Interesting Science: 28 January 2007

Friday, February 02, 2007

Easter Island: New Theory, Attenborough Video, Info

Contents:

1) New Theory: "Rats, not men, to blame for death of Easter Island"
2) Video clip from the BBC series "State of the Planet"
3) NASA image and caption
4) Papers by Terry Hunt

-------

1) New Theory: "Rats, not men, to blame for death of Easter Island"

The Independent UK, January 2007: It was the first and most extreme ecological disaster. Easter Island, in the south Pacific, once lush with subtropical broadleaf forest, was left barren and vast seabird colonies were destroyed after the arrival of man.

But now there is new evidence that human beings may not have been responsible for the destruction after all. Although Easter Island has long been held to be the most important example of a traditional society destroying itself, it appears that the real culprits were rats - up to three million of them.

..."A theme of self-inflicted, pre-European contact ecocide is common in published accounts," says the anthropologist Dr Terry Hunt, who led the research at the University of Hawaii's Department of Anthropology.

Continued at "Rats, not men, to blame for death of Easter Island"

The above news report is based on the paper:

Rethinking Easter Island’s ecological catastrophe
Journal of Archaeological Science, Volume 34 (2007) 485 - 502
Terry L. Hunt
doi:10.1016/j.jas.2006.10.003

Abstract

Rapa Nui (Easter Island) has become a paragon for prehistoric human induced ecological catastrophe and cultural collapse. A popular narrative recounts an obsession for monumental statuary that led to the island's ecological devastation and the collapse of the ancient civilization. Scholars offer this story as a parable of today’s global environmental problems. In this paper, I review new and emerging Rapa Nui evidence, compare ecological and recently acquired palaeo-environmental data from the Hawaiian and other Pacific Islands, and offer some perspectives for the island's prehistoric ecological transformation and its consequences. The evidence points to a complex historical ecology for the island; one best explained by a synergy of impacts, particularly the devastating effects of introduced rats (Rattus exulans). This perspective questions the simplistic notion of reckless over-exploitation by prehistoric Polynesians and points to the need for additional research. [Archaeology]

-------

2) Video clip from the BBC series "State of the Planet"

The clip begins with Edward O. Wilson ("We have to learn a new ethic that allows us to care as much about the Brazilian rainforest as our own local reserve..") and continues with David Attenborough ("A warning on what the future could hold..") narrating the 'current opinion' on the causes of Easter Island's ecological disaster:

-------

3) NASA image and caption (Large Image)

Landsat 7's Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) instrument collected this image of the island on January 3, 2001 and is titled "Easter Island (Rapa Nui)"

Accompanying text:

On Easter Sunday in 1722, a Dutch explorer sailing in the vast and nearly landless waters of the South Pacific Ocean came upon a small island, alone in more than 8.5 million square miles of sea. In honor of the religious holiday, the explorer, Jacob Roggeveen, called the lonely spot Easter Island. Today, the native people call the island Rapa Nui, but the oldest known name appears to be Te Pito o Te Henua, or "The Center (or Navel) of the World."

When the Dutch sailors arrived, the isolated island had already been inhabited for more than one thousand years, most likely settled by Polynesian sailors in canoes between 400 and 700 A.D. The most amazing cultural artifacts on display were giant stone statues, called moai, resting on ahu, a raised platform of expertly fitted stones. (Ahu also describes a sacred ceremonial site where several moai stand.)

Most of the hundreds of moai on the island were carved out of volcanic rock in the crater of Rano Raraku, located in the southeastern part of the island. In addition to the hundreds of moai located at ahu around the island, Rano Raraku is littered with moai, some only half-carved, others that appear to have broken in the attempt to remove them from the quarry, and still others that seem to simply have been abandoned.

East of Rano Raraku is Ahu Tongariki, where in 1960 a tidal wave caused by an earthquake in Chile struck the southern coastline and swept 15 moai inland for several hundred feet. In 1992, the site was restored by a Chilean archeologist. On the western end of the island is the only town, Hanga Roa, where most of Rapa Nui's 2,000 residents live. South of the town is the island's largest volcanic crater, Rana Kao. Along the crater rim looking southward over the coast, lie the ruins of Orongo, a ceremonial site containing elaborate stone carvings and other artwork.

