guidoLaMoto

These artifacts are dated from ~ 65,000 to 40,000 y/a (H.neand. went extinct about then)....while the earliest evidence of H.sap in Europe dates to ~56,000y/a-- that means H.sap probably arrived even earlier than that (what's the chances the first evidence actually coincides with their first arrival?)... ...so, was the working of wood independently original with the neanderthals, or was it a matter of "monkey see, monkey do?" Neandertals were probably smarter and more talented than we've been giving them credit for. They practiced ritual burial of their dead for at least 120,000 years and had brain case volume a little larger than the contemporary sapiens....There is evidence that they made flutes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divje_Babe_flute Now if we just could find evidence that they had bongo drums too, we'd prove that they were the world's first Beatniks. (Yea, I'm old.)

The Romans celebrated the Equus October festival on the Ides (15th) of October each year. It was first mentioned in writings from the 4th century BC, but probably dates back to the kingdom days, and probably an extension of Etruscan customs.....It was celebrated at least into the late 4th century AD. The date corresponds to the end of the annual "war season" each fall, and is dedicated to Mars... ...a hose race with birigae (2 horse teams) was held on the Campus Martius, the winning lead horse was then ceremoniously sacrificed. It's head and tail removed. ....Then a street fight between residents of the Suburra bdistrict and the Sacra Via district was held, the winner being awarded the head and the loser the tail. The head was then displayed on an altar, while the tail was hurried to the Temple of Vesta so the fresh blood could be dripped onto the eternal Flame. The blood from the head was also held for rituals at the Parilla festival in April- birthday of Rome- suggesting Equus October is also a commemoration of Rome's origins in connection with the famous Trojan Horse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Horse

Symbolically communicating Power?-- a guy in a ruffled skirt, leaning back with one hip seductively thrown out to the side? That emperor must have used Tim Walz's publicity agent. I bet the missing arms were sculpted into a two-handed, limp wrist wave too? Speaking of which-- we oughta start a special museum just for all those missing arms & heads from classic statuary. I always check the bottom of the page and see that there are usually several hundred of lurkers on line here at any given time....None of yuse ever have any comments? Pretend you're at a bar after work and jump in the conversation. Nobody in the bar is an expert, but that doesn't stop them from giving an opinion....just don't throw any empty beer bottles at the news reader on the TV.

That ring looks like it was a prize in a box of ancient Egyptian Cracker Jacks....How amazing to find such a small thing at the bottom of an ocean lost 2000 years ago. The famous Pharos was copied several times, most notably to serve as the lighthouse at Ostia when expanded in the time of Nero, and also by the contemporary Egyptians themselves just 30 miles from the original as the Taposiris Magna tower. https://www.wonders-of-the-world.net/Seven/Copies-of-the-lighthouse-of-Alexandria.php#google_vignette

The Ehrlichs, famous purveyors of doom & gloom, wrote their infamous book The Population Bomb in 1968. Growing world population and poverty coupled with famine and dwindling food & energy supply had everyone in a panic....but then in two years Borlaug's Green Revolution and several new discoveries of oil fields and we've had a continuing diminution of poverty and an excess of food supply over the next 50 years...Nobody goes to bed hungry anymore. Calories and protein are readily available for everyone now and more importantly, have never been cheaper. Everyone can now afford to get fat. The rate of obesity in the US is even higher among those on "food stamps" (EBT Program) than it is among self pay food buyers. Life style changes, with less activity and more labor saving technology. doesn't help but is really a minor factor. Do the math- a lb of fat is 4000 cal but you can only burn 500 cal/hr with VERY vigorous exercise. The obese can easily cut out 1000 excess cals from their diet each day, but most people can't exercise hard enough or long enough to burn off 500 extra in a day.

Good for you! I dropped 25 lb quickly after I quit playing ball 20 y/a....I dropped it from my chest to around my waist. People get over-weight by eating excessively out of boredom or habit, but they get morbidly obese due to genetic factors. Those are the people who seem to maintain body weight on half the calorie intake as the non-obese. Those genes had survival value back when our ancestors were hunter/gatherers. It meant they were more likely to survive long periods of deprivation when game or roots & berries were in short supply. Cf- horses that are "easy keepers" in the stable, maintaining body weight on half the feed usually required. If fed full rations, those horses turn out to be diabetic. The former types of plump people probably shouldn't risk the expense and potentially serious side effects of medications to control appetite, but the latter probably won't be successful at weight loss without the meds. But the meds do not "cure" the physiological defect. They treat it. More than half of users will quickly regain the weight after discontinuing the stuff.

