Cheerful or not

Victim of Assad || The Weekly Standard

In a grim footnote to the ongoing human tragedy in Syria, the country’s cultural heritage as well as its civilian population is now in peril. Syria, a center of civilization in the ancient and medieval eras, boasts some of the finest archaeological sites in the near east, notably the old cities of Damascus and Aleppo as well as the ancient synagogue at Dura Europos. Bashar al-Assad’s regime, which should have the knowledge and ability to protect sensitive sites, has done nothing to spare them. There have been reliable reports of violence at a number of sites, including the so-called “Bride of the Desert,” the Roman city of Palmyra, the Omari mosque in Deraa, the early Christian church of St. Julian in Homs, and the medieval castle known as the “Krak des Chevaliers” outside that city.

Palmyra contains Babylonian, Hellenistic, Roman and Islamic treasures, and was home to the legendary Queen Zenobia who rebelled against the Romans in the third century AD. Abandoned for centuries and in an isolated location, the ruins are—or were—particularly well preserved. Given the popularity of Palmyra as a tourist destination, Assad had in the past been content to leave well enough alone. But in February the troops rolled in and took up positions in the 17th-century Citadel of Ibn Maan overlooking the modern town and adjacent to the Roman ruins. Civilians report heavy gun and tank fire targeting any activity in the site, and the extent of the damage can only be imagined.

How the Bow and Arrow Took Over the World || Danger Room @ Wired

The bow was the first mechanical device that could outpace projectiles thrown by hand, and it was the best weapon humans had during horse-mounted combat—all the way up until the advent of the revolving pistol. It was a pretty huge step in the scheme of weapons development.

Prehistoric cultures—amazingly, independent of one another across the globe—developed bow and arrow sets for hunting and combat. The oldest arrow points, discovered in South Africa, were made of bone and date back some 61,000 years. Pre-medieval people in Africa along with the American Indians and Eskimos had their own versions of the bow and arrow. In Japan, gigantic 8-foot-tall wooden bows were found alongside smaller models crafted from whalebone or horn, and pictures of Japan’s first emperor, Jimmu, who ruled around 660 BC, depict him holding a large bow….

[A]rchery wasn’t just for battle and food. The recreational sport dates back to the Egyptians and Greeks, and the earliest archery societies in England started popping up in the 16th Century. Early archers had to compensate for inaccurate, unsturdy wood models that sent the arrow on a circuitous trip to its target.

“If it’s not stable, the bow will zig zag after the release,” and the arrow will follow, explains Douglas Denton, the project engineer in charge of Hoyt Archery’s line of Olympic-ready bows.

And yet, for most of history, archers put up with this unruly behavior because there was nothing superior. But in the mid-20th century, bow makers found better, more stable materials like laminated wood, plastic and fiberglass. Temperature and humidity didn’t warp these materials and archery became more predictable.

Modern models borrow largely from aerospace innovations. “Limbs,” or the top and bottom fins that extend from the handle, are made of syntactic foam (think tiny, tiny glass balls) in resin that have been covered in carbon fiber—very sturdy. Super-strong bowstrings are made up of stuff like Gore fiber to prevent the instrument from snapping, which was a recurring—and painful—problem until fairly recently.

The most recent leaps in innovation have been in the bow’s geometry. In the last four years, there have been more structural changes in the bow than in the previous 30. In a nutshell, Hoyt rejiggered the way the forces operate within the instrument, so shooting arrows now requires much less effort on the bowman’s part.

[Archery was the one sport I desperately wanted to participate in during sophomore gym class.  They tried to put me in driver’s ed during that unit (which made no sense — I wasn’t turning 16 until an entire year later), and I actually sobbed while trying to convince the teacher to switch me over to bows and arrows.  Robin Hood and Artemis made a huge impression on me.]

Radical theory of first Americans places Stone Age Europeans in Delmarva 20,000 years ago || Washington Post

At the height of the last ice age, Stanford says, mysterious Stone Age European people known as the Solutreans paddled along an ice cap jutting into the North Atlantic. They lived like Inuits, harvesting seals and seabirds.

The Solutreans eventually spread across North America, Stanford says, hauling their distinctive blades with them and giving birth to the later Clovis culture, which emerged some 13,000 years ago.

