The feral child

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

However confounding that is to our natural intellectual curiosity.

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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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Le comte éternel

When I was a kid, the high point of my year was the two-week trip my dad and I took every August to Arizona and New Mexico.  He was an avid rockhound and lapidary, so his goal was collecting agate and turquoise and jasper to bring home and make into jewelry.  Mine, on the other hand, was wandering in the beautiful, desolate hills that were so unlike the lush near-jungles of my native southern Louisiana.

Another thing I loved about that part of the country was the abundance of peculiar little curio shops.  Some were clearly tourist traps, but some were run by honest-to-goodness old-time eccentric southwesterners, and filled with weird and wonderful oddities.  One of these I recall well was in Alpine, Texas, and was mostly a used book store, but had all sorts of other stuff (including, to my dad's delight, rocks).

That's where I picked up a copy of Richard Cavendish's book The Black Arts, about the history of occultism.  At that age (I was about thirteen at the time) I was absolutely fascinated with this stuff.  And it was in The Black Arts that I first ran across the peculiar character known as the Comte de Saint-Germain.

Saint-Germain is one of a handful of people who are, supposedly, immortal.  Here's the passage about him from Cavendish's book:

One of of the most famous of all those who are supposed to have possessed the Elixir of Life is the Count of Saint-Germain.  "The Comte de Saint-Germain and Sir Francis Bacon," says Manly P. Hall, the leading light of the Philosophical Research Society of Los Angeles, "are the two greatest emissaries sent into the world by the Secret Brotherhood in the last thousand years."  The Secret Brotherhood is a group of Masters, whose headquarters are said to be in the Himalayas and who are attempting to guide mankind along higher paths.

Saint-Germain hobnobbed with the highest social circles in France, winning the favour of Madame de Pompadour in 1759 with his "water of rejuvenation."  Immensely erudite and enormously rich, he was a skillful violinist, painter, and chemist, had a photographic memory, and was said to speak eleven languages fluently, including Chinese, Arabic, and Sanskrit...  He was believed to be over two thousand years old...  He delighted in reminiscing about the great ones of the past with whom he had been on familiar terms, including the Queen of Sheba and Cleopatra.  He was a wedding guest at Cana when Christ turned the water into wine.  There is a pleasant story of him describing a dear friend of long ago, Richard the Lionheart, and turning to his manservant for confirmation.  "You forget, sir," the valet said solemnly.  "I have only been five hundred years in your service."

Saint-Germain attributed his astonishing longevity to his diet and his elixir...  He is supposed to have died in Germany in 1784, but occultists believe that he was probably given a mock burial... It is said that he was frequently seen alive in the next century and was known to Bulwer-Lytton.

It's a curious story, to say the least.  In Umberto Eco's brilliant novel Foucault's Pendulum, his character of Agliè coyly hints that he's the latest rebranding of the Comte de Saint-Germain -- but when the main character, Casaubon, tries to tell this to his psychologist, and that Agliè/Saint-Germain is at the center of a gigantic and murderous conspiracy, the doctor gives him a level look and says, "Monsieur, vous êtes fou."  ("Mister, you are crazy.")

Reading about this stuff can definitely leave you feeling that way, but there's no doubt Saint-Germain was a real guy.  He left behind a number of surviving musical compositions, and two extant written works are attributed to him.  He was employed on diplomatic missions by French King Louis XV.  Voltaire met him, and despite Voltaire's generally skeptical view of things, he apparently at least halfway believed the Comte's grandiose tales.  He called Saint-Germain "the Wonder-Man -- a man who does not die, and who knows everything."  Prince Charles of Hesse-Kassel called him "the greatest philosopher who ever lived."  

Giacomo Casanova, however, wasn't so impressed, although he had to admit to some grudging admiration for Saint-Germain's ability to lie so convincingly:

This extraordinary man, intended by nature to be the king of impostors and quacks, would say in an easy, assured manner that he was three hundred years old, that he knew the secret of the Universal Medicine, that he possessed a mastery over nature, that he could melt diamonds, professing himself capable of forming, out of ten or twelve small diamonds, one large one of the finest water without any loss of weight.  All this, he said, was a mere trifle to him.  Notwithstanding his boastings, his bare-faced lies, and his manifold eccentricities, I cannot say I thought him offensive.  In spite of my knowledge of what he was and in spite of my own feelings, I thought him an astonishing man as he was always astonishing me.

