By: The Scribe on Thursday, July 19, 2007
It was around 20,000 years ago – give or take several thousand years, of course – that the species of people known as Neanderthals breathed their last. Although they had co-existed for thousands of years with what are referred to as “modern humans”, scientists have been perplexed for decades as to why humans survived and Neanderthals died out. Everything from genocide to technology to social organization has been suggested, however more recent evidence seems to point to a much simpler explanation: they were just too cold… and a little too stubborn.
It seems that Neanderthals’ inability to adapt to climate change led to a breakdown of subsistence patterns and technological advances, which meant that they refused to alter their hunting patterns when the large game animals they were used to hunting eventually fled south. The colder temperatures saw migrations of bison, red deer, and other large animals, and the surrounding vegetation slowly began to disappear. The previously lush environment of Europe soon became a sparse steppe with patches of desert, incapable of supporting more plant life and thus no longer providing hunters with the forest vegetation they had previously relied on to sneak up on their prey.
Without camouflage, stalking wild game became much trickier – and while modern humans adapted their technology to make use of a wider range of resources, Neanderthals simply did not manage to develop the skills needed to survive in a half-steppe, half-desert environment. Even though Neanderthals typically didn’t live past their 30s, as revealed through skeletal evidence, the new hunting environment was much more harsh and treacherous.
As the success rates for hunts dropped, so did the food supply – and in return, the mortality rates quickly increased. As people ate less, they became more susceptible to illness and reproduction dropped significantly; as the Neanderthals slowly starved to death, fewer babies were born and the population numbers began to dwindle.
Realistically, Neanderthals possessed the same level of cold resistance as modern humans, so it wasn’t the temperature that directly led to the species’ demise. Both Neanderthals and modern humans had mastered fire and made similar tools, cared for their sick, and had elaborate ritual practices and a developed appreciation for art. Instead, the Neanderthals’ demise resulted from an inability to change and adapt as the climate forced them to – whether this was a deliberate attempt to cling to tradition or a physical incapability remains unknown.
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Tomorrow: Mayan Looseleaf
By: The Scribe on Wednesday, July 18, 2007
While it is often taken for granted that Italy holds the title of Pasta Inventor, a discovery of the world’s oldest noodles has turned this belief on its head. Underneath 10 feet of sediment, at a small archaeological site near the Yellow River in northwestern China, the dried remains of thin, yellow noodles about 50cm long were found inside of a clay pot.
It seems that the noodles were inside of someone’s bowl for dinner, when a sudden catastrophe caused the settlement’s inhabitants to try and flee the area. This theory comes from the discovery of a number of skeletons at the site that were strewn about in various positions as though the people were attempting to escape the area.
The most likely explanation is a catastrophic earthquake that caused severe flooding from the river – enveloping the settlement and in the process, inverting someone’s bowl of noodles. This unique and unlikely combination of factors caused a vacuum space between the ground soil and the bottom of the bowl, preserving the noodles from decomposition!
The noodles are very similar in appearance to La-Mian noodles, a traditional Chinese dish made by repeatedly pulling and stretching the noodle dough by hand. It is a very labor-intensive process, suggesting that the community that made these ancient noodles already had a well-established sense of cuisine and cooking practices. Scientific analysis of the noodles revealed that they were made from millet grains, unlike modern noodles that are made using wheat flour.
Prior to the discovery, the earliest known record of noodles comes from a book written during the East Han Dynasty in China, dating somewhere between 25 and 220 AD – however, there has always been some debate as to whether the Chinese, Arabs or Italians invented the food first. With the discovery of these noodles, all signs point to China as the first noodle production powerhouse.
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Tomorrow: Coatless Neanderthals
By: The Scribe on Tuesday, July 17, 2007
It was around 1100 AD that an obscure native culture, known as the Gallina, lived in a small area of New Mexico’s northwest. And it was around 1275 AD that the entire culture suddenly vanished without a trace.
Until recently, less than one hundred skeletons from the Gallina culture have been found, but a new cache of seven skeletons has added a twist to the tale of this vanishing group of people. The bones of five adults, one child, and one infant all show evidence of violent murder. One skeleton had a fractured skull, jaw, forearm, pelvis and thighbone, and several ribs were also cracked. Another body had cut marks on the upper arm, similar to the kind of marks made by an axe. The skull of the child, probably about two years old at the time of death, had been crushed.