The first & last lines are obviously plain French....The body of the message seems to be written in an artificial alphabet....I wonder if all the vertical dashes are just check marks used by the reader to keep track of his place as he used the key to decipher the symbols one by one? Sherlock Holmes didn't need no stinkin' AI to quickly decipher the codes of the Dancing Men or Porlock's message in The Valley of Fear.

Excellent half hour video on how Rome got so wealthy. Spoiler- the war booty was only a small part of it.....Some amazing parallels to modern economics. https://youtu.be/ibsrS58vu88?si=h7UnkXYAPYHv5pgx

Amazing that the wood remained so well preserved after almost 2100 years. The article says that it may have been treated with resins as a preservative. They used copper nails-- you have to wonder if that also helped, copper being so toxic to living cells.....Shipwrecks in salt water are subject to invasion and destruction by screw worms, the big reason the wood parts usually deteriorate over time.....That's not a problem in fresh water. There are hundreds of shipwrecks well preserved in The Great Lakes where the cold, hypoxic water inhibits bacterial & fungal growth and there are no screwworms. As an aside-- I looked up Mithridates quickly cuz I always get them all confused- those guys all look alike to me.... This ship was from M. VI....But the embarrassing Battle of Carrhae was during the war with M. IV....I had to laugh at the Wiki entry about the death of Crassus when he was tortured and killed by pouring molten gold down his throat. Wiki says "he was killed during a scuffle.."

Pliny the Younger's follow up letter to Tacitus describing his personal experience with the eruption gives some insight to the psychology of those faced with the impending disaster and ambivalence about escaping. https://www.pompeiin.com/en/Pliny_the_Younger_files/2LetterToTacitus.pdf The Latin text https://lingualatina.github.io/texts/browsable/pliny/6.20/

When I was a kid, sitting at the dinner table with my family, my father would frequently ask "Whadja learn In school today, kid?"....I'd make a face as if I were thinking, then make up something like "The Belgian Congo is the world's leading exporter of Tungsten and the leading importer of woolen socks."....Dad would be satisfied and we could go back to enjoying our meal in peaceful silence. How do we know the machine got the message right? "A decoding key is believed to have originally accompanied the correspondence,..."......That makes no sense at all. Pretty stupid if true.

What's the big deal??... I mean, even if Christ was buried there, He didn't stay very long, did He? I'm pretty sure just about any site outside of the city walls in those days would have been olive groves, so that finding is not that much "proof" - just "consistent with."

Baptism was by no means a new concept unique to John and the Christians. Many, if not all ancient religions involved various rights of purification. A quick search of "Roman religion purification rights" came up with this as the number one result-- https://www.unrv.com/articles/how-romans-tried-to-purify-people-places-and-armies.php Oops....this shoulda been posted on the other thread about the new archeological site at the temple in Jerusalem.

Glad you dodged the bullet of the storm. From the pic, it looks like just a regular house took the brunt of that explosion. A bank and the ancient structures just happened to be nearby. My friend's gas clothes drier developed a leak a few yrs ago and exploded. It leveled the house, broke windows up & down the block. He was in the far end of the building at the time but it still blew him so far down the sidewalk that the firefighters who found him thought he was a pedestrian just passing by. Luckily he had only minor bruises from the landing. Nasty stuff.

A) Are we to understand that you're in Athens now? 2) Do you have a good alibi as to your whereabouts at the time of the explosion? C) Gas leak, terrorism or overzealous bank robber?

Fascinating. How did either species ever survive? Life was tough in The Jungle. The fad has been to claim we still carry 1-2% "Neanderthal genes" with the implication that interbreeding was the source....but I'm not convinced that it is anything more than a high probability of mutation and back mutation. After all, if allele A has a 1 in X chance of mutating to allele A', then allele A' has the same 1 in X chance of making the same base pair error and mutating to A again. OTOH- We can make the argument that H.sapiens who lived in small, closely related groups of probably only 10-20 individuals, with minimal contact with other clans, would have quickly accrued the problems of inbreeding if there wasn't a large amount of inter-clan breeding....but there must have been a high level of competition between groups for hunting territory, so a co-operative interbreeding plan was unlikely. They probably were in the habit of kidnapping members of the other groups, ie- our tendency to have "slavery" as part of our societies may well be innate, having survival value for our species-- analogous to flying south for the winter among geese.* * If goose down is supposed to be so warm, why do geese fly south for the winter?

How unbelievable....Everybody knows blondes were a rarity in ancient Rome.