Throughout his life (assuming he did actually die!), Saint-Germain's ability to astonish kept him the darling of high society.  His portrait hangs in the Louvre:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

So who was he?

This is where it gets even more interesting, because no one knows for sure.  In fact, no one even knows his real name; he had a dozen or more by which he was regularly known.  He claimed to be the son of Francis II Rákóczi, Prince of Transylvania, but keep in mind that the guy also claimed to be thousands of years old, so that should be taken with a large handful of salt.  Rákóczi did have a son, named Leopold George -- but the records indicate Leopold died at age four.  The occultists, of course, have an answer for that (they seem to have an answer for everything, don't they?) -- they say that Rákóczi kept his son's survival a secret to protect him from the scheming Habsburgs, which accounts for Saint-Germain's education and wealth (and penchant for secrecy).  All through his life he wove a web of mystery around himself, and reveled in the cachet it gave him with the aristocracy.  

P. T. Barnum, though, in his 1886 book The Humbugs of the World, clearly wasn't having any of it:

The Marquis de Créquy declared that Saint-Germain was an Alsatian Jew, Simon Wolff by name, and was born at Strasbourg about the close of the 17th or the beginning of the 18th century; others insist that he was a Spanish Jesuit named Aymar; and others again intimate that his true title was the Marquis de Betmar, and that he was a native of Portugal.  The most plausible theory, however, makes him the natural son of an Italian princess and fixes his birth at San Germano, in Savoy, about the year 1710; his ostensible father being one Rotondo, a tax-collector of that district.

Barnum was an expert on fooling the gullible; there's the sense here that he wasn't fond of the competition.

Whoever Saint-Germain was, there's no doubt he was a fascinating character.  Predictably, I'm not buying that he was thousands of years old, nor that somehow, he's still alive.  And many of his claims are somewhere between "implausible" and "ludicrous."  But there's no doubt that he was an accomplished and skilled trickster, and relished the air of mystery his stories gave him.  It'd be nice to have some answers to the questions he surrounded himself with, but the truth is, he was too good at covering his tracks -- and like the more famous mystery of Jack the Ripper, we'll probably never know his identity for sure. 

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The disappearance of Tartessos

I'm not a historian, but I certainly have been fascinated with history for years.  I just finished re-reading Robert Graves's wonderful books I, Claudius and Claudius the God -- fictionalized, but largely historically accurate, accounts of the tumultuous life of Tiberius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, better known as the Roman emperor Claudius, fifth and penultimate emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty.  Since then I've gone back into reading some of the mytho-historical works I first looked at while doing my master's degree, the Icelandic saga literature (I'm currently in the middle of the Laxdæla Saga, the tale of the people of the Lax River Valley.  The highly entertaining chapter I just finished is about a guy named Killer-Hrapp who was so awful he didn't want to stop doing awful things after he died, so he had his wife bury his body under the floor of their house, and he proceeded to haunt the place as a reanimated corpse.  Apparently zombies are not a recent invention.)  After that, I'm back to the southern Mediterranean (and pure non-fiction) for How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower by Adrian Goldsworthy.

So I'm what I'd consider a reasonably well-informed amateur.  Which is why a link I was sent by my friend and frequent contributor to Skeptophilia, Gil Miller, came as such a surprise.  Because the article describes a civilization on the Iberian Peninsula, contemporaneous to the ancient Greeks, that I'd never heard of before.

The civilization was called Tartessos.  They dominated the southern parts of what are now Spain and Portugal in the first part of the first millennium B.C.E., and inexplicably vanished sometime around the middle of it.  They spoke an unknown non-Indo-European language which has survived in written form in 95 different inscriptions; the alphabet has been deciphered -- "Southwestern Paleohispanic Script," a "semi-syllabic" script in which some characters represent single sounds and others represent syllables -- but the language itself is still largely a mystery, and doesn't appear to be closely related to any known language.

