The enduring mystery of Kaspar Hauser

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

The heading of the letter read:

Von der Bäierischen Gränz
daß Orte ist unbenant
1828

[From the Bavarian border
The place is unnamed
1828]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kaspar Hauser died three days later without ever explaining further.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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ET, call Lexington

If you needed more evidence that we're living in surreal times, some scientists have collaborated with the Tourism Board of Lexington, Kentucky to send a message to aliens inviting them to come to the city for a visit.

The message was sent via infrared laser toward TRAPPIST-1, a multi-planet system about forty light years from Earth.  Astonishingly, they actually got permission from the Federal Aviation Administration -- not a government office known either for its flexibility or its sense of humor -- to beam the message out.  The message, in coded bitmap form, contained information regarding the intent of the transmission, some photographs of the Lexington area, and an audio recording of blues musician Tee Dee Young.

"The bitmap image is the key to it all," said Andrew Byrd, a linguistics expert at the University of Kentucky, who was one of the scholars involved in the project.  "We included imagery representing the elements of life, our iconic Lexington rolling hills, and the molecular structure for water, bourbon, and even dopamine because Lexington is fun."

It also contained the message, "Come to Lexington!  We have horses and bourbon.  Just don't eat us."

I feel obliged to interject here that I'm not making any of this up.

The Lexington Tourism Board's promo art for the project, which I also did not make up

Regular readers of Skeptophilia know that the possibility of alien life -- perhaps intelligent life -- is a near-obsession with me, but I'm not sure this is really the way to go about trying to contact it.  While TRAPPIST-1 isn't a bad choice given the fact that it's fairly close and we know it has seven planets, there's no indication any of them host life.  Four of the planets appear to orbit within the star's "Goldilocks Zone," where the temperatures are "just right" for water to exist in liquid form, but that doesn't mean the planets have liquid water, or even atmospheres.  The fact that the planets have such tight orbits -- the farthest one only has an orbital radius six percent of Earth's, and orbits its star in nineteen days -- suggests they're probably tidally locked, meaning the same side of the planet always faces the star.  (I wrote about the difficulty of life evolving on a tidally-locked planet a year ago, if you're curious to read more about it.)

Then there's the problem of waving hello at aliens who might be vastly more powerful than we are and would respond by squashing us.  Stephen Hawking addressed this in stark terms back in 2010, saying, "We don't know much about aliens, but we know about humans.  If you look at history, contact between humans and less intelligent organisms have often been disastrous from their point of view, and encounters between civilizations with advanced versus primitive technologies have gone badly for the less advanced.  A civilization reading one of our messages could be billions of years ahead of us.  If so, they will be vastly more powerful, and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria."

Of course, if there are intelligent aliens out there, they probably already know about us.  At least the ones under 104 light years away do, because there's an expanding bubble of radio and television transmissions sweeping outward from us at the speed of light that began with the first commercial radio broadcast in 1920.  Assuming any aliens on the receiving end are at least as smart and technologically capable as we are, they're probably already decoding those transmissions and listening to Fibber McGee and Molly and watching Lost in Space, after which they will definitely think we're no more valuable than bacteria.

The last issue -- and this may be the good news, here, if you buy what Hawking said -- is that because TRAPPIST-1 is forty light years away, any aliens who might live there won't receive the message until 2064, and the earliest we could get a response is 2104.  Even if they have some kind of superluminal means of travel and jumped into their spaceships as soon as they got the message, it wouldn't be until the 2060s that they could even potentially get here.  

At least the Lexington Tourism Board has a good window of time to get their hotels ready for the influx of alien tourists.  And if they turn out to be hostile, at that point (if I'm still alive) I'll be over a hundred years old, and I figure that an alien laser pistol blast to the face is about as dramatic a way to check out as I could ask for, so I suspect I'll be fine with the Earth being invaded regardless which way it goes.

So the Lexington Tourism Board's efforts fall squarely into the "No Harm If It Amuses You" department.  And I guess the more time people spend focusing on this sort of thing, the less they'll spend dreaming up new and different ways to be awful to each other.  So as far as that goes, I'm all for sending messages to the stars.

Even if the best things you can think of to talk about are horses, bourbon, and dopamine.

