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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The lost catalog

After yesterday's rather elegiac post about the breadth of creative work we've lost over the ages, a friend and long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link suggesting that in some fortunate cases, maybe "lost" doesn't mean forever.

The ancients knew all too well that the vagaries of time made books and scrolls precious, easily-damaged treasures.  Fire, damage from insects and mice, and even just the wear-and-tear from repeated use all took their toll on written work.  Add to that the fact that before the invention of movable type, hand-copying manuscripts was a laborious and time-consuming occupation, and it's no wonder that books were rare and expensive, often only to be found in libraries, monasteries, and the homes of the very wealthy.

This awareness of how much could perish forever if a single library was destroyed prompted some scholars to try and catalog manuscripts, to create a record of the rich diversity of books out there in the world.  One of these was named Hernando (also known as Ferdinand) Colón, the illegitimate son of none other than Christopher Columbus.

Colón was a fascinating character.  Uninterested in his father's passion of establishing trade routes, exploration, and colonization, he preferred instead to travel around Europe and buy books.  He founded a personal library in Seville where he welcomed visits from other scholars, and at its height it contained over fifteen thousand books.  His library contained all sorts of books -- unlike many of his time, he didn't consider books by non-Christians to be worthless "works of infidels" -- and his library became one of the best-known in western Europe.

It was also unwieldy.  Imagine trying to find a particular piece of information in a library that big, with no indexing system.  Back then, there was no such thing as a card catalog, much less a search engine.  So Colón set about writing the sixteen immense volumes of Libros de los Epitomes, a bibliography and short summary of every single one of the books in the library.

It's a good thing he did, because (like the Library of Cologne I wrote about yesterday) Colón's library wasn't to last.  Besides the aforementioned hazards all books are subject to, Colón came to the attention of the narrow-minded zealous religious bigotry of the Inquisition, and a number of his books -- the ones judged to be heretical -- were seized and burned.  But by that time they had been catalogued, so we have at least a glimpse of what lay inside them.

Fourteen of the sixteen Libros were known to have survived, and reside at the Biblioteca Colombina de Sevilla, along with what is left of Colón's book collection.  But now, quite by accident, the fifteenth volume was found to be still in existence as well -- somehow it had made its way to the Arnamagnæan Institute at the University of Copenhagen, which houses the huge book collection of eighteenth-century Icelandic scholar Árni Magnússon.  The three-thousand-odd books in the Institute have only recently been studied in any sort of detail, and it was quite a shock when Guy Lazure, of the University of Windsor (Canada), was working there and found a thirty-centimeter-thick, two thousand page book that turned out to be one of the lost volumes of the Libros de los Epitomes.

The recently rediscovered fifteenth volume of Libros de los Epitomes [Image courtesy of the Arnamagnæan Institute and the University of Copenhagen]

"It’s a discovery of immense importance, not only because it contains so much information about how people read five hundred years ago, but also, because it contains summaries of books that no longer exist, lost in every other form than these summaries," said Edward Wilson-Lee of Cambridge University, who wrote a biography of Colón called The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books.  Wilson-Lee emphasizes that Colón was qualitatively different from other book collectors of the time, because he didn't limit his acquisitions to scholarly tomes and the classics.  "This was someone who was, in a way, changing the model of what knowledge is.  Instead of saying 'knowledge is august, authoritative things by some venerable old Roman and Greek people', he’s doing it inductively: taking everything that everyone knows and distilling it upwards from there.  It’s much more resonant with today, with big data and Wikipedia and crowdsourced information.  This is a model of knowledge that says, 'We’re going to take the breadth of print – ballads and pornography and newsletters – and not exclude that from the world of information.'"

It will be fascinating to see what lost gems of antiquity will show up -- in summary form, at least -- in the fifteenth volume of the Libros.  Not as good, perhaps, as having the actual copies as they were before they fell prey to time and the Inquisition, but far better than nothing.  At least it will give us an idea of the scope of what was lost -- and raise the hope that maybe, in other obscure collections somewhere out there, some lost masterpieces of the past are still waiting to be found.

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A refuge from the cold

I've always wondered how our distant ancestors survived during the various ice ages.