Two of the bodies were also arranged in an unusual way: an adult male and a female were face down, on their knees, with their heads bent back far enough to rest between their shoulder blades. The female’s head had been snapped back so far that a piece of her vertebrae had been forced into the back of her skull. This could have been the result of a deliberate pose, or it is possible that the individuals were crouched defensively when their necks were broken. This kind of position also shows that whoever killed these people did not bother to bury them – they simply carried out the murders and moved on.
Another unusual feature of the murder scene was a burnt pit house quite near to where the bodies were found. According to reports from previous Gallina sites, in 90% of cases, attackers tended to throw their Gallina victims inside their own houses and then burn the houses on top of them. However at this site, the bodies had simply been thrown into a pile. According to archaeologists working at the site, it is extremely likely that more bodies and burnt houses are nearby – though whether they will show such evidence of brutal murder is uncertain.
Although very little is known about this culture, two of the adult skulls showed distinct evidence of culturally-induced cranial deformation – they have an unusual flattened shape which has not show up anywhere else in the American southwest. It is entirely possible that distinctive internal traits such as these were the cause of violent conflicts with other groups of Gallina people in the area, or it may have also been the result of drastic climate change in the region.
In fact, one of the main theories on the massacre site is that the Gallina culture’s disappearance was the result of genocide. Around 1100 AD, shortly after the culture appears in the archaeological record, the southwest of New Mexico was struck with severe drought. By about 1150 AD, the water table had begun to drop, preventing inhabitants of the region from growing as much corn as was needed to survive – it is possible that this could have been the source of stress between villages, as they struggled to ensure each group had enough resources. With competition for water and arable land, it is possible that internal strife took a turn for the worse – resulting in mass killings for the sake of food and water.
A second theory rests on the known evidence that other established cultural groups in the area, such as the Anasazi, abandoned their own massive settlements during the drought. If established groups like the Anasazi saw the new Gallina people as a threat – new, alone, without any political allies – they may have done what they thought they needed to do to restore the land’s harmony. After all, if they had no problems growing their corn for hundreds of years – and then a new group of people came into the area, and all of a their sudden corn wasn’t growing anymore – who were they going to blame?
Although the fate of the Gallina culture remains undetermined, the horrendous violence inflicted on the most recent skeletons certainly shows that whatever happened, the conflict was swift and ruthless – and let toward a complete destruction of an entire culture.
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Tomorrow: 2000 year old noodles, yummy!
By: The Scribe on Monday, July 16, 2007
During the height of Mayan civilization, it seems that the court of every ruler had for itself a scribe: someone who could record the goings on of the king, write down the local history, and compose messages or important documents. Paintings of scribes from this time depict them as seated cross-legged on the floor, wearing a short kilt, a headpiece, and holding a pile of brushes, ready to write.
Court scribes would have been men of very high rank – well educated, with noble families in positions of power. Primarily, they were responsible for glorifying the king’s accomplishments through art and literature, and many of these pieces were used as public displays to strike awe into the hearts of the people – if one was to compare a Mayan scribe’s job with a modern career, he could be likened to a professional propagandist.
Though they lived in the lap of luxury for most of their lives, the downside of being a Mayan scribe came during times of war – after all, if the enemy can capture someone who has spent a great deal of time in the king’s court, hearing all of his strategies and plans, what better target than a royal scribe? In addition, any scribe who had devoted his life to another ruler’s glorification certainly wasn’t going to be of any use to an enemy king… and so, since Mayans could always use another excuse for a public spectacle, the attacking tribe would humiliate the scribe in a public ceremony, first mutilating him amidst the cheers of the watching crowd, leading toward his execution. One of the favored methods of torture was breaking a scribe’s fingers and tearing out his fingernails, though cutting the fatty pads of flesh off the fingers to the bone was also an option.
Although it may seem more viable for an enemy king to have simply retrained captured scribes and forced their allegiance, it was likely that the king would have had many of his own scribes already, and simply not needed the services of another. In addition, it also wasn’t unusual for a scribe to be related to the defeated king in some capacity or another, which would have made any forced allegiances questionable at best.
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Tomorrow: Ancient CSI: New Mexico
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