Finding a king...  

OK - I've been listening to waaaay too many Medieval history courses, but still this is just mind-blowing:

Nonetheless, at the tail end of last summer, a team of experts dug three trenches across the site and began hunting for evidence of the long-lost friary, where Richard III was recorded to have been buried.

The search turned up traces of the building, and then something altogether more exciting: A human skeleton, complete with evidence of battle wounds -- a blow to the head, and an arrow in the back -- and scoliosis, or curvature of the spine.

"I didn't think it was likely to be him at first," explains bioarchaeologist Jo Appleby, who excavated the remains. "The skull didn't seem to be in quite the right place -- now we know that's because of the scoliosis -- but it didn't seem to 'go' with the legs.

"When I lifted the skull and saw the injury, a little alarm bell started to ring, but I told myself perhaps someone had dug into the grave at a later date and hit it with a spade, so I thought 'Don't say anything yet.'

"I cleared the arms and legs, and then went up the spine, hunting for vertebrae, [but] they weren't there, they weren't where I expected them to be. Instead they went in completely the wrong direction. At that point, I thought 'Hang on!'"

"Someone came over and said 'I think you need to see this,'" Buckley says. "We were looking at something else, so I said 'I'm a bit busy at the moment,' and they said 'No, no, you really need to see this.'"

They were stunned to discover the remains were in surprisingly good condition - particularly given the fact they were apparently laid to rest in a simple shroud, with no coffin to protect them. [More]

And then this morning, science adds the crowning moment.

Experts from the University of Leicester said DNA from the bones matched that of descendants of the monarch's family.
Lead archaeologist Richard Buckley, from the University of Leicester, told a press conference to applause: "Beyond reasonable doubt it's Richard."
Richard, killed in battle in 1485, will be reinterred in Leicester Cathedral.

Mr Buckley said the bones had been subjected to "rigorous academic study" and had been carbon dated to a period from 1455-1540.

Dr Jo Appleby, an osteo-archaeologist from the university's School of Archaeology and Ancient History, revealed the bones were of a man in his late 20s or early 30s. Richard was 32 when he died.
His skeleton had suffered 10 injuries, including eight to the skull, at around the time of death. Two of the skull wounds were potentially fatal.
The spine was badly curved, a condition known as scoliosis, but there was no trace of a withered arm, as some Tudor historians had claimed Richard had. [More]

How cool is that! (Both articles are well-written, please follow the links)

Before the Segway...  

The best we could do was this for personal transportation.

 

Looks like something for scouting cornfields to me.

Still sunk after all these years...  

What is it about the Titanic?  I mean, it's not like Spock died.

I wasn’t the only one who was obsessed—or writing. It may not be true that “the three most written-about subjects of all time are Jesus, the Civil War, and the Titanic,” as one historian has put it, but it’s not much of an exaggeration. Since the early morning of April 15, 1912, when the great liner went to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, taking with it five grand pianos, eight thousand dinner forks, an automobile, a fifty-line telephone switchboard, twenty-nine boilers, a jewelled copy of “The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam,” and more than fifteen hundred lives, the writing hasn’t stopped. First, there were the headlines, which even today can produce an awful thrill. “ALL SAVED FROM TITANIC AFTER COLLISION,” the New York Evening Sun crowed less than twenty-four hours after the sinking. A day later, brute fact had replaced wishful conjecture: “TITANIC SINKS, 1500 DIE.” Then there were the early survivor narratives—a genre that has by now grown to include a book by the descendants of a Lebanese passenger whose trek to America had begun on a camel caravan. There were the poems. For a while, there was such a glut that the Times was moved to print a warning: “To write about the Titanic a poem worth printing requires that the author should have something more than paper, pencil, and a strong feeling that the disaster was a terrible one.” Since then, there have been histories, academic studies, polemics by enthusiasts, and novels, numbering in the hundreds. There’s even a “Titanic for Dummies.” This centennial month alone will see the publication of nearly three dozen titles. [More]

There is nothing more truly American...  

Than paying too much for land. A fair case can be made our country was invented not so much by religious hard-liners (despite what the TP imagines) as men who knew where wealth really, really comes from.  Like Ethan Allen (from a new biography review):

Randall works hard to make this a story about salt-of-the-earth, democratic New England settlers fighting off New York's aristocratic land barons—so hard, in fact, that you have to admire the effort. Alas, the evidence won't conform. The Green Mountain Boys were driven less by ideology than by a desire to keep their land and, at least in Allen's case, to legalize deeds bought on the cheap to sell for a hefty profit. Both sides were gambling wildly, and as the imperial conflict heated up, the stakes rose.
Back in London, groups of well-connected investors were eying quantities of land so vast as to make the Vermont speculation seem like child's play. The greatest of these ventures was the proposed colony of Vandalia, covering 20 million acres in what now comprises West Virginia and Kentucky. Parties to the enterprise at various times included Benjamin Franklin and two of George Washington's brothers. Unfortunately, Virginia claimed the land in question, as did Connecticut and Pennsylvania—each state having sold the land to settlers and investors—although by 1774 it was all, according to the British government, under the jurisdiction of Québec. Vermont, in short, was a very big story writ small.
Indeed, who wasn't a land speculator in this freewheeling age? George Washington, a former surveyor, had amassed thousands of acres in the Ohio valley and spent 10 years lobbying the governor of Virginia to legalize his titles. Gen. Thomas Gage, who would lead British forces against Washington, held 18,000 acres, and had married into one of the greatest landowning families on the continent. When fighting broke out in 1775, these contested speculations loomed in the background.
Just how these contests over land play into the Revolution is one of the most debated questions in American history. In 1909, historian Carl Becker argued that the American Revolution was not so much about home rule as "who should rule at home." The struggle for independence, in other words, centered less on exalted principles than on the quest for political and economic power by provincial elites. Popular among muckraking classes during the age of Robber Barons, this interpretation was hard to reconcile with a patriotic account of the nation's founding and eventually fell out of favor. [More]

There are times I think this insatiable desire for land, even over cash, is hard-wired into my genes. If so, maybe I can trace my ancestry back to some illustrious figures of our past, albeit illegitimately, no doubt.

