The small number of readers familiar with Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel of the 17th Century Swedish Invasion of Poland-Lithuania The Deluge will have some sense of its devastating impact on the country. No one living today, however, realised that Swedish looting included the theft of Polish architecture on a massive scale.
A recent major drought in Poland caused the waters of the River Vistula to recede to levels unprecedented in living memory, revealing tons of architectural masonry looted by the Swedes and loaded onto barges for transport down the river to Gdansk, and thence across the Baltic to Sweden. The invaders’ greed apparently exceeded their navigational judgment, and one or more of the barges sank in the river, possibly as the result of overloading.
Low rainfall over the past few months has brought the Vistula, Poland’s longest river, to its lowest level since regular records began 200 years ago. ...
Historians believed that the Swedes who invaded Poland in the 17th century planned to move the looted cargo up the Vistula to Gdansk, where the river joins the Baltic Sea, and from there transport it home. There is still no firm explanation of why the boats sank on the way.
Kowalski said he and his team had so far located up to 10 tonnes of stonework, but this was only the beginning. “The boats had a capacity of 50-60 tonnes (each), so we think that we should find much more,” he said.
Once it has been removed from the river bed and catalogued, the plan is to take the masonry to Warsaw’s Royal Castle, one of the sites from which, historians believe, it was looted by the Swedish invaders.
For now though, the low water levels that revealed the artefacts are hampering efforts to retrieve them. Regular lifting equipment would sink into the mud, but the river is too low for the researchers to bring in floating cranes.
“We need to wait until it gets higher,” Kowalski said.
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Gość Warszawski [Warsaw’s Guest] has a slideshow
Most readers probably remember the Archimedes Palimpsest, the discovery of the survival of seven treatises by the Greek mathematician Archimedes, including his The Method which solved several problems using methods anticipating the Integral Calculus developed by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibnitz in the 17th Century, in a palimpsest used to record a 13th century Byzantine prayerbook.
Palimpsests are pages of manuscripts or scrolls from which earlier writings have been scraped away, so that the parchment could be reused to record a different text. This medieval form of recycling inadvertently makes the recovery of the eliminated earlier texts possible when modern sophisticated methods of imaging are used.
The Washington Post recently reported that a team, headed by Michael Toth, a former DOD imaging expert, is working systematically on a project which is examining the very large collection of manuscripts preserved over the centuries in the Greek Orthodox monasteries of the Sinai.
The more prominent legible words are 1,200 years old and are interesting enough, but they are not what the scientists are here for. The team is really after the overwritten text from centuries earlier, last seen by the person who scraped it away to recycle the precious animal-skin parchment.
Such erased texts are known as palimpsests, and until their pages enter the imaging room, no one alive now or, in many cases for more than a millennium, can say for sure what has been hidden. The work is tedious, like carefully brushing away sand at a traditional archaeology dig, but the promise of what can be found is a powerful motivator.
This is Toth and his colleagues’ most ambitious project to date, and it is just one component of a major transformation under way in the desert. The team is working within the stone walls of the Sacred and Imperial Monastery of the God-Trodden Mount of Sinai — St. Catherine’s for short.
For 17 centuries, the Greek Orthodox Christian monks here have protected an unparalleled trove of manuscripts. Now the monastery is in a multimillion-dollar push to physically and digitally protect its treasures and make them easily accessible, in most cases for the first time, to scholars around the world.
In the process, the monks will establish a model for the preservation of irreplaceable ancient manuscripts in a world where more and more of them are threatened by the chaos of war and revolution.
The possibilities are fascinating. We know of countless lost classical works which we moderns would love to get our hands on, poems by Sappho, plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles, the dialogues of Aristotle and the treatises of Plato, that might very possibly have seemed of indifferent interest to Eastern churchmen of the Dark Ages and which could easily have been selected to be scraped away and overwritten with some, at the time seemingly more pertinent, religious text.
The search in Leicester for the remains of Richard III, the last Plantagenet monarch of England slain August 22, 1485 at Bosworth Field, may have achieved success.