While Livy. Cassius Dio, Tacitus, etc give us the typical major points of history concerning events, wars, important leaders,dates etc, much of the details of everyday life, customs and philosophy is gained thru the letters of men like Cicero, Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger. I've been reading those of Pliny the Younger lately. I like comparing the original Latin to the versions translated to English, and am continually impressed by how much the info in the translations involve extrapolation of details not actually present in the original. This particular egregious example has motivated this post-- Letter XXVI To Calvissius https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2811/2811-h/2811-h.htm#link2H_4_0027 in which Pliny is describing the lifestyle of his elderly friend, poet and 2x consul Spurinna-- The translation says "...After this he has a good brisk game of TENNIS..." (!!!???)....But, in fact, the original Latin https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/pliny.ep3.html merely states "Deinde movetur pila vehementer et diu."..."Then a ball is moved vigorously and for a long time." ..and I'm still struggling to understand the couple of lines just before that example-- "Ubi hora balinei nuntiata est ......in sole, si caret vento, ambulat nudus." = "When the hour for bathing is announced....in the sun, if the wind is lacking, he walks nude."... Now. I realize that the prolonged effects of gravity over a lifetime can elongate certain body parts, but to the point that the wind makes a difference?? Really now.

Italian movie from 1978 depicting life of peasant share croppers around 1900.....Put tunics on 'em instead of pants & jackets, and I bet that's basically how Iife was for peasant farmers in ancient Italy.... It reminds me of the time I spent in Italy 50 yrs ago....I was traveling with my girl friend, a native Italian who had immigrated to the States five yrs earlier. We visited her home town back in the mountains of Calabria. She led me 300 yds down a very steep path to the small, babbling brook. She pointed to a rock at the edge of the water and said, "That was my rock for beating the clothes when we did the laundry."...Then she got this far-away look on her face, which turned after a minute to a look of consternation--- "What the HELL did we beat them on a rock for?"

In Pliny juniors famous letter to Tacitus describing the 79 AD eruption of Vesuvius, he states that the ground at Misenum where he was living at the time, across the bay from Pompeii, was heaving more than usual during the few days before the eruption, but because that heaving was so common there, nobody paid any attention to it. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2811/2811-h/2811-h.htm#link2H_4_0065. Letter LXV This ground heaving is still a problem today around the Bay of Naples, and has recently become more active. https://freeastroscience.com/sleeping-giant-awakens-why-naples/

Speaking of Latin in inscriptions, etc,this site https://www.online-latin-dictionary.com/ is useful and easy to use. If you enter a word that's used in one of its declined/conjugated forms, the site will tell you how it's being used and also show its base form.....Works for many languages, including ancient Greek....Lost at the bottom of the page is a place for English to Latin translation. ...and here's a good list of common abbreviations used in inscriptions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_classical_Latin_abbreviations "DM" is a common one on tombstones- Dis Manibus = (dedicated) to the Manes (spirits of the dead)

Romans not only thought death by lightening strike was an act of vengeance from the gods, but that you had to be buried on the spot on which you were struck....Tullus Hostillius, third king of Rome was said to have been struck and killed just outside the Regia, royal residence right next to the temple of the Vestal Virgins in The Forum. ...Emperor Marcus Aurelius Carus (282-83 AD) was also said to be killed by a lightening bolt while on campaign, but more likely he was assassinated and the gods were blamed. The strict delineation of responsibility for day time vs night time lightening reminds me of Union Rules. A union carpenter once told me that he was hired to assemble some shelves for an upcoming convention at Chicago's huge McCormick Place. He needed some more light, so he plugged in a drop light....A union steward walked over immediately, shaking his head and said "The contract calls for a union electrician to do that." One was called, and the carpenter had to idle away 30 minutes for him to show up. He didn't care. He's paid by the hour, not the piece.

Was it Buddhist or those @#$& Hari Krishnas begging at the seaports? There's nothing new under the sun.

Gang activity in Rome dates back to antiquity. Gangs often provided services & goods not provided directly by the govt. (Cf- "NGOs" today) More modern entities like "The Mafia" served a purpose in providing protection, food etc for areas where an absentee govt was supposedly in charge but weak. https://youtu.be/LLsUAJ5oOFI?si=-gyirdVIlTTYUlcp Clodius famously terrorized Romans with his army of street thugs, and Crassus, richest man in Rome and one of the triumvirs, made his fortune by setting fires and then offering to buy the property as it burned. Deal done, his private fire dept put the blaze out and then he rehabbed the property at a sizeable profit. ...and then there's the famous episode of riots at the games in the amphitheater in Pompeii (59AD) that spread into the streets and led to an Imperial interdiction against games there for ten years. https://www.worldhistory.org/image/3838/fresco-showing-the-riot-of-59-ce-in-the-amphitheat/

Sixty-five years after first commiting it to memory, "qui quae quod....cuius cuius cuius.....cui cui cui...." still flows like fresh spring water...even when I forget to take my Arricept.... ...not to mention "hic haec hoc....huius huius huius..."