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I was hoping you could tell me! Haven’t got around to it unfortunately.Ooh - that sounds interesting! Is it any good?
I was hoping you could tell me! Haven’t got around to it unfortunately.Ooh - that sounds interesting! Is it any good?
I'll put it on my list - but I'm getting through that very slowly these days and there are quite a few books on it unfortunately. You'll have probably had time for it before I get that far.I was hoping you could tell me! Haven’t got around to it unfortunately.
Just getting back to this topic, I'm most familiar with the famous Arab medieval travelers Ibn Jubayr and Ibn Battuta. Ibn Jubayr spent around two years in the 1180s on his pilgrimage from al-Andalus to Mecca and back, via Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and Sicily. Much of it by sea. His account of 12th century Norman Sicily is especially interesting I think, a relatively rich portrait of Sicily at a time when it still had a mixed Christian-Muslim population.the enormous distances and difficult terrain, causing a trip from China to India to take many months even in good conditions
Such a different world, isn't! In that Silk Road book, there are various examples of monks and merchants travelling between China and India, either over land, along deserts and through the mountains, or over sea - where instead the hold-up can sometimes be adverse winds or no boat, getting people stuck for weeks or even months in some seaport halfway through.Just getting back to this topic, I'm most familiar with the famous Arab medieval travelers Ibn Jubayr and Ibn Battuta. Ibn Jubayr spent around two years in the 1180s on his pilgrimage from al-Andalus to Mecca and back, via Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and Sicily. Much of it by sea. His account of 12th century Norman Sicily is especially interesting I think, a relatively rich portrait of Sicily at a time when it still had a mixed Christian-Muslim population.
Ibn Battuta traveled much further for much longer, all the way from Tangier to India, south-east Asia, and China. But he tended to stop in places along the way for extended periods of time, and his account is unreliable at certain points, including with regard to dates. But, to give an example of a fraction of his travels, he is believed to have left New Saray on the Volga north of Astrakhan in December and reached the Indus the following September (the exact years are in doubt, but early 1330s). So about 8 months, via modern-day Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
I read Ibn Battuta back when I was at uni writing about the Mongols, how the empire(s) set up structures to facilitate long distance trade and travel etc. Fascinating stuff, one of those books I keep coming back to thumb through once in a whileJust getting back to this topic, I'm most familiar with the famous Arab medieval travelers Ibn Jubayr and Ibn Battuta. Ibn Jubayr spent around two years in the 1180s on his pilgrimage from al-Andalus to Mecca and back, via Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and Sicily. Much of it by sea. His account of 12th century Norman Sicily is especially interesting I think, a relatively rich portrait of Sicily at a time when it still had a mixed Christian-Muslim population.
Ibn Battuta traveled much further for much longer, all the way from Tangier to India, south-east Asia, and China. But he tended to stop in places along the way for extended periods of time, and his account is unreliable at certain points, including with regard to dates. But, to give an example of a fraction of his travels, he is believed to have left New Saray on the Volga north of Astrakhan in December and reached the Indus the following September (the exact years are in doubt, but early 1330s). So about 8 months, via modern-day Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
It’s so good, I’m pretty sure we briefly discussed it in this thread way back. The entire seven or eight year interval spent in India is especially interesting and at times so farcical.I read Ibn Battuta back when I was at uni writing about the Mongols, how the empire(s) set up structures to facilitate long distance trade and travel etc. Fascinating stuff, one of those books I keep coming back to thumb through once in a while
Overview article: Human-evolution story rewritten by new data and computing power (nature.com)Nature Briefing said:Human evolution has no single birthplace
Humans did not emerge from a single region of Africa, but from several populations that moved around the continent one million years ago and intermingled for millennia. The widely held idea of a single origin of Homo sapiens is based in part on fossil records. Computer modelling and genome data from modern African and European populations revealed that “our roots lie in a very diverse overall population made up of fragmented local populations”, says evolutionary archaeologist Eleanor Scerri. This means human evolution looks more like a tangled vine than a ‘tree of life.’
Full article: The Washington Post | 11 min readNature Briefing said:The fingerprint of the anthropocene
Researchers are deciding whether a tree-lined lake outside Toronto will become the ‘golden spike’ that defines a new, human-dominated geologic period: the anthropocene. This beautiful interactive feature shows how the lake’s unusual chemistry preserves perfect layers of everything that fell in that year, divided by a thin layer of calcite. From the signs of 200 years of Indigenous settlement, to the traces of radioactive plutonium from nuclear-weapon tests in the 1950s, “it is a permanent legacy of human impacts on the planet, written in the rock record”, says geologist Colin Waters, chair of the Anthropocene Working Group, convened by the International Union of Geological Sciences.
