Categories
Editorial

Benin City: A Stunning Metropolis Annihilated By the British Empire

Benin City

Modern estimates suggest that at one point the walls were four times longer than the Great Wall of China, using up to a hundred times more material than the Great Pyramid of Cheops. Beyond the city limits, further walls were constructed to divide the surroundings of the capital into around 500 distinct villages. This complicated network of walls was all dug by hand, the mosaic of settlement boundaries covering 6,500 sq. km in total. Huge metal lamps fueled by palm oil lined the city’s streets, a precursor to modern street lighting. When the Portuguese first laid eyes on the city in the middle of the jungle, they classified it as one of the most beautiful, well designed cities in the world. Lourenco Pinto, the captain of a Portuguese ship, observed in 1691: “Great Benin, where the King resides, is larger than Lisbon, all the streets run straight and as far as the eyes can see. The houses are large, especially that of the king which is richly decorated and has Fine columns. The city is wealthy and industrious. It is so well governed that theft is unknown and the people live in such Security that they have no door to their houses.” Now, nothing of that city, believed to have been founded in 900 CE, remains. A new city has been built on the site, but no traces of the original’s unique splendor can be seen. The first centuries of European contact had seen Benin City enjoy a mutually beneficial trade relationship with Portugal. That all started to change in the nineteenth century, however, as Britain and other imperial powers upped their exploitation of Africa, moving from trading to the more profitable system of direct colonial take over. By 1884, chiefs of a plethora of tribes in the Niger Delta had signed treaties placing their people under the protection of the British crown. A protectorate government was set up with a headquarters in Calabar, and the area of British interest in the region continued to expand. By 1886 the activities of the Royal Niger Company had engulfed the area surrounding Benin, but the Oba (king) of Benin refused to sign up to the same treaties. For years Benin held out against many of the trading and other demands made by the British, yet the situation became increasingly perilous for the increasingly isolated kingdom. As Dr. Victor Osaro Edo wrote in 2009: “The fall of Benin from 1885 onwards became inevitable.” A trigger came in January 1897, when the Acting Consul-General in the region: James Phillips, led a large delegation to Benin City. The delegation hadn’t made their intentions clear and were making their visit during the Igue festival, when the Oba was not supposed to receive any visitors. What the expedition’s real intentions were is still debated, but Phillips’ unannounced arrival was seen as an invasion and intercepted by the Oba’s forces. In the ensuing battle, only two officers survived of the roughly 200 people in Phillips’ party. The retaliation by the British forces, known as the Benin Expedition, was swift and brutal. A large British force of 1,200 soldiers, at the time labelled the Punitive Expedition, was deployed. In February 1897, the machine gun bearing troops arrived at Benin, their orders were to conquer the city. Fierce fighting ensued, the Benin forces resisting for 17 days before the British expedition (including a large force of African recruits) took the Kingdom. What followed was a wave of destruction, the people of the city forced to flee as the invaders burnt it to the ground. The Oba’s palace was destroyed, while he was forced to live the rest of his life in exile in Calabar. The cultural relics of the city: ivory and bronze sculptures, were looted and then sold off to pay for the Benin Expedition. Today, around a thousand Benin bronzes can still be found in public and private collections around the globe, most notably in Britain but also elsewhere. These artefacts of the kingdom are relics of the achievements of the great city of Benin, and a powerful reminder of its fate at the hands of British imperialism. ]]>

Categories
Breaking News

80-Year-Old Nazi Time Capsule Unearthed in Poland

Mein Kampf as wedding present (1)

Mein Kampf, other books and historical materials describing the town of Falkenburg, as it was known then. Ordensburg Krössinsee was one of three educational centers constructed in the 1930s in Germany for the purpose of training future leaders of the Nazi Party. It was built near the town of Falkenburg in what was Germany at the time. Today it’s the town of Zlocieniec, Poland, and the former training camp is used by the Polish army The individual buildings and designated areas which made up the facility included a Hall of Honor, twenty separate living quarters, a dining hall, an educational hall, the commander’s house, administrative buildings, a house for female employees, a sick bay, a sports field, an arena for riding, horse barns and two towers (although four had been planned). A hotel, swimming pool and water sports facility were also planned but never constructed. To attend the educational center, cadets, called Ordens Junkers, had to be a minimum 5 feet 4 inches (1.63 m) tall and be between 23 and 26 years old. They were required to be racially pure, in good health and have no physical limitations. Classes included the study of politics, world history and philosophy, while afternoons were spent on battle tactics, military drills, equestrian techniques (a program for which it was recognized), and sports. In 1937, the facility was shared with the Hitlerjungen or Hitler Youth. Between 1933 and 1945, the Hitler Youth was Germany’s only official youth organization and consisted of the Hitlerjugend for males between the ages of fourteen and eighteen and the Deutsches Jungvolk for younger boys between ten and fourteen years old, as well as the League of German Girls. The Hitler Youth members would become the sole occupants of the camp following the invasion of Poland in 1939 and the start of World War II. The capsule and its contents have been transferred to the National Museum in Szczecin for translation, categorizing, preservation and display. ]]>