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The fate of Flight 1282

In many people, there's a deep-seated need to find a reason for the bad things that happen in the world.

Well, of course, there always are reasons, but those are proximal causes; the car crashed into a telephone pole because the tires hit an icy spot on the road, Uncle Hubert died because his cancer recurred, the house caught fire because of an electrical short in the wiring.  But there's this strange desire to ascribe more to it than that, to find ultimate causes beyond the here's-why-it-happened proximal causes.

It's not limited to unfortunate events; that sort of thinking can extend to positive ones as well.  "It was meant to be" is a deeply seductive idea.  I remember running into it in the fantasy literature I grew up with, that certain outcomes were fated to be by some sort of overarching pattern to the universe.  Take this example from The Lord of the Rings:

"There was more than one power at work, Frodo," [Gandalf said.]  "The Ring was trying to get back to its Master.  It had slipped from Isildur's hand and betrayed him, then when a chance come it caught poor Déagol, and he was murdered; and after that Gollum, and it had devoured him.  It could make no further use of him: he was too small and mean, and as long as it stayed with him he would never leave his deep pool again.  So now, when its Master was awake once more and sending out his dark thought from Mirkwood, it abandoned Gollum.  Only to be picked up by the most unlikely person imaginable: Bilbo from the Shire! 

"Behind that there was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring-maker.  I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker.  In which case, you, Frodo, also were meant to have it.  And that is an encouraging thought."

I think I'm not alone in having read this passage and found it a comforting idea.  I ran into it again, even more explicitly, in the novel/fable for adults The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, in which the main character is told repeatedly that if you are on the right path to accomplishing your life's goal, "the universe itself will conspire to make certain you succeed."

Wouldn't it be lovely if that were true?

Most people are profoundly uncomfortable with the idea that the universe might be simply a weird and chaotic place -- full of proximal causes, but damn few ultimate ones.  That it's a place where things sometimes work out even when you do everything wrong, and sometimes don't, even when you do everything right.

The reason the topic comes up is the much-publicized emergency landing made on January 5 by Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 from Portland, Oregon to Ontario, California, minutes after takeoff, when a chunk of the fuselage blew off.  Astonishingly -- some say miraculously -- there were no serious injuries.

Even weirder is that the two seats next to the place where the damage occurred, 26A and 26B, were empty at the time.

To say this is fortunate is a significant understatement.  Claims have surfaced since then that the two seats had been sold and the two passengers were delayed and missed the flight, but those claims have not been verified and it's possible the seats were simply empty.

Almost immediately, two explanations began to circulate, one benevolent and one of a darker hue.

The more positive one was that a divine power had intervened to save the two people who would have sat in those seats, as well as the rest of the people on the plane.  "God is great!" posted a devout Reddit user.  "How can anyone doubt His existence after something like this?"

Well, the sticking point is all the times circumstances conspire to produce a more gruesome outcome.  It's all very well to see God's hand in saving the two presumed passengers, and to utter platitudes like "God must have a plan for them!"  The problem starts when you apply it the other way.  In for a penny, in for a pound, you know?  If Great-Aunt Petunia falls down the stairs and breaks her neck, do you then say, "I guess God was done with her"?

Sometimes things end happily, but often they don't.  If you think there's a Grand Plan, you'd better be ready to explain both.  (Unless you fall back on "God works in mysterious ways," which is an unassailable position but explains exactly nothing.)

Also circulating, though, is a less pleasant option for the reason behind the aircraft accident, and that's the one taken by the conspiracy theorists.  I've already seen a variety of twists on this, but the most common is that Alaska Airlines was running a test of its emergency protocols and deliberately staged the rupture, but at least was kind enough to make sure the two seats next to the hole would be unoccupied at the time.  Besides being wildly unlikely -- airplanes are expensive, and there are lots of ways to test emergency protocols without blowing a hole in the side of one in midair -- there's the dubious logic of the airline company saving two people while simultaneously risking the lives of the other 177 people on board.

But as usual, the conspiracy theorists are convinced they've figured it out.  Better a horrifying reason, apparently, than no reason at all.

