Frisbee Dog

Frisbee with Kidu, this week. I always thought it would be fun to have a dog to play frisbee with, and now I live with one who loves it.

Two Days Outside

I didn't write much last week for a bunch of reasons, including fatigure from a very busy weekend and spending all of Wednesday and Thursday out in the field. This was a continuation of the monitoring gig I wrote about several times last year, along the George Washington Memorial Parkway in northern Virginia.

The road is being rebuilt, and as part of this project they are repairing a bunch of outfalls (places where pipes that carry water under the road empty out). You can see from this picture that some of the outfalls are in bad shape. The GW Parkway parallels the Potomac River and a good portion of it lies within archaeological sites. So the National Park Service, which owns the Parkway, has required that work on the outfalls within archaeological sites be monitored by an archaeologist. Including this one.

The subcontractor responsible for rebuilding the outfalls is a Spanish-speaking outfit called RBA. Speaking no Spanish, I sometimes have trouble communicating with their crews; usually at least one has passable English, but not always. One interesting incident happened Tuesday when four guys were carrying an erosion control snake into position. (Photo from last year to show what this looks like.) The snakes are full of mulch, so they are heavy, and these guys were carrying one about 30 feet long down a pretty steep slope when one guy's belt came undone and his pants fell down. He stopped, which led to a sort of chain reaction along the line, everyone being brought up short and one guy falling down. Then somebody said something that must have been hilarious, because they all started laughing uproariously while they tried to get their train started again, stumbling, bumping into each other, laughing so hard they sometimes doubled over as they worked their way down the slope. Quite the scene.

The foreman of this crew was a guy I think of as the Stump Hater. He hates stumps and spends what seems to me like crazy amounts of time removing all stumps from anywhere he is working. The only time during this project I ever rushed out into the work zone was to stop this guy from digging out a stump in an artifact-rich area where he had no business digging. So of course while he was cutting a sort of ramp across the face of the steep slope above the outfall he spent most of the time digging out four stumps. Watching this I kept thinking that I would have done this ramp differently and used the largest stump to buttress the downhill side of the ramp, but no. Since this was all up on the fill prism for the roadway, built in the 1950s, it was none of my business, so I just watched as he methodically wreaked his vengeance on all nearby stumps.

I spent my breaks exploring. This site was about 50 yards from a stream called Pimmit Run, which looks like this.

Just downstream from my outfall were the remains of a late 19th-century estate that was torn down when the parkway was built, including terracing, specimen trees, and a strange little fishpond.

I was fascinated by the patterning of the dead reeds along the creek, but it would take a much better photographer than I to capture the effect.

On my birthday I found snowdrops blooming; one of the great things about a late February birthday is that nature often celebrates the day with early signs of spring.

A red-shouldered hawk gave me a severe screeching when I walked too close, but it was in no mood to be photographed so all I got was this surrealist blob.

All in all it was two pretty good days.

Links28 February2025

Olmec "earth monster" sculpture recently returned to Mexico

from a private American collection. This work dates

to between 800 and 400 BC and weighs a ton.

Just a note that friend-of-the-blog David and I saw Eivor in Silver Spring on the 23rd, and she was fabulous. Some of her music sounds more like casting a spell than anything else I know. Sadly that was the last stop on her North American tour, so it will be a while until we can see her again on this side of the Atlantic.

Major quantum computing announcement from Microsoft: press release, news story, 6-minute video from Sabine Hosenfelder, who says this is "good news, but not remotely as important as they try to make it appear."

The release of Andrew Tate divides Trump's supporters. Wasn't QAnon supposed to be about fighting sex trafficking?

Interesting essay on the thought of Harold Innis (1894-1952), a key thinker in media studies venerated by Marshall McLuhan, James Carey, and others in the field.

A new kind of artifact for your consideration, the "divination spoon;" this example comes from the Isle of Man, c. 400 to 100 BC.

Tweet summarizing the argument that James K. Polk was America's most successful president; since he had accomplished all his goals in one term he didn't even run for a second.