I hated 'em then...  

I hate 'em now. Not really, but some guys can't seem to stop catching a break.

The two had already sold slightly more than 300 acres outside Chicago, at an average of $25,000 per acre.

They took those proceeds and bought 4,000 acres, in 17 downstate counties, that they rented to other farmers. That left them 1,800 acres to farm corn and soybeans in Chicago's exurbs, including fewer than 1,000 acres they owned.

That's when fate smiled on them.

During the past year, corn prices have doubled on increased demand for use as livestock feed and biofuels, and soybean prices have risen by more than 50 percent.

As those prices rose, the Baltz brothers began selling their fertile land downstate that they paid $2,500 to $4,000 an acre for and which is valued at as much as $8,000 an acre. During the past 12 months alone they've sold more 2,000 acres. Now they are more active farmers in their own backyards.

During the past three months, they've purchased from lenders almost 1,000 acres of farmland in Will and Kendall counties that were once scheduled for homes, paying a fraction of what developers paid years ago.

"A lot of (banks) just want it off their books," Ed Baltz said. "We got a little more power because we got the cash to spend."

On a recent warm afternoon, the brothers stood behind a weathered, vacant white-frame home and barn north of Black Road in Shorewood, on 246 acres that, at their peak, sold for $65,000 an acre and in 2005 were annexed by the village and zoned for more than 400 single-family detached homes.

The Baltz brothers paid $3.6 million, or about $14,500 an acre, for land that already has subdivision utilities brought to the property line. This year, though, the only thing rising out of the dirt will be the corn that Bob Baltz planted last month. [ More]

 [Click to enlarge]

This is the world we live in. And it is germane to recall that Chicago was a mere military outpost when southern IL was booming.

I also use these examples to remind me my decisions about land (like yours) can have disproportionate consequences.

Two dots...

I would never had connected: the Trib and colonial farmland speculation.

At issue is language regarding the legal rights of creditors vis-à-vis debtors. The United States has long had a body of law regarding this issue. A few years ago, for instance, the real estate speculator Sam Zell bought the Chicago Tribune in a debt-leveraged buyout. The newspaper soon went broke, wiping out the employees’ stock ownership plan (ESOP). They sued under the fraudulent conveyance law, which says that if a creditor makes a loan without knowing how the debtor can pay in the normal course of business, the loan is assumed to have been made with the intent of foreclosing on property, and is deemed fraudulent.This law dates from colonial times, when British speculators eyed rich New York farmland. Their ploy was to extend loans to farmers, and then call in the loans when the farmer’s ability to pay was low, before the crop was harvested. This was indeed a liquidity problem – which financial opportunists turned into an asset grab. Some lenders, to be sure, created a genuine insolvency problem by making loans beyond the ability of the farmers to pay, and then would foreclose on their land. The colonies nullified such loans. Fraudulent conveyance laws have been kept on the books since the United States won its independence from Britain. [More]

The difference between illiquidity and insolvency will continue to be hotly debated as the Greek financial crisis proceeds. Farmers may have a hard time intuitively following this debate as with our asset prices soaring, solvency is not the first concern.

In general, as finance is scrutinized more intensely, I think due diligence of lenders will be stressed more. And as bailouts have proven politically damning (especially on the right), that well of relief may have gone dry.

Then addeth ye two sticks...

Stuff you never knew about the history of butter.

There is no evidence that the Romans used butter in their cuisine, (no form of butter appears in the ancient Roman cookery book Apicius) preferring olive oil, but used pure butter “medicinally”, including for making the skin “pliable” and in other situations that are too easy to imagine to be described here. Pliny suggests using it with honey for teething infants (which at least has deliciousness to recommend it) and Galen suggests using it as lamp fuel and then putting it on the eyes to cure inflammation and (presumably) sightedness. In Tablet VIII of The Epic of Gilgamesh, written some four thousand years ago, Gilgamesh makes an offering of purified butter to Shamash, the Babylonian sun god. (the gods, it was known, have no interest in milk solids). These days we usually call this sort of butter “ghee” or sometimes “clarified butter” (clarified butter, which the French quietly use a great deal in baking, has been cooked to boil off excess water, but not long enough for the milk solids to brown) to differentiate it from what we now think of as “butter,” but for millennia it was just butter.