After all, we're mostly-hairless primates evolved on the warm, comfy African savanna, and it's hard to imagine how we coped with conditions like you often see depicted in books on early humans:

Le Moustier Neanderthals by Charles Knight (1920) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Despite the bear pelts around their nether regions, I've always wondered how they didn't all freeze to death.  When the weather's nice, bare skin is fine; I only wear a shirt during the summer under duress, and can't remember the last time I wore swim trunks when I went swimming in my pond.  But when the weather's cold -- which, here in upstate New York, is more often than not -- I'm usually wearing layers, and that's even indoors with our nice modern heating system.  Okay, admittedly I'm a wuss about the cold, but the fact remains that we're evolved to dwell in temperate regions.  Which, for a significant part of the Pleistocene Epoch, most of the world was not.

In particular, during the Last Glacial Maximum, between twenty-six and twenty thousand years ago, much of the Northern Hemisphere was experiencing a climate that the word "unpleasant" doesn't even begin to describe.  The average temperature was 6 C (11 F) colder than it is today, which was enough to cause ice sheets to spread across much of North America and northern Europe (where I currently sit, in fact, was underneath about thirty meters of ice).  Much of the non-glaciated land experienced not only dreadful cold, but long periods of drought.  The combined result is that the sea level was an estimated 130 meters lower than it is today, and broad dry valleys lay across what are now the bottoms of the Bering Sea, the North Sea and English Channel, and the Gulf of Carpentaria.

These conditions opened up passageways for some people, and closed off living space for others.  This was the time that the various pulses of immigrants crossed from Siberia through Beringia and into North America, where they became the ancestors of today's Indigenous Peoples of North and South America.  (If you want to read a brilliant account of how this happened, and some of the science behind how we know, you must read Jennifer Raff's wonderful book Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas.)  The same sort of thing happened from southeast Asia into what is now Australia.

In Europe, though, things got dicey to the point that it's a wonder anyone survived at all.  In fact, what brings this up is a study that appeared in Nature last week by a humongous team led by paleogeneticist Cosimo Posth of the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology.  The team did a complete genomic analysis of 356 individuals whose remains range from thirty-five thousand to five thousand years of age -- so right across that awful Last Glacial Maximum period -- to try to figure out how groups moved when the ice started coming in, and afterwards, once it retreated.

What they found was that only one part of Europe showed a consistent human genetic signature throughout the time period: the Iberian Peninsula.  What this indicates is that modern Spain and Portugal were a "climate refugium" during the worst of the glaciation, where people came to stay when the climate turned very cold, and pretty much stayed put.  Other areas that you might think were possible candidates for comparatively warm hideouts, such as what are now Italy and Greece, show a significant genomic shift across the Last Glacial Maximum, indicating that the people there before the cold set in either migrated or else died out, and were replaced by immigrants who moved in after things warmed and the area once again became more hospitable for humans.

"At that time, the climate warmed up quickly and considerably and forests spread across the European continent," said Johannes Krause, senior author of the study, in an interview with Science Daily.  "This may have prompted people from the south to expand their habitat.  The previous inhabitants may have migrated to the north as their habitat, the 'mammoth' steppe, dwindled,.  It is possible that the migration of early farmers into Europe triggered the retreat of hunter-gatherer populations to the northern edge of Europe.  At the same time, these two groups started mixing with each other, and continued to do so for around three thousand years."

Me, I'm curious what happened to these people afterward.  As a linguist, not to mention a white guy of western European descent, I've wondered if we're talking about my forebears, here -- and what languages they spoke.  My suspicion is that we're looking at the ancestors of today's Basques, who still live in northern Spain; they speak a non-Indo-European language that is usually considered a relic of the earliest languages spoken in Europe.  The Indo-European-speaking peoples (therefore the ancestors of the majority of today's Europeans) didn't reach Europe until about four thousand years ago, so long after the heyday of the people who were the subjects of the Posth et al. paper.

So you have to wonder who the descendants of these very early Europeans are.  "Not me" is my general assessment, considering my general cold-hardiness.  Drop me into an ice age where I had to live in a cave, hike on glaciers, hunt mammoth, and fend off cave bears, and I'd last maybe three days, tops.  I'm highly impressed by the ability of these ancient humans to survive, but given a choice I'll stick with my warm house, indoor plumbing, electric stove, and coffee maker.