The headless female body found in an Irish bog, c. 350-1 BC. I'm wondering why they speak of DNA as something that may be done in the future, since these days a DNA test can be done in a couple of days.

Russell Vought's "radical constitutionalism" and the Trump agenda.

Tyler Cowen on the rate of AI adoption and why it may not have as much economic impact as you might hope. Under the "O-Ring model" it is often the weakest link that determines success, and "Soon enough, at least in the settings where AI is supposed to shine, the worst performer will be the humans." In some areas AI may soon not only be smarter than humans, but too smart for us to recognize how smart it is.

The landscape of Inca pilgrimages to mountain peaks.

Bronze Age timber circle ("Woodhenge") found in Denmark.

On Twitter/X, Richard Hanania compares the careers of Elon Musk before and after social media addiction.

Fascinating gold seal found by British metal detectorist.

The worst volume control contest, very amusing.

Against relevance mongering.

Important progress in treating pancreatic cancer using mRNA vaccines, the very technology RFK Jr. wants to ban. (Original paper, news story, Sloan-Kettering accouncement)

Not to mention that the whole "what we need is to leave healthier, more organic lives, not use drugs or vaccines" thing would make more sense if the Trump administration weren't rolling back Biden's bans on cancer-causing chemicals.

New frescoes showing the mysteries of Dionysus found in Pompeii.

Following in a long political tradition, Elon Musk promises that his actions will raise economic growth in the US to 3%, exactly the average of the last two Biden years.

Alex Tabarrok says the Trump's attack on wokeness in the universities will misfire because they are mostly cutting science funding and woke scientists aren't the problem.

New drug to extend the lives of dogs approved by the FDA. How many who get prescriptions will give the drug to their dogs and how many will keep it for themselves?

Immigration is surely a factor in the rise of German's AfD party, but the NY Times finds that a better predictor is out migration: the more people a district has lost in the past 25 years, the more likely it was to support AfD. A party for those left behind.

Feudalism as a contested concept. This debate has been going on among historians for a century without having any impact on the word's use by others, including economists and political scientists. My view is that the word "feudalism" is dubious in implying a coherent body of policy or ideas, but we need some word to describe the privatization of government power that was so widespread in medieval Europe. During my dissertation research I encountered a bizarre variety of people who claimed the right to beat people up and imprison them on behalf of the king, including two peasants who said they were the hereditary guardians of an irrigation ditch. In many traditional societies wealthy, important people wield a lot of power that is sort of theirs and sort of delegated from the king or emperor, but my impression is that medieval western Europe was a leader in this sort of thing.

Links 21 February 2025

Donkey from Karahan Tepe in Turkey, possibly 10,000 years

old, which would make it wild

Animal life in Florida storm sewers, including alligators. (NY Times, original paper) In my neighborhood, foxes and raccoons regularly use the sewers to get around.

Good Vox article on the advances in brain-to-text technology recently announced by Meta.

Kevin Drum summarizes the current House and Senate budget proposals, which are very far apart. And the radical differences between the House and Senate defense budgets and the ideas floated by Peter Hegseth.

Sabine Hossenfelder describes a new paper that applies mathematical rigor to the notion that the laws of our universe can evolve over time, 6-minute video. And here she again attacks the state of contemporary physics.

For the third year in a row, the winner of the NBA dunk content is a 6'2" white guy, Mac MacClung. Watch him dunk while jumping over a car. The biggest stars don't enter the contest any more because there are these dunk specialists who would beat them.

The NY Times runs a piece on why people don't dress up to go out for dinner any more which somehow fails to mention the world "class," even though it cites a self-proclaimed "expert" who wrote a book on the topic. People used to care a lot about their dress because how you dressed signified your social class, which was supremely important. Class is less important now, so how you dress is less important. There may be other factors but the class question is by far the main one.

Long-studied tomb in Egypt identified as that of Thutmose II, which all the news sites describe as the tomb being "discovered."