Categories
Breaking News

Vikings, Ancient Egyptians and the Spread of the House Cat

Young Japanese House cat (2)

in up to 37% of homes in the USA. However, until now, little was known about the history of cat domestication. Indeed, scientists still debate whether the house cat can truly be called a domesticated animal, debating whether its behaviour and anatomy are truly that different from its wild relatives. “We don’t know the history of ancient cats. We do not know their origin, we don’t know how their dispersal occurred,” Eva-Maria Geigl, an evolutionary geneticist at the Institut Jacques Monod in Paris, told Nature. Geigl presented the study, along with her colleagues Claudio Ottoni and Thierry Grange. The team carried out the first ever large scale study of ancient feline DNA, taking specimens excavated from thirty archaeological sites in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. All together, they sequenced the DNA of 209 cats, dating from 15,000 years ago to the eighteenth century CE. Tellingly, a 9,500 year old human burial in Cyprus contained the remains of a cat. According to the authors of the study, this suggests that the connection between humans and felines dates back at least as far as the dawn of agriculture, which began in the nearby fertile crescent around 12,000 years ago. Geigl and colleagues’ results suggest that cat populations grew in two distinct waves. As early farming communities expanded into the Eastern Mediterranean they brought Middle Eastern wildcats with a particular mitochondrial lineage with them. Geigl suggests that the grain stockpiles of these early farming communities attracted rodents, which in turn attracted wild cats. Humans might have started to domesticate cats after seeing the benefits they offered in keeping stores free of rats and other rodents. Meanwhile, around 6,000 years ago wild cats started to be tamed in ancient Egypt, the civilisation’s feline fixation deepening to the point that millions of cats were mummified. Thousands of years after the Middle Eastern cat lineage had entered the Mediterranean, cats descended from Egypt started to spread across Eurasia. A mitochondrial lineage present in cat mummies from the fourth century BCE to the fourth century CE was also found in cats in Turkey, Bulgaria and Sub-Saharan Africa. Again, rodents were likely responsible for the spread of cats. The study suggests that sea-faring people likely used them to keep rodents in check on ships. Fascinatingly, the team also found cat remains from the Egyptian lineage at a Viking site in northern Germany dating to between the eighth and eleventh century. “There are so many interesting observations” in the study, Pontus Skoglund, a population geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, told Nature. “I didn’t even know there were Viking cats.” Geigl’s team also analysed the DNA mutation responsible for the blotched coats found on tabby cats. They found the unique mutation didn’t occur until the Medieval period. The scientists now hope to sequence more nuclear DNA from ancient cats, to further our understanding of the mysterious, under studied history of our feline friends. This article was corrected on 25th September 2016. The original said that cats were kept as pets in over 75% of homes in the US. The correct figure is in fact between 30% and 37%.]]>