Impure butter was viewed by the Greeks and Romans as a sure sign of barbarism and an invitation to be “civilized.” The Northern peoples were presumed to coat themselves in butter for reasons that ranged from the medicinal to the deeply troubling. The expression “as revolting as a butter-headed Burgundian” (Aussi révoltante que bourguignon avec du beurre dans ses cheveux) dates from this period, and some scholars have suggested that the French reputation for rankness is also butter-related. It was only after the fall of Rome that it slowly became acceptable to eat butter in polite company. By the Middle Ages, German and French butter fanatics would actually bribe their priests to allow them to eat butter during Lent, until, under pressure from the pro-butter Protestants, the Catholic Church allowed the consumption of butter during Lent during the 16th century. [More]

From Gilgamesh to Julia Child, butter enthusiasts have been spreading it thick. And unlike fluid milk consumption, we're eating more of it.

 [Source]

I'm not sure what happened in the mid 90's - was it a diet craze? I grew up on margarine, and actually preferred it. Jan was a butter person. Like all so many things, I soon came to align my preference with Jan's.

It's just easier that way...

[via sullivan]

Ye Olde Ballgayme...

How old is baseball?  Wouldja believe over 700 years?

The image in question is found in the margins of the calendar that was originally part of the Ghistelles Hours, a 14th-century Flemish book of hours probably made for John III, Lord of Ghistelles and Inglemunster or his wife. Since John died in 1315 and the calendar begins its cycle of years on Sunday, it's usually dated to either 1301 or 1307. (If the name of the manuscript sounds vaguely familiar, it's because the Ghistelle Hours was broken into pieces and sold as individual leaves and quires, so fragments of it are perennially on sale at Sotheby's and Christies and the like.**)

The calendar pagers were kept together and sold all as one unit and are currently in the possession of the Manuscript Library of the Walters Art Museum, which featured the image recently as part of an exhibit titled "Checkmate! Medieval People at Play".  A few media outlets picked the story up from the exhibit's press release, and it's been bouncing around the web lately with various claims about its origin and subject.***

So, is it the first ever image of baseball?  If you're willing to count proto-proto-proto baseball as baseball, and put an "extant" in front of image,**** well sure. Though there's no base in sight, various historians of sport have identified this game as a version of "stool ball" or "stump ball", which was baseball played with only one base, where the object was for the pitcher to hit a stump or a stool or other handy protrusion with the ball while the batter protected it by batting away the pitcher's balls.  Each player stood on or near what was essentially a "base" If the batter made contact, he was expected to run around the pitcher's base and back to his own.  Various fielders could catch the batted ball and throw the ball at the stool while the batter is occupied running. We have no clue how the scoring might have worked, but apparently the game was co-ed and the sort of thing you'd play at an Easter festival. 
[More - including medieval monkeys at bat]

The more I learn about the Middle Ages the more I realize people were much like us.  Only hungrier, colder, sicker, shorter, more ignorant...

Forget "sports drinks" or "energy drinks"...

Get a load of the power of the "civilization drink": milk.

One of the reason the sight of Visigoths coming over the hill toward them was pretty unnerving to Roman soldiers was the dudes were huge - relatively speaking.  And all because of a tiny evolutionary mutation and the ultimate secret weapon - the cow.

The new settlers also had something of a miracle food at their disposal. They produced fresh milk, which, as a result of a genetic mutation, they were soon able to drink in large quantities. The result was that the population of farmers grew and grew.

These striking insights come from biologists and chemists. In a barrage of articles in professional journals like Nature and BMC Evolutionary Biology, they have turned many of the prevailing views upside down over the course of the last three years.

The most important group is working on the "Leche" project (the name is inspired by the Spanish word for milk), an association of 13 research institutes in seven European Union countries. The goal of the project is to genetically probe the beginnings of butter, milk and cheese.

An unusual circumstance has made this research possible in the first place. Homo sapiens was originally unable to digest raw milk. Generally, the human body only produces an enzyme that can break down lactose in the small intestine during the first few years of life. Indeed, most adults in Asia and Africa react to cow's milk with nausea, flatulence and diarrhea.

But the situation is different in Europe, where many people carry a minute modification of chromosome 2 that enables them to digest lactose throughout their life without experiencing intestinal problems. The percentage of people with this modification is the highest among Britons and Scandinavians (see graphic). [More of a must-read for any dairy producer]

 

[Click to embiggen]

The ability to tap into this mother-lode (heh) of protein and fats helps me understand why dairy farming is deeply woven into the tradition of  agriculture of Northern Europe. (Check out the slopes they graze in Switzerland, for one extreme).  Milk literally made them the people they are today.

 [Source]

Not only could cows utilize some pretty marginal terrain, but the invention of cheese provided a storage and nutrient concentration method that further exploited this food source.  This evolutionary advantage we take for granted is also one big headache for the global future of lactose-purveyors as much of the population growth is not occurring among milk drinkers.

Experts disagree on the extent, but it also adds into the reason the Dutch (big dairy consumers) have shot past Americans as the tallest people in the world, although superior pre- and post-natal and genetics care are likely much bigger factors.

While obesity has tripled in many Western European countries since the 1980s, the Dutch keep growing upwards. The average height is now 6 feet 1 inch for Dutch men and 5 feet 7 inches for Dutch women. So why are the Dutch so tall? Theories abound. An often-heard argument is the Dutch love of dairy and their protein-rich diet, but there are also serious studies that look at height differences, and the Dutch pop up time and again in many of them. [more]

 

Milk - it does a people good.

Our ethanol connection...

I get castigated everytime I suggest the Founding Fathers were mere mortals like...well, me, but this news leads me to think we could have found some common ground.