The Telegraph reports the finding of remains that may very possibly be those of Richard.
Over 500 years since he was killed in battle, archaeologists believe they have finally found the skeleton of King Richard III, buried deep beneath a council car park.
Experts said a fully intact skeleton matched much about what they knew about the medieval king, and are hoping that DNA tests will put their beliefs beyond doubt.
The remains were found three weeks into an archaeological dig by a team from Leicester University, which recently pinpointed the site of the ancient Grey Friars church, where Richard was believed to be buried after being killed in the Battle of Bosworth in August 1485, and which was razed to the ground in 1538 during the Dissolution of the Monasteries ordered by Henry VIII.
To their astonishment, an excavation unearthed a result which experts said were “beyond out wildest dreams”.
Five key aspects underlined their belief that appears to have ended a decade-long search for his remains.
The skeleton was an adult male, who appeared fit and strong. He had suffered significant trauma to the head where a blade had cut away part of the back of his skull; an injury consistent with battle.
A barbed arrow head was found lodged between vertebrae in his upper back, and spinal abnormalities pointed to the fact that he had severe scoliosis, a form of spinal curvature. This would have made his right shoulder appear visibly higher than his left, which is consistent with contemporary accounts of Richard’s appearance.
Richard’s two year reign was the subject of one of William Shakespeare’s most famous plays, which portrayed him as an evil, ugly hunchback, and which helped cement the public perception of him.
The remains were found in the Choir area of the church, again consistent with historical record of where he was buried.
Unknown artist, Richard III, mid-16th century, Society of Antiquaries, London
A search is on in Leicester for the remains of Richard III, slain in battle at Bosworth Field, and then buried at Greyfriars Church. The location of the burial, and even the exact location of the Franciscan Friary, have been lost to five centuries of development.
Philippa Langley, from the Richard III Society which has been involved with the project, said: “We know he was buried here but the church disappeared after the dissolution of the monasteries as did his grave so today we begin the search for Richard.
“We know his body was led into Leicester and put on display for three days by Henry Tudor before he was buried.
“I hope we do find him because I want to give him a proper resting place and also to explode a lot of myths around Richard III.”
Richard Buckley, co-director of the Archaeology Service at the university, said: “It is quite a long shot but it’s a very exciting project. We don’t know the whereabouts of any of the friary buildings at the moment. We don’t know precisely where the body would have been buried but we suspect it would be in the choir or near the alter.”
If bones are found they will be assessed for trauma to the skeleton, as the monarch was killed in battle, then be subject to DNA analysis.
King Richard III, the last Plantagenet, ruled England from 1483 until he was defeated at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485.
Richard may never be found as there is also a tradition that the late king’s remains were thrown into the River Soar at the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
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On 22 August 1485, Richard met the outnumbered forces of Henry Tudor at the Battle of Bosworth Field. He was astride his white courser. The size of Richard’s army has been estimated at 8,000, Henry’s at 5,000, but exact numbers cannot be known. During the battle Richard was abandoned by Baron Stanley (made Earl of Derby in October), Sir William Stanley, and Henry Percy, 4th Earl of Northumberland. Despite his apparent affiliation with Richard, Baron Stanley’s wife, Lady Margaret Beaufort, was Henry Tudor’s mother. The switching of sides by the Stanleys severely depleted the strength of Richard’s army and had a material effect on the outcome of the battle. Also the death of John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, his close companion, appears to have had a demoralising effect on Richard and his men. Perhaps in realisation of the implications of this, Richard then appears to have led an impromptu cavalry charge deep into the enemy ranks in an attempt to end the battle quickly by striking at Henry Tudor himself. Accounts note that Richard fought bravely and ably during this manoeuvre, unhorsing Sir John Cheney, a well-known jousting champion, killing Henry’s standard bearer Sir William Brandon and coming within a sword’s length of Henry himself before being finally surrounded by Sir William Stanley’s men and killed. Tradition holds that his final words were “treason, treason, treason!”, when he found Lord Stanley had turned against him. The Welsh accounts state that Sir Wyllyam Gardynyr killed King Richard III with a poleaxe. The blows were so violent that the king’s helmet was driven into his skull. The account reads, “Richard’s horse was trapped in the marsh where he was slain by one of Rhys Thomas’ men, a commoner named Wyllyam Gardynyr.” Another account has Rhys ap Thomas himself slaying the king.