Unfortunate coincidence the article is written entirely by women from the same garbage university.A bad day for sexists worldwide: turns out it's not true that men hunted while women gathered, hunter-gatherer societies were much more egalitarian in terms of these tasks.
Sorry, is this serious? If so, could you expand on that a little? I'm not sure how this is valid criticism of the contents of the article.Unfortunate coincidence the article is written entirely by woman from the same garbage university.
I'm not criticising the article. I haven't even read the article.Sorry, is this serious? If so, could you expand on that a little? I'm not sure how this is valid criticism of the contents of the article.
Interesting fact for you. If you look at how humans hunted larger prey, it was by long distance running with the animal eventually collapsing/them catching it due to exhaustion. With that in mind, it makes sense women hinted with men because ultramarathons are one of the few sports there is no discernible difference in performance between male and female competitors (in fact women might actually be better).A bad day for sexists worldwide: turns out it's not true that men hunted while women gathered, hunter-gatherer societies were much more egalitarian in terms of these tasks.
But then I'm really confused at what you're saying. Are you pre-empting the elitist argument others might raise against this? Or are you really raising this as an issue?I'm not criticising the article. I haven't even read the article.
Ha, I didn't know that!Interesting fact for you. If you look at how humans hunted larger prey, it was by long distance running with the animal eventually collapsing/them catching it due to exhaustion. With that in mind, it makes sense women hinted with men because ultramarathons are one of the few sports there is no discernible difference in performance between male and female competitors (in fact women might actually be better).
I hate these news
They were some fairly detailed accounts of the proceedings in various cities in that book on the Silk Road that I read as well. Interesting stuff - it's fascinating to get this kind of insight into what daily life really looked like in practice, rather than another mile-high overview. Thanks!@Cheimoon in case you’re still interested in this stuff, I’ve been reading through a classic work called A Mediterranean Society (vol. 1) by S. D. Gotein, a really rich account of life in medieval North Africa and the Levant based on the famous Cairo Geniza. He gives some details of the schedules of the overland caravans that connected Cairo with the Maghrib (North-West Africa) in the 11th and 12th centuries:
Also I found this section on a particular problem faced by Jewish travelers interesting:
There’s so much more to share from this work, rare to have a place and time in pre-modern, non-Western history so thoroughly portrayed.
That's fascinating! I looked it up on Wikipedia, and also found this article that gives a lot of context and discusses Göbekli Tepe as well. Super interesting stuff: Is an unknown, extraordinarily ancient civilisation buried under eastern Turkey? | The Spectator
Video tour of Karahan Tepe by an archaeologist released a couple of days ago.
It's a site that's about 60km from Gobekli Tepe but supposedly even older. So as far as we can tell, this is the oldest surviving monument in the history of humanity.
I really like that guy's stuff, as well as anything related to Gobekli Tepe.
Video tour of Karahan Tepe by an archaeologist released a couple of days ago.
It's a site that's about 60km from Gobekli Tepe but supposedly even older. So as far as we can tell, this is the oldest surviving monument in the history of humanity.
He's done an awesome series criticising that Hancock bloke as well.I really like that guy's stuff, as well as anything related to Gobekli Tepe.
Ah brilliant, I need to watch this. I've spent ages arguing with a friend that Bimini Road is just differentially eroded limestone beds.He's done an awesome series criticising that Hancock bloke as well.
See also the brief article in Nature and the scientific paper.Nature Briefing said:Furore over ‘oldest pyramid’ claim
A paper claiming that a structure in Indonesia is the oldest pyramid in the world has raised the eyebrows of archaeologists and prompted an investigation by publisher Wiley’s ethics team. The study concludes that a structure lying beneath the prehistoric site of Gunung Padang in West Java might have been constructed as far back as 27,000 years ago — long before Egypt’s great pyramids. However, critics say that the buried layers are more likely to have occurred naturally, and that there’s no evidence people had the skills to build a pyramid at the time. The site has been linked to a fringe idea of an advanced global civilization that was wiped out 12,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age.
Yeah, the whole thing seems to be built on wishful thinking first and foremost...Proof read by Graham Hancock...
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They (History Hit) came to a site I supervised on during HS2. Disappointed they didn't add the part in where they asked me while I was digging a skeleton how I felt about it and I answered that it was pretty gucci.fecking love this guy. He's also in some more casual fun "expert reviews" type videos where he looks at battle scenes in film and TV (I think for Insider? They do loads of those). Oh yeah, and he's also a flaired user (basically someone who answers questions a lot) on the AskHistorians subreddit, which when I found out I can tell you made me feel pretty inadequate about the fact that I also used to be one.
History Hit has loads of good history videos, on many different topics and for different levels of interest or knowledge, incidentally.
