Archaeologists do it in holes: Tales from the stratigraphy

[Oexmelin]

Check out Jill Lepore's The Name of War, if you are interested in the topic.

[KRonn]

Check out Jill Lepore's The Name of War, if you are interested in the topic.

Looks good, thanks for the info.

"About The Name of War
Winner of the Bancroft Prize

King Philip's War, the excruciating racial war—colonists against Indians—that erupted in New England in 1675, was, in proportion to population, the bloodiest in American history. Some even argued that the massacres and outrages on both sides were too horrific to "deserve the name of a war."

[11B4V]

Check out Jill Lepore's The Name of War, if you are interested in the topic.

Looks good, thanks for the info.

"About The Name of War
Winner of the Bancroft Prize

King Philip's War, the excruciating racial war—colonists against Indians—that erupted in New England in 1675, was, in proportion to population, the bloodiest in American history. Some even argued that the massacres and outrages on both sides were too horrific to "deserve the name of a war."

Benjamin Church FTW

[viper37]

lidar scans reveal bigger Mayan Empire than previously thought:
http://discovermagazine.com/2019/mar/a-lost-world-emerges
no word yet on the Rebellion to restore the Mayan Republic or the Resistance either.

[jimmy olsen]

Neat!

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/03/ancient-switch-soft-food-gave-us-overbite-and-ability-pronounce-f-s-and-v-s

Ancient switch to soft food gave us an overbite—and the ability to pronounce 'f's and 'v's
By Ann GibbonsMar. 14, 2019 , 2:00 PM

Don't like the F-word? Blame farmers and soft food. When humans switched to processed foods after the spread of agriculture, they put less wear and tear on their teeth. That changed the growth of their jaws, giving adults the overbites normal in children. Within a few thousand years, those slight overbites made it easy for people in farming cultures to fire off sounds like "f" and "v," opening a world of new words.

The newly favored consonants, known as labiodentals, helped spur the diversification of languages in Europe and Asia at least 4000 years ago; they led to such changes as the replacement of the Latin patēr to Old English faeder about 1500 years ago, according to linguist and senior author Balthasar Bickel at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. The paper shows "that a cultural shift can change our biology in such a way that it affects our language," says evolutionary morphologist Noreen Von Cramon-Taubadel of the University at Buffalo, part of the State University of New York system, who was not part of the study.

Postdocs Damián Blasi and Steven Moran in Bickel's lab set out to test an idea proposed by the late American linguist Charles Hockett. He noted in 1985 that the languages of hunter-gatherers lacked labiodentals, and conjectured that their diet was partly responsible: Chewing gritty, fibrous foods puts force on the growing jaw bone and wears down molars. In response, the lower jaw grows larger, and the molars erupt farther and drift forward on the protruding lower jaw, so that the upper and lower teeth align. That edge-to-edge bite makes it harder to push the upper jaw forward to touch the lower lip, which is required to pronounce labiodentals. But other linguists rejected the idea, and Blasi says he, Moran, and their colleagues "expected to prove Hockett wrong."

First, the six researchers used computer modeling to show that with an overbite, producing labiodentals takes 29% less effort than with an edge-to-edge bite. Then, they scrutinized the world's languages and found that hunter-gatherer languages have only about one-fourth as many labiodentals as languages from farming societies. Finally, they looked at the relationships among languages, and found that labiodentals can spread quickly, so that the sounds could go from being rare to common in the 8000 years since the widespread adoption of agriculture and new food processing methods such as grinding grain into flour.

Bickel suggests that as more adults developed overbites, they accidentally began to use "f" and "v" more. In ancient India and Rome, labiodentals may have been a mark of status, signaling a softer diet and wealth, he says. Those consonants also spread through other language groups; today, they appear in 76% of Indo-European languages.

Linguist Nicholas Evans of Australian National University in Canberra finds the study's "multimethod approach to the problem" convincing. Ian Maddieson, an emeritus linguist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, isn't sure researchers tallied the labiodentals correctly but agrees that the study shows external factors like diet can alter the sounds of speech.

