A Working Lego Model of the Antikythera Mechanism

Holy crap. From Small Mammal (via Boing Boing), a functional replica of the Antikythera Mechanism MADE OF LEGOS:

This is a 2000-year-old analog computing device reconstructed out of Lego. It predicts solar and lunar eclipses, accurate to within two hours — all using plastic gears. Andy Carol, its designer, builds mechanical computers out of Lego as a hobby. He made this device basically because Adam Rutherford, an editor and producer at Nature, dared him to. When Adam heard that Andy had actually built the device, he called me and said, “Well, clearly we have to make some sort of film about this thing now.”

So they did, and here it is. This makes me jump up and down and shake around with delight.

The Antikythera Mechanism in Lego from Small Mammal on Vimeo.

Andy Carol also made a working model of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, probably the most complex analog computer since the Antikythera Mechanism! Of course, the real thing looks totally different (by which I mean ugly):























The story of the device itself is amazing - discovered in a shipwreck by sponge divers in 1901, it remained a more or less a mystery for decades. Everyone knew it was a sophisticated machine but the thing was in such bad shape that no one could do much with it. (Besides speculate about the influence of ancient astronauts, as the "History" channel is wont to do.) The advent of high-tech x-ray scanners, however, unlocked the device's mysteries, as this video from Nature reports:


I think Michael Wright's model of the device gives a great sense of how the device actually looked and functioned:



I have to put in a plug here for my pet project, "archaeological optimism". Most of the news coverage of the device portrays it something out of time. Like this headline from an io9 story on the device: "Advanced imaging reveals a computer 1,500 years ahead of its time". Bullshit! It was exactly appropriate for its time because that was the time when it was made. Greek scientists had the capacity to create complex mechanical calculators, and did. No need to drag them out of their place.

The 'device out of time' trope is just the arrogance of the present, thinking that we are the culmination of all of history so far. Bullshit. Time and civilization does not have an end point or a state that is 'better' than another. That attitude becomes an excuse for belittling the genius of our forebears by painting their greatest accomplishments as something abnormal, instead of granting them an equal moral status to us.

Nubian Antibiotic Beer

From the archaeological optimism department: a recent paper shows that ancient Nubians used antibiotics - and delivered them in beer! Analysis of bones from the Ballana culture of lower Nubia from ca. 350-550 AD, contained significanct concentrations of tetracycline, (first produced as a modern cure in 1948). The paper, by George Armelagos and Mark Nelson, is in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

Nelson, a leading expert in tetracycline and other antibiotics, became interested in the project after hearing Armelagos speak at a conference. “I told him to send me some mummy bones, because I had the tools and the expertise to extract the tetracycline,” Nelson says. “It’s a nasty and dangerous process. I had to dissolve the bones in hydrogen fluoride, the most dangerous acid on the planet.”

The results stunned Nelson. “The bones of these ancient people were saturated with tetracycline, showing that they had been taking it for a long time,” he says. “I’m convinced that they had the science of fermentation under control and were purposely producing the drug.”

Tetracycline binds with calcium and phosphorus, which is pretty much what our bones are made of - so if you take it, part of it stays with you.

I have found my chance to share images like this with you. I am taking it.

This is not totally new news - Armelagos has been working on this research since 1980. By 2000, his team had pretty conclusively demonstrated that the tetracycline was delivered via beer. The mechanism is neat: ancient Egyptians and Nubians used bread as a source of yeast for fermentation. They would leave out some bread dough, collect local yeast from the air, half-bake the bread (leaving the center sticky so the yeast could breed), and then put the bread in a soup of malted grain to start brewing.

An ancient brewery setup.

The other thing that floats around in the air with that yeast is strepomycetes bacteria. Normally these aren't very interesting, but when they're trapped in environments they don't like - especially moist and acidic ones, like in the inside of a half-baked bread loaf, or a fermenting vat of beer - the streptomycetes start producing tetracycline! Which means that when your beer is done, it's full of antibiotics. Armelagos wrote a very readable article about the science and experimental archaeology they used to figure this out (in Natural History, from way back in 2000).

I have to admit, I would be more keen to take antibiotics if they were delivered this way.

Of course, when Armelagos was first sorting this out in the 80s, people were skeptical, saying it was impossible, the tetracycline must have been introduced to the bones later. Typical unwillingness to believe that ancient people could have figured out anything clever, like colonizing the Americas, performing brain surgery, or building astronomical observatories. This assumption that amazing inventions can only be made with petroleum-powered machines is a kind of industrial age narcissism. I think that the technologies invented after 1800 have in most cases just made it easier for humans to do things they already knew how to do a very long time ago.

It's a bit early for a beer here in my time zone, but we'll see if I don't get into a little 'experimental archaeology' later.

Mesolithic Dildosity: Ancient 'Sex Toy' found in Sweden

Last month excavations at the Mesolithic site of Motala in Östergötland, Sweden, turned up this, ah, stimulating artifact made of antler bone:

Swedish National Heritage Board

Martin Rundqvist at ScienceBlogs describes the dig:

Excavations in waterlogged sediment along River Motala ström have produced great numbers of bone and wood objects that have rarely been preserved elsewhere. Most are harpoon and leister points, but now a bone dildo (a boner?) has joined the growing collection. Measuring twelve by two centimetres, its size is perhaps not very impressive, and there are many non-dildoish uses for which it may have been intended.

The articles note that relatively few phalluses are known from the stone age (mesolithic, neolithic) compared to the number of artifacts showing voluptuous female forms. Of course, if phalluses were usually carved in bone or wood, they wouldn't survive like clay or stone. The site at Motala is unusual because organic material is preserved so well.