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After the Pax Romana

My fellow author and twin-brudda-from-anudda-mudda Andrew Butters is one of several people who are always the lookout for cool developments in science and history to throw my way, and this time he's found one that is right square in my wheelhouse.

I've always had a near-obsession with the western European "Dark Ages" -- between the collapse of Roman rule at the end of the fourth century C. E. and the consolidation of Frankish rule under Charlemagne in the middle of the eighth.  Part of the reason for my fascination is that so little is known for certain about it.  When people are fighting like hell just to stay alive, not too many of them are going to prioritize writing books about the experience, or (honestly) even bothering to learn how to read and write.  Add to that the fact that during the turmoil, a great many of the books that had been written beforehand were destroyed, and it all adds up to a great big question mark.

The people who lived on the fringes of the once-great Roman Empire -- the Celts in the west, the Germanic tribes and Scandinavians in the north, the Slavs in the east -- took advantage of the chaos to reestablish some degree of autonomy, although they left little in the way of written records either, so what we know of their customs, politics, and beliefs is only from what's left of their buildings, monuments, and other durable artifacts.

But that doesn't mean there isn't more out there to find.  The link Andrew sent me, from the site LiveScience, describes a site from the province of Galicia in northern Spain, an area that even today owes much of its culture and music to its Celtic heritage.  Castro Valente, originally thought to be from the Iron Age and therefore pre-Roman, has turned out to be from that awkward blank spot in history I'm so fascinated with -- the fifth century C.E., shortly after the Romans wrote finis on the Pax Romana and hightailed it back to Italy to defend the home country against the Visigoths and Vandals.

Using lidar (light detection and ranging -- a relatively new technique using lasers to map out underground archaeological sites), researchers from University College London and the University of Santiago de Compostela found that the site is the remains of a fortress that had been built on the remains of an Iron Age settlement, but the main structure is of early fifth century construction.  It's huge, covering an area of twenty-five acres, comprised of thirty towers and a defensive wall a little over a kilometer long.

Part of the wall at Castro Valente

The people of the region had never been "pacified" (using that term from the Roman perspective) for long.  The northwestern part of the Iberian peninsula was inhabited by three Celtic groups, the Callaeci in the far northwest, the Lusitani in what is now northern Portugal, and the Astures a little to the east (you might surmise, correctly, that the last-mentioned gave their name to Asturia, the modern name for the north-central province of Spain).  All three were perpetual thorns in the side to the would-be rulers of the region.  The northwestern part of the Iberian Peninsula was only under nominal Roman control even at the height of the Empire, and when a long spate of unfortunately-timed inept rulers kept the central government of Rome in continuous upheaval, followed by repeated invasions from the east by Germanic and Slavic armies, the subjugated people in the west thought that'd be a fine time for them to assert their own independence.  (In fact, right around the same time that Castro Valente was being built, Rome itself was sacked by the Visigoths under Alaric -- a blow from which the Roman Empire never really recovered.)

The hilltop fort could only do so much, though.  Most of that region eventually fell to the Suebi, a Germanic people originally from the Elbe River valley.  The Kingdom of the Suebi lasted for 170 years, at which point they, too, were conquered by the Visigoths, which lasted until 720 C.E. when the Muslim Umayyad Caliphate pretty much overran the entire Iberian Peninsula.

When you think of the history of Spain, chances are you don't think of the Celts and the Germans -- but they had a major role in shaping the language and culture of the region.  This influence is strongest in the northern and western parts of the region; in fact, in modern Galicia there's a significant link still to the Celtic nations.  They even share a musical tradition -- I own a set of Galician bagpipes (a beautiful instrument called a gaita).  Check out this incredible performance by Susana Seivane -- whose father designed my pipes!

It's fascinating to see ancient history still present around us -- not only in the artifacts and archaeological sites, but in the culture we enjoy in the modern world.  These traditions have their roots in the distant past -- in this case, stretching back to a tumultuous period when it looked like the entire established order was collapsing permanently.  That it didn't is a tribute to human resilience and perseverance through a time where day-to-day life was fraught with danger, something we can read in the remnants of stone walls and foundations still standing in the now-peaceful Spanish woodlands.