Whether you buy the first or second scenario, though, the urge to find an explanation for the happy outcome of the accident (beyond the proximal causes, such as the skill of the pilot and copilot in landing the damaged plane) is leading people onto some very thin philosophical ice.  I'm reminded of the brilliant and devastating novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder, which I read when I was in eleventh grade.  I don't exaggerate when I say I never saw the world the same way afterward.  In the book, devout and innocent Brother Juniper, a monk in seventeenth-century Peru, is devastated when five members of the village where he lives were killed in the collapse of a bridge over a canyon.  Believing that God always has a reason for everything, for "the fall of every sparrow," he sets out to study the life histories of each of the victims, to see if he can determine why those five and no others were killed.

In the end, he reaches a deeply troubling conclusion; either the mind of God is so subtle that a human could never parse it, or else there was no reason.  Things simply happen because they happen; there are no patterns and no ultimate causes.  It's a heretical position, and at the end of the book Brother Juniper is burned at the stake by the Inquisition along with all of his writings.

So perhaps there is a reason that the two seats on Flight 1282 were unoccupied, beyond simple happenstance.  If so, it's beyond me to see what that might be, given how many times things go wrong and people do die.  Scary as it is, I think it's much more likely that the universe is simply a chaotic place where -- to quote the wonderful song "The Monkey's Paw" by Laurie Anderson -- "it's the roll of the dice, a shot in the dark, the big wheel, the big ride."

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A fracture beneath Tibet

If there's one thing I've learned from my forty-plus years of dabbling in science, it's that the universe is a weird and complex place.

It's why I frequently heard the complaint from my students that "in every science class, the first thing the teacher tells us is that everything we learned in the previous science class is wrong."  This, of course, is inaccurate and not particularly fair; it's not that the earlier tier of information was untrue so much as it was incomplete.  After all, you need a basic grasp of the underlying principles before you can understand the twists, complications, and exceptions.

Take, for example, the paper that appeared last week in Science about a strange phenomenon involving the plate tectonics under the Himalayas.

The simple model of plate tectonics is that there are three types of boundaries between plates: (1) a divergent zone or rift, where two plates are moving apart; (2) a convergent zone or thrust fault, where two plates are coming together, and one plunges beneath the other; and (3) a strike-slip fault or transform boundary, where two plates move in opposite directions alongside each other.  This broad-brush depiction can have an additional layer of complication added right away, when you consider the relative directions of motion (two colliding plates aren't necessarily, or even usually, going to be moving at right angles to the boundary, for example), and whether the plates in question are thin, dense, brittle oceanic plates or thick, lightweight, rigid continental plates.

To narrow in on the location in question, the junction between the Indian Plate and the Eurasian Plate is a convergent zone between two chunks of continental crust.  When this happens, the conventional wisdom is that the two big blocks of rock are too cold and thick to subduct, so they basically just ram into each other and crumple, forming a mountain range.  (Besides the Himalayas, another place this is happening is the Alps.)

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of the United States Geological Survey]

But it turns out that this picture of what's happening under Tibet is neither complete nor all that accurate.

A study out of Utrecht University looked at the seismic waves produced by earthquakes in the region, and found that they were consistent with a bizarre scenario; as it crashed into Eurasia, beginning about sixty million years ago, India has delaminated.  The bottom slice of the Indian Plate has peeled apart from the top, and that lower, denser piece is subducting, while the rest has simply smashed against the larger mass of the Eurasian Plate, creating two focal points for earthquakes, one shallow and one deep.

The real tipoff came when the researchers analyzed the gas bubbles in hot springs in the region.  Helium comes in two isotopes -- a light isotope, helium-3, and a heavier one, helium-4.  Helium-3, being less dense, tends to offgas more quickly in surface rocks, soils, and water, so a high He-3/He-4 ratio indicates a source lower in the mantle.  And springs in the southern parts of the Himalayas are depleted in helium-3, whereas northern parts have a higher than expected amount of the lighter isotope -- indicating that the bubbles coming from southern parts of the fault zone have a shallower source, but when you cross into the northern parts, suddenly the bubbles are originating from much deeper mantle material that has flowed in over the split section of the fractured plate.

A cross-section of the Himalayas, from south (left) to north (right)

So once again, we have a situation way more complex than the model you were taught in high school.  But that's the way it goes, you know?  Every time we think we have things figured out, the universe turns around and astonishes us.

And those of us who love science wouldn't have it any other way.

