Grave matters

Today we take a trip into the past with three new discoveries from the world of archaeology, sent my way by my eagle-eyed friend and fellow writer, Gil Miller.

The first one has to do with ancient fashion.  Have you ever wondered how our distant ancestors dressed?  Whether it was crudely stitched-together rags, as the peasantry are often depicted?  Leopard-skin affairs, like the Flintstones?  Or nothing but a brass jockstrap, like this guy?

Turns out it wasn't so different from what you and I are wearing.  (I'm assuming you're not naked except for a brass jockstrap.  If you are, I won't judge, but I also don't want to know about it.)  An analysis of the clothing worn by a 3,200 year old mummy recovered from China's Tarim Basin was wearing tightly-woven, intricately-made trousers, built to be durable and allow maneuverability -- a little like today's blue jeans.

The pants worn by "Turfan Man" [Image from M. Wagner et al./Archaeological Research in Asia, 2022]

The cloth is a tight twill weave -- something that was assumed to be invented much later -- and had a triangular crotch piece that seems to be designed to avoid unfortunate compression of the male naughty bits while riding horseback.  The decoration, including an interlocking "T" pattern on the bands around the knees, is very similar to patterns found used on pottery in the area, and as far away as Kazakhstan and Siberia.

From ancient Chinese fashion items, we travel halfway around the world for something a little more gruesome -- a burial in the Lambayeque region of Peru that seems to contain the skeleton of a surgeon, along with his surgical tools.

The burial has been dated to the Middle Period of the Sican Culture, which would have been somewhere between 900 and 1050 C. E., and was recovered from a mausoleum temple at the rich archaeological site of Las Ventanas.  The man was obviously of high standing; he was wearing a golden mask pigmented with cinnabar, a bronze pectoral, and a garment containing copper plates.  But most interesting was the bundle of tools he was buried with -- awls, needles, and several sizes and shapes of knives.  This, the researchers say, identifies him as a surgeon.

It's hard for me to fathom, but surgery was done fairly regularly back then -- up to and including brain surgery (called trepanning).  There was no such thing as general anesthesia, so it was done under local anesthesia at best, probably supplemented with any kind of sedative or painkilling drugs they had available.  Still, it was a horrible prospect.  But what is most astonishing is that a great many of the patients, even the ones who had holes drilled into their skulls, survived.  There have been many cases of skeletons found that show signs of surgery where the surgical cuts healed completely.

But still, the ordeal these poor folks went through is horrifying to think about, so let's move on to the third and final article, that comes to us from England.  An archaeologist named Ken Dark has led a team of researchers in studying 65 grave sites in the counties of Somerset and Cornwall that date back to a time of history I've always had a particular fascination for -- the Western European "Dark Ages," between the collapse of the Roman Empire as a centralized power in the fourth and fifth centuries C. E. and the reconsolidation of Europe under such leaders as Charlemagne and Alfred the Great, four hundred years later.

The "darkness" of the so-called Dark Ages isn't so much that it was lawless and anarchic (although some parts of it in some places probably were), but simply because we know next to nothing about it for sure.  There are virtually no contemporaneous records; about all we have, the best-known being Gildas's sixth-century De Excidio et Conquesto Britanniae, are accounts that contain legend mixed up with history so thoroughly it's impossible to tell which is which.  I bring up Gildas deliberately, because his is the only record of King Arthur written anywhere close to the time he (allegedly) lived, and the graves that Dark and his team are studying date from right around that pivotal time when Christianized Romano-Celtic Britain was being attacked and overrun by the pagan Angles, Saxons, and Jutes.

The burial practices of noble sixth-century Britons stands in stark contrast from Anglo-Saxon burials from the same period; the Britons, it's believed, scorned the ostentation and ornate decorations of pagan funerals, and by comparison even high-status individuals were buried without much pomp.  What sets these graves apart from those of commoners is that they were set apart from other graves, had a fenced enclosure, and were covered with a tumulus of stones that the early Celts called a ferta, which was a sign of high standing.

"The enclosed grave tradition comes straight out of late Roman burial practices," Dark said.  "And that's a good reason why we have them in Britain, but not in Ireland -- because Britain was part of the Roman empire, and Ireland wasn't...  We've got a load of burials that are all the same, and a tiny minority of those burials are marked out as being of higher status than the others.  When there are no other possible candidates, that seems to me to be a pretty good argument for these being the ‘lost' royal burials."

So that's today's news from the past -- ancient blue jeans, primitive surgery, and Dark Age noble burials.  Sorry for starting your day on a grave note.  But it's always fascinating to see not only how things have changed, but how similar our distant ancestors were to ourselves.  If we were to time travel back there, I'm sure there'd be a lot of surprises, but we might be more shocked at how much like us they were back then.  To borrow a line from Robert Burns, a person's a person for a' that and a' that.

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It's in the palm of your hand

Amongst the downsides of being superstitious is that sometimes, you find out you're in for some bad luck.

A girl I went to college with had a real thing for Tarot cards. And even considering the generally vague, this-could-apply-to-anyone interpretations of most Tarot card spreads, there are a couple of cards that are unequivocally bad.  The Nine of Swords, for example, isn't good news, which you could probably tell just from looking at it:

So, by the laws of chance (not that true believers think that's what's going on here, but still) -- every once in a while, you're going to get a bad spread of cards laid out in front of you by your friendly neighborhood fortuneteller.  And what did my college friend do, when it happened to her?