The findings also suggest our facility with f-words comes at a cost. As we lost our ancestral edge-to-edge bite, "we got new sounds but maybe it wasn't so great for us," Moran says. "Our lower jaws are shorter, we have impacted wisdom teeth, more crowding—and cavities."

[Malthus]

Neat!

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/03/ancient-switch-soft-food-gave-us-overbite-and-ability-pronounce-f-s-and-v-s

Ancient switch to soft food gave us an overbite—and the ability to pronounce 'f's and 'v's
By Ann GibbonsMar. 14, 2019 , 2:00 PM

Don't like the F-word? Blame farmers and soft food. When humans switched to processed foods after the spread of agriculture, they put less wear and tear on their teeth. That changed the growth of their jaws, giving adults the overbites normal in children. Within a few thousand years, those slight overbites made it easy for people in farming cultures to fire off sounds like "f" and "v," opening a world of new words.

The newly favored consonants, known as labiodentals, helped spur the diversification of languages in Europe and Asia at least 4000 years ago; they led to such changes as the replacement of the Latin patēr to Old English faeder about 1500 years ago, according to linguist and senior author Balthasar Bickel at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. The paper shows "that a cultural shift can change our biology in such a way that it affects our language," says evolutionary morphologist Noreen Von Cramon-Taubadel of the University at Buffalo, part of the State University of New York system, who was not part of the study.

Postdocs Damián Blasi and Steven Moran in Bickel's lab set out to test an idea proposed by the late American linguist Charles Hockett. He noted in 1985 that the languages of hunter-gatherers lacked labiodentals, and conjectured that their diet was partly responsible: Chewing gritty, fibrous foods puts force on the growing jaw bone and wears down molars. In response, the lower jaw grows larger, and the molars erupt farther and drift forward on the protruding lower jaw, so that the upper and lower teeth align. That edge-to-edge bite makes it harder to push the upper jaw forward to touch the lower lip, which is required to pronounce labiodentals. But other linguists rejected the idea, and Blasi says he, Moran, and their colleagues "expected to prove Hockett wrong."

First, the six researchers used computer modeling to show that with an overbite, producing labiodentals takes 29% less effort than with an edge-to-edge bite. Then, they scrutinized the world's languages and found that hunter-gatherer languages have only about one-fourth as many labiodentals as languages from farming societies. Finally, they looked at the relationships among languages, and found that labiodentals can spread quickly, so that the sounds could go from being rare to common in the 8000 years since the widespread adoption of agriculture and new food processing methods such as grinding grain into flour.

Bickel suggests that as more adults developed overbites, they accidentally began to use "f" and "v" more. In ancient India and Rome, labiodentals may have been a mark of status, signaling a softer diet and wealth, he says. Those consonants also spread through other language groups; today, they appear in 76% of Indo-European languages.

Linguist Nicholas Evans of Australian National University in Canberra finds the study's "multimethod approach to the problem" convincing. Ian Maddieson, an emeritus linguist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, isn't sure researchers tallied the labiodentals correctly but agrees that the study shows external factors like diet can alter the sounds of speech.

The findings also suggest our facility with f-words comes at a cost. As we lost our ancestral edge-to-edge bite, "we got new sounds but maybe it wasn't so great for us," Moran says. "Our lower jaws are shorter, we have impacted wisdom teeth, more crowding—and cavities."

Not sure this part is correct:

When humans switched to processed foods after the spread of agriculture, they put less wear and tear on their teeth.

In ancient agriculture, grain gad to be ground to be eaten. This process usually left bits of sand in the resulting food, which wore at teeth more than a hunter-gatherer's diet of cooked meat and gathered berries, grubs and seeds. In areas where wheat was gathered, the advent of agriculture made little difference to teeth - what mattered most was how grain was processed (using mortars = bad teeth; agriculturalists were more likely to use mortars.)