A more interesting data series is per capita alcohol consumption, which covers a longer period and indicates how heavily people were drinking. In their indispensable 1982 book Drinking in America, Mark Edward Lender and James Kirby Martin report that "the period from the 1790s to the early 1830s was probably the heaviest drinking era in the nation's history." They estimate that per capita alcohol consumption among people 15 or older rose from 5.8 gallons in 1790 to 7.1 gallons in 1810 and remained at that level until 1830 at least. (These numbers convert various alcoholic beverages to gallons of pure ethanol.) By contrast, per capita consumption was about 2.1 gallons in 1850 and about 2.3 in 2007.
Despite what today looks like heavy drinking, Lender and Martin write, "America's colonists were not problem drinkers—at least not if social policy directed at alcohol abuse is any indication....The provincials heard little public outcry against alcoholism….A general lack of anxiety over alcohol problems was one of the most significant features of drinking in the colonial era." That changed after the American Revolution, when social and economic changes simultaneously loosened the communal constraints that had deterred drunken misbehavior, created anxieties that encouraged people to drink more, and made drinking throughout the day (especially at work) more problematic. [More]

Our species' long history with fermented anything is conveniently forgotten too often, IMHO.  The desire for an altered state of consciousness (being inebriated) has propelled economics of such events as the Whiskey Rebellion and colored the history of almost every culture.

There was also the issue that water was generally bad for your health.  Wine and beers at least had alcohol to partially offset the inherent contamination present in virtually all water save pristine lakes and streams. Only after safe water was available for most did such moral movements as the Prohibition gain steam.

Alcoholic beverages have long served as thirst quenchers. Water pollution is far from new; to the contrary, supplies have generally been either unhealthful or questionable at best. Ancient writers rarely wrote about water, except as a warning (Ghaliounqui, 1979, p. 3). Travelers crossing what is now Zaire in 1648 reported having to drink water that resembled horse's urine. In the late eighteenth century most Parisians drank water from a very muddy and often chemically polluted Seine (Braudel, 1967, pp. 159-161). Coffee and tea were not introduced into Europe until the mid-seventeenth century, and it was another hundred or more years before they were commonly consumed on a daily basis (Austin, 1985, pp. 251, 254,351, 359,366).
Another important function of alcohol has been therapeutic or medicinal. Current research suggests that the moderate consumption of alcohol is preferable to abstinence. It appears to reduce the incidence of coronary heart disease (e.g., Razay, 1992; Jackson et al., 1991; Klatsky et al., 1990, p. 745; Rimm et al., 1991; Miller et al., 1990), cancer (e.g., Bofetta & Garfinkel, 1990) and osteoporosis (e.g., Gavaler & Van Thiel, 1992), among many other diseases and conditions, and to increase longevity (e.g., DeLabry et al., 1992). It has clearly been a major analgesic, and one widely available to people in pain. Relatedly, it has provided relief from the fatigue of hard labor.
Not to be underestimated is the important role alcohol has served in enhancing the enjoyment and quality of life. It can serve as a social lubricant, can provide entertainment, can facilitate relaxation, can provide pharmacological pleasure and can enhance the flavors of food (Gastineau et al., 1979, p. xx).
While alcohol has always been misused by a minority of drinkers, it has clearly proved to be beneficial to most. In the words of the founding Director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, "... alcohol has existed longer than all human memory. It has outlived generations, nations, epochs and ages. It is a part of us, and that is fortunate indeed. For although alcohol will always be the master of some, for most of us it will continue to be the servant of man" [More]

At any rate, the more we know about our forebears the more we can realize how extraordinary their accomplishments were compared to many eras.  Despite being folks like us they seemed able to advance the cause of man and civilization when the moment presented itself.

Not so different...

I was going to put this in the next Junkbox, but my reaction to it grew.  So FWIW: the earliest surviving painted portraits.

It is the remarkable realism, almost photographic, that separates these portraits from Egyptian wall paintings or even Medieval art.

The portraits were attached to burial mummies at the face, from which almost all have now been detached. They usually depict a single person, showing the head, or head and upper chest, viewed frontally. The background is always monochrome, sometimes with decorative elements. In terms of artistic tradition, the images clearly derive more from Graeco-Roman traditions than Egyptian ones. The population of the Faiyum area was greatly enhanced by a wave of Greek immigrants during the Ptolemaic period, initially by veteran soldiers who settled in the area.
Two groups of portraits can be distinguished by technique: one of encaustic (wax) paintings, the other in tempera. The former are usually of higher quality.
About 900 mummy portraits are known at present. The majority were found in the necropoleis of Faiyum. Due to the hot dry Egyptian climate, the paintings are frequently very well preserved, often retaining their brilliant colours seemingly unfaded by time. [More]

These were folks like us.

Bring back bear-baiting, too...

Obviously way too many people took those Renaissance Fairs too seriously, because they are trying to make jousting the new Extreme Sport.