Kevin Bryan's Fifty Takes on world affairs (Twitter/X, Marginal Revolution)

Also at Marginal Revolution, more on Germany's industrial decline.

This Smithsonian article on Canyon de Chelly is interesting mainly because of the complexity of modern Native connections to the cliff dwellings, which are much contested among the Hopi (who consider themselves the descendants of the builders) and the Navajo, who may have killed the builders but were once besieged in the canyon by the US government. Also some information on what archaeologists are still trying to learn about these much-studied sites.

Scott Siskind, Lives of the Rationalist Saints, amusing.

The development of political thought and writing under the Ottoman Empire, summary at JSTOR with a free link to the academic article behind it.

Mobs in early medieval Europe.

The Well that Warned about Water's Spiritual Dangers

Remarkable puteal or well-head from Ostia, 2nd century AD, excavated in 1797 and now in the Met.

It depicts two cautionary tales concerning water. This is Narcissus falling in love with his reflection.

And this is Hylas being captured by nymphs, part of the cycle of tales around the Argonauts. Astonishing.

Marriage and Inequality in Denmark

Economic historian Gregory Clarke has been studying social mobility over the long term. He believes that it is very stable over time and across nations: "if we even go back to medieval England, rates of social mobility were just as high as they are now." 

One of the things he talked about in his interview with Tyler Cowen was assortative mating, that is, the tendency of people to marry those of their own social and educational status. He notes that in the US and Europe, husbands and wives resemble each other as much as siblings do. 

But it does produce more inequality, so if you’re worried about inequality in society, you don’t want assortative mating. The one way to correct a lot of inequality would just be to have much more random matching.

One of the remarkable things about Denmark is, education is essentially free until you’re age 24. They give you subsidies for your living expenses, for childcare provision — it’s all available. They’ve compressed the income distribution quite sharply.

There is this periodic survey of how well students do, the PISA measures. Nordic countries have not reduced the inequality of PISA measures compared to much more unequal societies like the United States. Again, it’s just interesting that a high degree of inequality is still found within these societies. It turns out that in Nordic societies, people are mating again very strongly assortatively even now. That is the thing that you would worry more about, that there is going to be this trade-off between assortative mating and the degree of inequality in a society. 

The major disagreement between Clarke and Cowen is about how much this matters. Cowen thinks relative inequality is less important than everybody's rising income, but Clarke thinks people mainly care about relative differences:

People are just as divided in terms of the types of groups that they meet with as they would be 500 years ago. So, I really want to stick with this idea that in a society like England, we have not in any way improved rates of social mobility in the last 300 years.

Which is an interesting question: could it be that Americans think the economy is terrible because they are comparing themselves to the rich, so we would be happier if we were all poorer but more equal? Does social media increase our dissatisfaction by constantly showing people happier and more beautiful than we are?

Proofs for God, Again

According to Scott Siskind, people on the Internet are once again debating proofs of the existence of God. He calls our attention to an alternative explanation, Max Tegmark’s mathematical universe hypothesis, which posits that all possible mathematical objects exist. I do not find this any more interesting than most proposals in this field. Siskind lists these various arguments for god's existence:

• Cosmological: Why is there something rather than nothing?
• Fine-tuning: Why are the values of various cosmological constants exactly perfect for life?
• Argument from comprehensibility: why is the universe so simple that we can understand it?
• First cause argument: All things must have a cause.
• Teleological argument: Why does the world have interesting structures like living things?

All of these, it seems to me, boil down to saying that the universe cannot be explained by its own laws; therefore, something outside the universe, or not bound by its laws, is required to explain it. To that I would say, first, that we do not understand the laws of the universe well enough to make that claim, and second, so what? If we cannot understand that thing outside our universe in any way, or know anything about its purposes or whatever, what difference does it make what we call it? What is the point in talking about it?