Paper on this topic:  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16353225

[jimmy olsen]

Nice find

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/mar/17/nile-shipwreck-herodotus-archaeologists-thonis-heraclion

Archaeology
Nile shipwreck discovery proves Herodotus right – after 2,469 years
Greek historian's description of 'baris' vessel vindicated by archaeologists at sunken city of Thonis-Heraclion
Dalya Alberge

Sun 17 Mar 2019 08.30 GMT

In the fifth century BC, the Greek historian Herodotus visited Egypt and wrote of unusual river boats on the Nile. Twenty-three lines of his Historia, the ancient world's first great narrative history, are devoted to the intricate description of the construction of a "baris".

For centuries, scholars have argued over his account because there was no archaeological evidence that such ships ever existed. Now there is. A "fabulously preserved" wreck in the waters around the sunken port city of Thonis-Heracleion has revealed just how accurate the historian was.

"It wasn't until we discovered this wreck that we realised Herodotus was right," said Dr Damian Robinson, director of Oxford University's centre for maritime archaeology, which is publishing the excavation's findings. "What Herodotus described was what we were looking at."

In 450 BC Herodotus witnessed the construction of a baris. He noted how the builders "cut planks two cubits long [around 100cm] and arrange them like bricks". He added: "On the strong and long tenons [pieces of wood] they insert two-cubit planks. When they have built their ship in this way, they stretch beams over them... They obturate the seams from within with papyrus. There is one rudder, passing through a hole in the keel. The mast is of acacia and the sails of papyrus..."

Robinson said that previous scholars had "made some mistakes" in struggling to interpret the text without archaeological evidence. "It's one of those enigmatic pieces. Scholars have argued exactly what it means for as long as we've been thinking of boats in this scholarly way," he said.


But the excavation of what has been called Ship 17 has revealed a vast crescent-shaped hull and a previously undocumented type of construction involving thick planks assembled with tenons – just as Herodotus observed, in describing a slightly smaller vessel.

Originally measuring up to 28 metres long, it is one of the first large-scale ancient Egyptian trading boats ever to have been discovered.

Robinson added: "Herodotus describes the boats as having long internal ribs. Nobody really knew what that meant... That structure's never been seen archaeologically before. Then we discovered this form of construction on this particular boat and it absolutely is what Herodotus has been saying."

About 70% of the hull has survived, well-preserved in the Nile silts. Acacia planks were held together with long tenon-ribs – some almost 2m long – and fastened with pegs, creating lines of 'internal ribs' within the hull. It was steered using an axial rudder with two circular openings for the steering oar and a step for a mast towards the centre of the vessel.

Robinson said: "Where planks are joined together to form the hull, they are usually joined by mortice and tenon joints which fasten one plank to the next. Here we have a completely unique form of construction, which is not seen anywhere else."

Alexander Belov, whose book on the wreck, Ship 17: a Baris from Thonis-Heracleion, is published this month, suggests that the wreck's nautical architecture is so close to Herodotus's description, it could have been made in the very shipyard that he visited. Word-by-word analysis of his text demonstrates that almost every detail corresponds "exactly to the evidence".

[jimmy olsen]

Neat!

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/03/ancient-switch-soft-food-gave-us-overbite-and-ability-pronounce-f-s-and-v-s

Ancient switch to soft food gave us an overbite—and the ability to pronounce 'f's and 'v's
By Ann GibbonsMar. 14, 2019 , 2:00 PM

Don't like the F-word? Blame farmers and soft food. When humans switched to processed foods after the spread of agriculture, they put less wear and tear on their teeth. That changed the growth of their jaws, giving adults the overbites normal in children. Within a few thousand years, those slight overbites made it easy for people in farming cultures to fire off sounds like "f" and "v," opening a world of new words.

The newly favored consonants, known as labiodentals, helped spur the diversification of languages in Europe and Asia at least 4000 years ago; they led to such changes as the replacement of the Latin patēr to Old English faeder about 1500 years ago, according to linguist and senior author Balthasar Bickel at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. The paper shows "that a cultural shift can change our biology in such a way that it affects our language," says evolutionary morphologist Noreen Von Cramon-Taubadel of the University at Buffalo, part of the State University of New York system, who was not part of the study.