The Tartessian Fonte Velha inscription, found near Bensafrim, Portugal, which dates to the seventh century B.C.E.  [Image is in the Public Domain]

The Tartessians were known to the Greeks, who valued their trading partnerships with them because it gave them access to tin, necessary for the fabrication of bronze.  In the fourth century B.C.E. they were going strong -- the historian Ephorus describes "a very prosperous market called Tartessos, with much tin carried by river, as well as gold and copper from Celtic lands" -- but then, right around that time, they vanished completely, for reasons that are still uncertain.

They went out with a bang, too.  The link Gil sent, which was to an article at the wonderful site Atlas Obscura, describes an archaeological site called Casas del Turuñuelo, located in the Spanish province of Extremadura, near the border of Portugal.  What the researchers found seems to indicate that immediately before their mysterious disappearance, the Tartessians had a massive sacrifice of horses, donkeys, cattle, dogs, pigs... and possibly humans.  After arraying the sacrificed animals -- for example, deliberately arranging two horses facing each other symmetrically, with their forelegs crossed -- the Tartessians set fire to the entire place, burning to the ground what had been a thriving city.  They then apparently buried the ash, bones, and rubble...

... and took off for parts unknown.

Why a thriving and apparently wealthy civilization would do this is an open question.  There's been some speculation that they had been hit repeatedly by earthquakes, and thought that an enormous hecatomb would appease the gods.  But without any hard evidence, this is nothing more than a guess.  And the great likelihood, of course, is that they didn't vanish, nor even die out, but migrated elsewhere and merged with a pre-existing population.  But if that's true, then where did they go?  After about 400 B.C.E. there seems to be no sign of clearly Tartessian artifacts anywhere in western Europe.

They were still remembered long afterward, though.  In the second century C.E. the Greek historian Pausanias was in Olympia, Greece, and saw two bronze chambers in a sanctuary that the locals said were of Tartessian manufacture.  He elaborated thusly:

They say that Tartessos is a river in the land of the Iberians, running down into the sea by two mouths, and that between these two mouths lies a city of the same name.  The river, which is the largest in Iberia, and tidal, those of a later day called Baetis, and there are some who think that Tartessos was the ancient name of Carpia, a city of the Iberians.

Which squares with what we know about the Tartessians from archaeological sites, centering on the area near the mouth of the Guadalquivir River, which flows into a marshland that is now the Doñana National Park, a beautiful place I was lucky enough to visit a few years ago.

But of course, there's no historical mystery without some kind of wild speculation appended to it, and the Tartessians are no exception.  There are people who claim that Tartessos is actually the civilization of Atlantis, described by the ancient Greeks as being "beyond the Pillars of Hercules" (i.e. the Straits of Gibraltar).  Which Tartessos is.  But any other connection to Atlantis seems way beyond tentative to me, starting with the fact that supposedly Atlantis "sank beneath the sea," while all of the sites known to be inhabited by the Tartessians are on dry land.

Inconvenient, that.

Of course, I have to admit it's hard to do underwater archaeology, so if there are Tartessian sites sunk in the Atlantic, we might not know about them.  Still, it seems a little sketchy to decide that "rich civilization near Gibraltar that vanished suddenly" leads to "Tartessos = Atlantis."

So that leaves us with a conundrum -- an apparently wealthy and powerful civilization upping stakes and taking off.  Of course, the Tartessians aren't the only instance of this happening; pretty much the same disappearing act had occurred eight hundred years earlier to the Myceneans, who had dominated the eastern Mediterranean for a good half a millennium before suddenly abandoning their strongholds (many of them were burned to the ground) in around 1,200 B.C.E.  (Some historians have attributed the collapse of Mycenae to a prolonged drought, but that's also speculation.)