The universe is a mystery; we do not know why it is here or why it is the way it is or whether we have some special role in it. What does the word "god" add to that basic insight? If by "god" you mean, "whatever explains what we can't explain," I can't really object. I simply don't get why taking the old notion of "god" as a superpowerful sort of being and using it in this abstract way is helpful. 

Rather than toward Max Tegmark, I would direct those concerned with this problem to David Hume. In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion he created a dialogue between Philo, a skeptic, and Demea, a deist:

Philo the skeptic says that we cannot understand or know anything about a transcendent reality that explains or sustains the ongoing order of nature, while theists such as Demea say that we cannot understand or know anything about the transcendent reality, which is God, that explains or sustains the ongoing order of nature. Since the inserted clause does not help us in the least, the difference between them is merely verbal. And this is Hume's conclusion.

Nuraghe

Since we were just discussing whether the alleged 3rd millenium BC fortress at Cortijo Lobato in Spain might really be that old, I thought it might be worth looking at the most famous collection of old stone forts in the Mediterranean World: the Nuraghe of Sardinia.

There were once at least 7,000 of these stone structures on the island, and more than 500 survive to some height. They are generally dated to the Bronze Age, roughly 1900 to 1000 BC; the recent scholarship asserts that most of the major sites were established before 1500 BC. That doesn't mean, though, that everything you see was that old, since many were added to over time and dating stonework is an extremely trick business.

They were noted by Greek visitors, some of whom speculated that the builders were the descendants of Deadalus. At least, various online sources say so, although I have not yet identified the ancient source.

All contain at least one tower, many of them about 60 feet (20m) tall; one is supposed to have been 100 feet (30m) tall when measured in the eighteenth century.

Inside is a corbel-vaulted chamber or tholos, the same technique as was often used for Bronze Age tombs.

Some of them have double exterior walls with a winding staircase between them, like Pictish brochs.

The argument over what they were began in Roman times and continues. They look like the fortress homes of clan chiefs to me, but various authorities have made them out to be temples, border forts, and various other even less likely things. 

Some Italian archaeologists reconstruct their original appearance like this. I do not know how widely accepted these interpretations are, but renderings like this appear on the official government signs by some of the major sites. 

Here is a digital rendering from Radio France. Part Disney, part sand castle, all strange.

We call the culture of the people who built these Nuragic, but that's just a recent formation from the name of their fortresses. Besides the forts, the most famous thing about them is their delightful bronze figurines, many of which have been found in tombs.

But to get back to where we started. This is the small, central fort at Cortijo Lobato, supposedly dating to around 2900 BC.

And these are Nuraghe. The shapes are similar, and they are all built of stone, but the small fort at Cortijo Lobato still looks to my eye very different, based on very different building technologies. I will keep my eye out and if I ever find any serious discussion of the dating evidence from Cortijo Lobato, I will pass it along; and if any of you have found any academic discourse on the subject, please share it.

Derek Walcott, "Love after Love"

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life. 

The Contested Roots of Appalachian Culture

Some of you may be familiar with David Hackett Fischer's book, Albion's Seed (1989). Fischer aimed to show that American regional differences (to this day) derived mostly from four different British source populations: the East Anglian Puritans who went to New England, Quakers who went to Pennsylvania, people from the west of England who went to Virginia and the Carolinas, and people from the English-Scottish border country who migrated to the Appalachians.

Albion's Seed is a monumental book and I don't have the time or the energy to get into all the things I like and don't like about it. But a friend just sent me an excellent review article (JSTOR) that compares Albion's Seed to another very interesting book, The American Backwoods Frontier by Terry G. Jordan and Matti Kaups (1989).

In asserting that Appalachian culture came from the Borders, Fischer was following a tradition of American scholarship that goes back to the 1700s. The Scotts-Irish, in particular – people from southern Scotland who were settled in northern Ireland, then moved on from there to America – have long been cited as the progenitors of Appalachia. Certain things about white Appalachian culture can indeed be traced in a fairly direct way to the Borders: the music, most obviously, but also tendencies toward clannishness, violence, a kind of egalitarianism that was social but not economic, and a savage aversion to having snobbish outsiders tell them what to do.