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An MRI built for two

Some years ago, I injured my left knee doing martial arts, and a couple of weeks later found myself inside an MRI machine.  The technician, who would be the odds-on favorite for the least personable medical professional I've ever met, started out by telling me "strip down to your underwear" in tones that would have done a drill sergeant proud, then asking me if I had any metal items on my person.

"I don't think so," I said, as I shucked shirt, shoes, socks, and pants.  "Why?"

His eyes narrowed.  "Because when I turn these magnets on, anything made of metal will be ripped from your body, along with any limbs to which they might be attached."

I decided to check a second time for metal items.

After reassuring myself I was unlikely to get my leg torn off because I had forgotten I was wearing a toe ring, or something, I got up on a stretcher, and he cinched my leg down with straps.  Then he said, "Would you like to listen to music?"

Surprised at this unexpected gentle touch, I said, "Sure."

"What style?"

"Something soothing.  Classical, maybe."  So he gave me some headphones, tuned the radio to a classical station, and the dulcet tones of Mozart floated across me.

Then, he turned the machine on, and it went, and I quote:

BANG BANG BANG CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH *whirrrrrr* BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG etc.

It was deafening.  The nearest thing I can compare it to is being inside a jackhammer.  It lasted a half-hour, during which time I heard not a single note of Mozart.  Hell, I doubt I'd have heard it if he'd tuned in to the Rage Against the Machine station and turned the volume up to eleven.

The upshot of it was that I had a torn meniscus, and ended up having surgery on it, and after a long and frustrating recovery period I'm now mostly back to normal.

But the MRI process still strikes me as one of those odd experiences that are entirely painless and still extremely unpleasant.  I'm not claustrophobic, but loud noises freak me out, especially when I'm wearing nothing but my boxer briefs and have one leg tied down with straps and am being watched intently by someone who makes the T-1000 from Terminator 2 seem huggable.  I mean, call me hyper-sensitive, but there you are.

So it was rather a surprise when I found out courtesy of the journal Science that the latest thing is...

... an MRI scanner built to accommodate two people.

My first thought was that hospitals were trying to double their profits by processing through patients in pairs, and that I might be there getting my leg scanned while old Mrs. Hasenpfeffer was being checked for slipped discs in her neck.  But no, it turns out it's actually for a good -- and interesting -- reason, entirely unconnected with money and efficiency.

They want to see how people's brains react when they interact with each other.

Among other things, the scientists had people talk to each other, make sustained eye contact, and even tap each other on the lips, all the while watching what was happening in each of their brains and even on their faces.  This is certainly a step up from previous solo MRI studies having to do with emotional reactions; when the person is in the tube by him/herself, any kind of interpersonal interaction -- such as might be induced by looking at a photo or video clip -- is bound to be incomplete and inaccurate.

Still, I can't help but think that the circumstance of being locked into a tube, nose to nose with someone, for an hour or more is bound to create data artifacts on its own.  I mean, look at the thing:

One of the hardest things for me at the men's retreat I attended a couple of years ago, and about which I wrote a while back, was an exercise where we made sustained eye contact at close quarters -- so you're basically standing there, staring into a stranger's eyes, from only six inches or so away.  I'm not exactly an unfriendly person, per se, but locking gazes with a guy I'd only met hours earlier was profoundly uncomfortable.

And we weren't even cinched down to a table with a rigid collar around our necks, with a noise like a demolition team echoing in our skulls.

So as much as I'm for the advancement of neuroscience, I am not volunteering for any of these studies.  I wish the researchers the best of luck, but... nope.

Especially since I wouldn't only be anxious about whether I'd removed all my metal items, I'd have to worry whether my partner had, too.  Although I do wonder what would show up on my brain MRI if I was inside a narrow tube and was suddenly smacked in the face by a detached arm.

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Ghost cities

I just finished reading The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization by Brian M. Fagan, and what struck me over and over again was an astonished thought of how we managed to survive at all.

For most of human history (and prehistory), the human species lived in communities of various sizes that were constantly teetering on the brink of mass starvation.  Fagan makes the point again and again; for the majority of humanity, all it took was one bad season to spell complete disaster.  There was no Plan B.  Except for the small number of civilizations that lived in areas with sufficient wild foods to forage, a drought or a flood or a freeze at the wrong time and you were in deep, deep trouble.