In any case, that's today's historical mystery that I'd never heard of.  Hope you enjoyed it.  For me, it brings to mind the words of Socrates, when someone told him he'd been judged the wisest man in the world, and what did he think of that?  Socrates responded: "If I am accounted wise, it is only because I realize how little I know."

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Mathematics tends to sort people into two categories -- those who revel in it and those who detest it.  I lucked out in college to have a phenomenal calculus teacher who instilled in me a love for math that I still have today, and even though I'm far from an expert mathematician, I truly enjoy considering some of the abstruse corners of the theory of numbers.

One of the weirdest of all of the mathematical discoveries is Euler's Equation, which links five of the most important and well-known numbers -- π (the ratio between a circle's circumference and its diameter), e (the root of the natural logarithms), i (the square root of -1, and the foundation of the theory of imaginary and complex numbers), 1, and 0.  

They're related as follows:

Figuring this out took a genius like Leonhard Euler to figure out, and its implications are profound.  Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman called it "the most remarkable formula in mathematics;" nineteenth-century Harvard University professor of mathematics Benjamin Peirce said about Euler's Equation, "it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means, but we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth."

Since Peirce's time mathematicians have gone a long way into probing the depths of this bizarre equation, and that voyage is the subject of David Stipp's wonderful book A Most Elegant Equation: Euler's Formula and the Beauty of Mathematics.  It's fascinating reading for anyone who, like me, is intrigued by the odd properties of numbers, and Stipp has made the intricacies of Euler's Equation accessible to the layperson.  When I first learned about this strange relationship between five well-known numbers when I was in calculus class, my first reaction was, "How the hell can that be true?"  If you'd like the answer to that question -- and a lot of others along the way -- you'll love Stipp's book.

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

The horse warriors

I'm always drawn to a historical mystery.

The difficulty, of course, is given that a huge amount of our history has either highly unreliable records or else no records at all, a lot of mysteries will never get resolved satisfactorily.  Two examples I read about recently which are as fascinating as they are frustrating are the true identity of Jack the Ripper, and the fate of the "Princes in the Tower" -- the two young sons of English King Edward IV, who disappeared in around 1483 and were probably murdered.  

As a quick aside, it bears mention that in the latter case the alleged culprit, King Richard III, was not the horrific, amoral villain you might think, if your only source is the play by Shakespeare.  He was actually competent and not a selfish monster, nor was he a hunchback; the Shakespearean smear job makes for great theater, and appeased the anti-Yorkist monarchy of the time, but has unfairly tarred a man who -- if Henry Tudor hadn't decided to swipe the throne -- probably would have been considered a pretty good leader.  He may still have had the princes killed, though; such behavior by a king anxious to eliminate rivals and put his own claim to the throne beyond question was not at all uncommon at the time.  But Shakespeare having Queen Margaret call him a "deformed, bunch-backed toad" seems a little excessive.

Sometimes there's an entire ethnic group that is mysterious, again usually because we have mostly archaeological evidence to go by, supplemented by dubiously accurate accounts written down by other (often hostile) cultures.  In fact, the whole reason why the subject of historical mysteries comes up is because of a paper I read a couple of days ago about the Scythians, the central Asian "horse warriors" who bumped up against the cultures their territory bordered -- principally Greece, Rome, China, and Persia -- and whose accounts form the basis of our knowledge of who they were.

The Golden Stag of Kostromskaya, one of the most famous Scythian artifacts (ca. 7th century B.C.E.) [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Joanbanjo, Placa en forma de cérvol tombat, trobada al túmul de Kostromskoy a Kuban, segle VII aC, CC BY-SA 3.0]

In "Ancient Genomic Time Transect from the Central Asian Steppe Unravels the History of the Scythians," which appeared last week in Science Advances and was authored by a huge team led by Guido Alberto Gnecchi-Ruscone of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, we read about a genomic study of the remains of over a hundred individuals from Scythian burial sites, and find out that they were hardly a single unified ethnic group -- their genomes show a significant diversity and represent multiple origins.  So the Scythians seem more like a loose confederation of relatively unrelated people than the single unified, monolithic culture of fierce nomads depicted in the writings of their rivals.