But this thesis has always had a glaring problem: how did people from the Borders learn to live in the vast forests of North America? 

These folks came from a mostly barren landscape where most buildings were stone and the main economic activity was raising sheep. The people of colonial Appalachia, by contrast, built almost entirely with logs and focused their farming on corn, tobacco, and hogs. As Jordan and Kaups complained, the Scotts-Irish thesis purported to explain Appalachian culture while ignoring all the things that actually enabled British immigrants to survive in their new environment. Jordan and Kaups directed our attention toward a different source group: the Finns who came into the Swedish colony on the Delaware River in the mid 1600s. There were not many of these Finnish immigrants, probably just a few hundred, but certain things about their background and political status made their situation unique. First, they knew how to live in the forest, since they had been living on the forested margins of agricultural civilization in Sweden and Finland (then part of the Swedish kingdom). They knew how to build with logs, practice slash-and-burn agriculture on soils of dubious fertility, make everything they needed out of wood. Once in the New World they found themselves the allies of certain powerful Native nations, notably the Susquehannocks (whom they joined in a war agains the British colony of Maryland) and the Shawnee. These connections allowed them to move out to the frontier and prosper as traders and interpreters. (There are links to my company's reports on the history and archaeology of the Potomac Valley, from which I learned all this, in this old post.)

So to Jordan and Kaups, American backwoods culture was not Scotts-Irish, but "Fenno-Indic."

It seems obvious to me that it was both. It also seems obvious to me that the particular geography and political history of the Appalachians shaped the culture that emerged. The basic economic system of the colonial Appalachians had little to do with northern Britain, owing much more both to the Finnish frontiersmen and to the fusion of European, Native, and Caribbean agriculture that had already been developed in 17th-century Virginia. The question of Appalachian political and social attitudes is harder to answer. Just like the people of the Borders, Appalachian frontiersmen were defined both by war against outsiders (Native, then British) and conflicts with allegedly friendly governments based on the wealthier lowlands, conflicts that culminated during the Civil War with the secession of West Virginia from Virginia and pro-Union risings from northern Alabama to eastern Tennessee. So how much should we attribute to  inherited attitudes from the old country, and how much to more recent New World experience? Or, from another angle, did the people and culture of the Broders survive and thrive in Appalachia because circumstances resembled those at home?

These people with their monocausal explanations make me crazy.

Hell in Nineteenth-Century China

Life is Short, a demon

In his amazing history of what we usually call the Taiping Rebellion, God's Chinese Son: the Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan, (1996) Jonathan Spence takes a long look at the ritual calendar of southern China in the early 1800s. It was astonishingly dense. Essentially every day was sacred to some being or another, from Bodhisattvas to the spirits of local springs, so a superstitious person of the era must have been very busy propitiating all those powers. For example, the first day of the first lunar month belongs to the Maitreya Buddha, who rules the future, usually depicted as a fat and smiling man; he should be propiated with prayer and by vows to respect the will of heaven. 

The eighth day, in contrast, belongs to Yan Luo, known to all as the king of hell. Strangely, though, the Jade Record notes that Yan Luo has lost his former proud position as lord of the first of the hellish palaces. In that role, long ago, he proved too compassionate to those who had been unjustly killed, and allowed them simply to return to earth again to lead new lives.

This Jade Record was one of the most widely circulated religious Chinese tracts in the 1820s and 1830s. Because its folk Buddhist theology seemed to Spence to be important background to the rise of Hong Xiquan and his loosely Christian "Heavenly Kingdom," he devoted several pages to its horrifically detailed description of what happened to souls in the afterlife. This disgression within a digression is my favorite part of God's Chinese Son, which may say something interesting about my own taste in history.

