Not Rudolf Ems, or, Some Problems with Internet Images

This images has been circulating on Tumblr attributed to Rudolf von Ems, who lived from 1200-1254. When I saw it I thought, hey, that's cool, but no way does it date to the 13th century. So I looked up Rudolf von Ems, and it turns that he was a writer, not a painter. This is an illustration from his Weltchronik, or world history. My daughter and I eventually tracked it back to a manuscript in the Zentralbibliothek Zürich, which indeed dates to the 14th century, not the 13th. Ha.

But seriously the number of misattributed, misdated, and mistitled works of art on the internet is just a tiny glimpse of the perils of believing what you read on the average site. Plus there are all the things I think are fake, as I have often noted here. So caveat lector. When in doubt, try a google image search; sometimes it will find another site with the right information. Then check wikipedia and the web sites of the big museums. If  you can't find what you want in those places, you may be in for a search, but when you solve the puzzle your satisfaction will be its own reward.

Sungir: Inequality in the Old Stone Age

Sungir is an archaeological site in Russia, about 120 miles (200 km) east of Moscow. It was discovered by clay miners in 1955 and excavated between 1957 and 1977. The best radiocarbon dates come out around 32,050 to 28,550 BC.

The site is large, complex, and fascinating, but today I will focus on the two famous burials.

The first was a middle aged man adorned with ‘stunning signs of honor’: bracelets of polished mammoth-ivory, a diadem or cap of fox’s teeth, and nearly 3,000 laboriously carved and polished ivory beads.

Reconstruction of the man's clothing.

Nearby was an even more amazing burial of two children laid head to head. The latest thinking is that both were boys, one about 13 and the other about 10, decked with 5,000 beads and a long lance carved from a mammoth tusk. DNA analysis suggests that while all six of the analyzed skeletons from the site were from the same population, they were not closely related. The two children were first or second cousins, and even less closely related to the older man.

Reconstruction. The best guess is that all the beads from these three burials would have taken 10,000 hours to produce.

The reason this site has been in many articles recently concerns the origins of economic and political inequality. Most people looking at this site have concluded that there was already serious inequality among this group of people 35,000 years ago. Despite that you still regularly see the claim that inequality began with agriculture, or specifically with the ownership of land. Based on this site, probably not.

On the other hand the evidence of inequality in the Old Stone Age is pretty thin, missing from most millennia in most places. So there is also evidence for egalitarian bands of the kind we know from some contemporary hunter-gatherers. As always the lesson is that humans are stunningly diverse: you simply cannot point to any period or region and say "everybody was like this," not even 35,000 years ago.

New Nazca Lines and the Worldwide Problem of Geoglyphs

Interesting news from Peru, where a drone study of the desert surrounding the famous Nazca Lines has turned up new, undocumented formations. Above are some of the famous, long known works. These are cool and also arouse our wonder; in a world without the technology needed to see them properly, why were they made? For the gods, one supposes, but why? In the case of Nazca one theory is that the first lines pointed to things, either sacred mountains and springs or astrological events like the solstice rising of key stars. The thing seems to have kept developing almost as if under its own momentum, with ever more complex figures being created partly because people had gotten good at creating them. So the technology of making these huge drawings came first, and then the idea that they would be pleasing to the gods. Or so some people say.

Above and below are two of the new discoveries. These were not known because they are older and much fainter than the famous formations, completely invisible from the ground and very hard to see from the air without the enhancements that have been applied to these photographs.

The generic name for formations like this is "geoglyphs." Geoglyphs are a hot issue in archaeology right now because people are finding them all over the world. This is generally done using Google Earth, but there are other sources of imagery like the old Corona spy satellites and drones.

The term covers a variety of different site types. For example, the large, V-shaped stone corrals of the Middle East, known as "kites" and apparently used in hunting wild antelope or goats, are sometimes called geoglyphs. (From the Saudi desert) So are what look like old settlements in the Amazon.

The term endures because so many formations have been spotted whose nature is completely unclear; maybe they are practical, maybe they are the ruins of structures, or maybe they are spiritual or works of art. Best to keep things simple by calling them geoglyphs.