Categories
Breaking News

Scientists Use New Tech to Virtually Unwrap Biblical Scroll

Dead Seas Scrolls Before Unraveled

New York Times, Seales has been working for the past 13 years on imaging techniques to digitally restore ancient scrolls too damaged to be read. Inspired by the charred scrolls found in Herculaneum, one of the locations destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE, the computer scientist was unsatisfied with traditional computer tomography (CT) scans as this technique would reveal only a jumbled mass of ink within a scroll. The solution that Seales devised was to reconstruct the writing surface of the scroll digitally before placing the inked letters back on it, resulting in an almost miraculously clear and legible image. The text of the scroll has been verified by Biblical experts to be the first two chapters of Leviticus from the Hebrew Bible. While the En-Gedi manuscript is not the first instance of this version of the text to be discovered by archaeologists, it is the very first time a severely damaged scroll thought to be impossible to read has been unrolled and then identified using non-invasive techniques. Additionally, the version of Leviticus recorded in the scrolls was found to be identical to the Masoretic text, making it the earliest instance of the use of such a text considering the document has been dated to between 50 and 100 CE. The Masoretic text is considered the authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible, and is one of the texts most often used for Protestant translations of the Old Testament. The revelation that the Masoretic text was in use as far back as nearly 2,000 years ago has prompted some paleography experts to suggest the En-Gedi text should be officially categorized as a Dead Sea scroll, especially if the age of the scroll is indeed accurate. Researchers have responded with enthusiasm to the news, proclaiming that Seales’ new technique could be the key to unlocking the secrets of any number of scrolls too damaged to open without risking permanent damage to the texts concealed within. The suite of software tools the computer scientist developed will be made available under an open source license once his current government grant period expires. The new research study, published recently in the journal Science Advances, can be found online here]]>

Categories
Breaking News

23,000-Year-Old Fish Hooks Discovered on Okinawa

Fishing for Ayu

CNN that humans are thought to have originally crossed over to Australia approximately 50,000 years ago, but that any evidence of maritime adaptation by humans had only been reported between Australia to Wallacea, a collection of primarily Indonesian islands. “Our findings suggest that Paleolithic people had adapted their maritime technologies to live not only in Wallacea and Australia, but a much wider geographic zone,” Fujita told CNN. “We found fish and human bones that dated back some 30,000 to 35,000 years. We don’t know what kind of tools were used to catch these fish, but we’re hoping to find some even older fishing tools.” The study was recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. An image of the hooks can be found here: here ]]>

Categories
Breaking News

New Research Says Neanderthals Were Jewelry-Makers

Neanderthal Burial Scene

Science, other scientists have been touting the new research as “a landmark study” proving that Neanderthals had enough intelligence to make these cognitive symbolic leaps. Much of the controversy stems from the date of the artifacts, as they were made around 42,000 years in the past – a time when Neanderthals were well in decline while modern humans were spreading across Europe and replacing them. However, after University of York bioarchaeologist Matthew Collins examined some of the unidentified bones discovered at the dig site and found them too small to use more traditional DNA identification methods on, he and his colleagues made the decision to use the new ancient protein analysis method instead. Analysis proved conclusively that the bone fragments were human, but it was still unclear if they had once belonged to a modern human or an archaic species such as a Neanderthal. To further pinpoint the identity, Collins and his colleagues conducted a comparison of the collagen within the fragments to those produced by modern humans and those produced by archaic humans. Collagen in Neanderthals contained high levels of an amino acid known as aparagine, as evidenced from previously-sequenced Neanderthal DNA; modern humans do not produce aparagine but instead have aspartic acid in their collagen. The researchers found evidence of aparagine amino acid, pointing to the bone fragments being of Neanderthal origin. Additionally, the type of collagen within the bone is only present in types of bone that are still growing, which combined with the presence of nitrogen isotopes associated with breast-fed children has led the scientists to believe that at least a portion of the bone fragments were from a Neanderthal infant. The findings have fanned the flames of debate when it comes to claiming that Neanderthals were incapable of creating symbolic jewelry of the type found on the site. It may be, according to some scientists, that Neanderthals living on site learned of the tools and techniques used for creating such jewelry from modern humans migrating to the area. The new data points towards renewed evidence that our archaic human cousins created these pieces of art themselves. Collins and his research team’s new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, can be found online here]]>

Categories
News

The Explorer Who Found The Grand Canyon But Wanted Cities of Gold

Map of Coronado's expedition (2)

Categories
Breaking News

Human Remains Found in Antikythera Shipwreck

Antikythera Mechanism (3)(1)