Jousting was popular enough to last for more than 400 years in Europe, but these days there are only some 200 competitive jousters around the world, about 30 of whom are in North America. (A couple hundred more perform at Renaissance fairs and festivals but do not compete.) The basic concept is unchanged from medieval times: two armor-clad opponents charge at each other on horses while wielding 11-foot-long wooden lances. The goal is to break your lance on your opponent’s shield or on a metal plate bolted to his chest called a grand guard, but unhorsings are an added thrill and — in the North American style of competition — the surest way to rack up points.
At the Pensacola championships — as will be the case later this summer at the heavy-armor tournament at the Longs Peak Scottish-Irish Highlands Festival in Estes Park, Colo. — two competitors began at opposite ends of a 180-foot list, or jousting field, with a rope barrier called a tilt rail running down the middle of it. A match consists of four passes, and a panel of four judges awards points after each pass: 1 point for a strike to the gridded grand guard, 5 for a broken lance and 10 for an unhorsing. Over the course of the three-day championships, there were four separate tournaments — one on Friday, two on Saturday and one on Sunday — with a winner of each and an overall champion at the end.
The championship event was created by two men, both professional jousters, who are on a mission to transform jousting from Renaissance-fair entertainment to arena sport. One is Shane Adams, the knight who unhorsed Tolle. The other is Charlie Andrews, a Hummer-driving former bull rider who spent six years as a Navy Seal and is hard-pressed to utter a sentence that doesn’t include at least one profanity. “I personally believe that Shane Adams and myself are the two best jousters in the world, period,” he says. “Anybody wants to argue it, you can come out and joust us or shut your pie hole.”
A member of the Chukchansi tribe in California, Andrews is 6-foot-4 and about 250 pounds, with tattoos of his spirit animals ringing his thick biceps. He doesn’t joust because he’s attracted to romantic notions of honor and chivalry or because he has an affinity for the medieval period. (“I don’t know jack about history, nor do I care,” he says.) He does it because he considers jousting one of the most extreme sports ever invented, and he likes doing things that most other people can’t or won’t do.
“I like violent sports,” says Andrews, who also participates in mixed martial arts. “I like hitting you. I like getting hit. I like competing man to man to see who the better man is that day.” [More than you may want to know about modern jousting]

I pause to let the testosterone clear from the air....

Well, could we be sending little Jacob (and Isabella) to jousting camp soon?

I don't think so. And neither do some guys who really understand the history involved.

And this is to be expected.  We just don't have the built-in communal language or familiar reference points to elevate jousting to a popular sport once more. We're too far removed from horses and lances to be able to tell what makes a skilled rider different than an adequate one or a good hit different than a loud one. Sure, we can appreciate a dude getting knocked off a horse, but that does not a sport make. If NASCAR really were just people waiting for a car crash to happen, it wouldn't be popular enough to make building all those nice tracks worthy anyone's while, and the TV networks would never show up, not even ESPN 32¾.

I understand the fun of reenactment for reenacting's sake, but I don't understand why anyone would think that people outside the immediate circle of reenactors and associated enthusiasts would much care. If jousting really wants to make the break to modern popularity, it probably needs to just drop the medievalism in anything other than name only. Sure, call the athletes knights and let them go by Sir This or Lady That if you want, name their teams or squads or whatever after medievalish things, but drop any pretense of reenacting. Leave the shiny plate mail and the fake British accents to your mascot on the sidelines. Gear up in ballistic nylon and kevlar and figure out a style of helmet that'll protect while still letting people see some of your face. Devise new rules that have little to do with whatever the 13th-Century Sir Whatsisface would have called proper. Add electronic sensors and an elaborate point-scoring system if you can't come up with any other way to judge who's the best than who gets knocked off the horse first.

Frankly, the idea of jousting with several-hundred-year-old weapons and armor would probably be pretty insulting to any of the knights who actually made their living jousting in the Middle Ages. They didn't technologically handicap themselves in order to meet some artificial standard of authenticity. If there had been some new affordable type of stirrup that kept them from breaking their ankles when dragged around by their horses after unseated by their opponents, they would have been queuing up around the block to get themselves one. [ More]

Of course I didn't think tattooing would become popular either.

Watch some jousting here (they didn't allow embedding).

[They rode sheep?!]

Historians ruin everything...

Our fondness for history as we-want-it-to-have-been is constantly being trampled by persnickety researchers armed with little more than facts and evidence.  The latest take-down for me is the Pony Express.

That the Pony Express generated such income would have gladdened the hearts of the venture’s original founders—William Hepburn Russell, Alexander Majors, and William Bradford Waddell—who never made a dime from the business. The heroic, nearly 2,000-mile delivery of mail across the country hemorrhaged money, from the first day a rider saddled up until the click of the transcontinental telegraph shut it down 78 weeks later. The Pony Express was one of the most colossal and celebrated failures in American business history, but its legacy, as the sale at Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries suggests, remains an enduring and revered piece of the Old West myth. Even today, old-timers in the remotest parts of the American West still speak of “the days of the Pony.” Few figures in that region’s history loom larger than those true riders of the purple sage, whom Mark Twain called “the swift phantoms of the desert.”

In its own day, the Express caused quite a stir. By beginning where the train and the telegraph line stopped at St. Joseph, Missouri, in 1860, the service closed an information gap that had long frustrated both coasts. The Pacific slope was a far country in those days: mail from the East took not days or weeks but many months to cross the nation by stagecoach or to be shipped around the stormy Cape Horn or through the fever-ridden Isthmus of Panama. The Pony cut the time of moving information overland to 10 days or less, and on this count at least it proved a spectacular success. It initially cost customers $5 to send one letter, although rates would crumble as the firm desperately tried to generate business. Still, that was a lot of money in 1860, when a laborer in Kansas might make only that in a week. Patrons of the fast service thus tended to be banks, newspapers, and officials, including diplomats. “[The riders] got but little frivolous correspondence to carry,” noted Mark Twain.

