

Undaunted, Hatto returned to his residence, and what the legend says happened next is hardly a surprise.  He was settling down for the night, and heard rustling and squeaking -- hordes of rats and mice, swarming up the stairs.  He fled, but they followed him, and eventually he made his way across the Rhine to his tower.  But the mice swam after him... and there was nowhere for him to go.  He was cornered and eaten alive.  And ever since then, the tower on the little island has been called the Mäuseturm -- "Mouse Tower," in German.

Bishop Hatto about to meet his fate (from The Nuremberg Chronicles, 1493) [Image is in the Public Domain]

There are four problems with this legend.

The first is that there's no contemporaneous historical record indicating that Hatto was nibbled to death by mice.  However, given the dearth of any records at all from the tenth century, perhaps we can set that one aside.

A more troubling issue is that the original name of the tower wasn't Mäuseturm -- it was Mautturm (which, more prosaically, means "toll tower").  The renaming of the tower to Mäuseturm seems to have happened much later, and as a sort of play on words that works way better in German than it does in English.

Third, there is no historically credible source documenting Hatto being all that much worse than any other medieval religious or secular leader.  After all, this was a time when being nasty to peasants was right up there with fox hunting and falconry as the favorite sport of the nobility.  There had been an earlier Archbishop of Mainz -- also, confusingly, named Hatto -- whose reputation for being an unmitigated asshole was much better documented.  (Among many other things, he promised Count Adalbert of Babenburg safe passage through his lands, then captured him and had him beheaded, and later plotted unsuccessfully to murder Henry, Duke of Saxony.)  This Hatto's nasty reputation may have besmirched the later Hatto's -- and for what it's worth, Hatto I is also reputed to have come to a bad end, having died after being struck by lightning.

Fourth, the whole eaten-by-mice thing is the punchline of the stories of two other allegedly nasty medieval rulers -- Popiel of Gopło and the Count of Wörthschlössl, each of whom has his own "Mouse Tower" (still standing to this day) where he allegedly met his grisly fate.  To judge by the legends, German mice did nothing but run around all the time looking for cruel peasant-abusers to eat:

Mouse 1: Hey, bro, we gotta get going.  We're supposed to go eat the Count von Wienerschnitzel tonight.

Mouse 2: Seriously?  I've still got indigestion from the archbishop we ate last night.  Can't we find, like, a nice salad bar or something?

Mouse 1: Dude.  Get your ass up.  We're mice, and we eat evil German magnates.  I don't make the rules.

Mouse 2 (*sighs heavily*): Fine.  But I'm fucking well taking tomorrow off.

So for those of you who like tales of divine and/or rodent-mediated vengeance, the whole Bishop Hatto story is kind of a non-starter.  Kind of a shame, really.  It'd be nice if evil people got such a swift comeuppance.  I can think of a few who would be good candidates, if any modern mice who read Skeptophilia are casting about for victims to devour.

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The fingerprints of a slaughter

During the reign of Augustus Caesar, the Roman leadership felt very close to all-powerful.

They had enjoyed unbridled expansion into what is now France and Spain, the Near East, and North Africa.  The Roman legions were well-trained, disciplined, and powerful, led by ruthless men chosen because of their knowledge of strategy.  When they launched campaigns northward, against the Germanic tribes who lived in what is now Austria, Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands, it seemed like it was only a matter of time before just about all of Europe came under Roman sway.

That all came to a screeching halt in the year 9 C.E.

I'd heard about the overwhelming defeat of the 17th, 18th, and 19th Legions near the village of Kalkriese, Germany in my college history classes, but I got a much better perspective on it last year when I read the wonderful book The Battle that Stopped Rome: Emperor Augustus, Arminius, and the Slaughter of the Legions in the Teutoberg Forest by Peter S. Wells.  The general gist is as follows.

Arminius (known in German as Armin or Hermann, but most historians use his Latin appellation of Arminius) was a chieftain of the Cherusci, a Germanic tribe who lived in northwestern Germany.  Arminius had been sent to Rome by his father, Segimerus (Sigimer), after the latter had agreed to become a vassal of the Roman Empire.  Many of the Cherusci resented this deeply -- Arminius amongst them.  But while he was in Rome, he played along, and learned a great deal about Roman military strategy, and eventually achieved Roman citizenship.

By trusting him, the Romans had sown the seeds of their own defeat.