Speculation about how the island's inhabitants built and moved the massive moai to ahu all along the coastline and at various sites in the island's interior has fueled scientific imagination and controversy that goes on today. Several experiments (see Thor Heyerdahl's The "Walking" Moai of Easter Island from Norway's Kon-Tiki Museum) have been carried out using materials that would have been available to the inhabitants, and most scientists agree that any method they might have used would have required a large amount of wood and wood fiber: to construct sleds or other sliding platforms, to make ropes, and to create levers to help position the statues.

The demand for wood eventually stripped the island of nearly all its forests, and when the lush palm forests disappeared, the topsoil began to erode. Crops failed and archeological and anthropological evidence suggests violent civil wars and perhaps even cannibalism preceded the collapse of Rapa Nui's first civilization. The loss of wood guaranteed the inhabitant's isolation for hundreds of years. The islanders were unable to build canoes. After hundreds of years of isolation, the arrival of the Dutch sailors was probably as surprising to the native islanders as the discovery of a populated island in such a remote location was to the Europeans.

Source: NASA's Earth Observatory - To locate the page, enter "Rapa Nui" (rather than "Easter Island") into the search box. At the time of writing, the image is located on Page 76 but this will change as new items are added.

-------

4) Papers by Terry Hunt:

Ancient DNA of the Pacific rat (Rattus exulans) from Rapa Nui (Easter Island)
Journal of Archaeological Science, Volume 33, Issue 11, November 2006, Pages 1536-1540
S.S. Barnes, E. Matisoo-Smith and T.L. Hunt
doi: 10.1016/j.jas.2006.02.006

Abstract

We report analysis of ancient mitochondrial DNA sequences from nine archaeological specimens (8 femura and 1 incissor) of Rattus exulans excavated from Anakena Beach Dune on Rapa Nui. Sequence of a 239-base-pair fragment of the hypervariable mitochondrial control region reveals a single mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequence of all samples corresponding to the R9 haplotype prevalent in East Polynesia. This suggests a single or very limited introduction of Rattus exulans to the island. Rapa Nui, like other remote islands of Polynesia, remained effectively isolated following colonization.

Rethinking the Fall of Easter Island: New evidence points to an alternative explanation for a civilization's collapse.
American Scientist 94:412-419.
Volume 94, Number 5 September-October 2006

Every year, thousands of tourists from around the world take a long flight across the South Pacific to see the famous stone statues of Easter Island. Since 1722, when the first Europeans arrived, these megalithic figures, or moai, have intrigued visitors. Interest in how these artifacts were built and moved led to another puzzling question: What happened to the people who created them?

In the prevailing account of the island's past, the native inhabitants - who refer to themselves as the Rapanui and to the island as Rapa Nui - once had a large and thriving society, but they doomed themselves by degrading their environment. According to this version of events, a small group of Polynesian settlers arrived around 800 to 900 A.D., and the island's population grew slowly at first. Around 1200 A.D., their growing numbers and an obsession with building moai led to increased pressure on the environment. By the end of the 17th century, the Rapanui had deforested the island, triggering war, famine and cultural collapse.

Jared Diamond, a geographer and physiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, has used Rapa Nui as a parable of the dangers of environmental destruction. "In just a few centuries," he wrote in a 1995 article for Discover magazine, "the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism. Are we about to follow their lead?" In his 2005 book Collapse, Diamond described Rapa Nui as "the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by overexploiting its own resources."

...Diamond is certainly not alone in seeing Rapa Nui as an environmental morality tale.

Late Colonization of Easter Island
Terry L. Hunt and Carl P. Lipo

Originally published in Science Express on 9 March 2006
Science 17 March 2006:
Vol. 311. no. 5767, pp. 1603 - 1606
DOI: 10.1126/science.1121879

Easter Island (Rapa Nui) provides a model of human-induced environmental degradation. A reliable chronology is central to understanding the cultural, ecological, and demographic processes involved. Radiocarbon dates for the earliest stratigraphic layers at Anakena, Easter Island, and analysis of previous radiocarbon dates imply that the island was colonized late, about 1200 A.D. Substantial ecological impacts and major cultural investments in monumental architecture and statuary thus began soon after initial settlement.