But this creates a serious potential problem in my profession. Besides all the serious scholars engaged in this work, searching the globe for geoglyphs has become the hobby of a growing class of crackpots. People have claimed to find ancient solar temples in the patterns of modern railroad lines and electrical wires. Those are easily brushed aside, but what about patterns at the very edge of detectability? Because as the Nazca example shows, geoglyphs will fade over time even in the desert, and in plowed areas or grasslands they may have been rendered invisible to all but the most discerning eye. There is also the old archaeological problem of what is a spiritual site and what might have had a practical use, which is often, given the state of our knowledge, unresolvable.

Now imagine that you are the archaeologist for a new windfarm in the American west. An amateur researcher claims to see an ancient medicine wheel glyph in aerial imagery of your site, but you can't see it. A local Indian tribe gets wind of the discovery and its leaders demand investigation, or just demand that the site of the glyph be considered sacred. What happens? Who decides what is a real geoglyph and what isn't? How would you go about finding out? The field is too new for there to be any guidelines, leaving us to flounder around as best we can.

Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae

Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed
Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;
And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
     Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,
Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay;
Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
     When I awoke and found the dawn was grey:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind,
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
     Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
   Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

--Ernest Dowson

Against Anti-Dogmatism, or, Adult Neurogenesis

When I was in college, everybody knew that the adult brain added no new neurons. This notion went back to the early twentieth century. In 1928, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, one of the fathers of modern neuroscience, wrote:

Once development was ended, the founts of growth and regeneration ... dried up irrevocably. In the adult centers the nerve paths are something fixed, ended and immutable. Everything must die, nothing may be regenerated.

Then, in the 1980s, evidence began to emerge that contradicted this theory. It started with mice, which everyone now agrees continue to create new neurons in adulthood. Then there were hints of new brain cells in adult humans, first in the hypothalamus and then in the rest of the brain.

Starting around 2000, a whole wave studies found more evidence for adult neurogenesis, and began to tie it to all sorts of other ideas. One study suggested that stress blocked neurogenesis, and that this caused depression. Others found that living an enriched life stimulated neurogenesis. And then the cascade: sex stimulates neurogenesis, running stimulates neurogenesis, listening to music stimulates neurogenesis.

These studies were not accepted by all neurologists; some found the new work unconvincing. Thus a scientific fight broke out, and the authors of the new, pro-neurogenesis studies were not shy about mocking their opponents:

A milestone is marked in our understanding of the brain with the recent acceptance, contrary to early dogma, that the adult nervous system can generate new neurons. One could wonder how this dogma originally came about, particularly because all organisms have some cells that continue to divide, adding to the size of the organism and repairing damage.

So the idea that adult human brains produce no new cells was a "dogma," and we all know there's nothing worse than that. It is the job of all right-thinking people to overthrow dogma wherever we find it, and replace it with proper science that promotes mental growth in maturity, running, sex, and all other Good Things.

This week a new salvo came out from the no adult neurogenesis side, and it seems to be a very powerful attack. Ed Yong has a good summary:

In a new study, and one of the biggest yet, a team led by Arturo Alvarez-Buylla at the University of California at San Francisco completely failed to find any trace of young neurons in dozens of hippocampus samples, collected from adult humans. “If neurogenesis continues in adult humans, it’s extremely rare,” says Alvarez-Buylla. “It’s not as robust as what people have said, where you could go running and pump up the number of neurons.”

Two of Alvarez-Buylla's colleagues did the key work:

Shawn Sorrells and Mercedes Paredes analyzed the brains of 17 adult humans who had died and donated their bodies to research. The duo searched for telltale molecules that are specifically made in young neurons, or in the stem cells that produce such neurons. To their surprise, they found nothing. “Even in our best-preserved samples, we didn’t see any evidence of neurogenesis,” Paredes says.

They did find plenty of new neurons in the brains of children, so their method was perfectly capable of picking them up.

Obviously this is not the last word; the argument will go on. But I think the latest negative findings make this a good cautionary tale about science in our time, and about the popular reception of science. We love theories that attack old dogma; we also love theories that promote adult learning and self-empowerment ("Eleven proven ways to generate more brain cells!"). The new ideas about neurogenesis fit into our hopes like a key in a well-oiled lock. I, for one, accepted them without ever looking into the matter in detail, or checking out the writings of opponents.

