The vanished legion

In the Doctor Who episode "The Eaters of Light," the Twelfth Doctor and his companions, Bill and Nardole, go back to second-century Scotland to settle a dispute they're having over what actually happened to the Roman Ninth Legion (the Legio IX Hispania), which was deployed in the British Isles during the first century but rather suddenly disappears from the records in around 120 C.E.

Being Doctor Who, of course there are aliens involved -- a mysterious and powerful creature that feeds off of light, and which the native Picts knew how to control, but the attacks by the Romans (specifically the Ninth Legion) disrupted their ability to manage the portal behind which it was trapped, and it was in danger of getting loose and wreaking havoc.  In the end, the Doctor convinces the Picts and the Romans to set aside their hostilities and work together to deal with the bigger danger, and the Pictish leader, along with some of her warriors, and the entire legion choose to sacrifice their lives to contain the creature behind the door (which lies amongst a very atmospheric ring of standing stones out on the windswept heather), thus saving the world and also explaining why the Ninth Legion suddenly vanished.

The disappearance of the Legio IX Hispania is one of the more curious historical mysteries.  An early hypothesis, promoted by German historian Christian Theodor Mommsen, was that the Ninth had been wiped out in a battle with the Picts in 108 C.E., but there are a couple of problems in this claim.  First, the Romans were meticulous record-keepers, and didn't shy away from writing down what happened even when they'd lost.  If an entire legion had been destroyed in battle, it's curious that no one ever mentioned it.  Second, there's some evidence that at least a few members of the Ninth survived -- there are inscriptions that may be from them in the ruins of the Roman base at Nijmegen (now in the Netherlands) dating from the 120s.  It's possible, of course, that the artifacts -- including a silver-and-bronze military medal with "LEG HISP IX" engraved on the back -- were brought there by someone else.  After all, inscriptions about the Ninth Legion showing up at a particular time and place doesn't mean the Ninth Legion was there at the time.

Despite this argument, some have suggested that there were members of the Ninth at Nijmegen -- perhaps only a handful of survivors of a rout in Scotland.  Other historians go even further, believing the entire legion survived and was merely redeployed elsewhere, ultimately meeting their end in the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132-135 C.E.) or even as late as Marcus Aurelius's war against the Parthians (161-166 C.E.).

But again, we run up against the fact that although there are records of both of those battles, the Ninth Legion is never mentioned.  If they fought -- and possibly were destroyed -- in either of those conflicts, why did no one ever say so?

Most historians still subscribe to the idea that the Ninth was wiped out in Scotland, despite it leaving considerable questions about how it happened and why no one documented it.  British archaeologist Miles Russell, in his book The Celtic Kings of Roman Britain, says, "by far the most plausible answer to the question 'what happened to the Ninth' is that they fought and died in Britain, disappearing in the late 110s or early 120s when the province was in disarray."

Of course, a historical mystery like this leaves fertile ground for fiction writers to invent their own solutions, and the episode of Doctor Who is far from the only fanciful solution that has been proposed.  A good many of them involve time slips and transportation to an alternate reality, but none is as out there as the fate proposed in a Doc Savage novel wherein the Ninth is transported through an interdimensional gateway and ultimately end up in the African Congo, where their descendants survive until the 1930s.

And people say the plots of Doctor Who are ridiculous.

In any case, from a factual perspective what we're left with is a great big question mark.  An entire legion of Roman soldiers suddenly stops showing up in the records, and no one is really sure why.  The frustrating thing is that given the unlikeliness of finding any documents from that time that we don't already know about, it's doubtful we'll ever know for certain -- a highly unsatisfactory answer to our natural human curiosity.

Me, I'm voting for the light-eating alien having something to do with it.

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Relics of the distant past

Today we'll stay in an archaeological vein, mostly because a couple of loyal readers of Skeptophilia read yesterday's post and responded with links of their own and messages which basically boil down to, "Yes, but have you seen this?"