“No enterprise of the kind in its day was ever celebrated on the Pacific coast with more enthusiasm than the arrival of the first pony express,” wrote historians Frank A. Root and William E. Connelley in The Overland Stage to California (1901). “News of the arrival of the first mail across the continent by the fleet pony was published with flaming head-lines in a number of the coast evening papers.” Huge crowds assembled in San Francisco to welcome the brave rider who had brought news so quickly from so far. Only a few observers made negative comments, claiming that the entire venture was a mere publicity stunt designed to drum up more lucrative mail contracts.

The privately financed Pony Express was hastily thrown together in late 1859 and began operations on the evening of April 3, 1860. After the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad train arrived late that day with the mail, a rider and his horse were ferried across the Missouri, heading west into history. That cargo’s goal was Sacramento, capital of the state of California, which had been rocketed into the Union on the heels of the gold rush just 10 years before. At the same time, another rider had set out eastward from California.

Piggybacking on existing posts along the Oregon Trail and other established overland routes, the Pony Express set up operations with approximately 190 way stations about 10 to 12 miles apart. Someone had been hired to feed and care for the horses at each stop. The average station, wrote the celebrated British explorer Richard Burton, who followed the route while the Pony was running, “is about as civilized as the Galway shanty [Burton loathed the Irish], or the normal dwelling-place in Central Equatorial Africa.” The floor of the “Robber’s Roost” station in present-day eastern Nevada was “a mass of soppy black soil strewed with ashes, gobs of meat offals, and other delicacies,” and the roof leaked, too. There were no real windows but what he described as “portholes.” “Beneath the framework were heaps of rubbish, saddles, cloths, harness, and straps, sacks of wheat, oats, meal, and potatoes, defended from the ground by underlying logs, and dogs nestled where they found room.” The station had running water, he noted—an actual spring leaked continually inside, maintaining “a state of eternal mud.”

Riders frequently changed horses at most stations, usually riding no more than 100 miles before being relieved. Though speed was required, they rarely galloped, an activity particularly hazardous when traversing deserts pocked with prairie-dog holes that could easily break a horse’s leg. On the plains the riders often had to navigate around the still enormous herds of buffalo. Keep moving, the riders were instructed, but take no unnecessary risks. [A little more after my exceptionally liberal excerpting]

C'mon - they weren't galloping flat out?  No wonder the trains won.

But on the other hand they can help us begin to grasp some of the true horrors of history. I read long ago about the self-inflicted famine the Chinese people suffered during the Great Leap Forward (which I actually remember reading about in Weekly Reader in grade school). 

One of the most horrifying tales uncovered by Yang in the course of his research came from Xinyang, a small city in Henan province, where the famine was at its worst. When he visited, Yang was not directed to the official archives as he’d expected, but instead sent to meet Yu Dehong, a retired cadre from the local waterworks bureau. In their own quiet way, the Xinyang officials might have been giving Yang a helping hand.
Yu was what you might call the local history crank – except the stories he nagged people about did not concern municipal landmarks or the arrival of the city’s first steam train. As the political secretary to the Xinyang mayor in the late 1950s, Yu was an eyewitness to a mini-Holocaust in his hometown, its surrounding villages and even his own family.
Mao had ordered Chinese farms to be collectivised in the late 1950s and forced many peasants who had once productively grown grain to put their energies into building crude backyard blast furnaces instead. As part of this “Great Leap Forward”, Mao’s acolytes predicted that food production would be doubled, even tripled in a few years and that steel production would soon surpass output in advanced western countries. The new rural communes began reporting whopping, fake harvests to meet Mao’s demand for record grain output. When the government took its share of the grain based on the exaggerated figures, little was left for ordinary people to eat.
According to the most conservative calculations, one million people out of a population of eight million in Xinyang died between 1958 and 1961. Yu was often gently advised to drop the issue in the years afterwards. Instead, he wrote a detailed account in his own name and submitted it to the local party secretary. “Some people asked me, ‘Haven’t you committed enough mistakes?’” he said. “But if the official history won’t include this material, then my private history will. I have the materials to back me up.”
Xinyang was generally blessed with good harvests, unlike much of Henan, known as the “land of beggars” for its history of impoverishment and famines. But any advantage the city had was undermined by the officials who ruled over it. At the time, Henan and Xinyang were overseen by radical leftists fanatically devoted to Mao who viewed the grain harvest solely through the prism of violent class struggle. Yu remembers vividly a series of surreal meetings in 1959, when the 18 counties in Xinyang city reported their harvest for the year. After a furious debate in which each county reported wildly exaggerated figures, they settled on a figure about three to four times the real size of the harvest. The distortion was more than enough to set in train the disaster that followed. It was not long before mass starvation began to grip the city and surrounding areas.
As winter turned to spring in the early months of 1960, a thick smell of death began to rise out of the landscape. Yu remembers the change of season clearly. Walking around the semi-rural enclave, he saw thousands of corpses strewn alongside the roads and in the fields. During the winter, the bodies had hardened and set in the cramped, bent shapes in which people had died. They looked like they had been taken out of a freezer and then randomly scattered across the landscape. Some of the corpses were clothed, but the garments had been ripped from others, and flesh was missing from their buttocks and legs. In the first days of spring, the corpses began to thaw, emitting a sickly smell that permeated the everyday life of a shell-shocked local citizenry.
The surviving residents protested later that they had been too short-handed and exhausted to give the dead the dignity of a burial. They blamed the disfigured corpses on hungry dogs, whose eyes, according to rumours which swept the area, had turned red after gnawing at human flesh. “That is not true,” said Yu. “All the dogs had already been eaten by humans. How could there be dogs left at the time?” The corpses hadn’t been eaten by ravenous animals. They had been cannibalised by local residents. Many people in Xinyang over that winter, and the two that followed, owed their survival to consuming dead members of their families, or stray corpses they could get their hands on. [More]

Of all the many benefits of the Internet, it may be the powerful corrective action of meticulous fact-checking (which essentially describes historians for me) that yields the biggest payback. Our ability to imagine and reshape history to our own ends is famous, and at least we will have access to other resources to inform our opinions.