The Guardian, an international team of researchers from the Greek Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution discovered the jumbled skeleton near the end of August during an exploratory dive to the seafloor where the ship rests. Woods Hole representative Brendan Foley, one of the participants in the underwater study of the Antikythera wreck, says that the remains may be the most exciting scientific discovery made during the current efforts to study the sunken ship. Judging by the well-preserved state of the bones, researchers say the person was male, likely a teenager or in his early twenties, and might have been trapped when the ship went down. Foley added that the remains of the young man, who has been dubbed “Pamphilos” by the researchers, may have been buried fairly quickly in silt as a result. This bodes well for the possibility of extracting genetic material from Pamphilos’ bones and sequencing them successfully, raising hopes that this will lead to the first instance of a victim of an ancient shipwreck having his entire DNA mapped for study. In fact, the only similar efforts include remains from the Vasa, a Swedish warship that sank beneath the waves in 1628, and the Mary Rose, the great British warship of King Henry VIII. Pamphilos – or what was left of him – was discovered in a jumble of bones: arm bones lying atop leg bones and rib pieces, with teeth and the skull all scattered close by. The skeleton was found surrounded by other artifacts such as broken pieces of pottery. The young man’s nickname comes from a drinking vessel bearing the name discovered on a previous underwater dig. In ancient Greek, Pamphilos means “friend of all.” There is of course no proof that the identity of these remains is the same as the original owner of the cup. However, Foley says that it can be surmised that a Greek male bearing that name had been either a passenger or a crewmember present on the ship during its final, fateful voyage. These remains are not the first to be found within the wreck. Indeed, the famous Jacques Cousteau, who visited the site in 1976, brought several bone fragments to the surface. However, the most recent find is much more complete, much more well preserved, and has the merit of being discovered after several decades’ worth of advances in archaeological technology methods for analyzing ancient remains. ]]>

Categories
Breaking News

American Alligators are as Old as They Look

Two American Alligators (1)

Gavialosuchus americanus: the huge crocodile which once dominated the coastline of Florida but went extinct around 5 million years ago, and alligator fossils at a variety of locations indicated that the two species could have coexisted. Despite their adaptability and resilience, American alligators were nearly driven to extinction by hunting early in the twentieth century. The number of alligators left in the wild has significantly increased under The Endangered Species Act, and with a more comprehensive evolutionary history, conserving the habitats where alligators have been the dominate species for millions of years may be more effective. “The same traits that allowed alligators to remain virtually the same through numerous environmental changes over millions of years can become a bit of a problem when they try to adapt to humans,” Whiting is quoted as saying in the statement, “Their adaptive nature is why we have alligators in swimming pools or crawling around golf courses.” Although modern alligators do appear prehistoric, the group they’re part of, Crocodylia, has been around for at least 84 million years, with a diverse line of ancestors that dates back to over 200 million years ago, as far as the Triassic. This research was published in the Journal of Herpetology and Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology. ]]>

Categories
Breaking News

Mammoth Skull Find Raises New Evolutionary Questions

Wooly Mammoth(1)

The Mammoth Site who worked with the national park team, called the fossil “spectacular-looking”. He added that it was one of the best mammoth skulls he had ever seen himself – and that he had seen many good mammoth skulls during his professional career. The fossil was first discovered by national park biologist Peter Larramendy in 2014. The sharp-eyed scientist spotted one of the skull’s tusks jutting out from a canyon wall, prompting an investigation and excavation. Based on radiocarbon dating of nearby charcoal samples conducted by the US Geological Survey, the fossil is thought to be about 13,000 years old. This timeline puts the mammoth living concurrently with Arlington Man: a set of remains discovered on Santa Rosa Island in 1959 which potentially represent the oldest known human skeleton yet to be found in North America. However, now that the mammoth skull has been fully excavated for analysis, the mystery has deepened instead of becoming clearer. Wilkins says the species the mammoth belongs to is uncertain, as it does not fit the profile of the pygmy mammoth, a species of mammoth that lived on the Channel Islands and grew to about six feet tall. The pygmy mammoth was an evolutionary offshoot of the larger, 14-foot-tall Columbian mammoth, which was common across the North American continent at the time. The solution to this mystery may be revealed through a study of the skull’s fossilized teeth. Doing so could help scientists determine the age of the creature before it died. It also has the potential to reveal the genetic makeup of the mammoth, placing it more decisively in either the Columbian or the pygmy bloodline. There is the possibility of a third result, as the mammoth skull could represent a transitional species between Columbian and pygmy mammoths – evidence of the evolutionary adaptation to a smaller habitat as it was selected as an advantageous trait. The likelihood of this being the case seems low, however. The next stop for the fossilized skull will be the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. Once it arrives, it will be properly preserved and studied before being put on display and made available to the general public. The second-largest island of the Channel Islands, Santa Rosa is approximately 26 miles from the city of Santa Barbara. During the last Ice Age, Santa Rosa and the surrounding islands were one solid landmass only five miles off the coast, making it relatively easy for large animals such as the Columbia mammoth to migrate to the island. Later, the island would come to be inhabited by a maritime Paleocostal population of early humans that are thought to have been the progenitors of the native Chumash people who resided on the island until being displaced by white settlers. ]]>