Polydore Vergil, Henry Tudor’s official historian, would later record that “King Richard, alone, was killed fighting manfully in the thickest press of his enemies”. Richard’s naked body was then exposed, possibly in the collegiate foundation of the Annunciation of Our Lady, and hanged by Henry Tudor, now King Henry VII, before being buried at Greyfriars Church, Leicester. In 1495 Henry VII paid £50 for a marble and alabaster monument. According to one tradition, during the Dissolution of the Monasteries his body was thrown into the nearby River Soar, although other evidence suggests that a memorial stone was visible in 1612, in a garden built on the site of Greyfriars.[18] The exact location is now lost due to over 500 years of subsequent development. On 24 August 2012, the University of Leicester and Leicester City Council, in association with the Richard III Society, have joined forces to begin a search for the mortal remains of King Richard III. Led by University of Leicester Archaeological Services (ULAS), experts will be seeking to locate the Greyfriars site and discover whether the remains of Richard III may still be found. There is currently a memorial plaque on the site of the Cathedral where he may have once been buried, as well as a stone plaque on the bridge where his remains were allegedly thrown into the Soar.
The New York Times has a scary and intriguing medical detective story.
The ambulance sped up to the red brick federal research hospital on June 13, 2011, and paramedics rushed a gravely ill 43-year-old woman straight to intensive care. She had a rare lung disease and was gasping for breath. And, just hours before, the hospital learned she had been infected with a deadly strain of bacteria resistant to nearly all antibiotics.
The hospital employed the most stringent and severe form of isolation, but soon the bacterium, Klebsiella pneumoniae, was spreading through the hospital. Seventeen patients got it, and six of them died. Had they been infected by the woman? And, if so, how did the bacteria escape strict controls in one of the nation’s most sophisticated hospitals, the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md.?
What followed was a medical detective story that involved the rare use of rapid genetic sequencing to map the entire genome of a bacterium as it spread and to use that information to detect its origins and trace its route.
Rumours of a World War II German submarine at the bottom of the river have been around for years, but a sonar image may prove that it’s more than just a bump on a log.
Brian Corbin, a diver from Happy Valley Goose Bay, and others were searching the river bottom with side-scanning sonar for three men lost over Muskrat Falls back in 2010 when they came across what appears to be a submarine.
“We were looking for something completely different, not a submarine, not a U-boat — I mean, no one would ever believe that was possible,” Brian Corbin told CBC News.
It certainly wasn’t unheard for German U-boat to be operating off the coast of Labrador and Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick during the war targeting convoys to Great Britain. One reached as far upriver on the St. Lawrence as Rimouski, some 300 km from Quebec City.
“I think it is possible,” Wyman Jacque, town manager for Happy Valley Goose Bay, told the Star Thursday.
Jacque said the U-boat could have quite easily made the trip inland on Labrador’s largest estuary to the shipping port of Happy Valley Goose Bay from the coast and he added the Churchill River before it was dammed back in the 1970s might well have been deep enough to allow the Germans sailors to get to the area of the Falls.
The Churchill River empties into what is known as Lake Melville, a salt water body of water where Happy Valley Goose Bay is located. Muskrat Falls is about 26 kilometres from Lake Melville.
“I can tell you that I have seen the sonar and the outline . . . and you can actually see an outline of what appears to be . . . a submarine,” Jacque said.
The German Embassy in Ottawa, which has been contacted about the possible find, has confirmed that as many as 50 U-boats were unaccounted for when the war ended in 1945.
[S]earchers believe they’ve found a World War II German submarine at the bottom of a Canadian river, 60 miles from the ocean.