-------

Thursday, February 01, 2007

Neolithic Settlement of Stonehenge Builders Found (+Video)

Archaeology: Archaeologists at the University of Sheffield have unearthed a huge settlement at Durrington Walls, near Stonehenge, confirming that the Stonehenge monument was part of a larger ritual centre [center].

The excavations reveal an enormous ancient settlement that once housed hundreds of people. Archaeologists believe the houses were constructed and occupied by the builders of nearby Stonehenge, the legendary monument on Salisbury Plain.

The houses have been radiocarbon dated to 2600-2500 B.C., the same period Stonehenge was built - one of the facts that leads the archaeologists to conclude that the people who lived in the Durrington Walls houses were responsible for constructing Stonehenge. The houses form the largest Neolithic or new stone age village ever found in Britain.

The discoveries help confirm a theory that Stonehenge did not stand in isolation but was part of a much larger religious complex used for funerary ritual. Durrington Walls is the world's largest known henge - an enclosure with a bank outside it and a ditch inside, usually thought to be ceremonial. It is some 450 metres across and encloses a series of concentric rings of huge timber posts. Only small areas of Durrington Walls, located less than two miles from better-known Stonehenge, have been investigated by archaeologists.

Eight of the houses' remains were excavated in the Stonehenge Riverside Project, led by Professor Mike Parker Pearson [1] from the University of Sheffield and five other archaeologists from the UK. Six of the floors were found well-preserved. Each house once measured about 5 metres square and had a clay floor and central hearth. The team found 4,600-year-old debris strewn across floors, postholes and slots, which once anchored wooden furniture that had disintegrated long ago.

In a separate area inside the western part of Durrington henge, the team discovered two other Neolithic houses, each surrounded by a timber fence and a substantial ditch. Isolated from the others, these houses may have been dwellings of community leaders, chiefs or priests living separately from the rest of the community. Or, because of the nearly complete lack of household waste typically found in such houses, the archaeologists speculate that they may have been shrines or cult houses used for rituals, unoccupied except for a fire kept burning inside.

The rest of the houses are clustered on both sides of an imposing stone-surfaced avenue some 30 metres wide and 170 metres long, found in 2005 and further excavated by the team in 2006. The avenue connects remains of a colossal timber circle with the River Avon. Existence of the avenue, which mirrors one at nearby Stonehenge, indicates people once moved between the two monuments via the river. Discovery of the avenue has helped the team piece together the purpose of the entire Stonehenge complex.

Professor Parker Pearson now believes that Stonehenge and Durrington Walls were intimately connected. He said: "Durrington's purpose was to celebrate life and deposit the dead in the river for transport to the afterlife, while Stonehenge was a memorial and even final resting place for some of the dead. Stonehenge's avenue, discovered in the 18th century, is aligned on the midsummer solstice sunrise, while the Durrington avenue lines up with midsummer solstice sunset."

He added: "This discovery at Durrington Walls sheds light on the actual purpose of Stonehenge and shows that it wasn't a monument in isolation but part of a larger complex.

"It is vital in our understanding of Stonehenge and paves the way for further investigation at the site in the summer and hopefully more remarkable finds."

Source: University of Sheffield News Release "Sheffield archaeologists unearth huge settlement at Stonehenge" 31 January 2007

-------

Mike Parker Pearson ("These are people who knew how to party!") is interviewed for CNN/National Geographic:

The full National Geographic report can be seen at "Video: Stonehenge Builders' Village -- An Inside Look"

The BBC also have a video report via a link at "Stonehenge builders' houses found"

-------

[1] From Mike Parker Pearson's homepage:

"In 1998 my Malagasy colleague Ramilisonina and I visited Stonehenge and Avebury and developed a new theory about the purpose of these and other stone circles in Britain. Our story is told in Mike Pitts' book Hengeworld (Arrow Books 2000) and Francis Pryor's book Britain BC (Harper Collins 2003). The theory has a number of implications which can be investigated through fieldwork; one of these is that Stonehenge was linked via 'avenues' and the River Avon to a Neolithic monument with timber circles at Durrington Walls (and Woodhenge) as part of a larger complex in which the passage from wood to stone acted as a metaphor for the conduct of funerary rites and ancestor ceremonies along the axis of the river."