Upon Segimerus's death, Arminius returned home to take up the chieftainship.  At the same time, the three legions that were charged with maintaining the peace in Germany were taken over by a brutal man named Publius Quinctilius Varus, whose harshness raised a great deal of ire amongst the Germanic people -- both those who were enemies and those who were nominally friendly.  Arminius became Varus's trusted advisor -- and used his knowledge to forge secret alliances with a number of other groups in the area.

The plans came together in autumn of the year 9 C.E.  The weather was turning bad, and Varus wanted to get his legions back to Rome before it became too difficult to travel.  What is especially ironic is that Arminius's uncle, Segestes, warned Varus the night before they decamped that Arminius was a traitor -- but Varus dismissed the warning as nothing more than a family feud and personal animosity at Arminius's popularity.

Arminius's training in strategy paid off.  He chose his site beautifully.  In the wooded hills near the modern town of Osnabrück, they entered a forest that was bounded by overgrown, thicketed hillsides on one side and a bog on the other.  This necessitated that they spread out -- by the time they were into Teutoberg Forest the legions were a long, straggling line over fifteen kilometers in length, hemmed in on both sides, with no easy place to mobilize defense and nowhere to run.

That's when Arminius sprang his trap.

All three of the legions were completely destroyed.  Varus himself survived, but the following day committed suicide in humiliation.  Total Roman losses in the debacle are estimated at between fifteen and twenty thousand.  A handful of men escaped -- or were allowed to escape -- to bring the news back to Augustus, who reportedly shouted, "Quinctili Vare, legiones redde!"  ("Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions!")  It's said that Augustus never really recovered from the shock of the defeat; it certainly put an end to any serious attempt to recapture German territory, and the Rhine River became the boundary between the Roman Empire and the uncontested lands of the Germanic tribes for decades.  Augustus himself died almost exactly five years later, disappointed to the end at how his campaign for European domination had come to a crashing halt.

The Teutoberg Forest today [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nikater, Hermannsweg02, CC BY-SA 4.0]

A lot of Roman artifacts have been found near Kalkriese -- significantly, very few Germanic ones -- but it's difficult to date metal with any kind of precision.  But a recent study of some of the artifacts by a team from the German Mining Museum Bochum, Leibniz Research Museum for Geo-Resources, and the Varus Battle Museum has developed a technique that suggests a way to identify the provenance of metal goods, and has pinpointed the artifacts from Kalkriese as coming from the 17th, 18th, and 19th Legions.

Thus, relics of the famous Battle of Teutoberg Forest.

Each Roman legion came with its own set of metalworkers, and each of them created their tools using a slightly different recipe for making bronze and brass.  Using a mass spectrometer, the researchers were able to pinpoint the subtle fingerprint of each legion's spearpoints, knives, shield fittings, armor, and jewelry, and from comparing metal objects known to come from the three "lost legions," they identified the articles from Kalkriese as remnants of one of the most famous battles ever fought.

"In this way, we can allocate a legion-specific metallurgical fingerprint, for which we know the camp locations at which they were stationed," said Annika Diekmann, one of the co-authors of the study.  "We find that the finds from Dangstetten [where the 19th Legion was stationed prior to their destruction in the battle] and Kalkriese show significant similarities.  The finds that come from legion sites whose legions did not perish in the battle, differ significantly from the finds from Kalkriese."

It's fascinating that we now have a way of identifying archaeological artifacts that are non-organic, where such techniques as carbon dating don't work.  What is now a quiet, peaceful forest was once the site of unimaginable bloodshed, in a battle that altered the course of history.  Looking at these objects brings home the impact of this victory on the Germans; Arminius is still considered a national hero, and the imperial ambitions of Rome were changed forever.  

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The clothing department

Mark Twain quipped, "Clothes make the man.  Naked people have little or no influence on society."

Given the fact that most of us are clothed most of the time, it's easy to lose sight of how odd it is.  We're one of the only species that covers our bodies -- the only others I can think of offhand are hermit crabs and caddisfly larvae.  In the climate where I live, of course, a lot of it is necessity.  For nine months of the year, we get temperatures that would be pretty uncomfortable if we weren't dressed warmly; for six of those months, if I ran around naked I'd risk freezing off body parts I still occasionally have a use for.

Even when it's warm, though, just about all of us wear some kind of body covering, for the sake of adornment, propriety, or (usually) both.  It's a custom in just about every culture on Earth.