That's it, I'm unsubbing. If they can't recognize content gold like that, they're not worth my time.They (History Hit) came to a site I supervised on during HS2. Disappointed they didn't add the part in where they asked me while I was digging a skeleton how I felt about it and I answered that it was pretty gucci.
There is a general-public article in The Independent: Valley of lost cities found hidden in the Amazon | The Independent. And also a scientific paper in Science: Two thousand years of garden urbanism in the Upper Amazon | Science.Ancient Amazonian cities discovered
A civilization of interconnected cities — including houses, plazas, roads and canals — has been found hidden under vegetation in Ecuador. LIDAR imaging reveals settlements that are at least 2,500 years old and comparable in size to Mayan cities in Mexico and Central America. “This shows a very dense occupation and an extremely complicated society,” says archaeologist Michael Heckenberger. “For the region, it’s really in a class of its own in terms of how early it is.”
It looks like Graham Hancock's theory's are being proved correct time and time again.From Nature Briefing:
There is a general-public article in The Independent: Valley of lost cities found hidden in the Amazon | The Independent. And also a scientific paper in Science: Two thousand years of garden urbanism in the Upper Amazon | Science.
Fascinating stuff. There was so much more in the Americas, and especially in the Amazon, than we are aware of - and as a result, that entire area is hugely underestimated historically. I love reading about this.
Obligatory image (of the LIDAR map):
What theory was that? Sorry, I don't know this person.It looks like Graham Hancock's theory's are being proved correct time and time again.
he's a proponent of the Younger Dryas Impact Theory, that the earth cooling drastically in that period was caused by a huge meteor impact.. he talks a lot about there being lost civilisations because of this (caused by floods etc..)What theory was that? Sorry, I don't know this person.
Ooohhh.... one of those fantasy authors. He did ring a distant bell as a pseudo-scientist, but I didn't have time to look it up and didn't want to immediately adopt a negative angle. I suppose it was a joke by @fergies coat though, since this Younger Dryas stuff is many millennia before these new finds in Ecuador.he's a proponent of the Younger Dryas Impact Theory, that the earth cooling drastically in that period was caused by a huge meteor impact.. he talks a lot about there being lost civilisations because of this (caused by floods etc..)
although, I don't think there being lost civilisations in the Amazon really falls very neatly into that theory.. I think that is more likely explained by the europeans bringing smallpox and wotnot which wiped out the amazon tribes, and then the forest just grew over everything in the next century or so
But the Younger Dryas Impact is supposed to of happened around 13kya, whereas these new Amazonian "cities" (they're large, long lived, planned settlements - would need to see more evidence before I was comfortable calling them cities) date to around 500BCE-c.600CE - almost ten thousand years after the supposed Younger Dryas Impact.he's a proponent of the Younger Dryas Impact Theory, that the earth cooling drastically in that period was caused by a huge meteor impact.. he talks a lot about there being lost civilisations because of this (caused by floods etc..)
But Europeans didn't arrive in that region of S.America until the 16th century, these proto-cities (for want of a better term) had been abandoned for around a thousand years by then - so can't be linked to European diseases. If I had to guess, I'd suggest the failure of these settlements might be linked to climate change, but there's no evidence of that at this point and my guess would only be because drought/aridification has been linked to the failure of an awful lot of agricultural societies in the last 6000 yearsI think that is more likely explained by the europeans bringing smallpox and wotnot which wiped out the amazon tribes, and then the forest just grew over everything in the next century or so
Cities come and go all the time though. This is just one place if I remember correctly. Maybe it lost a war, or it was by an outbreak, or there was some natural event. There are so many realistic possibilities. The interesting part, to me, is rather the identification of these kinds of places and the evidence they bring that complex societies existed in what's now dense Amazonian forest.But Europeans didn't arrive in that region of S.America until the 16th century, these proto-cities (for want of a better term) had been abandoned for around a thousand years by then - so can't be linked to European diseases. If I had to guess, I'd suggest the failure of these settlements might be linked to climate change, but there's no evidence of that at this point and my guess would only be because drought/aridification has been linked to the failure of an awful lot of agricultural societies in the last 6000 years
Don't get me wrong, it's a really exciting piece of research - adding to a growing corpus of evidence for long lived and widespread complex societal settlement in the Amazonian basin. Just saying that the abandonment of these settled landscapes has nothing to do with European diseases like smallpox.Cities come and go all the time though. This is just one place if I remember correctly. Maybe it lost a war, or it was by an outbreak, or there was some natural event. There are so many realistic possibilities. The interesting part, to me, is rather the identification of these kinds of places and the evidence they bring that complex societies existed in what's now dense Amazonian forest.