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The mystery of the Cagots

It will come as no surprise to long-time fans of Skeptophilia that I love a mystery.  And if that mystery is mixed up with questions of ancestry and human genetics, well... that's going to pique my interest but good.

This topic comes up because a couple of days ago I stumbled upon an interesting ethnic minority I'd never heard of -- the Cagots, a distinct group found in northern Spain and southwestern France (the same region where you find high proportions of Basque ancestry -- although they appear to be unrelated).  Like many minorities, they were persecuted by the majority culture, to the point that a separate Cagot culture has all but disappeared, and today people are reluctant to admit they have Cagot ancestry (if they even realize it).

The "Street of the Cagots' Bridge" (Campan, Hautes-Pyrénées département) [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Sotos, Rue du village de Campan (Hautes-Pyrénées) 3, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Where it gets really interesting is their origin.  To start with, their name varies by region -- Cagot is the most common, but they've also been called Cagous, Cahets, Gahets, Gafets, Agots, Argotes, Capots, Cacons, Cacous, Caquots, and Caqueux, not to mention about a dozen others.  This makes any kind of linguistic analysis of the name difficult, to say the least.  One idea is that the name comes from the Occitan word caas, meaning "dog," and an old version of the word "Goth" -- and comes along with a suggestion that they are the descendants of the remnants of the Visigoths who were defeated by Clovis I at the Battle of Vouillé in 507 C.E.  Illustrating the truth of the adage that "for every claim there's an equal and opposite claim," others have suggested that they're descended from people who called themselves "hunters of the Goths" -- i.e. the Saracens and Moors left behind after the Battle of Tours in 732 C.E.  Yet another claims they're descended from the Erromintxela, a group of Spanish Roma, thus linking them to another tragically marginalized group.

Typical of persecuted minorities, there hasn't been much in the way of study of these people, and by now most of them have long since been subsumed into the dominant French and Spanish cultures.  But it should be possible to figure this out; for centuries there was "forced endogamy," where Cagots could only marry other Cagots, and they were only allowed to live in self-contained communities on the fringes of towns.  (In a scary parallel to other practices of visually identifying minorities, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Cagots were required to wear a badge with a pattern of a duck's foot and/or a cloak with a yellow trim.  The reason for the association with ducks and the color yellow is unknown.)  The result of these practices of isolation is that there should be enough genetic distinctness to detect, even if the current descendants are of considerably mixed ancestry.

It immediately got me to thinking about other groups I've read about that are of uncertain origins -- three in the United States that come to mind are the Melungeons of eastern Tennessee and Kentucky and southwestern Virginia, the Brass Ankles of South Carolina, and the Redbones of southwestern Louisiana.  What little genetic study has been done -- and members of all three groups have been understandably reluctant to cooperate with scientists they perceive as being part of the prejudiced majority -- suggests that all of them are "tri-racial," with ancestry from Sub-Saharan Africa, Native American tribes, and Europe.  Members of all three groups were classified as "mulattos" or "Indians" on the nineteenth-century censuses, but census takers back then were notoriously bad about accuracy of data collection on minorities.

So like the Cagots, they are still poorly-studied mysteries with little to no certainty about their origins.

Besides the obviously abhorrent treatment members of these groups received, what's appalling and frustrating about all of this is that the truth is, there is no such thing as ethnic or racial purity.  Which, of course, is the basis of most of these discriminatory practices.  I look pretty solidly White Western European, but my DNA test picked up my ancestry from my Ashkenazi great-great grandfather, something I wrote about not long ago -- and my genealogical research has found ancestors who were Basque, Mi'kmaq, and Abenaki, although they're long enough ago that those didn't show up on my genetic analysis.  If you go farther back still, the concept of race gets even more ridiculous (from a genetic perspective; it obviously has extremely important historical and cultural significance).  All people of western European descent, for example, are thought to have common ancestors as little as a thousand years ago; the same is almost certainly true of other clusters of related ethnic groups.  And there's decent evidence of a genetic bottleneck triggered by a volcanic eruption on the Indonesian island of Toba 74,000 years ago, an event that may have reduced the entire human population of the Earth to around seven thousand people -- the size of a single small village.  If this is correct, those seven thousand people are the ancestors of everyone on Earth, over and over and over, and all of our family trees first branch out and then coalesce to a very narrow set of limbs.