Was it used for chipping stone tools? As a dildo? Both?!?!?! The coverage is very cautious:

"Your mind and my mind wanders away to make this interpretation about what it looks like – for you and me, it signals this erected-penis-like shape," said archaeologist Gšran Gruber of the National Heritage Board in Sweden, who worked on the excavation. "But if that's the way the Stone Age people thought about it, I can't say."

Part of science is not jumping to conclusions, but jeez, let's not overdo it.


Another look (SNHB).

Whether it's a dildo or not is a different story. Dildos have a pedigree going back at least to Classical Greece - see the jokes about lost dildos in Aristophanes' Lysistrata, or Herodas Mime 6, where we learn that shoemakers sometimes also took orders for custom-made toys (red leather!)¹ I find the idea of much older dildos totally unsurprising perhaps because I assume that ancient people were just as creative (and sex-obsessed) as we are. Another instance of archaeological optimism, if you will!

Of course, any kind of decoration is a problem for archaeologists. Does the decoration mean it was 'symbolic' and not functional? If we're not sure what it was, it must be a ritual item! At least the archaeologists here have a functional hypothesis - or as one commenter jokes, maybe using a dildo for flint-knapping gave the owner 'plausible deniability'. It's true that we can't say for sure. But the guys interviewed in this Livescience article sure are trying hard to avoid the idea that this thing is even penis-shaped, much less a sex toy.

That seems kind of weird to me. But of course, most of the world's archaeologists come from cultures with a strange attitude toward representations of sex. By which I mean the Judeo-Christian-Islamic strain of monotheism, which has a conspicuous lack of festivals celebrating giant penises. In a lot of cultures such things are normal and fun: a Dionysian phallus-fest in a modern Greek village, various Japanese fertility festivals, or the veneration of the lingam of Shiva are just things people do. And then there's this unforgettable description of a Dionysian procession in Alexandria sponsored by Ptolemy II (mid-200s BC):

In another [cart] was a gold phallus one hundred and eighty feet (55m) long, painted in various colours and bound with fillets of gold; it had at the extremity a gold star, the perimeter of which was nine feet.²

Oops, not supposed to see that.

It might be stretching the article too much to say that the dildo-skepticism is part of some kind of Christian cultural baggage. But how much does cultural 'common sense' affect our interpretation of objects, archaeologically? Would Japanese or Indian archaeologists approach this find less cautiously? Would it even be newsworthy in a culture that wasn't still afraid of sex? Given that relatively few countries dominate world archaeology, how much of what we think we know about the past is colored by our cultural conditioning?

1 One could do a blog full of nothing but archaeological penises. I'll even let you claim credit for the idea if you start it.
2 From Callixeinos of Rhodes, quoted in Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae 413D.

Palaeolithic Crete makes me feel cheerful

They found these on Crete. That's big news, because they're old. Like Palaeolithic old. 130,000 years old? 700,000 years old? No one's sure yet, but certainly is much older than any artefact on Crete is supposed to be. Why's that? Because Crete is an island, and has been for 5 million years. That means for people to have got there, they had to have been travelling long distances by boat a long, long time before anyone thought it was possible.

The evidence is from the Plakias Survey, led by Eleni Panagopoulou (Ephoreia of Palaeoanthropology and Speleology) and Thomas Strasser (Providence College), presented at the Archaeological Institute of America meetings last month in Anaheim. It's not just scraps, either - the survey found over 2,000 Mesolithic and Lower Palaeolithic stone tools, and backed it up with research on the geological deposits in which they were found. The terminus ante quem is 130,000 years BP, though they could be much older.

So people came to Crete. Or were they people? Anatomically modern Homo Sapiens didn't evolve until about 200,000 years BP, and didn't make it to Europe until about 50,000 BP. Moreover, these look a lot like Achulean tools, which are associated with Homo Erectus. As John Noble Wilford writes in today's New York Times:

But archaeologists and experts on early nautical history said the discovery appeared to show that these surprisingly ancient mariners had craft sturdier and more reliable than rafts. They also must have had the cognitive ability to conceive and carry out repeated water crossing over great distances in order to establish sustainable populations producing an abundance of stone artifacts.

I wrote last week about "archaeological optimism", the idea that people in the past were much more capable than we moderns give them credit for.* As the quote above shows, the idea that our ancestors were stupid and uncreative - proverbial cavemen and cavewomen - runs deep and dies hard. In this case it may have been our cousins in the Homo Erectus and Homo Heidelbergensis families who deserve the props for sailing to Crete (from Anatolia? Libya? Greece? It was blue water, with no land in sight).

"I'm on a boat!"

Cognitive ability? Are you serious? No one bats an eyelash at the idea of Homo Erectus traveling 10,000 km from Africa to freaking Southeast Asia across mountains and rivers and deserts and tiger-infested jungles and whatnot - but it's shocking that they could build boats and hop 50km from the Peloponnesos to Crete?

To answer my rhetorical question above: duh, of course Homo Erectus and Homo Heidelbergensis and Homo whatever-whatever were people. They were badasses who colonized a whole world and figured out how to live in the harshest environments using nothing but stone, wood, and their wits. It's awesome, and we should send out love and respect to these people whether they were our direct ancestors or not.**

Thomas Strasser and Curtis Runnels are giving a lecture about the findings in Providence, RI on April 7 (details to be announced on the ACSCA website at some point). In the meantime, enjoy this topical music video based on a premiere archaeological film.




* Yes, I'm now feeling self-satisfied.
** And can we get some names for the cousins on the family tree that sound less perverted and/or German?