If history is alive in China, it can be alive everywhere.  It makes me hopeful for all of us. 

A guy gets lonely out on the savanna...

For a very abstruse evolutionary anthropological paper, it got pretty sensational coverage:

Modern humans and Neanderthals had sex across the species barrier, according to a leading geneticist who is overseeing a project to compare their genomes.

Professor Svante Paabo, director of genetics at the renowned Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, will shortly publish his analysis of the entire Neanderthal genome, using DNA retrieved from fossils. He aims to compare it with the genomes of modern humans and chimpanzees to work out the ancestry of all three species.

Modern humans arrived in Europe from Africa about 40,000 years ago to find Neanderthals already living there. The two species then co-existed for 10,000-12,000 years before Neanderthals died out — a fact that has caused endless academic speculation about whether they interbred. [More]

Of course the operative phrase - from the media viewpoint - is "had sex".  And to be sure that is one quick and easy explanation for what produced the evidence in question.  Plus it got enough attention to show up my blog, as well.

But maybe there are slightly more prosaic ways this could happen.

That's not to say that the hybridization hypothesis is without merit. Indeed, the authors did a damned good job presenting their case, and their reasoning is sound. The point I'm making is that sex isn't the only option. And if hybridization did occur to the extent they predict, we're likely to find more hints at its existence. Analyzing the DNA of some of the suspected hybrid fossils, for example, might settle it once and for all. Or we may never know if the gene variants that are similar between Eurasians and Neandertals are due to sex, selection, or substructure. Time may have simply destroyed too much of the evidence for us to be sure.
What is certain is that sex sells, which is why the only thing the media is talking about when it comes to this paper is that ancient people may have shagged their evolutionary siblings. It's just so damned frustrating because the sexual exploits of early humans is only the tiniest piece of this huge discovery. Oh, the things we may learn from this genome about our own evolution, and our closest relatives! Whether we had sex with Neandertals or not, the work this team has done will change forever our understanding of hominid evolutionary history. The impact this genome will have on the science of human evolution is huge. The breakthrough science, the future implications of this work - that's what the media should be talking about - not ancient sex scandals. [More]

In order to crowd out Lawrence Taylor, the hung Parliament, the BP spill, and "WTF" Thursday at the NYSE, a researcher better have something more than "early humans show mysterious genomic clues".

Sex sells. Period.

Mommy, where did I come from?...

In my case, England.  From brilliant site that can display where your (English) surname was most prevalent in 1881.

For "Phipps"

[via fallows]

Sentences you don't hear too often...

Regarding early European farmers:

Studies of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is inherited maternally, tell a different story. The majority of European mtDNA haplogroups appear to have arrived on the continent during the Palaeolithic.

Dr Patricia Balaresque, first author of the study, said: "In total, this means that more than 80% of European Y chromosomes descend from incoming farmers. In contrast, most maternal genetic lineages seem to descend from hunter-gatherers.

"To us, this suggests a reproductive advantage for farming males over indigenous hunter-gatherer males during the switch from hunting and gathering, to farming - maybe, back then, it was just sexier to be a farmer."[More][My emphasis]

Deep inside, I think we all know this still to be true.

In the beginning...

It may not have been agriculture that propelled the civilization of humans.  It seems before we decided to try sedentary farming, we built temples to worship.

Standing on the hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins. Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built. The site isn't just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization. In fact, Schmidt thinks the temple itself, built after the end of the last Ice Age by hunter-gatherers, became that ember—the spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed.
...
This theory reverses a standard chronology of human origins, in which primitive man went through a "Neolithic revolution" 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. In the old model, shepherds and farmers appeared first, and then created pottery, villages, cities, specialized labor, kings, writing, art, and—somewhere on the way to the airplane—organized religion. As far back as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, thinkers have argued that the social compact of cities came first, and only then the "high" religions with their great temples, a paradigm still taught in American high schools.

Religion now appears so early in civilized life—earlier than civilized life, if Schmidt is correct—that some think it may be less a product of culture than a cause of it, less a revelation than a genetic inheritance. The archeologist Jacques Cauvin once posited that "the beginning of the gods was the beginning of agriculture," and Göbekli may prove his case. [More]

It was a comforting and blatantly self-serving conceit that it all began with farmers. While this site is not without controversy (read the whole article), it still upends much of the sequence of human development. The earliest evidence of farming barely reaches to 10,000 BC.

Still, I have to wonder if the story ends here. The more we know about our very earliest colleagues, the more we realize we underestimate their ingenuity and productivity.  Maybe we'll be leapfrogging the dates of various steps of civilization for some time to come.

Dept. of Duh!...

Maybe I'm missing something really important here but did we really need a study to prove the railroads made agriculture boom?

