Did two Volcanic Eruptions in 536 & 540 AD Change the Course of History?

Contemporary chroniclers wrote about a "mystery cloud" which dimmed the light of the sun above the Mediterranean in the years 536 and 537 CE. Tree rings testify poor growing conditions over the whole Northern Hemisphere - the years from 536 CE onward seem to have been overshadowed by an unusual natural phenomenon. Social crises including the first European plague pandemic beginning in 541, are associated with this phenomenon. Only recently have researchers found conclusive proof of a volcanic origin of the 536 solar dimming, based on traces of volcanic sulfur from two major eruptions newly dated to 536 CE and 540 CE in ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica.

An international team of climate scientists led by Dr. Matthew Toohey at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel and Prof. Dr. Kirstin Krüger of the University of Oslo (UiO), with financial support from the Centre for Earth Evolution and Dynamics (CEED) at the UiO, have investigated the time period using the new ice core data, historical evidence and climate models. As they write in the international journal Climatic Change, the impact of the volcanic double event of 536/540 on Northern Hemisphere climate was stronger than any other documented or reconstructed event of the past 1200 years. "One of the eruptions would have led to a significant cooling of the Earth's surface. Two of them, so close in time, caused what is probably the coldest decade of the past 2000 years," says Dr. Matthew Toohey from GEOMAR, lead author of the study today at a press conference at the annual EGU Meeting in Vienna where he presented the results.

To simulate the impact of the 536 and 540 eruptions, the scientists used the available data from ice cores and the descriptions of the solar dimming from contemporary scholars. With this data they estimated the magnitude of the eruptions and their approximate locations on Earth, and then simulated the spread and impacts of the aerosol clouds resulting from the volcanic injection of sulfur into the stratosphere. This revealed that following the eruptions, the solar radiation at the Earth's surface was strongly reduced over the Northern Hemisphere for several years, and caused decreases in the hemispheric average temperature of up to 2 degrees Celsius.

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A Massive Roman era Vineyard in Vagnari, Italy

Archaeologists from the University of Sheffield have uncovered a unique insight into the life of one of the Roman Empire's most prominent landowners.

Until now, very little was known about Rome's Imperial leaders aside from their battle triumphs, territorial conquests and monumental legacies.

Researchers from the University of Sheffield's Department of Archaeology investigating the vast Imperial estate of Vagnari in Italy, have now unearthed evidence of wine production on an industrial scale – shedding light on their home life away from the battlefield.

The excavation team discovered the corner of a cella vinaria, a wine fermentation and storage room, in which wine vessels, known as dolia defossa, were fixed into the ground.

The heavy and cumbersome wine vessels have the capacity of more than 1,000 litres and were buried up to their necks in the ground to keep the temperature of the wine constant and cool – a necessary measure in hot climates.

The scale of the wine production provides clear evidence for industrial activities and provides a glimpse into the range of specialist crafts and industries practised by residents - painting a better and more complete picture of life on the Imperial estate and the wealth it provided for its owner.

Maureen Carroll, Professor of Roman Archaeology at the University of Sheffield, said: "Before we began our work only a small part of the vicus, which is at the heart of the estate and its administrative core, had been explored though the general size and outline of the village had been indicated by geophysics and test-trenching.

"The discovery that lead was being processed here at Vagnari is also particularly revealing about the environment in which the inhabitants of the village lived and potential health risks to which they were exposed.

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"Late Antique Little Ice Age" Contributed to Decline of Eastern Roman Empire, Bolstered Arab Conquests?

Researchers from the international Past Global Changes (PAGES) project write in the journal Nature Geoscience that they have identified an unprecedented, long-lasting cooling in the northern hemisphere 1500 years ago. The drop in temperature immediately followed three large volcanic eruptions in quick succession in the years 536, 540 and 547 AD (also known as the Common Era CE). Volcanoes can cause climate cooling by ejecting large volumes of small particles - sulfate aerosols - that enter the atmosphere blocking sunlight.

Within five years of the onset of the "Late Antique Little Ice Age", as the researchers have dubbed it, the Justinian plague pandemic swept through the Mediterranean between 541 and 543 AD, striking Constantinople and killing millions of people in the following centuries. The authors suggest these events may have contributed to the decline of the eastern Roman Empire.

Lead author, dendroclimatologist Ulf Büntgen from the Swiss Federal Research Institute said, "This was the most dramatic cooling in the Northern Hemisphere in the past 2000 years."