When Stanford proposed this “Solutrean hypothesis” in 1999, colleagues roundly rejected it. One prominent archaeologist suggested that Stanford was throwing his career away.

But now, 13 years later, Stanford and Bruce Bradley, an archaeologist at England’s University of Exeter, lay out a detailed case — bolstered by the curious blade and other stone tools recently found in the mid-Atlantic — in a new book, “Across Atlantic Ice.”

“I drank the Solutrean Kool-Aid,” said Steve Black, an archaeologist at Texas State University in San Marcos. “I had been very dubious. It’s something a lot of [archaeologists] have dismissed out of hand. But I came away from the book feeling like it’s an extremely credible idea that needs to be taken seriously.”

Other experts remain unconvinced. “Anyone advancing a radically different hypothesis must be willing to take his licks from skeptics,” said Gary Haynes, an archaeologist at the University of Nevada-Reno.

At the core of Stanford’s case are stone tools recovered from five mid-Atlantic sites. Two sites lie on Chesapeake Bay islands, suggesting that the Solutreans settled Delmarva early on. Smithsonian research associate Darrin Lowery found blades, anvils and other tools found stuck in soil at least 20,000 years old.

Displaying the tools in his office at the National Museum of Natural History, Stanford handles a milky chert blade and says, “This stuff is beginning to give us a real nice picture of occupation of the Eastern Shore around 20,000 years ago.”

Further, the Eastern Shore blades strongly resemble those found at dozens of Solutrean sites from the Stone Age in Spain and France, Stanford says. “We can match each one of 18 styles up to the sites in Europe.”

Once Hidden by Forest, Carvings in Land Attest to Amazon’s Lost World || New York Times

According to stunning archaeological discoveries here in recent years, the earthworks on Mr. Araújo’s land and hundreds like them nearby are much, much older — potentially upending the conventional understanding of the world’s largest tropical rain forest.

The deforestation that has stripped the Amazon since the 1970s has also exposed a long-hidden secret lurking underneath thick rain forest: flawlessly designed geometric shapes spanning hundreds of yards in diameter.

Alceu Ranzi, a Brazilian scholar who helped discover the squares, octagons, circles, rectangles and ovals that make up the land carvings, said these geoglyphs found on deforested land were as significant as the famous Nazca lines, the enigmatic animal symbols visible from the air in southern Peru.

“What impressed me the most about these geoglyphs was their geometric precision, and how they emerged from forest we had all been taught was untouched except by a few nomadic tribes,” said Mr. Ranzi, a paleontologist who first saw the geoglyphs in the 1970s and, years later, surveyed them by plane.

For some scholars of human history in Amazonia, the geoglyphs in the Brazilian state of Acre and other archaeological sites suggest that the forests of the western Amazon, previously considered uninhabitable for sophisticated societies partly because of the quality of their soils, may not have been as “Edenic” as some environmentalists contend.

The Birth of Religion || National Geographic

Before them are dozens of massive stone pillars arranged into a set of rings, one mashed up against the next. Known as Göbekli Tepe, the site [in southern Turkey] is vaguely reminiscent of Stonehenge, except that Göbekli Tepe was built much earlier and is made not from roughly hewn blocks but from cleanly carved limestone pillars splashed with bas-reliefs of animals—a cavalcade of gazelles, snakes, foxes, scorpions, and ferocious wild boars. The assemblage was built some 11,600 years ago, seven millennia before the Great Pyramid of Giza. It contains the oldest known temple. Indeed, Göbekli Tepe is the oldest known example of monumental architecture—the first structure human beings put together that was bigger and more complicated than a hut. When these pillars were erected, so far as we know, nothing of comparable scale existed in the world.

At the time of Göbekli Tepe’s construction much of the human race lived in small nomadic bands that survived by foraging for plants and hunting wild animals. Construction of the site would have required more people coming together in one place than had likely occurred before. Amazingly, the temple’s builders were able to cut, shape, and transport 16-ton stones hundreds of feet despite having no wheels or beasts of burden. The pilgrims who came to Göbekli Tepe lived in a world without writing, metal, or pottery; to those approaching the temple from below, its pillars must have loomed overhead like rigid giants, the animals on the stones shivering in the firelight—emissaries from a spiritual world that the human mind may have only begun to envision.