But how long has this been going on?  Its ubiquity speaks to its antiquity; something shared by almost everyone is probably either highly important, or else very old.  (Once again, probably both.)  When we picture our distant ancestors, we usually think of them in furs and skins:

Gary Larson's cavemen aside, when did humans first start wearing clothes?

Some new research on fossils in Germany suggests it might be a lot longer ago than we realized -- perhaps as much as 300,000 years.

Archaeologists studying bones of cave bears (Ursus speleus) near the town of Schöningen found knife marks on the phalanges, metacarpals, and metatarsals -- the bones of the paws.  When butchering an animal for meat, the paws are usually ignored; there is little meat there, so the effort just isn't worth it.  The archaeologists studying the site claim that this is evidence that the men and women who cut up the unfortunate bears whose remains are at the site were after something else -- fur.

"The study is significant because we know relatively little about how humans in the deep past were protecting themselves from the elements," said Ivo Verheijen of the University of Tübingen, co-author of the study, which appeared two weeks ago in The Journal of Human Evolution.  "From this early time period, there is only a handful of sites that show evidence of bear skinning, with Schöningen providing the most complete picture.  We found the cutmarks on elements of the hands/feet where very little meat or fat is present on the bones, which argues against the cutmarks originating from the butchering of the animal.  On the contrary, in these locations, the skin is much closer to the bones, which makes marking the bone inevitable when skinning an animal."

The skins could have been used as clothing, but also might have been bedding.  The earliest evidence of sewing -- eyed needles -- comes from about 45,000 years ago.

So the discovery in Germany doesn't cinch down our ancestors from 300,000 years ago as being clothes-wearers, but it does mean they were aware of the use of animal pelts for something.  And given how cold it was back then, it'd be surprising that they didn't go pretty quickly from "This is comfy to sleep on" to "I could stay a hell of a lot warmer if I draped this around myself."

One thing I've always wondered is how we've become the only animals that have any sense of modesty about certain body parts, which (after all) we all have in some fashion or another.  It's one of those things that seems perfectly reasonable until you start thinking about it.  Customs do vary from place to place, of course; when we were in Denmark in summer, we saw women sunbathing topless, and nobody batted an eyelash.  In America, that'd cause some serious freakouts, and probably arrests for indecent exposure, even though guys can run around shirtless all they want.  And as far as the parts farther down, just about all cultures have a taboo against exposing those.

It's odd.

In any case, wherever our sense of modesty comes from, it seems to be very, very old.  And given that behaviors don't fossilize, it's likely that we'll never know the full story.  But it looks like Gary Larson's visions of cave men and women wearing pelts might not be all that far off.

Although I doubt seriously whether they held spelling bees.

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A window into the distant past

I love a good mystery, and mysteries abound regarding human prehistory.

Of course, that's kind of self-evident, given that it's pre-history.  Anything we know is based on inference, from looking at artifacts and other traces left behind for us to find.  And like fossils, we have to keep in mind that what we're seeing is a small percentage -- no one knows how small -- of what was originally out there.  (One of my biology professors said that trying to reconstruct the Tree of Life from the existing fossil record is analogous to reconstructing the entire History of Art from a dozen paintings or sculptures chosen at random from the tens of thousands that have been created by humanity.  This was before the use of genetic evidence for determining phylogeny, so the situation has improved -- but we're still working from inference and very incomplete evidence.)

So that's pretty much where we are with our knowledge of human prehistory.  Which is why when there are eye-opening new discoveries in that field, it always makes me sit up and take notice.

Today we're going to look at three new archeological finds that have given us a new lens into our distant ancestors' lives, and all of which were published in the last week.

First, some new artifacts from Scotland have provided information about one of the least-known European cultures -- the Picts.

The Picts were a collection of (probably) Celtic-speaking tribes that inhabited Scotland prior to its invasion first by the Irish Dál Riata and then by the Vikings.  We know next to nothing about them or their culture.  Even the name of the group isn't native to them -- it comes from the Latin pictus ("painted"), from their habit of going into battle naked, covered with paint.

Which, I have to admit, is pretty damn badass.

But we don't know much else about them, because they left no written records at all.  We assume they spoke a Celtic language, but don't really know for sure; and any suggestion of root words in Gaelic that may have come from Pictish are guesses (such as the claim that place names starting with Pit-, Lhan-, and Aber- come from Pictish words).

So any artifacts that are unequivocally Pictish in origin are pretty amazing.  Like the ones discovered earlier this year by Anne MacInnes of the North of Scotland Archaeological Society.