What the racists don't get, and don't seem to want to get, is that the science is incontrovertible; we're all cousins, regardless of whether we look different now.

In any case, I thought the presence of a curious ethnic group in an area to which a large chunk of my mom's ancestry traces its origins was pretty fascinating.  I don't know if I have Cagot ancestry, but it wouldn't surprise me; my mom's forebears in western France were largely poor laborers and peasants.  No way to figure out for certain, though, especially given the paucity of studies on the group.

But it does bring home the fact that the ties that unite us are, in reality, far stronger than the features that divide us.  A lesson that many of us, unfortunately, have yet to learn.

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The code breakers

I've always been in awe of cryptographers.

I've read a bit about the work British computer scientist and mathematician Alan Turing did during World War II regarding breaking the "unbreakable" Enigma code used by the Germans -- a code that relied on a machine whose settings were changed daily.  And while I can follow a description of how Turing and his colleagues did what they did, I can't in my wildest dreams imagine I could do anything like that myself.

I had the same sense of awe when I read Margalit Fox's fantastic book The Riddle of the Labyrinth, which was about the work of linguists Alice Kober and Michael Ventris in successfully translating the Linear B script of Crete -- a writing system for which not only did they not initially know what the symbol-to-sound correspondence was, they didn't know if the symbols represented single sounds, syllables, or entire words -- nor what language the script represented!  (Turned out it was Mycenaean Greek.)

I don't know about you, but I'm nowhere near smart enough to do something like that.

Despite my sense that such endeavors are way outside of my wheelhouse, I've always been fascinated by people who do undertake such tasks.  Which is why I was so interested in a link a friend of mine sent me about the breaking of a code that had stumped cryptographers for centuries -- the one used by King Charles V of Spain back in the sixteenth century.

Charles was a bit paranoid, so his creation of a hitherto unbreakable code is definitely in character.  When the letter was written, in 1547, he was in a weak position -- he'd signed the Treaty of Crépy tentatively ending aggression with the French, but his ally King Henry VIII of England had just died and was succeeded by his son, the sickly King Edward VI.  Charles felt vulnerable...

... and in fact, when the letter was finally decrypted, it was found that it was about his fears of an assassination plot.

As it turned out, the fears were unfounded, and he went on to rule Spain and the Holy Roman Empire for another eleven years, finally dying of malaria at age 58.

His code remained unbroken until recently, however.  But the team of Cécile Pierrot-Inria and Camille Desenclos finally was able to decipher it, thanks to a lucky find -- another letter between Charles and his ambassador to France, Jean de St. Mauris, which had a partial key scribbled in the margin.  That hint included the vital information that nine of the symbols were meaningless, only thrown in to make it more difficult to break.  (Which worked.)

Even with the partial solution in hand, it was still a massive task.  As you can see from their solution, most of the consonants can be represented by two different symbols, and double letters are represented by yet another different (single) symbol.  There are single symbols that stand for specific people. 

But even with those difficulties, Pierrot-Inria and Desenclos managed to break the code.

All of this gives hope to linguists and cryptographers working on the remaining (long) list of writing systems that haven't been deciphered yet.  (Wikipedia has a list of scripts that are still not translated -- take a look, you'll be amazed at how many there are.)  I'm glad there are people still working on these puzzles.  Even if I don't have the brainpower to contribute to the effort, I'm in awe that there are researchers who are allowing us to read writing systems that before were a closed book.

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Run like a dinosaur

One of my favorite movies, which I have seen I don't even know how many times, is Jurassic Park.

I'm honestly not much of a movie-watcher, but the first time I saw this one, it grabbed me from the opening scene and pretty much never let go.  Besides the great acting (Jeff Goldblum being top of the list... I've been known to swipe his line, "I hate it when I'm always right") and eye-popping special effects, it also gave us a window into something that has been the subject of speculation for centuries: the behavior of extinct animals.