According to the text, those who spread copies of the Jade Record and encourage others to read it

not only escape the worst torments of hell, and bring prosperity to their families and descendants, but in the transmigration of their souls may be reborn as human beings, or even move to higher stages of life – men to the happy lands, and women to the lives of men.

but

those who ignore, deface, or mock the tracts will find no such mercy, but be condemned at death to descend to the lower layers hell and, according to their crimes on earth, move through each of the ten hellish places in turn.

Pictures in the Jade Record show, for those who cannot read, how the judged souls are transformed. Only a few return as happy, healthy humans. Of the others, some are allowed to stay human, yes, but condemned to be ugly, misshapen, poor, and ill; while many, according to their sins, return as horses, dogs, birds, fish, or creeping things.

Near the palace of the first hell is a tower 63 measures tall (= 9x7, so the product of two magical numbers; among their other accomplishments the Chinese created the world's most extenisve numerology). Devils take the unfortunate souls to the top of the tower, from where they can view the families they left behind and see that rather than mourning their loss they are 

cursing the dead one's memory, defying his instructions, selling off the goods and property he so painfully acquired, and battling through lawsuits for what is left.

After this discouragement they are assigned to one of sixteen dungeons.

Under the Highest God's general supervision, each of the other nine gods of hell has his holy day, and an invocation that, if correctly and respectfully uttered, may war off his rage. Cumulatively, among themselves, they judge every foible of which humans are capable, and few will escape bing punished by them. The role of the god who rules the first hell is a prelimninary scrutiny of the newly dead, prior to passing them on to others. In his palace hangs a mirror, called the Mirror of Reflection, where all must see their own sins through their own eyes. 

The catalog of sins and sinners in the Jade Record is very extensive:

Thither go the quack doctors, the priests who deceive children of either sex to be their acolytes, people who sequester other's scrolls or pictures, marriage go-betweens who lie about their clients charms. Hither come shop clerks who deceive their customers, prisoners rightfully condemned who escape from jail and avoid punishment, grave robbers, tax evaders, posters of abusive bills, and negotiators of divorce. . . .

Death Has Gradations, another demon

Souls are guided through this process by two demons known as Life is Short (that's him at the top of the post) and Death Has Gradations, above. 

It is always hard to know what to make of such notions. On the one hand, there was no shortage in China of all the things the lords of hell were supposed to punish, so the warnings may not have been very effective. On the other, people have devoted a remakable amount of effort to propitiating unseen powers: building temples, performing pilgrimages, carrying out rites of a thousand kinds. Belief, as I have said many times, is a hard thing to quantify, but there are certainly senses in which it matters a great deal.

Links 14 February 2025

Lovely image that's all over the Arcane web sites,

but always without attribution;

I suspect it's a 20th-century tombstone

After eight years of argument, Britain finally decided to tear down Grenfell Tower. (NY Times, BBC) My piece on the tower disaster is here.

Bizarre essay that purports to be about "post-feminism" but is really a cry of anguish against the modern world, where women retreat from competitions they can't win into illness (real or imagined), convents, online scams, witchy covens, tradwife fantasies, or "fainting couches." What, exactly, does this writer want? Life without pain or struggle? I diagnose her as caring too much about stuff that doesn't matter and suggest Buddhism.

Japan's "keyhole tombs."

Alex Tabarrok reviews a book about the "licensing racket." I agree we have far too much licensing, but I consider it a hard problem to decide where to draw the line; somewhere between RNs (definitely) and yacht sellers (definitely not), but exactly where?

The Bridges of Old London, photo set.

Boom Supersonic claims to have achieved one of their goals, supersonic flight with no audible sonic boom. (Corporate web site, news story)

Cambridge, MA, one of the most liberal cities in America, has gone full YIMBY, raising the height limit to 6 stories across most of the city. The crusade over the past decade to make affordable housing a social justice issue is starting to have major impacts on local policy, which is where it matters most. (Twitter/X) The Harvard Crimson reported in December (good article) that advocates for the reform "said low density zoning is a relic of exclusionary and racist housing policies that barred residents of color and low-income residents from parts of the city."