Size and power were no guarantors of safety.  The Mycenaeans, the Indus Valley Civilization, the Mayan Empire, the Pueblo Culture, the Tiwanaku People, and the Sumerians all declined and collapsed at least in part due to the vagaries of the climate.  More recently, the Little Ice Age contributed to the Great Famine of 1315-1317 which affected most of Europe and killed millions; and repeated crop failures during the eighteenth century, coupled with the monarchy's seeming inability to deal with them, almost certainly were part of what gave momentum to the French Revolution.

Despite all this, our intrepid ancestors not only survived, but in many places, thrived.  Sometimes even in regions where it's hard to imagine.  For example, consider two archaeological discoveries of hitherto-unknown cities -- one in the desert of northwestern Arabia, and the other in the Amazonian lowlands of Ecuador.

A study led by Guillaume Charloux of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique found the remains of a fortified complex surrounding the Khaybar Oasis dating to the fourth and third millennium B.C.E., giving evidence of a permanent settlement that persisted for at least several centuries.

The authors write:

The multidisciplinary investigation carried out between 2020 and 2023 by the Khaybar Longue Durée Archaeological Project (CNRS-RCU-AFALULA) demonstrates that the Khaybar Oasis was entirely enclosed by a rampart in pre-Islamic times, like several other large regional walled oases in north-western Arabia (Tayma, Qurayyah, Hait, etc.).  The cross-referencing of survey and remote sensing data, architectural examinations and the dating of stratified contexts have revealed a rampart initially some 14.5 km long, generally between 1.70 m and 2.40 m thick, reinforced by 180 bastions.  Preserved today over just under half of the original route (41 %, 5.9 km and 74 bastions), this rampart dates back to the Bronze Age, between 2250 and 1950 BCE, and had never been detected before due to the profound reworking of the local desert landscape over time.  This crucial discovery confirms the rise of a walled oasis complex in northern Arabia during the Bronze Age, a trend that proved to be central to the creation of indigenous social and political complexity.

A different study that also came out this week looked at the ruins of a city complex with buildings, gardens, streets, and plazas, now buried in the tangle of the Ecuadorian rain forest near the Upano River.  This one is even more mysterious than the Arabian settlement; we knew there were people living in northwestern Arabia back then, even if we didn't know they had built a city.  Here, archaeologists have found the remains of a complex, settled civilization, its beginnings contemporaneous with the Roman Republic and which lasted for a thousand years, and we have no idea who the people were that inhabited it -- neither what language they spoke nor how they were related to other Indigenous groups in the area before and afterward.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons James Martins, Amazon rainforest - panoramio, CC BY 3.0]

Sacha Vignieri, writing for Science, commented about the research:

When intact, the Amazonian forest is dense and difficult to penetrate, both on foot and with scanning technologies.  Over the past several years, however, improved light detection and ranging scans have begun to penetrate the forest canopy, revealing previously unknown evidence of past Amazonian cultures.  Rostain et al. describe evidence of such an agrarian Amazonian culture that began more than 2000 years ago.  They describe more than 6000 earthen platforms distributed in a geometic pattern connected by roads and intertwined with agricultural landscapes and river drainages in the Upano Valley.  Previous efforts have described mounds and large monuments in Amazonia, but the complexity and extent of this development far surpasses these previous sites.

Of course, the fact that both the Arabian and the Amazonian cities were ultimately abandoned indicates that they too fell prey to the capriciousness that characterizes much of human history.  Whether the cause was war, famine, drought, disease, or some combination -- all too often those come together -- the Khaybar Oasis and Upano Valley civilizations left their intricately-constructed towns, either dispersing into other communities or else dwindling and finally dying.

Whichever it was, all we have are the ghostly remains of cities once inhabited by thriving populations -- a stark reminder of our own tenuous grasp on survival, something we often forget about because of the hubris of modern society.  I'm reminded of Percy Bysshe Shelley's haunting and poignant poem "Ozymandias," which seems a fitting place to end:

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert.  Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains.  Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

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Aurora stellaris

Today's topic falls into the category of "The More You Think About It, The Weirder It Gets," and comes to us courtesy of my writer friend Andrew Butters.