She picked up all of the cards, shuffled them, and laid them out again, until she got one she liked.

It's a more common response than you'd think.  Numerologists -- people who believe that everything can be converted to numbers, and those numbers control your future -- have been known to go through a legal name change if their names don't add up to a "good number."

Something similar is going on in Japan, where palmistry is all the rage.  You know: the idea that the lines on your palm somehow tell you how long you'll live, whether you'll become wealthy, whether you'll fall in love, and so on.  Now, palm lines aren't going to be so simple to change -- it's not as easy as changing your name, or picking up the cards if you don't like what you see.  So, what do you do if your life-line is short, if your heart line says you'll never find a nice person of whatever gender you favor, and so on?

You have them surgically altered.

I'm not making this up.  Surgeons in Japan are now being asked, with increasing frequency, to use an electric scalpel to burn lines in patients' palms to engrave a pattern that is thought to be lucky.  The surgery costs about a thousand bucks, which of course isn't covered by insurance.

Small price to pay, say true believers, if the outcome will bring money, love, long life, or whatever it is you're after.

"If you try to create a palm line with a laser, it heals, and it won’t leave a clear mark," said Dr. Takaaki Matsuoka, who has already performed five of these surgeries this year, and has another three scheduled soon.  "You have to use the electric scalpel and make a shaky incision on purpose, because palm lines are never completely straight.  If you don’t burn the skin and just use a plain scalpel, the lines don’t form.  It’s not a difficult surgery, but it has to be done right."

Before and after. Can't you just feel the luck radiating from the right-hand photograph?

Matsuoka seems like a believer himself, and not just an opportunist making a quick bunch of yen from the gullible.

"Well, if you’re a single guy trying to pick up a date, knowing palm reading is probably good.  It’s a great excuse to hold a lovely woman’s hands," he said, in an interview.  "Men usually wish to change their business related success lines, such as the fate line, the money-luck line, and the financial line.  The money-luck line is for making profits.  And the financial line is the one that allows you to save what you make.  It’s good to have both.  Because sometimes people make a lot of money, but they quickly lose it as well.  A strong fate line helps ensure you make money and keep it.  These three lines, when they come together just right, create the emperor’s line.  Most men want this."

As for women, Matsuoka says they mostly want to change the lines related to romance and marriage.

How could all of this work?  Matsuoka hedges a little on this question.

"If people think they’ll be lucky, sometimes they become lucky," he said, which makes him sound a little like the Japanese answer to Norman Vincent Peale.  "And it’s not like the palm lines are really written in stone—they’re basically wrinkles.  They do change with time.  Even the way you use your hands can change the lines.  Some palmisters will even suggest that their clients draw the lines on their hands to change their luck.  And this was before palm plastic surgery existed.  However, anecdotally I’ve had some success."

The last bit reminds me of the wonderful sketch by Mitchell & Webb, where a doctor tries to save his patient by extending his life-line with a ball-point pen:

I can't help but think that if any of these superstitious beliefs actually worked, they wouldn't work this way.  If Tarot cards, numbers, or lines on your palm -- or any of the other wacky suggestions you might have heard -- really do control our destiny, then just changing them to a pattern you like is kind of... cheating, isn't it?  You'd think that the mystical powers-that-be wouldn't let that happen.  If I were one of the mystical powers-that-be, I'd be pissed.  I'd probably trip you while you were carrying a full cup of hot coffee.

That'd sure show you.

Of course, a simpler explanation is that all of this is really just unscientific bullshit.  To test that conjecture, I may just break a mirror on purpose today, and cross the path of a black cat, and see if I can find a ladder to walk underneath.  Go ahead, Gods of Bad Luck, do your worst.  I'm guessing that I'll still make it all the way through the day without having a brain aneurysm.

And in any case, no one is getting close to my hands with an electric scalpel.  I have fairly extensive tattoos, so I'm no stranger to people doing ouchy things to my skin, but I draw the line at cutting into the palms of my hands with a laser.  That has gotta hurt like a mofo.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is by an author we've seen here before: the incomparable Jenny Lawson, whose Twitter @TheBloggess is an absolute must-follow.  She blogs and writes on a variety of topics, and a lot of it is screamingly funny, but some of her best writing is her heartfelt discussion of her various physical and mental issues, the latter of which include depression and crippling anxiety.

Regular readers know I've struggled with these two awful conditions my entire life, and right now they're manageable (instead of completely controlling me 24/7 like they used to do).  Still, they wax and wane, for no particularly obvious reason, and I've come to realize that I can try to minimize their effect but I'll never be totally free of them.

Lawson's new book, Broken (In the Best Possible Way) is very much in the spirit of her first two, Let's Pretend This Never Happened and Furiously Happy.  Poignant and hysterically funny, she can have you laughing and crying on the same page.  Sometimes in the same damn paragraph.  It's wonderful stuff, and if you or someone you love suffers from anxiety or depression or both, read this book.  Seeing someone approaching these debilitating conditions with such intelligence and wit is heartening, not least because it says loud and clear: we are not alone.

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