A later "Little Ice Age" between 14th and 19th centuries has been well documented and linked to political upheavals and plague pandemics in Europe, but the new study is the first to provide a comprehensive climate analysis across both Central Asia and Europe during this earlier period.

"With so many variables, we must remain cautious about environmental cause and political effect, but it is striking how closely this climate change aligns with major upheavals across several regions," added Büntgen.

The multidisciplinary research team made up of climatologists, naturalists, historians and linguists mapped the new climate information against a particularly turbulent period in history in Europe and central Asia. The volcanic eruptions probably affected food supplies - a major famine struck the region at precisely this time followed immediately by the pandemic.

Further south, the Arabian Peninsula received more rain allowing more vegetation to grow. The researchers speculate this may have driven expansion of the Arab Empire in the Middle East because the vegetation would have sustained larger herds of camels used by the Arab armies for their campaigns.

In cooler areas, several tribes migrated east towards China, possibly driven away by a lack of pastureland in central Asia. This led to hostilities between nomadic groups and the local ruling powers in the steppe regions of northern China. An alliance between these steppe populations and the Eastern Romans brought down the Sasanian Empire in Persia, the final empire in the region before the rise of the Arab Empire.

The researchers write, "The Late Antique Little Ice Age fits in well with the main transformative events that occurred in Eurasia during that time."

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A Network Analysis-based Approach to the Romano-British Transport System

The seeds of commerce: A network analysis-based approach to the Romano-British transport system

Authors:

Orengo et al

Abstract:

Communication routes are an important subject in the study of the human past. They allowed interactions between communities and the dispersal of goods and ideas. Their study, therefore, can shed light on the way in which communities inhabited the landscape, related to each other and were affected by macro-regional trends. Many methods, such as archaeomorphological analysis and Least Cost Route modelling (LCR), have been devised and are routinely employed for the reconstruction of ancient routes. Their analysis in terms of communication, trade or historical significance, however, has usually been left unexplored. This is probably due to the connected nature of routes, which form communication networks: these are shaped by interconnected nodes and extend over territories surpassing the regional scale in such a way that even a change in a single node or link can affect the whole network. Consequently, the partial reconstruction of communication networks provided by the aforementioned methods does not usually allow a holistic analysis. In this paper the relatively well understood British Roman road network is employed to explore the analytical possibilities offered by a combination of Social Network Analysis, Spatial Network Analysis and spatial interpolation-based distribution analysis. The British road network has been reconstructed using published data but also a variation of LCR in which cost surfaces are derived from cultural data obtained from large-scale cultural inventories. The distribution of introduced food plants during the Roman period serve as an excellent proxy for the study of trade along the network and its historical consequences. This multi-period archaeobotanical dataset has some evident advantages to other types of material remains: archaeobotanical remains are not reused as, for example, amphorae and, accordingly, they reflect a distribution pattern based on consumption or commerce. Some of them are imported (as they cannot be produced locally) and, consequently, their distribution would be applied through usage of the main routes.

The results suggest a continuous inflow of exotics but highlight their changing transport routes, their differential access and the particular weight of certain nodal sites in the development of this commerce with direct impact on urbanisation and the overall economy of Britannia. The Roman road network acted as a major factor in the distribution of sites, their political and economic importance and their permanence or disappearance as global economic trends changed over time.

Ancient Egyptians Observed Eclipsing Binary Algol ~3,000 Years ago

The Ancient Egyptian papyrus Cairo 86637 calendar is the oldest preserved historical document of naked eye observations of a variable star, the eclipsing binary Algol - a manifestation of Horus, a god and a king. This calendar contains lucky or unlucky prognoses for each day of one year. Lauri Jetsu and Sebastian Porceddu from the University of Helsinki have performed a statistical analysis of the Cairo Calendar mythological texts.

Their analysis revealed that the periods of Algol (2.85 days) and the Moon (29.6 days) strongly regulate the actions of deities in this calendar.

- Until now, there were only conjectures that many of the mythological texts of the Cairo Calendar describe astronomical phenomena. We can now unambiguously ascertain that throughout the whole year the actions of many deities in the Cairo Calendar are connected to the regular changes of Algol and the Moon, says Master of Science Sebastian Porceddu.

This research confirms that the first variable star, as well as its period, were discovered much earlier than was previously thought. These two "classical" milestones in the history of natural sciences need to be shifted three millennia backwards in time to 1244 - 1163 BC.