Before I get to the meat and potatoes of the story, two bits of background.

Auroras occur because of the solar wind, a powerful stream of particles (chiefly electrons and protons) emitted from the upper atmosphere of the Sun.  When they strike the Earth's upper atmosphere and interact with the various molecules in the air, this has the effect of exciting the electrons in the molecules (bouncing them to higher energy levels), and when those electrons fall back into the ground state, they emit the extra energy as light.  Because of the quantization of energy levels, each color (frequency) is associated with a particular transition in a particular element -- the commonest are reds and greens (from oxygen) and blues (from nitrogen).

Auroras on Earth are most often seen in high latitudes because of the shape of the Earth's magnetic field.  The slope of the magnetic field lines increases the closer you get to the poles, so at high latitudes it acts a bit like a funnel, creating spectacular displays in the Arctic and Antarctic regions.

Despite the fact that I feel like I feel like I live in the Frozen North (especially at this time of year), I've only ever gotten to see the auroras once.  It was about ten years ago, and we heard there was a solar storm and the "Northern Lights" were going to be seen a lot farther south than usual.  That night it was supposed to be crystal-clear -- also an unusual occurrence in this cloudy climate -- so once it was dark, my wife and I went across the street into the neighbor's field and watched for a while, with disappointing results of the "Is that a flicker?  I think that's a flicker" sort.

At some point my wife, who is clearly the brains of the operation, realized that we were looking for the Northern Lights, but we were facing south.  In our defense, there were fewer trees obstructing the sky in that direction, but it's still a little like the guy who was searching around the kitchen floor for his contact lens, and his wife joined him, but the two of them couldn't find it.  She finally said, "Are you sure you dropped it in the kitchen?"  And he responded, "No, I dropped it in the bathroom, but the light is better in here."

In any case, we turned around to the north...

.... and wow.

Over our rooftop and beyond the branches of the walnut trees was a light show like I've never seen before -- shifting curtains of green luminescence resembling some kind of gauzy emerald curtain.  It was spectacular.  We watched it for about forty-five minutes before it finally started to fade.

So if you're ever looking for auroras, make sure you're pointed the right way.

The second piece of background is that there is a strange astronomical object called a brown dwarf.  Brown dwarfs are almost-stars -- something on the order of twenty to eighty times the mass of the planet Jupiter.  Since the fusion of hydrogen into helium -- what powers stars' cores -- requires intense pressure to get started, there's a lower limit to the mass a star can have.  Below that mass, the gravity of its contents is insufficient to raise the pressure in the core to the point where fusion can begin, and what you end up with is something midway between a planet and a star.

Well, the link Andrew sent me is about a new discovery by the amazing James Webb Space Telescope -- of a brown dwarf, W1935, which has auroras.

On first glance, you might think, "why not?"  But remember how auroras are created.  They're caused by the interaction of a stream of high-energy particles with the atmosphere of a planet.

So where are the high-energy particles coming from?

Artist's illustration of W1935 [Image courtesy of artist Leah Hustak and NASA/ESA/CSA]

Even odder, the atmosphere of W1935 seems to have a temperature inversion -- a region of the atmosphere that warms, rather than cools, with increasing altitude.  Its upper atmosphere was glowing with the very specific infrared frequency given off when you heat methane.  So not only does it have auroras when there's no reason it should, there's some sort of a heat source that's creating convection in its atmosphere without it receiving an external heat input from a star.

"We expected to see methane, because methane is all over these brown dwarfs. But instead of absorbing light, we saw just the opposite: The methane was glowing," said Jackie Faherty, of the American Museum of Natural History, who led the study.  "My first thought was, what the heck?  Why is methane emission coming out of this object?...  With W1935, we now have a spectacular extension of a solar system phenomenon without any stellar irradiation to help in the explanation.  With the JWST, we can really 'open the hood' on the chemistry and unpack how similar or different the auroral process may be beyond our solar system."

So here we have one more example of a significant mystery out there in space, and yet another brilliant contribution to astronomy and astrophysics by the JWST.  It seems like every new cache of data opens up as many new questions as it solves old ones.  But that's the way it goes with science -- as Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "As the area of our knowledge grows, so too does the perimeter of our ignorance."

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