Postdocs Damián Blasi and Steven Moran in Bickel's lab set out to test an idea proposed by the late American linguist Charles Hockett. He noted in 1985 that the languages of hunter-gatherers lacked labiodentals, and conjectured that their diet was partly responsible: Chewing gritty, fibrous foods puts force on the growing jaw bone and wears down molars. In response, the lower jaw grows larger, and the molars erupt farther and drift forward on the protruding lower jaw, so that the upper and lower teeth align. That edge-to-edge bite makes it harder to push the upper jaw forward to touch the lower lip, which is required to pronounce labiodentals. But other linguists rejected the idea, and Blasi says he, Moran, and their colleagues "expected to prove Hockett wrong."

First, the six researchers used computer modeling to show that with an overbite, producing labiodentals takes 29% less effort than with an edge-to-edge bite. Then, they scrutinized the world's languages and found that hunter-gatherer languages have only about one-fourth as many labiodentals as languages from farming societies. Finally, they looked at the relationships among languages, and found that labiodentals can spread quickly, so that the sounds could go from being rare to common in the 8000 years since the widespread adoption of agriculture and new food processing methods such as grinding grain into flour.

Bickel suggests that as more adults developed overbites, they accidentally began to use "f" and "v" more. In ancient India and Rome, labiodentals may have been a mark of status, signaling a softer diet and wealth, he says. Those consonants also spread through other language groups; today, they appear in 76% of Indo-European languages.

Linguist Nicholas Evans of Australian National University in Canberra finds the study's "multimethod approach to the problem" convincing. Ian Maddieson, an emeritus linguist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, isn't sure researchers tallied the labiodentals correctly but agrees that the study shows external factors like diet can alter the sounds of speech.

The findings also suggest our facility with f-words comes at a cost. As we lost our ancestral edge-to-edge bite, "we got new sounds but maybe it wasn't so great for us," Moran says. "Our lower jaws are shorter, we have impacted wisdom teeth, more crowding—and cavities."

Not sure this part is correct:

When humans switched to processed foods after the spread of agriculture, they put less wear and tear on their teeth.

In ancient agriculture, grain gad to be ground to be eaten. This process usually left bits of sand in the resulting food, which wore at teeth more than a hunter-gatherer's diet of cooked meat and gathered berries, grubs and seeds. In areas where wheat was gathered, the advent of agriculture made little difference to teeth - what mattered most was how grain was processed (using mortars = bad teeth; agriculturalists were more likely to use mortars.)

Paper on this topic:  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16353225

It seems from the dating that labiodentals didn't enter languages immediately after agriculture was established ten thousand years ago. They started to spread between 2000 and 500 BC, which would be explainable by having more advanced agricultural processing.

[The Brain]

Nice ship thing.

[Caliga]

Check out Jill Lepore's The Name of War, if you are interested in the topic.

One of my undergrad professors.

[Malthus]

It seems from the dating that labiodentals didn't enter languages immediately after agriculture was established ten thousand years ago. They started to spread between 2000 and 500 BC, which would be explainable by having more advanced agricultural processing.

But Egyptians - for example - had horrible wear to teeth up until the Roman Era, again largely because of sand in the bread.

The emmer was taken from a silo [7] in which it had been stored after threshing and winnowing. The spikelets were moistened and pounded by men in mortars [8] in order to separate the chaff from the grain. The bran was removed and probably used as animal feed.
     The grinding was mostly women's work and took hours of hard labour kneeling down every day, often causing disability. Only the amount of meal used each day was prepared. They fought tedium by singing chants such as "May the gods give my master strength and health" [4] (or that is what their master, who left the record of these words, would have liked them to sing.)
    slave girl grinding corn Until the Middle Kingdom mills were placed on the floor, later they were raised onto workbenches, rendering the milling process somewhat less tiresome. The mill was a simple trough with two compartments. The grain was poured into the top compartment and by rubbing and crushing it with a grindstone, moved into the lower partition. Since the Roman Period rotary mills have been known [2].
     After sieving, the larger particles were poured back into the top for further grinding. The sieves made from rushes and the like, were not very efficient and allowed grains of sand and little flakes of stone to remain in the flour, especially when soft mill stones were used.
    This way of preparing the flour caused severe abrasion of the teeth above all of those who depended upon bread as their main source of nourishment (David, p.148). But it affected all classes: Amenhotep III for instance suffered badly from his teeth.

http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/timelines/topics/bread.htm

To accept this theory, I'd be inclined to ask for some evidence that hunter-gatherers had more wear than agriculturalists.