The Czech environmental agency wanted to build a wetland to protect critical habitat from acid runoff, but before they finished wrangling over land-use issues and so on they discovered that beavers had already built enough dams to create a wetland twice the size of the one they had planned. (NY Times, AFP)

Purple and gold shroud from an early Christian tomb put on display in France.

What archaeologists think are the foundations of Roman London's first basilica have been found deep under the modern city. (NY Times, Guardian, BBC)

Valentine's Day in Egypt.

Detecting super powerful neutrinos, and wondering where they came from.

Water Babies as an attempt by a Victorian thinker to bridge the growing gap between religion and science. Which is interesting, since I sometimes see all fantasy literature as a sort of end-run around scientific rationalism toward a reassuring spirituality.

Some discoveries in a field I know next to nothing about, the archaeology of medieval Korea.

Pondering the work of artist Henri Michaux as a way to understand what mescaline does to the brain.

Some on the left are seeing Trump's war on DEI as a chance to make a shift they have long supported, focusing on matters of money and class rather than race and gender. I used to know an upper class woman (her father was an ambassador) who made a lot of money from her woman-owned business, and I regularly teased her about being "disadvantaged." She at least had the grace to find it absurd, but she still cashed in.

A Copper Age Fortress Unearthed in Spain

For-profit Spanish archaeologists, their version of Cultural Resource Management, were recently exploring the site of a proposed solar farm when they discovered a massive fortress dating to between 2900 and 2400 BC. They call it Cortijo Lobato.

The site began as a small fortress (detail above) but was later massively enlarged; I can't tell from the news accounts if the excavators think the central portion was still standing after the outer walls were built.

Although the place looks impressive, it may have been taken by storm:

Some 4,900 years ago, during the Copper Age, a group of humans constructed a formidable fortress on a hill in what is now the Spanish city of Almendralejo in Badajoz province. This stronghold was protected by three concentric walls, 25 bastions or semicircular towers, and three deep ditches measuring up to four meters wide and two meters deep. Spanning 13,000 square meters, the complex featured robust stone and adobe walls, with a single entrance just 70 centimeters wide — designed to make it virtually impregnable.

Yet, despite its formidable defenses, the fortress was ultimately destroyed, burned, and razed by enemies, then abandoned 400 years after its construction. . . . Archaeologists have found evidence that Cortijo Lobato suffered “a widespread fire that affected key areas of the settlement. One of the strongest indications that this was an intentional act is the burning of wooden doors embedded in the adobe walls. These doors were far from other flammable materials, which suggests that the fire was not accidental, but rather the result of an assault on the fortification — a scene of violence and destruction in which the settlement was attacked, its defenses breached, and the structure ultimately set ablaze.” Among the remains, researchers uncovered numerous arrowheads.

Like these. Notice that they are made of stone; people of the Copper and even the Bronze Age still used stone for many tools and weapons.

It is notoriously difficult for archaeologists to distinguish between destruction wrought by war, and that caused by earthquake or fire, and debates have raged for decades about certain sites in Greece and the Middle East. But this case looks pretty good.

Which brings us to another level of speculation: could the possible destruction of this fortress be related to the arrival of Indo-European speakers in Spain? Because the period from 2400 to 2200 BC was one of great turmoil in Iberia, and the elite of the subsequent Bronze Age was largely descended from invaders bearing genes from the steppes.

Might be. But then again, the fortress was constructed centuries before that, presumably because the residents had plenty of other enemies.

Antisemitism Rising among Young People in the US

Multiple polls lately have said that young Americans are more antisemitic than older Americans. Young conservatives are somewhat more antisemitic than liberals, but the dramatic difference is by age.

Some possible explanations:

1. Is the online antisemitism I consider rather silly actually having a huge impact?
2. Is it largely about the changing status of Israel, from small, threatened nation to powerful bully?
3. Is it anti-globalism, anti-international finance attitudes?

Other thoughts?