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Location of one of Julius Caesar's Battles Found in Netherlands

At a press conference held on Friday Dec. 11, 2015 in the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam, archaeologist Nico Roymans from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam announced a discovery that is truly unique for Dutch archaeology: the location where the Roman general and statesman Julius Caesar massacred two Germanic tribes in the year 55 BC. The location of this battle, which Caesar wrote about in detail in Book IV of his De Bello Gallico, was unknown to date. It is the earliest known battle on Dutch soil. The conclusions are based on a combination of historical, archaeological, and geochemical data.

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Plague Samples Discovered from 2800 BC

Plague infections were common in humans 3,300 years earlier than the historical record suggests, reports a study published October 22 in Cell. By sequencing the DNA of tooth samples from Bronze Age individuals from Europe and Asia, the researchers discovered evidence of plague infections roughly 4,800 years ago. But it was at least another thousand years until the bacterium that causes the disease, Yersinia pestis, acquired key changes in virulence genes, allowing it to spread via fleas and evade the host immune system.

"We found that the Y. pestis lineage originated and was widespread much earlier than previously thought, and we narrowed the time window as to when it developed," says senior study author Eske Willerslev of the Center for GeoGenetics, University of Copenhagen. "This study changes our view of when and how plague influenced human populations and opens new avenues for studying the evolution of diseases."

Y. pestis was the notorious culprit behind the sixth century's Plague of Justinian, the Black Death, which killed 30%-50% of the European population in the mid-1300s, and the Third Pandemic, which emerged in China in the 1850s. Earlier putative plagues, such as the Plague of Athens nearly 2,500 years ago and the second century's Antonine Plague, have been linked to the decline of Classical Greece and the undermining of the Roman army. However, it has been unclear whether Y. pestis could have been responsible for these early epidemics because direct molecular evidence for this bacterium has not been obtained from skeletal material older than 1,500 years.

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What was the Roman Republic Really Like?

Ancient Greeks Were Sorta Right: Peuce Island Existed, but as the Dunavat Peninsula

The ancient legendary island of PEUCE – myth or reality?

Authors:

Romanescu et al

Abstract:

The testimonies left by the ancient Greeks indicate the existence of the legendary Peuce Island at the mouth of the Danube. Several locations for the island have been proposed throughout history: the pre-continental inland of Chilia, the fluvio-maritime levee of Letea, the initial alluvial fan of the Danube, the Dobroudjan inland between the Danube, the Black Sea and the valley of the Telita River and the Dunavat Peninsula, and others. All of these hypotheses have been proven wrong, except for that regarding the Dunavat Peninsula; but for the Dunavat Peninsula to have represented an island, there must have been a fluvial or maritime corridor separating it from the rest of the Dobroudjan inland. The Beibugeac corridor represented the last link in deciphering this enigma. Interdisciplinary research has been conducted to confirm or refute the theory of the existence of an arm. The overall morphology is favourable to the existence of a fluvial arm. Nonetheless, analysis of the geologic boreholes demonstrates that the nature of the sediments is purely continental and that they originate in the superficial erosion of the calcareous slopes belonging to the Dunavat Hills and Bestepe Hills. The position of Peuce Island in the south of the most important Danubian arm makes possible its location between the Halmyris Gulf, the Danube Delta and the continental inland of Dobroudja. The ancient Greeks were interested only in the exploitation of the sea and the coastal area. For this reason, they built cities only within reach of the sea (Orgame [Argamum], Histria, Tomis and Callatis). When viewed from the sea or the surrounding swamp areas, the Dunavat Peninsula – given that it is elongated and narrow – seemed like an island covered by pine forests. Because it was mistaken for an island, its misleading name was ascribed and transmitted throughout history.

Balaeric Mountain Goats Were Under Climate Induced Stress Before Humans Colonized the Islands

Analysis of coprolites from the extinct mountain goat Myotragus balearicus

Authors:

Welker et al

Abstract:

Humans colonized the Balearic Islands 5–4 ka ago. They arrived in a uniquely adapted ecosystem with the Balearic mountain goat Myotragus balearicus (Bovidae, Antilopinae, Caprini) as the only large mammal. This mammal went extinct rapidly after human arrival. Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain the extinction of M. balearicus. For the present study ancient DNA analysis (Sanger sequencing, Roche-454, Ion Torrent), and pollen and macrofossil analyses were performed on preserved coprolites from M. balearicus, providing information on its diet and paleo-environment. The information retrieved shows that M. balearicus was heavily dependent on the Balearic box species Buxus balearica during at least part of the year, and that it was most probably a browser. Hindcast ecological niche modelling of B. balearica shows that local distribution of this plant species was affected by climate changes. This suggests that the extinction of M. balearicus can be related to the decline and regional extinction of a plant species that formed a major component of its diet. The vegetation change is thought to be caused by increased aridity occurring throughout the Mediterranean. Previous hypotheses relating the extinction of M. balearicus directly to the arrival of humans on the islands must therefore be adjusted.