The first one comes to us from the ever-entertaining site Mysterious Universe, but unlike their usual fare of Bigfoots and UFOs, this one is about legitimate scientific research.  Not that you could tell from the title, which is "Yorkshire's Atlantis May Have Finally Been Found."  To be fair, the appellation of "Atlantis" isn't the fault of the author, Paul Seaburn; apparently this site, Ravenser Odd, has been called that before.  But unlike Atlantis, Ravenser Odd is a real place.  It was a port city on the estuary of the River Humber, attested thoroughly in records of the time until in 1362 there was a storm that breached the sand-based seawall and swamped it completely, and the once thriving town -- like its mythological namesake -- sank beneath the waves.

The shape of the long, narrow seawall is what gave the place its name, all the way back in Viking times, some four hundred years earlier; Ravenser Odd is a mangled version of hrafns eyr, which means "raven's eye" in Old Norse.  In its time it was a busy place.  It was one of the most thriving ports in the region, and a record from 1299 describes it as containing a central marketplace, wharves, warehouses, a court, a prison, a chapel, two mills, a tannery, an annual fair, and over a thousand residences.  The coastal region near the original submerged town retained the name, and in fact it's mentioned twice in Shakespeare, where he calls it "Ravenspurgh" (Richard II, act 2, scene 1, line 298, and Henry IV Part 1, act 1, scene 3, line 245).

Despite multiple attestations in the records, no one was able to find where the original Ravenser Odd had stood -- until now.

An amateur archaeologist named Philip Mathison, who is something of an expert on Ravenser Odd, stumbled upon an 1892 document on eBay that mentioned "submarine remains" at Spurn, a tidal island north of the mouth of the Humber -- and gave directions on how to find them.  Mathison went out in a boat with an echo sounder, and found what looked like a human-made rock wall, exactly where the document had said it would be.

"People had assumed it was way out to sea, as the shape of the peninsula now is very different to how it was in the thirteenth century," Mathison said.  "This document showed a stone ledge to the east of Spurn which I believe could be the walls of a dock or quay... The ridge was most likely rock armor to protect the port, as it was under threat from erosion way before it was abandoned.  The bulk of the town's buildings were on a shingle bank called The Old Den, to the west side of Spurn, and some brickwork from them has been found in the past.  The town curved around like a fish hook and the wharves were at the other end... But it needs a proper dive to find out."

Seems like Mathison is going to get his wish -- two archaeologists from the University of Hull have already purchased scanning equipment and obtained funding for other supplies for an expedition this summer, when the weather in the North Sea improves.

Also with a Viking connection is a study done at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst that seems to upend a long-held theory about why the Norse settlements of Greenland died out in the late fourteenth century.  Previous models had attributed the collapse to the onset of the Little Ice Age, a worldwide drop in global average temperature that (among other things) caused the Greenland sea access to freeze up year round and made it an even more miserable place to live than it already is.  But the new study -- using two organic molecules as markers that are known to indicate, respectively, temperature and water availability -- showed that during the period of the collapse, the temperature didn't drop much, but it became significantly drier.

The harsh winters were one thing, but when the rain stopped falling even in the warmest months of summer, that was the kiss of death for the crops and domesticated animals at the Norse settlements, and ultimately, the Norse themselves.  

For the last story, we return to the British Isles, where a geophysical survey near the town of Aberlemno uncovered a 1.7-meter-long stone carved with designs identified with the Picts, the mysterious people who inhabited northern and eastern Scotland before the Dál Riada Scots moved in and kind of took over in the tenth century.  There aren't many Pictish records around; they were Celtic, but appear to have spoken a Brythonic language related to Welsh, Cornish, and Breton, not a Goidelic language like Gaelic, Irish, and Manx.

The discovery was made quite by accident.  While moving some surveying equipment, they noticed some anomalies that seemed to indicate the buried foundation of a settlement.  They dug into the soil, and hit a rock. "I just brushed my hand, and there was a symbol," said Zack Hinckley, an archaeologist at the University of Aberdeen.  "And we had a freakout... there were genuine tears."

The Pictish stone from Aberlemno, Scotland

The difficulty is that given the paucity of Pictish records, little is known of the script, and it's currently unknown whether these were written language, or simply decorative symbols.  The stone has been removed to an archaeological conservation lab in Edinburgh for further study.

So there you are.  The world of archaeology has been hopping lately.  It's always amazing to me that despite the extensive research that's been done, with state-of-the-art mapping and surveying tools, that there are still plenty of astonishing artifacts out there to find.

Some of them, apparently, right underneath our feet.

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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!]