Some of what Crichton, Spielberg et al. came up with was fanciful and almost certainly wrong; a case in point is the frill-waving, venom-spitting Dilophosaurus that ate the villainous Dennis Nedry.  Now, don't get me wrong; it's a great scene, and Nedry deserved everything he got, and more.  But we don't know if the crests of the Dilophosaurus were even retractable; this idea came from an only distantly-related reptile species, the Australian frilled lizard.  And the idea that it had venomous saliva is a complete fiction, given that spit doesn't fossilize all that well.

Dennis Nedry about to become dinner.  That'll teach him for saying "No wonder you're extinct.  I'm gonna run you over when I come back down."

Likewise the terrifying pack-hunting and deliberate, highly intelligent distraction behavior ("Clever girl") of the Velociraptors is entertaining fiction, based upon their relatively large cranial capacity, big nasty pointy teeth, and documented accounts of pack hunters like coyotes using a decoy to drive prey toward its waiting pack mates.  It's unlikely that Velociraptors (or any other dinosaur) were that smart, and I doubt seriously that any of them could figure out how to unlatch a freezer door.

What's cool, though, is that there are some inferences about dinosaur behavior (and the behavior of other extinct animals) we can make from fossil evidence alone.  The iconic scene where Alan Grant and his friends are nearly run over by a stampeding herd of Gallimimus was based upon a set of tracks that may represent exactly what the movie depicts -- a group of small dinosaurs fleeing a larger carnivorous one.  (Some paleontologists still dispute this interpretation, however.)  But the fact remains that we can use fossils to make some shrewd guesses about behavior.

Take, for example, the tracks found recently of a three-toed theropod dinosaur in the Rioja region of Spain.  The species is impossible to tell from the tracks alone, but based upon analysis of the sediment layers, the researchers learned four things:

• The tracks were made on the order of a hundred million years ago, in the early to mid-Cretaceous Period.
• The gait and depth indicates that it was running at about 45 kilometers per hour (right around the top speed Usain Bolt ever achieved).
• Whatever the dinosaur was, it was on the order of two meters tall and between four and five meters from tip to tail.
• Scariest of all, the pattern of tracks showed that as it ran, the animal was accelerating.

So chances are, it was chasing prey.  But there was no evidence to determine whether the prey got away or was turned into a Dennis-Nedry-style all-you-can-eat buffet.

A dangerous time, the mid-Cretaceous.  While a lot of us dinosaur aficionados would love a chance to go back in time and see what it was like, my guess is that once there, most of us would have a life expectancy of under six hours.  So as much as I love Jurassic Park, I'm just fine with not re-creating it.

In any case, it's exciting to know that even though a hundred million years has passed, we can still make some inferences about how these long-extinct animals behaved.  Fossils like the theropod tracks in Spain can give us a window into a long-vanished world, and the fascinating, beautiful, and terrifying animals that inhabited it.

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I've mentioned before how fascinated I am with the parts of history that still are largely mysterious -- the top of the list being the European Dark Ages, between the fall of Rome and the re-consolidation of central government under people like Charlemagne and Alfred the Great.  Not all that much was being written down in the interim, and much of the history we have comes from much later (such as History of the Kings of Britain, by Geoffrey of Monmouth, chronicling the events of the fourth through the eighth centuries C.E. -- but written in the twelfth century).

"Dark Ages," though, may be an unfair appellation, according to the new book Matthew Gabriele and David Perry called The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe.  Gabriele and Perry look at what is known of those years, and their contention is that it wasn't the savage, ignorant hotbed of backwards superstition many of us picture, but a rich and complex world, including the majesty of Byzantium, the beauty and scientific advancements of Moorish Spain, and the artistic genius of the master illuminators found in just about every Christian abbey in Europe.

It's an interesting perspective.  It certainly doesn't settle all the questions; we're still relying on a paucity of actual records, and the ones we have (Geoffrey's work being a case in point) sometimes being as full of legends, myths, and folk tales as they are of actual history.  But The Bright Ages goes a long way toward dispelling the sense that medieval Europe was seven hundred years of nothing but human misery.  It's a fascinating look at humanity's distant, and shadowed, past.

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