The authors write:

The Scythians were a multitude of horse-warrior nomad cultures dwelling in the Eurasian steppe during the first millennium BCE.  Because of the lack of first-hand written records, little is known about the origins and relations among the different cultures.  To address these questions, we produced genome-wide data for 111 ancient individuals retrieved from 39 archaeological sites from the first millennia BCE and CE across the Central Asian Steppe.  We uncovered major admixture events in the Late Bronze Age forming the genetic substratum for two main Iron Age gene-pools emerging around the Altai and the Urals respectively.  Their demise was mirrored by new genetic turnovers, linked to the spread of the eastern nomad empires in the first centuries CE.

 If that's not intriguing enough, last week there was also new information uncovered about an artifact from the same place but a lot earlier, the "Shigir idol," which was uncovered from a peat bog in the Ural Mountains in 1890.  Its age is apparently greater than scientists have thought -- the new study suggests it's about 12,500 years old, making it the oldest wooden representation of a human figure known.

The Shigir idol [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Владислав Фальшивомонетчик, Большой шигирский идол, CC BY-SA 3.0]

"The idol was carved during an era of great climate change, when early forests were spreading across a warmer late glacial to postglacial Eurasia," said study lead author Thomas Terberger, of the University of Göttingen, in an interview in the New York Times.  "The landscape changed, and the art—figurative designs and naturalistic animals painted in caves and carved in rock—did, too, perhaps as a way to help people come to grips with the challenging environments they encountered."

What it brings home to me is the humbling thought of how little we actually know of our own history.  For every mystery we know about -- like Jack the Ripper and the Princes in the Tower we began with -- there are probably thousands of other equally fascinating events we don't have any way of knowing about.  The vast majority of humans died without leaving any extant traces, and since human remains and biodegradable artifacts (like the Shigir idol) only survive under specific (and uncommon) conditions, the vast majority of those are gone beyond recall, too.  When we luck out and find tangible evidence, like the Scythian burials, we can sometimes glean further information about a culture we knew little about.  The unfortunate but tantalizing truth, though, is that most of our own history is both unknown and unknowable.

Which for me makes it even more appealing, although inevitably, as frustrating as it is fascinating.

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The sad truth of our history is that science and scientific research has until very recently been considered the exclusive province of men.  The exclusion of women committed the double injury of preventing curious, talented, brilliant women from pursuing their deepest interests, and robbing society of half of the gains of knowledge we might otherwise have seen.

To be sure, a small number of women made it past the obstacles men set in their way, and braved the scorn generated by their infiltration into what was then a masculine world.  A rare few -- Marie Curie, Barbara McClintock, Mary Anning, and Jocelyn Bell Burnell come to mind -- actually succeeded so well that they became widely known even outside of their fields.  But hundreds of others remained in obscurity, or were so discouraged by the difficulties that they gave up entirely.

It's both heartening and profoundly infuriating to read about the women scientists who worked against the bigoted, white-male-only mentality; heartening because it's always cheering to see someone achieve well-deserved success, and infuriating because the reason their accomplishments stand out is because of impediments put in their way by pure chauvinistic bigotry.  So if you want to experience both of these, and read a story of a group of women who in the early twentieth century revolutionized the field of astronomy despite having to fight for every opportunity they got, read Dava Sobel's amazing book The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars.

In it, we get to know such brilliant scientists as Willamina Fleming -- a Scottish woman originally hired as a maid, but who after watching the male astronomers at work commented that she could do what they did better and faster, and so... she did.  Cecilia Payne, the first ever female professor of astronomy at Harvard University.  Annie Jump Cannon, who not only had her gender as an unfair obstacle to her dreams, but had to overcome the difficulties of being profoundly deaf.

Their success story is a tribute to their perseverance, brainpower, and -- most importantly -- their loving support of each other in fighting a monolithic male edifice that back then was even more firmly entrenched than it is now.  Their names should be more widely known, as should their stories.  In Sobel's able hands, their characters leap off the page -- and tell you a tale you'll never forget.

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