During the 1850s, land in U.S. farms surged by more than 100 million acres while almost 50 million acres of land were transformed from their raw, natural state into productive farmland. The time and expense of transforming this land into a productive resource represented a significant fraction of domestic capital formation at the time and was an important contributor to American economic growth. Even more impressive, however, was the fact that almost half of these total net additions to cropland occurred in just seven Midwestern states which comprised barely less than one-eighth of the land area of the country at that time. Using a new GIS-based transportation database linked to county-level census, we estimate that at least a quarter (and possibly two-thirds or more) of this increase can be linked directly to the coming of the railroad to the region. Farmers responded to the shrinking transportation wedge and rising revenue productivity by rapidly expanding the area under cultivation and these changes, in turn, drove rising farm and land values. [More]

In fairness, I did not plunk down $5 for the paper on principle, but just looking at the age of towns in IL for one example, the ones on the IL Central tend to be the oldest.  The railroads also prompted the immigration of millions of Northern Europeans to the Midwest and forever altered its previously Yankee culture.

That influence was by far the more important for America, IMHO.

In a year where I am cursing my luck...

Maybe I should consider how lucky my species has been.

Instead, moderns were very, very lucky—so lucky that Finlayson calls what happened "survival of the weakest." About 30,000 years ago, the vast forests of Eurasia began to retreat, leaving treeless steppes and tundra and forcing forest animals to disperse over vast distances. Because they evolved in the warm climate of Africa before spreading into Europe, modern humans had a body like marathon runners, adapted to track prey over such distances. But Neanderthals were built like wrestlers. That was great for ambush hunting, which they practiced in the once ubiquitous forests, but a handicap on the steppes, where endurance mattered more. This is the luck part: the open, African type of terrain in which modern humans evolved their less-muscled, more-slender body type "subsequently expanded so greatly" in Europe, writes Finlayson. And that was "pure chance."

Because Neanderthals were not adept at tracking herds on the tundra, they had to retreat with the receding woodlands. They made their last stand where pockets of woodland survived, including in a cave in the Rock of Gibraltar. There, Finlayson and colleagues discovered in 2005, Neanderthals held on at least 2,000 years later than anywhere else before going extinct, victims of bad luck more than any evolutionary failings, let alone any inherent superiority of their successors. [More]

I'm not sure I buy this theory 100%, but I do find as I age gracelessly, the role of sheer chance is much overlooked.  Many work harder and smarter than we do.  Many are more talented and visionary.  But they don't climb to the top.

Worse still, many who do seem unlikely competitors.  This could be a convenient excuse for bad results, but I think it could better prompt us to more correctly allocate credit for our own progress.

Piece by piece...

We find our history. 

The stunning discovery of "Ardi"was the product of careful work - and a lot of it.  Like, 15 years or so.

At 4.4 million years of age, Ardipithecus ramidus, which scientists have nicknamed Ardi, is now the oldest skeleton of a human ancestor since the discovery of Lucy, the 3.2 million-year-old female hominid skeleton discovered in Ethiopia in 1974.

Until now, Lucy was believed to have shared a common ancestor with prehistoric apes and to have evolved from there.

But scientists say their new analysis of the older Ardipithecus skeleton suggests that chimps and humans evolved separately from an even older common relative. [More]

Most interesting to me was the development of human ancestral bodies to bipedal, upright locomotion. Here is one of the best living science writers, Carl Zimmer:

Ardipithecus’s feet were mosaics too. The four little toes were adapted for walking on the ground. Yet the big toe was still opposable, much like our thumbs. This sort of big toe helped Ardipithecus move through the trees much more adeptly than Lucy.
But Ardipithecus could not climb through trees as well as, say, chimpanzees. Chimpanzees have lots of adaptations in their arms and shoulders to let them hang from branches and climb vertically up trees with incredible speed. Ardipithecus had hands were not stiffened enough to let them move like chimpanzees. Ardipithecus probably moved carefully through the trees, using its hands and feet all at once to grip branches.
Just a Reminder: We Didn’t Evolve From Chimpanzees
Chimpanzees may be our closest living relatives, but that doesn’t mean that our common ancestor with them looked precisely like a chimp. In fact, a lot of what makes a chimpanzee a chimpanzee evolved after our two lineages split roughly 7 million years ago. Ardipithecus offers strong evidence for the newness of chimps.

Only after our ancestors branched off from chimpanzees, Lovejoy and his colleagues argue, did chimpanzee arms evolve the right shape for swinging through trees. Chimpanzee arms are also adapted for knuckle-walking, while Ardipithecus didn’t have the right anatomy to lean comfortably on their hands. Chimpanzees also have peculiar adaptations in their feet that make them particularly adept in trees. For example, they’re missing a bone found in monkeys and humans, which helps to stiffen our feet. The lack of this bone makes chimpanzee feet even more flexible in trees, but it also makes them worse at walking on the ground. Ardipithecus had that same foot bone we have. This pattern suggests that chimpanzees lost the bone after their split with our ancestors, becoming even better at tree-climbing. [More]

This research was timely for me as I just finished a V-E-R-Y tedious 36 lectures by Brian M. Fagan on Human Prehistory and the First Civilizations.  I have written before about the audio courses that make my weekly commute to South bend to tape USFR marginally productive.  This one was a pain, but did prepare me oddly for the time frames used for early human development.

Good science takes time, and the years invested in this effort will move us slightly closer to understanding who we are and where we came from.