[viper37]

From this crypt, 24 centuries look at you

A tomb underground etruscan, old almost 24 centuries, with a skeleton surrounded by dishes, it has just been discovered in the south of Aléria (Haute-Corse), a first for 40 years that is "a key to understanding" of this mediterranean civilization to the influence of age in Antiquity.

It is on private land at a place called Lamajone and two meters deep in a necropolis of the roman period that the scientists of the national Institute of preventive archaeological research (Inrap) have unearthed the tomb "which dates back to the years 300 to 350 before Christ," after the type of ceramics found -jugs with scenery, explained Laurent Vidal, the head of these excavations, during a visit press site.

These excavations, which began in June 2018 and a cost of 1.5 million euros to the State, were first allowed to go 130 tombs of the roman period, along with their occupants and many items of jewellery from clay, made a muddy Tuesday by a fine rain and cold.

But it is the discovery of a handful of steps giving access to a corridor six meters long, leading into the hypogeum, a burial chamber of an etruscan carved into the rock a little more than a cubic metre, which brings a lot of hope. For the time being, a skeleton, 17 ceramics and two items of bronze "could be a mirror", which were half dug up, explains Laurent Vidal.

"A single individual is based on the substrate surrounded by furniture cover funeral, it is positioned on the left side, the head oriented to the East," described by the anthropologist Catherine Pigeade.

Is it a woman, a man, a notable ? Impossible to say but Ms. Pigeade hope to discover, through the study of anthropology, which began in situ and the research on DNA, gender, age, social rank as well as potential deficiencies or diseases.

– 'Missing link' –

"It has been many decades that this type of burial had not been discovered in the mediterranean area", explains to the AFP Franck Léandri, regional director of cultural Affairs.

The latest discoveries of this type dates back to the years 60-70, when 179 tombs of culture etruscan with this type of tomb in the basement would have been excavated at Casabianda, just 800 metres from the site of excavation by the archaeologists John and Laurence Jehasse. Dated between 500 and 259 av J.-C, these burials had been unearthed, with more than 4,000 objects – vases, jewellery, weapons, utensils, etc. – that can be admired today at the departmental museum of Aleria, neighbor.

The new find, "this is a key of understanding, it will enable us to reinterpret all the tombs discovered forty years ago with the modern methods of investigation, it is a kind of missing link with what you had before, such as scientific data", welcomes Mr Léandri.

For the time being, the priority is to protect the objects and bones, which have spent more than 2.300 years under the earth. "It is necessary to consolidate the remains as they were discovered," said the AFP Marina Biron, curator-restorer of the Inrap, which is dealing with the same pit excavations or in the barrack yard adjoining, where she first gestures to conservatives.

A race against the clock is launched to collect these historic resources during the fifteen days of excavations that remain before the field is returned to its owner, and that discoveries start to deliver their secrets in the laboratory.

Laurent Vidal "hope that the analysis of each vase will determine what they contain" and to "distinguish the perfume vases vases wine".

But already, the interest is international: "It is a subject to european and mediterranean that we share with the Italians, the English, the Americans and the Germans", stressed Dominique Garcia, the president of the Inrap, including the chairs of etruscology in Chicago, New York, Berlin or the Sorbonne.

The Etruscans ruled over a vast territory formed by the region of Tuscany and the Lazio until the Ist century before J.-C., prior to their integration in the roman Republic.

[dps]

God lord, the grammar in parts of that article is terrible.

[grumbler]

God lord, the grammar in parts of that article is terrible.

Google translate doesn't do grammar.

[dps]

God lord, the grammar in parts of that article is terrible.

Google translate doesn't do grammar.

One of the "sentences" doesn't even have a verb!