What appears to be a German U-boat was first spotted at the bottom of the Churchill River in Labrador two years ago by searchers using sonar to locate three men who had gone over Muskrat Falls, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reported Wednesday.
“We were looking for something completely different, not a submarine, not a U-boat—I mean, no one would ever believe that was possible,” Brian Corbin told the CBC. “It was a great feeling when we found it.”
Corbin said the object appears to be a 150-foot-long vessel.
The German government says it would be “sensational and unusual” for one of its submarines to have ended up so far inland, though it concedes it’s possible, the CBC reported.
“We do know that German U-boats did operate in that region,” Georg Juergens, deputy head of mission for the German Embassy in Ottawa, told the CBC. “We must brace ourselves for surprises.”
Juergens said the whereabouts of more than a dozen WWII U-boats may still be unknown. He said it would be “against our tradition and our naval customs” to raise the wreckage if it does prove to be a German sub.
“This site then would be declared a war grave at sea,” he said.
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The loss of German U-boat personnel in WWII was something like 75%.
Sam Kean, in Slate, explains that the number of human chromosomes suggests that modern humanity emerged from a small, inbred population.
Humans have 46 chromosomes. Our closest primate relatives have 48. So where did those extra two disappear to? ...
Let’s go back a million years, when most proto-humans had 48 chromosomes, and follow a hypothetical Guy who has 47. Again, a chromosome fused at the tips won’t affect Guy’s day-to-day health. But having an odd number of chromosomes will cripple the viability of his sperm. (If you prefer to think of a female, the same is true of her eggs.)
Say the fusion left Guy with a normal chromosome 12, a normal 13, and a 12-13 hybrid in each cell. During sperm production his body has to divide those three chromosomes into two cells, and there are only a few possible ways to divvy them. There’s {12} & {13, 12-13}, or {13} & {12, 12-13}, or {12, 13} & {12-13}. The first four sperms are either missing a chromosome or have a duplicate, practically a cyanide capsule for an embryo. The last two cases have the proper amount of DNA for a normal child. But only in the sixth case does Guy pass the fusion on. Overall, then, two-thirds of Guy’s children die in the womb, and just one-sixth inherit the fusion. And any Junior with the fusion would then face the same terrible odds trying to reproduce. Not a good recipe for spreading the fusion—and again, that’s still only 47 chromosomes, not 46.
What Guy needs is a Doll with the same two fused chromosomes. Now, the odds of two people with the same fusion meeting might seem infinitesimal. And they would be—except in inbred families, where the chances of finding a cousin or half-sibling with the same fusion don’t round down to zero so easily. What’s more, while the odds of Guy and Doll having a healthy child remain low, every 36th spin of the genetic roulette wheel (because 1/6×1/6 = 1/36), the child would inherit both fused chromosomes—giving him 46 total.
And here’s the payoff: Junior and his 46 chromosomes would likely have an easier time having children than his 47-chromosomed parents. Remember that the fusion itself doesn’t ruin you—lots of healthy people have fusions. It’s only reproduction that gets tricky, since fusions can lead to an excess or deficit of DNA in embryos. But because he has an even number of chromosomes, little Junior wouldn’t have any unbalanced sperm cells: Each would have the right amount of DNA to run a human, just packaged differently. As a result, all of his children have a good chance of being healthy. And if his children start having their own children—especially with other relatives with 46 or 47 chromosomes—the fusion could start to spread. ...
How did having 46 chromosomes then spread worldwide? It’s possible that having two fewer chromosomes than everyone else gave Guy and Doll’s family a whopping evolutionary advantage, allowing them to out-compete the 48-chromosome sluggards. But probably not. More likely, they happened to be living at a point when the human race nearly got wiped out.