-------

Also see the 2004 and 2005 Stonehenge Riverside Project Interim Reports via the Research/Stonehenge link on Mike Parker Pearson's homepage. Excerpt from the 2005 Report:

An unexpected discovery came with the investigation of a prone sarsen stone at Bulford (SU 175 431), just 2 miles to the east on the other bank of the Avon. The 2.8m-long Bulford stone lies within a ring ditch just north of a large cemetery of round barrows. Resistivity survey identified the course of the ring ditch and located further anomalies within it. The ring ditch's eastern half was excavated to reveal the base of a hole in which the sarsen had once stood. On its west side, the stone hole was flanked by a line of small post holes which are interpreted as having held anti-friction posts to enable the stone to be erected from the east side with minimal difficulty. Such posts are well known from excavations of stone holes at Avebury (Video - read info on how to rotate the view). To the immediate east of this stone hole there was a shallow pit filled with a cairn of broken flint nodules and sarsen flakes. The shape of the pit mirrors that of the stone and is most likely the base of the hole from which the sarsen was extracted in prehistory and raised vertically in the adjacent stone hole just 2m away. This would indicate that sarsens were distributed over Salisbury Plain as well as the Marlborough Downs 20 miles to the north.

-------

Issue 73 of British Archaeology (November 2003) contains "The Stonehenge Lasershow":

Laser technology might not be the first thing that pops into one's mind when thinking about archaeology. However, an increasing number of archaeologists are adopting lasers as efficient measuring devices. It is still early days, but already one process known as 'laser scanning' enables the recording of sensitive objects from our past more accurately than ever before, without physical contact. The results are high-resolution, digital 3-dimensional (3D) models for analysis, interpretation and display.

Last summer, late evening passers-by at Stonehenge might have seen a group of people carrying a strange array of futuristic-looking boxes, cables and computer equipment towards the monument. One onlooker peering through the fence, perhaps noticing the number of long-haired archaeologists, asked if the Stonehenge festival rock band Hawkwind would be playing amongst the stones.

It was in fact the beginning of a project to look at the ancient carvings, run jointly by Wessex Archaeology and Archaeoptics. It is the most hi-tech investigation ever conducted at Stonehenge.

The first discovered and best-known Bronze Age carvings at the site are the dagger and axehead found by Richard Atkinson in 1953, on the inner face of Stone 53, one of the imposing Trilithon sarsens. Existing records show about 13 other axes on the same stone, some very hard to see. About 26 axes have been claimed on the outer face of sarsen Stone 4, and three on the outer face of Stone 3, both in the stone circle. Known axes vary from 8 to 36 cm long. (Continued)

-------

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Earliest Semitic text revealed in Egyptian pyramid inscription

24th January 2007: The first public presentation on the earliest continuous Semitic text ever deciphered took place today at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The presentation was made by Professor Richard Steiner, professor of Semitic languages and literature at Yeshiva University in New York, in a lecture entitled "Proto-Canaanite Spells in the Pyramid Texts: A First Look at the History of Hebrew in the Third Millennium B.C.E." [1]. The lecture was sponsored by the Academy of the Hebrew Language in cooperation with the Hebrew University and the World Union of Jewish Studies.

Professor Steiner, a past fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University and a member of the Academy of the Hebrew Language, has deciphered a number of Semitic texts in various Egyptian scripts over the past 25 years. In his lecture today he interprets Semitic passages in Egyptian texts that were discovered more than a century ago, inscribed on the subterranean walls of the pyramid of King Unas at Saqqara in Egypt. The pyramid dates from the 24th century B.C.E., but Egyptologists agree that the texts are older. The dates proposed for them range from the 25th to the 30th centuries B.C.E. No continuous Semitic texts from this period have ever been deciphered before.