We should be more careful. We should be more respectful of science that has been accepted for decades, and less quick to celebrate novelty. We should be suspicious of findings that flatter us and of results that fulfill our hopes. Especially when the connection between the supposed science and the things value was so weak to begin with; why did we ever associate the number of brain cells with all good things, when we know perfectly well that is the connections between cells that matter?

Cliff Dwellings of the American Southwest

Throughout the Four Corners region of the U.S. Southwest are dozens of stone and adobe towns built into the face of towering cliffs. Most famous are the ones at Mesa Verde, like the Cliff Palace (above).

The cliff towns at Mesa Verde were built beginning in the 1190s CE, reached their height around 1250, began to decline in the 1270s, and had been abandoned by 1300. So they represent only a brief interval in the long history of the Southwest. But that is true of every archaeological site you can see in the region, and just about everything else about those vanished cultures. Because of all the wooden beams that have survived in the arid climate, many sites in the Southwest can be precisely dates using tree rings. The result is a crazy story in which a backward region with few people will suddenly boom, and its surging population will build a bunch of stone towns in a few decades, in some cases reaching a density that seems completely unfeedable in the desert. They may perfect a new art style, like the famous Mimbres pottery. Then decline sets in, the people start to move on, and within a century or two of the initial boom the place is nearly empty again. Then the same process repeats itself in another place dozens or hundreds of miles away. (Balcony House at Mesa Verde)

Nobody knows yet what to make of this. Attempts to explain it all based on climate change have fallen apart as the complexity of rises, falls, and apparent migrations has become clear. (Antelope House at Canyon de Chelly.)

One thing that has now been well established is that violence played a key part. Many of the cliff dwellings are obviously sited for defense, hundreds of steep yards away from water sources; some can only be reached using long ladders. These are not just towns, but fortresses. (Ledge Ruin at Canyon de Chelly)

We call the ancient people of the Four Corners region the Anasazi. This is from a Navajo word meaning "the ancestors of our enemies." The Navajo (and also the Apache) entered that region from the north around 1400 CE, after most of the Anasazi had left, and they probably killed or drove off the rest. (Navajo is another name bestowed by enemies; they call themselves the Diné.) (Spruce Tree House at Mesa Verde)

The Hopi, Zuni, and Pueblo peoples are all descendants of the Anasazi. But the thinking now is that the cultures we recognize by those names did not really begin to form until after 1300 CE, when there was a big population shift to the Rio Grande Valley. (Before then the place was nearly empty, despite having the most reliable water source in the whole region. Nobody knows why.) Things like the famous kachina dances and the clan structures can only be traced back to that time. But the pottery of historic Indians is recognizably within the Anasazi tradition, as is the architecture, so there are also important continuities. (Gila cliff dwellings)

The Tonto Cliff dwellings. These are in a different region than the big Anasazi cliff sites and are somewhat later in time, occupied from perhaps 1300 to 1350; they may have been built by people who had fled the Four Corners region.

The cliff dwellings are a story of adaptation: to survival in the desert, and to maintaining communities in a time of violence and migration. They are another of the amazing cultural flowers thrown forth by humanity despite, and sometimes because of, the most intense storms and struggles. (Cliff Palace, Mesa Verde)

White House ruin at Canyon de Chelly by Ansel Adams.

The Ames-Webster House, Boston, Massachusetts

Today's Gilded Age mansion is the Ames-Webster House in Boston's Back Bay, built in 1872 for Congressman (and robber baron) Frederick L. Ames.

It was originally designed by Peabody and Stearns and looked like this. Then in 1882 it was enlarged by architect John Hubbard Sturgis. I guess the original palace just wasn't roomy enough for Ames' growing family, or something.

Pictures of the interior look like a lot of other mansions from that era.

Nice conservatory.

Ballustrade.

Amazing stained glass by John LaFarge (1835–1910).

But what got me interested in the house was the decoration of the rotunda by LaFarge and French painter Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant (1845–1902).

Benjamin-Constant's murals depict a procession of Venetian nobles and, above them, imaginary four portraits of Emperor Justinian, Empress Theodora, and two other Byzantine characters.

Justinian.

First Counselor.

Theodora. How astonishing to have such amazing murals in your own house.

Spring in Washington

A true Washington site: bronze statue of a famous old orator in a cloud of cherry blossoms.