Take your pick for the cause of our near-extinction—ice ages, plagues, Indonesian gigavolcanoes. But humans have far less genetic diversity than most other species, and the most reasonable explanation for this is a genetic bottleneck: a severe reduction in the population of humans in the past, perhaps multiple times. One study suggested that our population, worldwide, might have dropped as low as 40 adults. (The world record for fitting people in a phone booth is 25.) That’s an outlandishly pessimistic guess even among disaster scientists, but it’s common to find estimates of a few thousand adults, below what some minor league baseball teams draw.
British hobbyists Reg Mead and Richard Miles searched for three decades on the basis of rumors of a farmer finding silver coins on his land before finding a massive hoard of 30,000-50,000 coins lying beneath a mound of clay under a hedge. The coins are believed to date from the first century B.C. and to have been struck by a tribe called the Coriosolitae who lived on the northern coast of modern-day Brittany. The theory is that the coins were buried to protect them from the Roman army advancing under the command of Julius Caesar.
All cattle are descended from as few as 80 animals that were domesticated from wild ox in the Near East some 10,500 years ago, according to a new genetic study.
An international team of scientists from the CNRS and National Museum of Natural History in France, the University of Mainz in Germany, and UCL in the UK were able to conduct the study by first extracting DNA from the bones of domestic cattle excavated in Iranian archaeological sites. These sites date to not long after the invention of farming and are in the region where cattle were first domesticated.
The team examined how small differences in the DNA sequences of those ancient cattle, as well as cattle living today, could have arisen given different population histories. Using computer simulations they found that the DNA differences could only have arisen if a small number of animals, approximately 80, were domesticated from wild ox (aurochs).
The study is published in the current issue of the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.
“How do you read a two-thousand-year-old manuscript that has been erased, cut up, written on and painted over [i.e., a palimpsest]? With a powerful particle accelerator, of course! Ancient books curator William Noel tells the fascinating story behind the Archimedes palimpsest, a Byzantine prayer book containing previously-unknown original writings from ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes and others.”
The Melungeons are an ethnic group, commonly described as a “tri-racial isolate,” resident in the Cumberland Gap neighborhood of Eastern Tennesee, Southwest Virginia, and Eastern Kentucky. The Melungeons’ comparatively dark complexions and other exotic characteristics have been attributed to mixed Amerindian and Spanish or Portuguese descent. Other alleged origins included shipwrecked Turkish slaves or descent from Gypsies. One legendary account claims that they descend from a native people resident before the arrival of European colonists.
Recent research seems to offer a much simpler explanation: descent from African freedmen.
[A] new DNA study in the Journal of Genetic Genealogy [Not apparently yet available on-line] attempts to separate truth from oral tradition and wishful thinking. The study found the truth to be somewhat less exotic: Genetic evidence shows that the families historically called Melungeons are the offspring of sub-Saharan African men and white women of northern or central European origin.
A North Korean slur on the intelligence of South Korea’s president led Slate’s Explainer to consult the experts and provide some thoughts on the actual storage capability of the human brain.
Most computational neuroscientists tend to estimate human storage capacity somewhere between 10 terabytes and 100 terabytes, though the full spectrum of guesses ranges from 1 terabyte to 2.5 petabytes. (One terabyte is equal to about 1,000 gigabytes or about 1 million megabytes; a petabyte is about 1,000 terabytes.)
The math behind these estimates is fairly simple. The human brain contains roughly 100 billion neurons. Each of these neurons seems capable of making around 1,000 connections, representing about 1,000 potential synapses, which largely do the work of data storage. Multiply each of these 100 billion neurons by the approximately 1,000 connections it can make, and you get 100 trillion data points, or about 100 terabytes of information.
Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders charging just for fun. (click on image for larger version)
The Scotsman reports some surprising results from recent Scottish DNA research.
ScotlandsDNA, the groundbreaking research project that probes far beyond the ink stains of family trees by analysing the genetic make-up of Scottish men and women, has unveiled its interim results, which show that 1 per cent of all Scots are descended from the Berber and Tuareg tribesmen of the Sahara.
My own patrilineal DNA results (Excel file) are very similar to the DNA of Somerled, the 12th century Lord of the Isles, from whom descend the various septs of Clan Donald.