The passages, serpent spells written in hieroglyphic characters, had puzzled scholars who tried to read them as if they were ordinary Egyptian texts. In August, 2002, Professor Steiner received an email message from Robert Ritner [2], professor of Egyptology at the University of Chicago, asking whether any of them could be Semitic. "I immediately recognized the Semitic words for 'mother snake,"' said Steiner. "Later it became clear that the surrounding spells, composed in Egyptian rather than Semitic, also speak of the mother snake, and that the Egyptian and Semitic texts elucidate each other."

Although written in Egyptian characters, the texts turned out to be composed in the Semitic language spoken by the Canaanites in the third millennium B.C.E., a very archaic form of the languages later known as Phoenician and Hebrew. The Canaanite priests of the ancient city of Byblos, in present-day Lebanon, provided these texts to the kings of Egypt.

The port city of Byblos was of vital importance for the ancient Egyptians. It was from there that they imported timber for construction and resin for mummification. The new discovery shows that they also imported magical spells to protect royal mummies against poisonous snakes that were thought to understand Canaanite. Although the Egyptians viewed their culture as far superior to that of their neighbors, their morbid fear of snakes made them open to the borrowing of Semitic magic.

"This finding should be of great interest to cultural historians," said Professor Steiner. "Linguists, too, will be interested in these texts. They show that Proto-Canaanite, the common ancestor of Phoenician, Moabite, Ammonite and Hebrew, existed already in the third millennium B.C.E as a language distinct from Aramaic, Ugaritic, and the other Semitic languages. And they provide the first direct evidence for the pronunciation of Egyptian in this early period." The texts will also be important to biblical scholars, since they shed light on several rare words in the Bible, he said.

"This is a sensational discovery," said Moshe Bar-Asher, Bialik Professor of Hebrew Language at the Hebrew University and president of the Academy of the Hebrew Language. "It is the earliest attestation of a Semitic language, in general, and Proto-Canaanite, in particular."

Image: Spell from the Egyptian pyramid text states in a Semitic language, but written in hieroglyphics: "Mother snake, mother snake says mucus-mucus."

Source: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

-------

[1] ABZU* entry:

Proto-Canaanite Spell in the Pyramid Texts [Text in Hebrew]

Steiner, Richard.

Publication Year: 2007
Type of Material: Article
Publisher: The Academy of the Hebrew Language
Place of Publication: Jerusalem
Subject: Egypt, Canaanite
Online access: http://hebrew-academy.huji.ac.il/PDF/steiner.pdf

ABZU Record number: 19727.Created: 1/25/2007 2:00:13 Last Modified: 2007-01-25 02:07:20 .

*"Abzu is a guide to networked open access data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East and the Ancient Mediterranean world."

-------

See Alleged Proto Canaanite spells** by Thomas Schneider, Chair in Egyptology, University of Wales Swansea:

"In response to the announcement of the alleged discovery of
Proto-Canaanite spells in the Pyramid Texts by Richard Steiner ...I think
it is imperative to be extremely cautious. As far as I see, the author
did not account for the most recent Egyptological treatment of the
spells in questions..."

** Originally posted to The Egyptologists' Electronic Forum Mailing List (EEF list)

-------

[2] See Robert Ritner's "Practical Egyptian Magical Spells":

"Spell for drinking Beer (prophylaxis for Hangover)

Hail to you Lady of Hetepet (Hathor, goddess of drunkenness)! There is no restraining Seth when he has set his heart on conquering a heart in that name of his of "Beer," to confuse a heart, to conquer the heart of an enemy, a fiend, a male ghost, a female ghost, etc. This spell is said during the drinking of beer; to be spat up. Truly effective, (proved) millions of times!

Retranslated from: J. F. Borghouts, The Magical Texts of P. Leiden I 348, Leiden: 1971, p. 27 (no. 24) and pl. 13 (col. 13/3-5)."

-------

Interesting Science

Friday, February 02, 2007

Easter Island: New Theory, Attenborough Video, Info

Thursday, February 01, 2007

Neolithic Settlement of Stonehenge Builders Found (+Video)

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Earliest Semitic text revealed in Egyptian pyramid inscription

About Me

The Dover Blogs

Links

Items on this Page

Archives