The face of the stone in the photograph not only has designs and a pretty cool-looking mythical beast, it has an inscription -- in Latin letters -- that may well be a Latin transliteration of the Pictish language.  Which makes it a rarity indeed.

"The two massive beasts that flank and surmount the cross are quite unlike anything found on any other Pictish stone," said John Borland, of Historic Environment Scotland and the Pictish Arts Society.  "These two unique creatures serve to remind us that Pictish sculptors had a remarkable capacity for creativity and individuality.  Careful assessment of this remarkable monument will be able to tell us much about the production of Pictish sculpture that we could never have guessed at."


Then, there's the discovery that was made near the Tollense River, on the Baltic coast of Germany, that indicates the existence of mercenary soldiers -- three thousand years ago.

On a historic -- well, prehistoric -- battleground, a team from the Lower Saxony State Agency for Cultural Heritage discovered, alongside skeletal remains showing war-related injuries, a toolkit brought in by one of the soldiers.  It contains a chisel, a knife, an awl, and a small sword, along with fasteners that seem to indicate its origin in southern Germany -- a distance of about five hundred miles.

"It was a surprise to find a battlefield site.  It was a second surprise to see a battlefield site of this dimension with so many warriors involved, and now it's a big surprise that we are dealing with a conflict of a European scale," says Thomas Terberger, co-author of the study.  "We had before speculated that some of these people might have come from the south.  Now we have, from our point of view, a quite convincing indication that people from southern Central Europe were involved in this conflict."

Suggesting that the man who carried the bag may have been a mercenary, although that is (of course) an inference.  So right around the time King David ruled the Israelites, there were professional soldiers waging war upon either other in northern Europe.

Last, we have a study showing that the Greek islands have been occupied for longer than we'd realized...

... a lot longer.

When most people in North America and Western Europe think of an "old civilization," they come up with Greece, Rome, Egypt, Sumer, China, India, the Inca, the Mayans...  but all of those (venerable and fascinating though they are) only date back a few thousand years.  The Great Pyramid at Giza, for example, was built around 3,500 years ago -- which seems like a lot.

But this new discovery shows that the island of Naxos was inhabited by our ancestors (and/or near relatives) two hundred thousand years ago.

At that point, they weren't exactly human, or at least not what we usually consider to be modern humanity.  These inhabitants of Naxos were Neanderthals, and had crossed into what is now an island during a time when the sea level was considerably lower because a lot of the water was locked up in glacial ice.

"Until now, the earliest known location on Naxos was the Cave of Zas, dated to 7,000 years ago," said project director Tristan Carter, an anthropologist at Ontario’s McMaster University.  "We have extended the history of the island by 193,000 years...  It was believed widely that hominin dispersals were restricted to terrestrial routes until the later Pleistocene, but recent discoveries are requiring scholars to revisit these hypotheses."

The word "Neanderthal" has, in common parlance, become synonymous with "uncultured cave man," and that characterization misses the mark by a mile.  They had culture -- they buried their dead, apparently made music, and may have even had spoken language (DNA studies show that they had the FOX-P2 gene, which is one of the genetic underpinnings of language in humans).  They made artifacts not only of utility but of great beauty:

A Neanderthal Acheulean hand-axe from about 50,000 years ago

Some of the archaeologists associated with the Naxos study even think the Neanderthal inhabitants of the island may not have walked there when the sea level was low -- they may actually have arrived there by boat.

Pretty smart folks, the Neanderthals.

It's also uncertain that they actually represent a different species from us.  Most of us carry Neanderthal genetic markers -- apparently I have three-hundred-odd of them, making me in the sixtieth percentile, cave-man-wise -- so there was definitely interbreeding between them and modern humans.  So they might be more correctly considered a subspecies -- although, as I've mentioned before, the concept of species is one of the wonkiest definitions in biology, and all attempts to refine it have resulted in more exceptions and contradictions than ever.

So probably best just to say that they're part of the family.

In any case, we've got three papers in one week that give us some very impressive new data on prehistory.  Until we invent time travel, this kind of evidence is about all we can rely on to create a picture of what life was like back then.  Which, even with the new information, leaves lots of room for refinement -- and imagination.

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In keeping with Monday's post, this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about one of the most enigmatic figures in mathematics; the Indian prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan.  Ramanujan was remarkable not only for his adeptness in handling numbers, but for his insight; one of his most famous moments was the discovery of "taxicab numbers" (I'll leave you to read the book to find out why they're called that), which are numbers that are expressible as the sum of two cubes, two different ways.