Genetic Study of India Highlights Mixture, Origins of Caste

Scientists from Harvard Medical School and the CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, India, provide evidence that modern-day India is the result of recent population mixture among divergent demographic groups.

The findings, published August 8 in the American Journal of Human Genetics, describe how India transformed from a country where mixture between different populations was rampant to one where endogamy—that is, marrying within the local community and a key attribute of the caste system—became the norm.

"Only a few thousand years ago, the Indian population structure was vastly different from today," said co–senior author David Reich, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. "The caste system has been around for a long time, but not forever."

In 2009, Reich and colleagues published a paper based on an analysis of 25 different Indian population groups. The paper described how all populations in India show evidence of a genetic mixture of two ancestral groups: Ancestral North Indians (ANI), who are related to Central Asians, Middle Easterners, Caucasians, and Europeans; and Ancestral South Indians (ASI), who are primarily from the subcontinent.

However, the researchers wanted to glean clearer data as to when in history such admixture occurred. For this, the international research team broadened their study pool from 25 to 73 Indian groups.

The researchers took advantage of the fact that the genomes of Indian people are a mosaic of chromosomal segments of ANI and ASI descent. Originally when the ANI and ASI populations mixed, these segments would have been extremely long, extending the entire lengths of chromosomes. However, after mixture these segments would have broken up at one or two places per chromosome, per generation, recombining the maternal and paternal genetic material that occurs during the production of egg and sperm.

By measuring the lengths of the segments of ANI and ASI ancestry in Indian genomes, the authors were thus able to obtain precise estimates of the age of population mixture, which they infer varied about 1,900 to 4,200 years, depending on the population analyzed.

While the findings show that no groups in India are free of such mixture, the researchers did identify a geographic element. "Groups in the north tend to have more recent dates and southern groups have older dates," said co-first author Priya Moorjani, a graduate student in Reich's lab at Harvard Medical School. "This is likely because the northern groups have multiple mixtures."

"This genetic datatells us a three-part cultural and historical story," said Reich, who is also an associate member of the Broad Institute. "Prior to about 4000 years ago there was no mixture. After that, widespread mixture affected almost every group in India, even the most isolated tribal groups. And finally, endogamy set in and froze everything in place."

"The fact that every population in India evolved from randomly mixed populations suggests that social classifications like the caste system are not likely to have existed in the same way before the mixture," said co–senior author Lalji Singh, currently of Banaras Hindu University, in Varanasi, India, and formerly of the CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology. "Thus, the present-day structure of the caste system came into being only relatively recently in Indian history."*

But once established, the caste system became genetically effective, the researchers observed. Mixture across groups became very rare.

Razib has an interesting post up.  Not sure what to make of it.

Sankofa: Awesome Ancient African Alphabets

Some are not so ancient,t but still.  Its an interesting introduction.

Did the Ancient Egytpians Document the Eclipsing Binary Algol

DID THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS RECORD THE PERIOD OF THE ECLIPSING BINARY ALGOL—THE RAGING ONE?

Authors:

1. L. Jetsu (a)
2. S. Porceddu (a)
3. J. Lyytinen (a)
4. P. Kajatkari (a)
5. J. Lehtinen (a)
6. T. Markkanen (a)
7. J. Toivari-Viitala (b)

Affiliations:

a. Department of Physics, FI-00014 University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 64, Finland

b. Department of World Cultures, FI-00014 University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 59, Finland

Abstract:

The eclipses in binary stars give precise information of orbital period changes. Goodricke discovered the 2.867 day period in the eclipses of Algol in the year 1783. The irregular orbital period changes of this longest known eclipsing binary continue to puzzle astronomers. The mass transfer between the two members of this binary should cause a long-term increase of the orbital period, but observations over two centuries have not confirmed this effect. Here, we present evidence indicating that the period of Algol was 2.850 days three millennia ago. For religious reasons, the ancient Egyptians have recorded this period into the Cairo Calendar (CC), which describes the repetitive changes of the Raging one. CC may be the oldest preserved historical document of the discovery of a variable star.