For example, 1,729 is the sum of 1 cubed and 12 cubed; it's also the sum of 9 cubed and 10 cubed.

What's fascinating about Ramanujan is that when he discovered this, it just leapt out at him.  He looked at 1,729 and immediately recognized that it had this odd property.  When he shared it with a friend, he was kind of amazed that the friend didn't jump to the same realization.

"How did you know that?" the friend asked.

Ramanujan shrugged.  "It was obvious."

The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel is the story of Ramanujan, whose life ended from tuberculosis at the young age of 32.  It's a brilliant, intriguing, and deeply perplexing book, looking at the mind of a savant -- someone who is so much better than most of us at a particular subject that it's hard even to conceive.  But Kanigel doesn't just hold up Ramanujan as some kind of odd specimen; he looks at the human side of a man whose phenomenal abilities put him in a class by himself.

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

Nazi coins from the future

In the latest from the "News Stories That Make Me Want To Take Ockham's Razor And Slit My Wrists With It" department, we have a claim about an odd coin allegedly found near a construction site in Mexico.

First, the facts of the situation, insofar as I could find out.

The coin is highly weathered, and has some phrases in both German and Spanish.  It says "Nueva Alemania" ("New Germany," in Spanish) and "Alle in einer Nation" (German for "all in one nation").  There's a swastika on one side and the Iron Cross on the other, and a blurred date ending in "39."  (If you want to see a video that includes shots of the coin, there's a clip at The Daily Star showing it and its finder, Diego Aviles.)

So that's the claim.  Now let's see which of the three possible explanations proffered to account for it makes the most sense to you:

1. It's a fake.
2. It's an obscure coin, dating from the late 1930s, and could be potentially valuable as a historical artifact.
3. The date actually reads "2039," so it's a coin from 21 years in the future, at which point a Nazi state will rule Mexico if not the rest of the world, except that one of the future Nazis time-slipped backwards and dropped the coin, only to be found by Aviles.  Since the fall of Nazi Germany in 1945, the Nazis have been hiding out in Antarctica, from which they will burst out some time between now and 2039, to initiate World War III and take over the entire world.

Yes, apparently there are people who think that explanation #3 is spot-on.  So it's like someone reworded Ockham's Razor to read, "Of competing explanations that account for all of the known facts, the most likely one is the one that requires 5,293 ad-hoc assumptions, breaking every known law of physics, and pretzel logic that only someone with the IQ of a peach pit could think sounded plausible."

But maybe I'm being a little uncharitable, because there are people who add to #3 some bizarre bullshit about it having to do with the "Mandela effect" and parallel universes and alternate realities.

Myself, I'm perfectly satisfied when I can explain things using the regular old reality.  But that's just me.

NOTE: Not the coin they found.  This one's a real Nazi coin.  [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Over at Mysterious Universe (the first link provided above), Sequoyah Kennedy does a pretty thorough job of debunking the whole thing, ending with the following tongue-in-cheek comment that rivals this post for snark:

Maybe the only explanation is that the Antarctic Nazis develop time travel in the near future, go back in time to the 1930’s, and try to convince the Mexican government to side with them in WWII by giving them a commemorative coin, which won’t work, because that’s a ridiculous and insulting way to forge an alliance.  The commemorative future coin will then be thrown away and left to sit in the dirt until it’s unearthed in 2018.  It’s the only rational explanation, really.

Indeed.  And we should also take into account that the story was broken in The Daily Star, which is the only media source I know that rivals The Daily Mail Fail for sheer volume of nonsense.

So the coin may well exist, but I'm putting my money on "fakery."  Even the idea that it's a real coin from the 1930s doesn't bear much scrutiny, because Mexico and Germany weren't on the same side in World War II, so it'd be pretty bizarre to have some kind of Mexican Nazi currency lying around.

Of course, when the Stormtroopers come roaring out of their secret bases in Antarctica and Cancun, I suppose I'll have to eat my words.  Occupational hazard of what I do.

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This week's Featured Book on Skeptophilia:

This week I'm featuring a classic: Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.  Sagan, famous for his work on the series Cosmos, here addresses the topics of pseudoscience, skepticism, credulity, and why it matters -- even to laypeople.  Lucid, sometimes funny, always fascinating.